These mysterious doctors were almost always men—very rarely women—and usually natives of Africa. Universally were they persons of advanced age and hideous aspect: the uglier the more successful in the pursuit of their criminal calling.
There was a class of them distinguished as “myal-men,” whose chief distinction consisted in their being able to restore life to a dead body.
Such was the belief of their ignorant fellow slaves, who little suspected that the defunct subject had been all the while only dormant, his death-like slumber secretly brought about by the myal-man himself, assisted by a prescription of the branched “calalue”—a species of caladium.
I cannot here enter into an explanation of the mysteries of Obi, which are simple enough when understood. I have met it in every land where it has been my lot to travel; and although it holds a more conspicuous place in the social life of the savage, it is also found in the bye-lanes of civilisation.
The reader, who may have been mystified about its meaning, will perhaps understand what it is, when I tell him that the obeah-man of the West Indies is simply the counterpart of the “medicine man” of the North-American Indians, the “piuche” of the South, the “rain-maker” of the Cape, the “fetish man” of the Guinea coast, and known by as many other titles as there are tribes of uncivilised men.
It is the first dawning of religion on the soul of the savage; but even when its malignant spirit has become changed to a purer aspiration after eternal life, it still lingers amidst the haunts of ignorance, its original form almost unaltered—witchcraft.
To the statement above made—that on every large plantation there was an obeah-man—the estate of Mount Welcome was no exception. It, too, was blessed, or rather cursed, by a follower of the art, an old Coromantee negro—Chakra by name—a man whose fell and ferocious aspect could not have failed to make him one of the most popular of its practitioners.
Such, to his misfortune, had he become.
He had long been suspected of having poisoned his master, the former owner of the estate, who had made an abrupt and mysterious exit from the world. The fate of this man, however, was not much lamented, as he bore the reputation of being a cruel slave-master. The present proprietor of Mount Welcome had least reason to regret it: since it gave him possession of an estate he had long coveted.
It was greater chagrin to him, that since entering upon the enjoyment of the property, several of his most valuable slaves had terminated their existence suddenly, and in a manner which could only be accounted for by the supposition that Obi had accomplished their destruction.