When hurried upon the slave-ships in the Kongo or at Lagos, the slave tied into a little package, hung among his other fetich treasures, seeds of his favorite foods. At least one of these seeds survived, in the West Indies and thence to the United States, with a native name “gumbo.” It is the okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), that exists all over Africa, and has spread over the United States.
Ground-nuts—“pea-nuts” (Arachis hypogea), which botanists claim to be a native of South America—have been grown from time immemorial all over Africa, and, in the Loango country bordering on the Kongo River, by the Ashira and some other tribes are used as their staple article of food, rather than the plantain (Musa sapientum), or “manioc,” cassava (Jatropha manihot). It is an important export from those regions and from the Gambia to-day. If the nut itself was not carried from Africa to America, its native name was; that name is “mbenda,” and it was corrupted to “pindar” in parts of the Southern States.
The evil thing that the slave brought with him was his religion. You do not need to go to Africa to find the fetich. During the hundred years that slavery in our America held the Negro crushed, degraded, and apart, his master could deprive him of his manhood, his wife, his child, the fruits of his toil, of his life; but there was one thing of which he could not deprive him,—his faith in fetich charms. Not only did this religion of the fetich endure under slavery; it grew. None but Christian masters offered the Negro any other religion; and, by law, even they were debarred from giving him any education. So fetichism flourished. The master’s children were infected by the contagion of superstition; they imbibed some of it at their Negro foster-mother’s breast. It was a secret religion that lurked thinly covered in slavery days, and that lurks to-day beneath the Negro’s Christian profession as a white art, and among non-professors as a black art; a memory of the revenges of his African ancestors; a secret fraternity among slaves of far-distant plantations, with words and signs,—the lifting of a finger, the twitch of an eyelid,—that telegraphed from house to house with amazing rapidity (as to-day in Africa) current news in old slave days and during the late Civil War; suspected, but never understood by the white master; which, as a superstition, has spread itself among our ignorant white masses as the “Hoodoo.” Vudu, or Odoism, is simply African fetichism transplanted to American soil.
“It is almost impossible for persons who have been brought up under this system ever to divest themselves fully of its influence. It has been retained among the blacks of this country, and especially at the South, though in a less open form, even to the present day, and probably will never be fully abandoned until they have made much higher attainments in Christian education and civilization. In some of the plantations of the South, as well as in the West Indies, where there has been less Christian culture, egg-shells are hung up in the corners of their chimneys to cause the chickens to flourish; an extracted tooth is thrown over the house or worn around the neck to prevent other teeth from aching; and real fetiches, though not known by this name [perhaps “mascots”?], are used about their persons to shield them from sickness or from the effects of witchcraft.”[92]
While on a furlough in the United States in 1891, I visited a town in Southern Virginia, and by invitation of the Negro pastor of the African church addressed them on foreign missions. Somewhat at a loss what attitude to take toward a Negro audience in speaking to them of Africa, I candidly asked the pastor what I should say. He bade me speak exactly as if I was addressing an educated white assembly. I did so. In describing native African virtues and vices, I mentioned their fetichism, and remarked that it was the same that obtained in the United States; and lest my hearers might think I was personally attacking them, I added, “down South in Georgia and Louisiana.” The bench of elders sitting just in front of me broke out, “And jist around hyar, too.”
I had read Cable’s “Creole Tales.” One of his characters is sick with a strange vague affection whose symptoms medicine had failed to reach. He is superstitious, and one morning he wakes in horror at finding a dead frog secreted under his pillow. That fetich was no novelist’s conjecture; it was true to life. About 1894 or 1895, while I was alone in charge of Gabun Station, for three successive mornings when I opened the front door, I found a dried frog leaning against the threshold. I did not care enough about it to inquire its significance or to ascertain who put it there. Since then I have found that it is not used as a fetich by people of the Gabun region, but probably by Upper Coast people. I remember that at that time I had three Bassa workmen from Liberia whom I suspected of stealing and who then suddenly deserted my service. I think they placed the frog there, either to injure me or to prevent my following up their theft.
Folk-Lore.
An attractive survival of African life in America are “Uncle Remus’s” mystic tales of “Br’er Rabbit.” They are the folk-lore that the slave brought with him from his African home, where in village hut and forest camp often have been told to my own ears similar weird personifications before Harris had actually written them. There being no rabbits in West Africa, “Br’er Rabbit” is an American substitution for “Brother” Njâ (Leopard), or Brother Ihĕli (Gazelle), in Paia Njambi’s (the Creator’s) council of speaking animals.