“White boys not to dig! I order them to go yesterday. They come back! I—” she made a gesture toward Nicky who unclosed his hand. The moisture of his palm was already breaking up the shape of the figures.
“Cliff’s father told us about the Egyptians doing this like this,” Nicky said. “They used to make little images of wax, he said, and put spells on them to injure the magicians’ enemies—then when they stuck pins in the wax, or burned it, the enemies were supposed to suffer with pain. But I didn’t know they did that sort of thing in Jamaica.”
“Sometimes,” Mr. Neale admitted. “But why did you come back to dig when Ma’am Sib ordered you away?”
“It isn’t her field,” Cliff answered. “I asked father. And, besides, there is another trench started. See! Over there.” He pointed to the digging that had been done at a point closer to the cabin.”
“Can they really hurt you—these voodoo people?” Tom asked. “I began to feel sort of uneasy——”
Mr. Neale spoke quietly in reply. “The boy was told to do as he did so as to suggest an idea to you,” he explained. “You see, all sorts of magic depend on our being afraid. We are afraid of things we do not understand. Because we don’t understand them we think ‘maybe they do have power to hurt us.’”
“It’s just the same as if I came to Tom some morning and looked at him as if something was wrong, and then asked him what’s the matter,” Cliff said. “He’d wonder and then begin to think that something was wrong and he would begin to feel sick, if he kept thinking about it long enough.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Neale replied. “Voodoo depends on ignorance and fear. Because people are ignorant and afraid, their own minds work against them. Tom let himself imagine there was danger——”
“I knew it,” Tom said, shamefacedly, “but it got the best of me.”
“But why did she do it?” demanded Nicky. “Not just because we didn’t obey her and stop digging——”