Try the Spirits

‘OF course you get those superstitions from the Negroes,’ said my friend.

We had been talking about her daughter’s wedding, and as the conversation eddied around details of color schemes and bridesmaids’ costumes I had asked, as one does at home, ‘What will the bride have for “something old, something borrowed, and something blue”? She certainly will have no lack of “something new.”’

Then it was that my friend responded, ‘I never heard of such a notion. Of course you Southern people get those superstitions from the Negroes.’

Since I have lived away from my own state I must have heard that remark a hundred times. Hitherto I had accepted it unchallenged, but this time doubt arose. Was it really probable that a Caucasian people had received from Negroes a custom that had to do with clothes and weddings?

The mental question sent me off upon a search for which I was not scholastically prepared. I went after the history of superstitions current in my own part of the country much as Bo-Peep went after her flock — vague as to pathways, but ‘determined for to find them.’

And find them I did, in English literature and in English speech and in the parts of the Southern states where Negro influence is least in evidence, till there seemed no doubt that our superstitions of every kind, with one exception, came to us from the British Isles. My second discovery was that they are n’t superstitions at all, but soothsayings in the exact sense, a summing up of popular observation, and that they are, or have been, true.

The old wedding-dress rhyme is an example. She is a happy bride who does not lose touch with the past, but loyally brings ‘something old’ as well as ‘something new’ for her setting out, who has the confidence of friends for ‘something borrowed,’ and who may wear ‘something blue,’ which is the color of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As with the last item in this count, there is undoubtedly, as all folklorists elaborate, religious origin or association either obvious or hidden in most of these old sayings, but the salt of common sense seems to be their preservative.

The belief that it is unlucky to begin anything on Friday can hardly be dissociated from the central tragedy of history that happened on Good Friday, but surely common sense has kept the saying current. A task of any significance is n’t often finished in a day, and if we begin it on Friday there is vis inertiœ to be overcome on Monday, whether a Sabbath or a ‘week-end’ intervene.

‘If thirteen sit down at the table, one of them will die within the year.’ This, and no feeble-minded talk about thirteen as an unlucky number per se, is the adage that has come down through the centuries, maybe through nineteen hundred years. That it derives from the Last Supper seems certain, but it is a fair guess that if the vital statistics of even two centuries ago were available one could see why the belief persisted.

To glance, but not quite to turn, away from the religious character of the old auguries, the woman in the Appalachian Mountains who to-day refuses to handle a broom after sunset admits, ‘A body’s simple to hold to such old ways. But,’ she adds, ‘ a body has got to quit sometime, and when the sun drops is as good a time as any.’ There you have the practical side of the matter for our time, and when that bit of folklore was lodged in her greatgreat-grandmother’s brain it may well have been all a woman’s life was worth to be seen with a broom after sunset, whether back home in quiet Shropshire or in Cotton Mather’s parish.

‘When the candle weaves a winding sheet there will be a death in the family.’ In spite of twentieth-century science, some of us shiver when we see a candle gutter in the wind. It is a direct draft that weaves that ‘winding sheet,’ and even in our day a great Scotch doctor gives no student his diploma until he has taught him this rhyme: —

It is not surprising, then, that when in our warm modern houses a candle gutters unaccustomedly it brings a picture of days, not very long ago, when in drafty houses old people, for their dim eyes’ sake, sat closest to the candles, and thin old shoulders bent shrinking from a sudden draft, while the candle wove a winding sheet, and pneumonia, ‘the old people’s friend,’ stole in.

Of sayings such as these, part of the truth has disappeared and just enough is left to keep them alive. There is another group, perhaps more simply the outgrowth of general observation, that is just as true as ever.

‘See a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.’ There is not a school child in America that doubts it, and the children are right, as usual. They are well-omened days when eyes are clear, attention is alert, and there is energy to spare for trifles.

‘ If you catch the first lizard you see in the spring, you will conquer your laziness’ — so Virginia children are taught. The naturalists, who know how well our little lizards have earned their name of ‘swifts,’ will realize that before he can be caught the battle with ‘your laziness’ is already won.

When the mountain woman tells you, ‘Woman company is bad luck when you are making soap, but man company is good luck p’int-blank,’ she is repeating a proverb that comes of watching many a kettle of soap. (Does ‘ proverb,’ by the way, mean ‘proved word’?) In our Southern mountains, soap making is one of the housemother’s many tasks. It is a delicate business — simple, but requiring undivided attention. ‘Woman company’ takes the attention of the hostess at a moment that may be fatal to the whole ‘kittle and b’iling,’ but ‘man company’ takes the head of the house out from underfoot!

‘If you make a wish on a falling star, your wish will surely come true.’ I have no defense for such a sudden leap, — unless it be per aspera ad astra, — but this pretty saying, on which our Southern boys and girls depend while shooting stars illumine the pansy-blue of August skies at home, has psychological endorsement everywhere. That which we wish we bring to pass, these wise ones tell us, and a wish must hold the mental field if it occur to consciousness before a falling star flashes and disappears.

Old-fashioned farmers wherever I have met them stubbornly do their planting by the moon, undaunted by the jibes of sons fresh home from agricultural college. And lo! the very latest discoveries as to light and plant metabolism tend to show that the older man may laugh last, after all. In this, as in the other fragments of the lore of other days that we have kept, down home, our forebears seem to have been long on observation and short on ratiocination.

Weaning by the zodiac lacks scientific confirmation still, but live-stock breeders in the South can show skeptical veterinarians that if ‘the sign’ be disregarded the mares will whinny and fret and even sicken and the colt will ‘dwine’ or at best be slow in learning to eat, but if some old Negro has told the boss when the zodiacal sign is ‘ edzac’ly right ’ the mare will hardly lift her head from grazing and the weanling colt will flourish undisturbed.

I say we get this lore ‘ from some old Negro,’ for if most of our local superstitions may be found in Chaucer, in chapbooks, in Samuel Pepys’s Diary, and in English literature generally, ‘from then till now,’ our bywords about animals seem to come to us from Africa. They, too, may have been sound wisdom in the jungle, but on that unfamiliar ground the reason is hard to trace for those who are not jungle-wise, and it does n’t always hold good for folk of other blood in other latitudes.

For us it would be silly to turn back if a black cat crossed our path, but if the big cats of Africa prowl black in the dark jungle it may be only common sense to go back to one’s village with its fence and fires.

The African Anthology of Blaise Cendrars has Negro myths that are oddly familiar to every Southern child. That assiduous scholar has laid hold of many a tale that sounds for all the world like Uncle Remus talking about Brer Rabbit and his neighbors. These are distinctly out of bounds of AngloSaxon common sense. The Southern child knows that Brer Rabbit running from left to right can’t really ‘carry your luck away,’ nor, running from right to left, fetch you good fortune. But have n’t we been taught before we left the nursery, and by the same wise, simple, and unfathomable friends who told the stories of Brer Rabbit, that ‘manners and behavior never hurt anybody’? It does n’t really do any harm to say to the bunny that bounds across your path, ‘Howdy, Mr. Rabbit. How’s your family?’