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Above a young Amengansie, Leana Davis, great-great grandmother of Mama Zogbé. Leana’s own grandmother of the same name, was famously known as “Mammy Doctor” in Richmond, Virginia during the 1790-1800s. She is mentioned in the Henry Hyatt historical collection of African-American “root workers”, “spiritualists” and “conjurers’. One of the most devastating events that took place during this post antebellum period was the final destruction of African religious traditions and cultural practices. Believing them to be mere “superstition, witchcraft and pagan,” African religions were universally criminalized, ridiculed and forbidden. No one understood at the time what devastating consequences its absence would engender on the spiritual health of future African-American generations.
Reel 3850: The Hyatt Collection
*Client Interviewed Testifying to Work of Leana Davis
(great-great-great-great grandmother of Mama Zogbé)
OLE LEANA DAVIS
“MAMMY DOCTOR”
“This man I married - oh, it was forty some years, forty-five or near fifty years ago now [happened about 1887]. He was taken sick and his mother said-somebody had poisoned him. And this old woman [Ole Leana Davis, called Mammy Doctor, well-known in Richmond years ago], whut waited [doctored] on him, come to see him, cut off getting de [medical] doctor's medicine. [This was standard practice to "cut off" the M.D. 's medicine, which was considered useless and harmful in witchcraft and hoodoo.] She went and got a he bullfrog and said she was goin' bury him at the center of the door and whoever did it was goin' come back and ask her what was de matter. Well, she got dis he bullfrog and put him in dis cup [top from a], baking-powder box [can], and made an oath and filled it full of five cents worth of new cayenne pepper. And he [bullfrog] bellowed like a bull. This ole cunjure woman put it under the sill of the door, right down in de corner here - and the house there today and that cup is down there now , I reckon - the door where he was Lf, vin' at, under the steps. And ev'ry mornin' for nine days his mother had to go there and stomp on de steps and say she hoped to God she'd get 'em. . . [Richmond, Va., (?), 380:7.]
Source: Henry Hyatt: Hoodoo, Conjuration, Rootwork & Witchcraft. Volume I. Page 906.
*NOTE: The Hyatt Collection is part of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, in Adams County, Illinois, whose groundbreaking interviews of Post Reconstruction African-American “root workers,” “spiritualists,” and “conjurers” is compiled in five volumes. It is currently housed in the UCLA Center for the Comparative Study of Folklore and Mythology (part of the UCLA Folklore Archives Special Projects) and the Mami Wata Healers Society Archives. Hyatt often conducted these interviews at great risk to his and the interviewees' lives.
© MWHS 2008. All Rights Reserved.
