Jeudi: Curios

The alligator is an amphibian both maligned and adored along the Gulf coast of the United States. Feared for their quiet ferocity, they are also appreciated as sources of magickal instruments. They just happen to taste great, too.

In old time hoodoo, animal curios were used quite literally all the time. Though the practice is discouraged more or less in our modern age, alligator curios continue to be popular. Bats, cats, frogs and toads have been set aside to a large degree but alligator parts can often be found, usually because they are raised commercially. The majority of the animal is sold for meat or hide - much like cattle - while feet and teeth are doled out to root workers. For a fee, of course.

Alligator teeth are popular amulets worn for protection in the South, particularly around the neck. This is no different than the practice in my current home state of Alaska, where bear and wolf teeth are worn to protect and impart the strength of the animal. The nice thing about gators is that they shed their teeth throughout their life. The truly lucky person will find a gator tooth along the bayou and then use it for the most common intention of this curio: good fortune in gambling.

Both the feet and teeth of alligators are considered extremely lucky as pocket pieces for those who frequent the gambling table. The tooth probably obtained this reputation for the reason just mentioned. Carrying the foot - usually of a small alligator - can reasonably be considered a form of like-makes-like magick. These amputated parts somewhat resemble an outstretched human hand, just waiting for money to be deposited in it.

Here are two old time recipes for gambling luck pocket pieces. One enlisting a gator's tooth, the other its foot.

Take an alligators tooth and, while visualizing yourself winning consistently at your chosen game of chance, dress it with whiskey, Van Van oil or Easy Life oil. Carry this in your pocket when you go out to gamble, and re-anoint it frequently.

On a piece of brown paper (a piece of paper bag works well), write down your wish for money in red ink. This may be specific to gambling or any other way of getting an income. Dress a gator foot with Van Van oil or whiskey and wrap the brown paper tightly around it. Wrap red thread or twine around this packet three times and tie this off with three knots. Carry this with you, in your pocket or purse, as you pursue your chosen source of money. As with the tooth, dress this mojo frequently with your chosen libation.

Some folks also attach an alligator foot to a key chain and use this daily to bring general luck and, as always, money. If you are really old school, attaching the foot to your watch fob harkens back to the very old days of New Orleans voodoo/hoodoo. Legend has it that Jean Laffite had a bejeweled gator foot that dangled from his watch fob. This was lost, depending on the story you hear, either at the Battle of New Orleans or in the great Galveston hurricane of 1818. Either way, his luck seemed to go with it.

And there's the lesson; hold on to your alligator foot, or tooth, for dear luck. Bonne chance ~

Header: Alligators by Tom Root via American Gallery

Lundi: Recipes

Last week, the ubiquitous Times-Picayune laid off half their staff and announced that they would be publishing only three times per week.  This despite having the largest readership, judging by paid subscriptions, of an daily newspaper in the United States, including the New York Times.  The Times-Picayune has officially been in business for 175 years but, prior to being a Times subsidiary, was a local southeastern Louisiana paper dating back to the days of Jean and Pierre Laffite.  If that isn't a sad comment on the state of journalism in the modern U.S. I don't know what is.

In honor of the great Picayune whose name came from how much it once cost, a wonderful old Creole recipe which has been featured in the Times-Picayune on more than one occasion: spinach Madeleine.

This recipe was probably first published in the now famous River Road Recipes cookbook from the Junior League of Baton Rouge.  It's a casserole that many Louisianans wouldn't dream of leaving off the Thanksgiving or Reveillon sideboard and it has, these days, one curiously modern ingredient: Mexican Velveeta.

2 10 ounce packages of frozen, chopped spinach
4 tbsps butter
2 tbsps all purpose flour
2 tbsps finely chopped onions
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1/2 tsp black pepper
3/4 tsp celery salt
3/4 tsp garlic salt
1 tsp Worchestershire sauce
Salt
Cayenne pepper
6 ounces Velveeta Mexican Mild, cut into small pieces
Bread crumbs (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Coat a 9 inch square casserole dish with butter or non-stick spray.

Cook the spinach according to the package directions. Drain and reserve 1/2 cup of the liquid from the pot.

In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.  Add the flour, stirring to blend; continue to stir for about 1 minute, making a very light roux.  Add the onions and cook until soft, not brown.  Add the milk and reserved spinach liquid, stirring constantly to avoid lumps.  Cook until liquid thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon, about 10 minutes.  Add pepper, celery and garlic salts, Worchestershire sauce, salt and cayenne to taste.  Add the cheese and stir until it is melted completely.

Place cooked spinach in an even layer in the prepared casserole dish.  Pour the cheese sauce over the spinach and top with bread crumbs if you like.  Bake until golden and bubbly, about 30 minutes, and serve warm.

This recipe has another little connection to old New Orleans and Jean Laffite, at least to my mind.  One of the ladies he was linked with at times was named Madeleine Rigaud.  That's all we know of her, just her name and her connection to Laffite the pirate.  You can make up the rest over the spinach dish that shares her name.

Header: Andrew "Action" Jackson salutes the Times-Picayune

Samedi: Ghost Stories

The excitement of NOLA Navy Week has me thinking about my ancestral home and the many legends of ghostly ships, seafarers and – in particular – pirates that linger there to this day.  With all that swirling around in my head, I realized that we haven’t had a good ghost story here at HQ for awhile.  Despite the brightness of spring, or warmth of fall depending on where you are on our dear Earth, I invite you to draw the blinds and allow yourself to slip away to an ancient, Louisiana bayou, where the frogs are chirping and the drown just won’t stay dead…

There was a quadroon man named Louis who lived on Bayou Grand Caillou in Louisiana.  He was a fisherman and sometimes he was happy with his trade, sometimes not.  Louis heard, from the other fisherman, that on a nearby island which was not much more than a muddy chenier, the Baratarian pirate known as Gambi had buried some of his treasure.  Now the talk went that Gambi was the most ruthless and treacherous of the pirates who aligned themselves with the famous Jean Laffite.  He would slit a man’s throat for no reason, and it was said that if anyone tried to steal his treasure, his ghost would slit his throat, too.

Louis was a brave man if, it must be admitted, not very bright and he began to enquire after this pirate’s treasure.  Where was it, he asked his friends, and when was the best time to go to the island and dig it up?  His friends told him he was crazy but Louis persisted.  Finally one old Cajun told him that the only way to find Gambi’s treasure was to go to the little island at night, under a full moon, and look for a patch of moss that glowed silver in the moonlight.  That was where the pirate had hidden his long lost horde.

As we said, Louis was brave, so on the night of the next full moon he packed up his little pirogue with a shovel and canvas and everything he thought he’d need to bring that pirate treasure home.  He quietly sailed out to that deserted island where there was nothing but a broken down old boat shed, one or two sad cypress trees and big patches of green moss all over everything.  Louis pulled his boat up high onto the broken shells of the shore, turned and almost immediately saw the silvery moss over by one of the trees.

The fisherman set directly to his task, the chuff and hiss of his spade, his own breathing and the croaking of frogs the only sound beside a mournful wind off the Gulf.  But then Louis heard another sound, like something being dragged across the shells at the water’s edge.  He turned and he was surprised to see his pirogue down in the water when he was sure he had dragged her high up on land.  He threw his shovel down and marched into the water.  Retrieving his boat, he dragged it up on shore again but this time he tied her up to that other sorry cypress tree.

Louis marched back to the hole he had started, grumbling about the wind and tide, but just as he was putting shovel to dirt again he saw two ugly, hairy feet appear, their toes just hanging over the chasm of his little ditch.  Suddenly, Louis felt cold.  He gulped even though his mouth was as dry as sand, and with all the courage he had he looked up from his spade.  There before him stood two horrible, grinning pirates.  They were sodden with water and seaweed, while little shrimp crawled in and out of their clothes and hair.  They each held a cutlass, both dripping with either rust or blood – Louis did not want to know which – and they stared at him with eyes as cold as gleaming silver.

Now Louis was brave, if not very bright, but he was also a good Catholic and he knew what to do when the Devil jumped up.  He fell to his knees, clasped his hands under his chin after crossing himself and began to recite the Hail Mary over and over and over again.  After the seventh sincere recitation of the prayer to the Virgin, Louis finally opened his eyes.  Sure enough, those silver-eyed, watery pirates had disappeared and Louis, well, he was still alive. 

Even as Louis let out a sigh of relief, he heard that awful scraping sound behind him once again.  Turning, he saw a third pirate sitting on his pirogue.  This one wore a long dagger, held a fine ivory handled pistol and his bristling, black mustache dripped red with blood.  He too was dripping wet, covered with crawfish and seaweed, but he wore fine, leather boots that marked him as a captain.

“Gambi?” Louis asked.

“The very one,” the phantom replied.  “And if you don’t get in this pathetic dinghy and row for your life, I’ll shoot you or slit your throat for no good reason.”  The pirate smiled, and one gold tooth gleamed like fire in the moonlight.

Louis didn’t have to be told twice.  Abandoning his tools, he untied his boat and jumped in rowing as hard as he knew how as far away from the island as he could. 

Once the pirogue was a few leagues out into the bayou, Gambi’s ghost put away his nasty pistol, slipped over the side of the boat and disappeared into the inky water.  Louis would later tell his friends that he knew for sure the creature was not of this Earth as no bubble rose to the surface when it sank below the waves.

So Louis went straight home and there his wife nearly shot him herself, he looked so different.  His hair had turned stark white and he would never smile again.  Though he told his story to anyone who would listen, it wasn’t long before Louis went to bed one night and died, perhaps joining those phantom pirates on that little chenier off Bayou Grand Caillou.

This story is told with many different variations around southeastern Louisiana and is especially remembered in the book Gumbo Ya~Ya edited by the incomparable Lyle Saxon.  In that version, however, the island is identified rather than the pirate; it is called L’Isle de Gombi.

Header: Phantom of Bayou des Mortes by Lew Lehrman

Mercredi: Herbal-Wise

I'm not a person who has an appetite for power. I’ve been in charge at various points in my life and that’s enough of that, thank you. But there are plenty of people who quite literally lust for power. More than love or personal security, power is virtually their deity. Holy bayou, I just described Jean Laffite...

Anyway, where there is a want there is a magick and hoodoo, like so many other forms of the stuff, has several herbs for drawing power. One of the most acclaimed is known in the southern U.S. as master of the woods. Its name in many other places is woodruff or sweet woodruff, and it is also familiar to Wiccan herbalists.

In Wicca, woodruff is used to improve physical strength. Scott Cunningham says that woodruff was – and is – carried by athletes and warriors to aid in achieving victory. Woodruff carried in a leather bag is also said to protect a person from physical harm. The added bonus: this sweet smelling herb is supposed to attract money as well.

In hoodoo, master of the woods is carried to increase strength, protect and even assist in pain relief. It is thought that master of the woods sprinkled in the shoes will delay the effects of fatigue until the shoes are removed. Adding Sampson snake root to this mojo increases its effectiveness. A decoction of the same herbs in oil, particularly if it has been blessed, can be rubbed onto sore joints and muscles for magickal relief.

The so called “Master Mojo” is a red flannel bag filled with master of the woods, Sampson snake root and master root (masterwort). This is then dressed with High John the Conqueror Oil and carried to obtain physical strength and worldly power. I sometimes wonder if the King of Barataria didn’t carry this mojo in his pocket, perhaps only to lose it before things went terribly awry for his smuggling empire. Just a fanciful thought on my part, but who can say. Bonne chance ~

Header: Lafitte the Pirate by Paul Ashbrook c 1960, a contemporary imagining of Jean Laffite