“Kelly the Conjure-Man”

Published in The Howard Collector, #5 (Summer 1964).

There are strange tales told when the full moon shines
Of voodoo nights when the ghost-things ran—
But the strangest figure among the pines
Was Kelly the conjure-man.

About seventy-five miles north-east of the great Smackover oil field of Arkansas lies a densely wooded country of pinelands and rivers, rich in folklore and tradition. Here, in the early 1850s came a sturdy race of Scotch-Irish pioneers pushing back the frontier and hewing homes in the tangled wilderness.

Among the many picturesque characters of those early days, one figure stands out, sharply, yet dimly limned against a background of dark legendry and horrific fable—the sinister figure of Kelly, the black conjurer.

Son of a Congo ju-ju man, legend whispered, Kelly, born a slave, exercised in his day unfathomed power among the darkest of the Ouachita pinelands. Where he came from is not exactly known; he drifted into the country shortly after the Civil War and mystery was attendant on his coming as upon all his actions.

Kelly did little work with his hands, and he did not mingle overmuch with his kind. They came to him; he never came to them. His cabin stood on the banks of Tulip Creek, a dark, serpent-like stream winding through the deep overhanging shadows of the pines, and there Kelly lived apart in dark and silent majesty.

A fine figure of barbaric manhood he was, perhaps six foot in height, mighty shouldered, supple like a great black panther. He always wore a vivid red flannel shirt, and great gold rings in his ears and nose heightened the bizarre and fantastic imagery of his appearance. He had little to say to white men or black. Silently, like an uncrowned king of dark Africa he stalked along the roads, looming like a dark inscrutable wizard among the pinelands. His eyes were deep, murky, far-seeing, and his skin was black as tropical night. The very aura of the jungle hung about him and people feared him, perhaps sensing something sinister, something abysmal that lurked in the black waters of his soul and peered through his murky eyes.

He was, indeed, incongruous in his environments. He belonged in another age—another land—another setting. He belonged in the haunted shadows of a fetish hut, lapped by the monstrous, brutish slumber of ancient Africa.

Kelly the “conjer man” they called him, and to his cabin on lonely Tulip Creek came the black people on mysterious errands. Furtively they stole like shadows through the sombre blackness of the pinelands but what went on in that dim cabin no white man ever knew.

Kelly was a professed dealer in charms, and a dispeller of “conjers.” The black folk came to him to have spells lifted from their souls where enemies had placed them by curses and incantations. More, he was a healer—at least he claimed to heal the black people of their diseases. Tuberculosis was rare among white people in that locality, but negroes were subject to its ravages, and these victims Kelly professed to heal. His methods were unique; he burnt snake bones to powder and sifted the powder in an incision made in the victim’s arm by means of a lancet made from an old razor. It is a matter of doubt whether anyone was ever healed by these methods—in fact, there is reason to believe the results were appallingly the opposite.

Perhaps Kelly did not himself believe he could combat tuberculosis in this manner; perhaps it was but a ruse to get the victim in his power; this is but a supposition, but primitive peoples have strange ways of bringing their fellows under their sway. Among some tribes it is but necessary to procure a lock of hair, a finger nail, a drop of blood, over which to utter certain incantations and perform certain rituals. Then, in the mind of the spell-weaver, and in the mind of the victim as well, the latter is completely under control. And there is the magic of molding a figure of the intended victim from clay. Pins stuck in this figure cause the human model to die agonizingly; place the clay figure in a stream, and as the water dissolves it, the human victim withers and fades away into slow dissolution. All these things are solemn truths in the minds of the voodooists.

Be that as it may, Kelly soon began to exercize unusual powers over the darkies of the locality. From a dispeller of “conjers” he became, it would seem, a weaver of spells himself. Negroes began to go violently insane, and rumor laid their obsessions at Kelly’s door. Whether the cause of their insanity was physical or mental was not known, but that their minds were affected by some uncanny thing was well evident. They were obsessed by the horrible belief that their stomachs were full of living snakes, created by the spell of some master-conjurer, and at the mention of this nameless wizard, suspicion turned to Kelly. Was it hypnosis, some obscure malady or maddening drug, or the action of sheer fear? No white man knew, yet the victims were indisputably mad.

In every community of whites and blacks, at least in the South, a deep, dark current flows forever, out of sight of the whites who but dimly suspect its existence. A dark current of colored folks’ thoughts, deeds, ambitions and aspirations, like a river flowing unseen through the jungle. No white man ever knew why Kelly—if Kelly it were—drove black men and black women mad. What was the secret of grim power, what the secret of his dark ambitions, no white man ever knew.

And Kelly never spoke of them, certainly; he went his way, silent, brooding, darkly majestic, that satanic something growing in his shadowy eyes until he seemed to look on white people as if they too were blind mewling puppets in the hollow of his black hand.

Then, in the late ’70s, Kelly vanished. The word is to be taken literally. His cabin on Tulip Creek stood empty, the slab door sagging open on the wooden hinges, and he was seen no more, stalking like a dark ghost through the pinelands. Perhaps the colored people knew, but they never spoke. He had come in mystery, in mystery he lived, and in mystery he went and no man knew the road of his going. At least no man ever admitted that he knew. Perhaps the gloomy waters knew. Perhaps Kelly’s victims turned on him at last. That lonely cabin in the black shadows of the moaning pines might have known a grisly midnight crime; the dusky waters of Tulip Creek might have received a form that splashed soggily and silently sank.

Or perhaps the conjure-man merely went his mysterious way in the night for reasons of his own, and on some other river pursued his fantastic career. None knows. Mystery hangs over his coming and his going, like a cloud impenetrable as night among the piney-woods, than which there is no blacker darkness this side Oblivion.

But even today his shadow haunts the long dim river-reaches and when the wind drones through the black pines under the stars, the old black people will tell you it is the spirit of the conjure-man whispering to the dead in the black shadows of the pinelands.

“Kelly the Conjure-Man”

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