Urine and Personal Concerns: Hair, Nails and Sweat

Every rootworker wants something of the person: a lock of hair, a nail clipping, a sweaty hatband, a little urine. With it, the work goes straight to them.

Hyatt’s informants guarded these things and hunted for them. What came off your body still belonged to you, and whoever held it held a piece of you.

What they are

Personal concerns are anything that has been part of the body or soaked in it. Hair from the comb, fingernails and toenails, sweat in clothing, menstrual blood, urine, which the informants called chamber lye or water.

A Norfolk informant said most women in that part of the world would save a man’s nail or hair clippings if he cut them in their presence (Hyatt 1743 · Norfolk, Va. · informant 470).

Hair

• Hair combed out with the dandruff, wrapped tight in red flannel with lodestone and stuck through with needles. The person breaks out in spots the size of quarters (Hyatt 1261 · Little Rock, Ark. · informant 900).
• A woman kept trained birds that brought her people’s hair. The hair was put in a tree, and the woman died (Hyatt 202 · Baltimore, Md. · informant 154).
• Three locks of the boss’s hair, kept wet with Hearts perfume, to win him over for a job (Hyatt 2283 · Fayetteville, N. Car. · informant 1412).

Nails

• Fingernails and toenails in a tin box with cayenne pepper, war water and devil dust, stopped tight and buried. The person’s hands “draw up”, and the longer it stays the worse they draw (Hyatt 26 · New Orleans, La. · informant 798).
• An old man told a young girl to give him her nail clippings so he could protect her. He wanted them to fix her so she would love him (Hyatt 880 · Wilmington, N. Car. · informant 299b).
• To pass off chills, cut your fingernails, tie them in a rag and drop them at the fork of the road. Whoever picks them up takes the chill (Hyatt 1005 · Jacksonville, Fla. · informant 608).
• For a whiskey business, your own nail clippings and the scrapings from under them steeped three days in whiskey, strained and added to the gallon you sell (Hyatt 2479 · St. Petersburg, Fla. · informant 992).

Sweat

Sweat carries a person’s strength. A New Orleans worker said that anything you had sweated in, socks, hatband or underwear, went into a small coffin he built, with dirt from a tomb and a cross (Hyatt 1780 · New Orleans, La. · informant 832).

Urine

Urine was the most used concern of all, for harm, for love, and for cleaning.

• To harm. Someone holding your nails puts their own chamber lye in a bottle with them and shakes it with nine needles. The cure is to make water by the stove with a handful of salt for nine mornings (Hyatt 1638 · Charleston, S. Car. · informant 519).
• To hold a man. His water and hers bottled together and buried. “He couldn’t raise a heart fo’ nobody else but ‘er” (Hyatt 3308 · Florence, S. Car. · informant 1294).
• To make him kind. Her urine put in his food (Hyatt 3400 · Brunswick, Ga. · informant 1184).
• To expose a witch. Your urine in a little bottle under her doorstep, and she will come and confess (Hyatt 11 · Wilmington, N. Car. · informant 267).
• For a child. Wash the soles of a backward child’s shoes with his own urine, and he will go to school (Hyatt 1616 · New Orleans, La. · informant 828).

Chamber lye as a wash

Scrubbing the steps and floors with urine was common across the South.

• With salt and Hearts Cologne on the step, it keeps the evil others put down from taking effect (Hyatt 1644 · Florence, S. Car. · informant 1293).
• Left to stand three days with salt and used to wash the house, it brings luck (Hyatt 2682 · Memphis, Tenn. · informant 1543).
• Sprinkled from the porch back into the house for seven mornings, it fills a business with customers (Hyatt 2684 · Vicksburg, Miss. · informant 733).
• Added to the scrub water each morning, with lye buried at the steps, the law will pass by (Hyatt 2692 · Mobile, Ala. · informant 688).

How it’s worked today

Personal concerns remain the strongest link in a working. Hair, nails and worn, unwashed clothing are collected for love, binding and baneful work, and many practitioners still burn or flush their own clippings and hair so no one else can use them.

Urine is still used in floor washes and in bottles to bind a lover, and as a feeding for hands.

Learn the work

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Source: Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo – Conjuration – Witchcraft – Rootwork, 5 vols., 1970-1978. Numbers refer to Hyatt’s own item numbers; the town and informant number follow. Written by Hoodoo Witch in our own words, with short quotations for reference.