The Silver Dime

In Hyatt’s interviews, a silver dime was a working tool. It warned you, it protected you, and it paid the spirits.

It had to be real silver. Every informant who mentions it is talking about the old silver dimes.

The warning: when silver turns black

This is the dime’s best-known job. If something has been put on you, the dime shows it.

• Bandage a dime over a swollen place. If you have been poisoned by a trick, the dime turns black. If it is only a swelling, it stays bright (Hyatt 606 · Waycross, Ga. · informant 1067).
• Sleep with a dime under your tongue. In the morning it will be “black as yore coat” if you are hurt (Hyatt 609 · Sumter, S.C. · informant 1365).
• A worker put a dime in a woman’s mouth for fifteen minutes. It came out black. He boiled it in a black frying pan to work on the trick (Hyatt 608 · Sumter, S.C. · informant 1380).
• Worn with a hole drilled through it on the neck, wrist, waist or leg, it darkens when someone is working on you (Hyatt 605 · Mobile, Ala. · informant 688).

Protection

• A dime round each ankle, and salt in both shoes, for two years after being cured (Hyatt 637).
• “Long as you live, you get you two silver dimes and wear ’em on your legs,” so nobody can put anything down for you. When her strings rotted and she lost them, she was hurt again (Hyatt 978 · New Orleans, La. · informant 851).
• Worn in the left shoe (Hyatt 589 · Brunswick, Ga. · informant 1174).

As medicine

• Silver filed from a dime into a glass of water, given to drink (Hyatt 971).
• Silver dust scraped from a dime, mixed with asafoetida and milk, taken for nine days to drive out live things (Hyatt 701 · New Orleans, La. · informant 832).

As payment and in hands

• Left at the grave to buy graveyard dirt from the dead (Hyatt 920 · Waycross, Ga. · informant 1164).
• Put inside a hand between a lodestone and High John the Conqueror (Hyatt 737).
• Laid on a dead man’s eyes, so his killer cannot get away (Hyatt 94 · Fayetteville, N.C. · informant 1398).

How it’s worked today

Workers still keep a pre-1965 silver dime for exactly these jobs. US dimes stopped being 90% silver after 1964.

It is worn at the ankle or in the shoe, carried in mojo bags for luck and protection, and checked often. A dime that darkens suddenly is cleansed, and so is the person wearing it.

Learn the work

← Back to The Hyatt Files

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.