Myrtle Collins
From Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers
Myrtle Collins (November 14, 1900 - April 17, 1959) was an African-American psychic reader, trick doctor, and spirit medium in Memphis, Tennessee, who blended hoodoo with Spiritualist and New Age practices. She was born Myrtle Emery Cherry to parents Ned Cherry and Sally Woods Cherry, themselves both born in Tennessee. She married David Collins, whose parents were both born in Mississippi, and between 1922 and 1939, the couple had eight children: boys Willburt, Emery, David, and James Shaw Collins, and daughters Annette, Maud, Leatha, and Ellise Collins. During the 1930s David Collins worked in construction, but by around 1940 he was employed by the Saint Louis - San Francisco Railway. Working for clients in Memphis from the 1930s through the 1950s, her business card read "Spiritual Doctor" and she was a member of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis or AMORC of San Jose, California, but when she died, her occupation was listed as "Beautician," a common cover at the time for being a fortune teller and rootworker. The clients whom Collins served in Memphis came from miles around, and the site of her home in 1938, 951 Stephens Street, was bordered by a number of places made famous in jug band and blues songs of the 1920s and 1930s: It is south-east of Wolf River Lagoon ("Wolf River Blues" by Noah Lewis) and south-west of Stonewall Place ("Stonewall Blues" by Cannon's Jug Stompers), a few blocks due south of Beale Street, 4th Street, and Vance Street (all three mentioned in "Fourth Street Mess Around" by the Memphis Jug Band), and a few blocks north-east of Bunker Hill ("Bunker Hill Blues" by Frank Stokes). Her home was also conveniently located a short walk due west of the Elmwood Cemetery, where Collins no doubt dug and paid for the graveyard dirt of spirits which she used in conjurations.
Due to the interest and diligence of the white folklorist Reverend Harry Middleton Hyatt we know quite a lot about Myrtle Collins's favourite hoodoo spells, which he recorded, transcribed and published in his massive five-volume collection "Hoodoo - Conjure - Witchcraft - Rootwork." He was sufficiently impressed with her clarity of speech and her willingness to share her knowledge that, out of 1,600 interviewees, he said that "she was the only person interviewed twice." In May of 1938, and again in October of 1939, Collins shared her life experiences, her Spiritualistic forms of mediumship, and her extensive knowledge of spell-casting with Hyatt. Her methods were embedded firmly in the the Southern African-diasporic tradition of magic, but among many other things, she told him that she had studied spiritualism by mail order and had received both a license and a diploma from "The White Brothers of San Jose, California,' which permitted her to teach. She gave Hyatt her business card and offered to tutor him rootwork for a fee. She described how she herself had paid for teachings and had bought conjure formulas from other professional practitioners, including Doctor Cicero Reed, a "white man" of San Jose, who she said was deceased by 1938, and to whom she had paid $25.00 for the recipe for a four-ingredient bath to restore men's spiritually tied sexual nature. (This formula is now known as the Memphis Uncrossing Bath in her honour.)
The "White Brothers" of San Jose -- whom Collins also called "the Rosicrucians" -- are a particular Rosicrucian Brotherhood long located in San Jose, California, and legally known as The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis or AMORC. This group's leaders claim to be lineage-holders in the White Brotherhood, a term popularized by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, originator of the Theosophical Society, to describe secret organizations that teach magic to a selected few students and work behind the scene for the social and political good of humanity. The fact that Hyatt capitalized the "White Brothers" and corrected Collin's "St. Joe's" to "San Jose" indicates that he was familiar with this New Age organization, as well he should have been, being an Anglican minister and thus aware of spiritual trends in the nation at the time. In fact, while Myrtle Collins was being interviewed by Harry Hyatt, the founder of the San Jose AMORC, H. Lewis Spence (1874-1955), was alive and thriving -- and had written prolifically on subjects as diverse as clairvoyance, hypnotism, psychism, occultism, Celtic magic, Egyptian magic and religion, and lost civilizations. All of his books and his correspondence courses were then in print and were advertised nationwide through magazines. There seems to be no doubt that Collins took one or more of Spence's correspondence courses and received a diploma for her work. She also told Hyatt that she had obtained a white robe and cap from the group. Thus it is safe to say that she, like Dr. E. P. Read, Madame Fu-Futtam, Black Herman, and Leafy Anderson, was not an uneducated rural practitioner of the type who might give Hyatt a recipe for a cleansing bath. Rather, she and her colleagues were professional spiritual workers who lived in sophisticated urban areas. Myrtle Collins, for instance, lived in metropolitan Memphis, Tennessee, a city far larger than San Jose, California, was at that time. She described gathering herbs and roots at a "farmyard" and buying herbal supplies in California during her annual trips out West to the AMORC headquarters.
She called herself a "trick doctor" and referred to Jesus Christ as the "trick giver and the trick taker" -- one who could put on or take off various spiritual conditions. As a Christian Spiritualist, much of her work was done "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." She described how to make knot spells and candles pells, how to administer cleansing baths to remove evil spirits, how to bury a spell at a gangster's or bootlegger's door to keep off the law, and how to contact a murder victim's spirit to assist you in locating the victim's unknown killer, using dirt from the grave and the worn shoe of a baby of the same gender as the victim, burned to ashes. She also described how to perform a hot-foot spell at a "three-point road" (a "Y" crossroads) in Texarkana, on the Arkansas-Texas state line, while wearing a silver dollar in your shoe and "stomping them out" so that when they went down that road they would meet with a car accident or die, depending on whether you burned a red coloured candle "for blood" or a black coloured candle for "slow death."
Myrtle Collins, with her traditional hoodoo methods, her Spiritualistic mediumship, and her openness to learning from and teaching white colleagues, are important indicators of how, in the early 20th century, urban hoodoo was evolving from a treasured compendium of surviving African magical beliefs and practices into the modern African-American, multi-cultural metaphysical system it is today.
Credits
This page is brought to you by the AIRR Tech Team:
- Author: cat yronwode
- Contributors: Papa Newt, Lukianos
- Image: Myrtle Collins; image sourced by Harry M. Hyatt; photo-edited by nagasiva yronwode
