The Kentucky Gazette

African Fetishism in Jamaica

A newspaper correspondent tells a story of African Fetishism in Jamaica, which shows method in the madness of the supernatural. A strange apparition haunted the Port Royal mountains, near the harbor of Kingston. It was called the "rolling calf," and came rolling down the mountains in a wheel of fire on the road leading to the harbor. In the wheels are fastened with chains, was the figure of a man with a calf's head, and it came with a rattle and roar, and passed out of sight in the direction of the city. It was believed in by the negroes, and seen and wondered at by white men, and no explanation was given by anybody except this: "It was the way the disembodied souls of those butchers were punished who in their lifetime took away the young calf from its mother and slowly tortured it to death by periodical bleedings."

This was sufficient for the negroes, and the people generally had faith in the thing and this explanation. It appears to have had a deeper meaning, however, and may be explained upon a rational business basis. The colored policemen were in the dark about its nature and origin and purposes, as well as everybody else, and it was perfectly right that they should be. They took its appearance as a matter-of-fact, and questioned no further. The reason they were not in the secret was this: Valuable smuggled goods were landed at night at Rock Fort, and had to be conveyed to the city by some safe means. It was a notorious fact that the 'rolling calf' appeared soon after arrival of certain steamers. Whenever it did so, the people shunned the vicinity of its operations. It effectually cleared the track for smuggled goods. That was the reason and the method of it. It was in its glory in 1863. Lately one who observed and shot at it then, while rolling, told the story in the house of a planter, near Kingston, and the planter laughed heartily at it. He said he had a man who could do the spectre. The spectre was performed on the same night, but the man who did it refused to tell how it was done, and the process of the trick remains unexplained. The performer had a reputation as an Obeah man, and had been imprisoned and flogged for practicing Fetishism.