I heard a very bizarre fieldwork story today in an anthropology talk. A female graduate student in the late '90s gave one of her professors a tape she recorded of her encounter with one of the "swamp people" in Mississippi. He put the tape aside and never listened to it until after she graduated but when he did, he was utterly amazed. The woman on the tape told an old santeria story in a language that existed 150 years ago, containing mostly English but also Catalan and Choctaw words, and is unlike anything known to exist today. He had to find out what this tape was and one of his colleagues tracked the student down on the internet. The story of the encounter that resulted in the tape was even stranger. She was doing research in the swamps of Mississippi and came upon a house of an old woman who was nearly 100 years old. The woman called herself Yansa (the name of a voodoo goddess), and told the student when she came to her door, "Come in. I have been expecting you". The woman was dressed in unusual garb, unlike anything people in the area normally wear, and her house was also unfamiliar in its furnishings and looked very, very old-fashioned in retaining African heritage. It was like stepping into another time and era. Then the woman fed the student some rice and touched her face in an annointing sort of way (I forgot exactly what happened), and the student got out the tape recorder to record the woman's story. And then the student asked her first question, but it wasn't in her natural English but in this obscure lost dialect, she opened her mouth and somehow just said, "You ye di ya" meaning, "Are you from around here?" Maybe she knew something of this broken English from her past, but she just knew what to say subconsciously. Then the old woman told a santeria story about Dambala, the snake goddess, in this strange archaic language. The student didn't understand all of it, but followed along. I listened to the tape and it is freakingly spoooooky. The old woman suddenly spoke like she was 30 years old, full of youth and vigor, but the way she spoke by hissing out the words and chanting them and whispering them could make your skin crawl. Then the student started getting scared and misunderstood something the woman said and she blurted out, "But I never knew you before". And then the old woman started mocking her and taunting in a sing-song voice, "Fraid a babaloo," and the student defensively said in standard English instead of dialect, "No, I'm not afraid of a babaloo". And the old woman said, "Good. Turn off the damn thing -- it take my namayama (soul)". And there the tape stopped. And then, not long after this encounter, the old woman died.....it's like she passed on the story for posterity and then she died. Later on, when others became interested in the tape, the student returned to the swamps to find the community to see if she could learn anything more about this woman but despite several attempts, the woman's house could never be found -- almost as if it never existed.
