Laying Tricks

In hoodoo a 'trick' is the prepared object laid where a person will meet it - at a door, under a step, in a path, in a bed - and 'tricking' is the act of laying one. The word covers the whole range from a protective packet at a threshold to the most hostile work, and it is the tradition's most ordinary noun for what is done to a situation, which is why 'tricking' came to mean harming in ordinary southern English.

The worker prepares the trick - a powder, a packet, a prepared object, a dressed candle stub, a written petition - and places it where the target will walk over it, touch it, or sleep above it. It may be buried, sewn into a mattress, dropped in a road, or left at a door, and the laying is often accompanied by spoken words and by a set time of day. After a set period the trick is taken up and disposed of, and how it is disposed of is part of the work.

This is the tradition's weapon, and the tradition's ethic about it is explicit: a trick laid without cause is an attack, the work returns on the worker who lays it without justification, and a root doctor asked to trick someone who has done nothing is expected to refuse. Much of the material in the collections about laying tricks is testimony about being tricked - what it feels like, how it was found, how it was taken off - which is the perspective the tradition itself most often records.