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Conjure man12/5/2023 ![]() ![]() I am glad my comments on the Southwest interest you, and I feel most highly honored, indeed, at the kind things you have said about my descriptions, etc. In Howard’s following letter (#152) from January 1931 to Lovecraft, he responds to the latter’s suggestion that he make use of Kelly in his fiction: Howard's photo of the Ouachita River area river in "Kelly's country". Howard was born in the Ouachita River area in Arkansas, and REH had two pictures of the Ouachita River area. ![]() Nor is it difficult to picture what happened in that lonely cabin, shadowed by the pine-forest - the crack of a shot in the night, the finishing stroke of a knife, then a sullen splash in the dusky waters of the Ouachita - and Kelly the conjure man vanished forever from the eyes of men.ĭr. They began to fear the conjure man and one night he vanished. There were desperate characters living in the river-lands, white folks little above the negro in civilization, and much more dangerous and aggressive. Son of a Congo ju-ju man was Kelly, and he dwelt apart from his race in silent majesty on the river… He lifted ‘conjers’ and healed disease by incantation and nameless things made of herbs and ground snake bones… Later he began to branch into darker practices… he black population came to fear him as they did not fear the Devil, and Kelly assumed more and more a brooding, satanic aspect of dark majesty and sinister power when he began casting his brooding eyes on white folks as if their souls, too, were his to dandle in the hollow of his hand, he sealed his doom…They began to fear the conjure man and one night he vanished… Probably the most picturesque figure in the Holly Springs country was Kelly the ‘conjer man,’ who held sway among the black population of the `70s. After recounting some of the local history, Howard goes on to write (letter #145): He mentions the Scotch-Irish settlement of Holly Springs, Arkansas, where his grandfather William Benjamin Howard settled in 1858. Lovecraft concerning the history and lore of the South and Southwest. In late 1930, Howard wrote a long letter to H. “Black Canaan” was inspired by the legend of Kelly the Conjure-man. “Kelly the Conjure-Man” was sent to Texas Company (Texaco Star) on June 4, 1931, and later rejected.
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