5

Alabama Life in a Shrimping and Oyster Shucking Camp 5

"These here are my girls, an' their children. We always gits
rid of the lice though, by gitting sage an' make strong tea, an'
take fat from chicken an' put in the tea and rub that on. The
grease kills the nits as well as the lice, an' the tea makes the
hair have new life an' color. I'm a great believer in the home
remedies, because them remedies do not wok on the blood like the
medicines these days. We uses the 'divine healer,' but you've got
to believe, b'fore he can do you any good. There's only a certain
one learned in healin', but this man can stop blood any time. Once
they was a man that the doctors had given up, and this healer
cuored him, an' they give him papers to go 'round healing'.

"Some of the home remedies we uses, is cobwebs with raw sugar
on it, to stop bleedin'. Tobacco is good for wasp stings, bumble-
bee stings and the honey bee sting. Just take a chaw out of your
mouth an' put it where you've been stung, an' it will kill the
sting right now. I tell you there is some good in every kind of
a weed in this world. You take rabbit tobacco is good for colds
and fever. Make a tea out of it and drink it. There's the mullein
leaves, they make good cough syrup. Take them an' boil down with
cherry bark and pine chips, and then put a little honey in it.
Another thing, you can make a poultice out of mullein leaves for
croup. But the best thing for pneumonia, is take hog hoofs, and
scorch them brown to where you can crumble them and boil into a
tea, and that'll cure pnuemonia, when nothing else wont.

"Another thing I does when the children get the earache,
you see, I smoke a pipe, an' I blow the smoke in the ear, an' that
stops the ache. For malaria we goes into the swamp and get black
jack roots and' put in gin."

One of the daughters began to laugh when Joe was talking

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