Traiteures were people who could heal others by prayer and laying-on of hands. Much of the traiteure knowledge about curing people comes from African influence. My great aunt, Leoni Ricouard, was a traiteure, and Granny often took the kids to see her for various cures. One such visit is described here.

Taking the sun out of your head
In South Louisiana, it gets terribly hot, sometimes over 100 degrees in the summer. People get so hot that they have headaches or even heat stroke. When we got headaches, your Granny used to take us to see Aunt Leoni Ricouard. Aunt Leoni used to keep holy water around the house because she helped a lot of people as a traiteure. So she would fill an empty mayonnaise jar with holy water and then put face cloth over the top, secured by a rubber band around the lip. She would turn the jar over on our heads and say a prayer to take the sun out of our heads. This prayer kept people from getting sunstroke. She did this for the workers in the area, too.

Roach Tea
My great grandmother’s son -- Uncle John we called him -- was bitten by a dog when he was 12 years old. In those days, they didn’t have tetanus serum, and people died from such bites. So when Uncle John was bitten he got very ill and came down with lockjaw. Great Grandma took him to the doctor, but they couldn't help him. The doctors finally gave up on him, and told Great Grandma to take him home to die. He would have actually starved to death or dehydrated.

Now Great Grandma had a housekeeper and nanny, a black lady who helped raise her thirteen brothers and sisters. The nanny lived just down the street. When Great Grandma brought Uncle John home and told the nanny what happened, the nanny said that she knew a traiteure who could cure him. The traiteure, an old black man, came over and checked out Uncle John. Then he told the children to go out and search for all the old cockroaches they could find. When the children returned, the traiteure had the nanny boil the cockroaches and strain the brew. What was left they called "roach tea." They fed the tea through a straw to Uncle John for about a week and a half. That was the only fluid or food he had, and he slowly started to recover. Uncle John lived to be 87 years old.

The strange thing about this is that this year on TV, I saw that they have discovered something in the cockroach that really does help cure lockjaw.

Both of these traiteure stories were collected from my mother, Judy Brining (1999).