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“A thousand miles away and more than a century later, a very similar and culturally tenacious belief would be echoed in the daily lives of Sapelo Island, Georgia, residents, where sightings of ‘Aunt Nancy’ the spider, were interpreted as an especially fortunate occurrence portending good things to come—but killing Aunt Nancy made you highly vulnerable to bad luck and could doom you to unfortunate, even deadly retribution. A Sapelo Island resident reveals: ‘For good luck, there was that black cat, of course, and we also had Aunt Nancy the spider. We called the spider An’ Nancy. An’ Nancy was quite wise. You could play with that spider all day long but they would not let you harm An’ Nancy. We did not harm it, we did not kill it, we did not do anything to it. That spider brings you good luck.’ A retention from the Ghanaian Ashanti of the Akan nation, stories of the trickster, Anansi, who comes in the form of a spider, was the subject of children’s game plays in both the American black belt South and the Caribbean where Anansi tales and stories shaped the content of folk wisdom in the form of riddles, stories, and proverbs.
-Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System
