For most of the first half of the twentieth century, if you were in trouble in the South Carolina Lowcountry, you had two places to go. One was the sheriff of Beaufort County. The other was a man on St. Helena Island who wore purple-tinted glasses, dressed in black, drove a car when almost nobody did, and could, it was said, sit in the back of a courtroom chewing a root and make a witness forget his own name. For twenty years those two men were at war, and the war ended with the sheriff on the other side. This is the history, told as straight as it can be, of Dr. Buzzard and the root doctors of Beaufort.
What is root work?
Root work, also called conjure or hoodoo, is the African American folk practice of healing, protection and influence that came to the Carolina coast with enslaved West Africans and survived there, among the Gullah people of the Sea Islands, in a form closer to its origins than anywhere else in the country. It is not Vodou, which is a religion; root work is a practice, and most of the people who used it were, and are, churchgoing Baptists and Methodists who saw no contradiction. A root doctor was consulted the way you’d consult a physician, a lawyer and a pastor, often for the same problem: a sickness, a lawsuit, a faithless husband, a neighbor who had put something on you.
The tools were roots and herbs, graveyard dirt, red flannel bags, candles, and the doctor’s own authority, which mattered more than any of the rest. Root work could cure and it could curse. The pale blue paint on Lowcountry porch ceilings, which we cover at haint blue, the boo hag and the plat-eye, is the everyday end of the same tradition: protection, applied by people who did not necessarily believe in it and were not taking chances. The root doctor was the professional end.
Who was Dr. Buzzard?
The name belonged to several men along the Carolina and Georgia coast over the years, but the one everyone means was Stephen Robinson, sometimes written Stepney or Stephany, born in 1885 at Frogmore on St. Helena Island, the big sea island east of Beaufort. The story on the island was that his father had been a conjure man brought from West Africa directly, long after the import of enslaved people was banned, and had passed the power to his son. Whatever the truth of that, by the early 1900s Robinson was practicing, and by the 1920s he was the most sought-after root doctor in the South, with clients coming to St. Helena from as far as New York and Chicago.
He was a performer and knew it. The purple glasses, the black suit, the fine cars, the silence. He was also, by every account, a serious practitioner who took the work seriously, a deacon-class member of his Baptist church on the island, and when the church burned he paid to rebuild the sanctuary. He married Molly Bleach of Frogmore. He was rich by Sea Island standards and nobody on St. Helena thought that strange: a doctor was a doctor.
What did “chewing the root” in court mean?
His specialty, and the reason the law noticed him. A defendant in Beaufort County, or his family, would hire Dr. Buzzard to attend the trial. He would sit in the back of the courtroom, in the glasses, and chew a root, and the prosecution’s witnesses would stumble, forget, contradict themselves, or decline to appear at all. Juries, it was said, found it hard to convict with him in the room. Whether the root did it, or the knowledge that he was there did it, was not a distinction anyone in the courtroom found useful. Sheriffs and solicitors found him in the back of their trials for years.
Sheriff McTeer, the white witch doctor
James Edwin “Ed” McTeer became sheriff of Beaufort County in 1926, at twenty-two, taking over the office when his father died in it, and held it for thirty-seven years. He was a Lowcountry man, raised among people who used root work, and he understood it better than most white officials. He also could not have a man in the back of his courtrooms unhexing his witnesses.
So he went after Robinson for practicing medicine without a license, which was the only charge the law offered. The case collapsed when McTeer’s main witness, called to the stand, went into convulsions and could not testify. A later attempt failed too. McTeer’s response, which he described himself in his memoir decades later, was not to give up but to change sides. He studied root work. He let it be known around the county that the sheriff was a doctor too, and a powerful one, who could take off anything Buzzard put on. People started coming to the sheriff’s office to have spells removed, and McTeer, by his own account, removed them. For the rest of his life he was known across the Lowcountry as the white witch doctor, and he did not object to the name.
How did the feud between Dr. Buzzard and Sheriff McTeer end?
With a death. Robinson’s son drove off a causeway on the island and drowned. Robinson, by the account McTeer gave and the island repeated, took it as the sheriff’s work: a counter-spell that had landed on the wrong man. He called a truce. He agreed to stop practicing medicine, meaning the potions and the cures, and McTeer agreed to leave the rest alone. Robinson kept doing root work, with the courtroom clients and the spells, until he died on May 5, 1947. He is buried at St. Helena Memorial Gardens. He left the practice to his son-in-law, who was called Buzzy, and the name Dr. Buzzard went on without him, worn by other men up and down the coast for fifty years. As late as 2016 a grandson was reported to be the last root doctor practicing on the island.
McTeer left office in 1963 and in 1976 published Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor, which is the source for most of what’s told above and which you should read with the understanding that it was written by one side. He died in 1979. The two of them are the Lowcountry’s great double act: the sheriff and the conjure man, each of whom spent his career convinced the other had real power, and each of whom may have been right.
Dr. Buzzard in books and film
If you know the name from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, that’s a different man, sort of. The root doctor in John Berendt’s book and Clint Eastwood’s film is based on the Savannah practice of Valerie Boles, the woman called Minerva, and her late husband Percy Washington, who worked as Dr. Eagle. The film renamed him Dr. Buzzard because that was the name people knew, which is itself a measure of how far Stephen Robinson’s reputation had traveled. Roger Pinckney’s Blue Roots is the best general book on Gullah folk magic; Baynard Woods’ Coffin Point is the one on McTeer.
Visiting
Go respectfully. Root work is a living practice, not a tourist attraction, and the people of St. Helena are not a museum exhibit. That said:
- Penn Center, St. Helena Island: the historic Gullah school and museum, the right place to learn the island’s history before you do anything else. Covered also on our page about the 1893 hurricane, which hit this island hardest.
- Frogmore and the island’s crossroads: the corner where U.S. 21 meets Lands End Road, with the Gullah Geechee Visitor Center, galleries and the Red Piano Too building. Robinson’s country.
- The Chapel of Ease ruins, Lands End Road: the tabby church a few miles on, on our list of Lowcountry ruins you can visit.
- Beaufort: the courthouse where the courtroom stories happened is downtown, and the Beaufort History Museum in the Arsenal covers McTeer.
St. Helena is about an hour and forty minutes from St. George, down U.S. 17 to Gardens Corner and U.S. 21 through Beaufort.
Why this story belongs here
Root work was never only a Sea Island thing. It ran up the rivers with the people who practiced it, Black, white and Native alike, and the Edisto country of Dorchester County had its own doctors, less famous than Buzzard and less written about. Carson Faust’s novel If the Dead Belong Here, which we cover at our page on Faust, has it along the Edisto in 1899. Our dispatches have it too, though they don’t name it: a church with one too many in the pews in The Second Congregation, a river that has to be asked in The Edisto Keeps Its Own. Dr. Buzzard would have recognized both. Everything we publish is on the dispatches page.
Sources
- J.E. McTeer, Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor (1976).
- South Carolina Encyclopedia, “Dr. Buzzard.”
- Baynard Woods, Coffin Point: The Strange Cases of Ed McTeer, Witchdoctor Sheriff (2010).
- Roger Pinckney, Blue Roots: African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People (1998).
- Local Life (Beaufort), “Under the Spell of Dr. Buzzard and Lowcountry Rootwork”; Beaufort County Library, “The Legacy of Dr. Buzzard.”