When hurried upon the slave-ships in the Kongo or at Lagos, the slave tied into a little package, hung among his other fetich treasures, seeds of his favorite foods. At least one of these seeds survived, in the West Indies and thence to the United States, with a native name "gumbo." It is the okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), that exists all over Africa, and has spread over the United States. Ground-nuts--"pea-nuts" (Arachis hypogea), which botanists claim to be a native of South America--have been grown from time immemorial all over Africa, and, in the Loango country bordering on the Kongo River, by the Ashira and some other tribes are used as their staple article of food, rather than the plantain (Musa sapientum), or "manioc," cassava (Jatropha manihot). It is an important export from those regions and from the Gambia to-day. If the nut itself was not carried from Africa to America, its native name was; that name is "mbenda," and it was corrupted to "pindar" in parts of the Southern States. The evil thing that the slave brought with him was his religion. You do not need to go to Africa to find the fetich. During the hundred years that slavery in our America held the Negro crushed, degraded, and apart, his master could deprive him of his manhood, his wife, his child, the fruits of his toil, of his life; but there was one thing of which he could not deprive him,--his faith in fetich charms. Not only did this religion of the fetich endure under slavery; it grew. None but Christian masters offered the Negro any other religion; and, by law, even they were debarred from giving him any education. So fetichism flourished. The master's children were infected by the contagion of superstition; they imbibed some of it at their Negro foster-mother's breast. It was a secret religion that lurked thinly covered in slavery days, and that lurks to-day beneath the Negro's Christian profession as a white art, and among non-professors as a black art; a memory of the revenges of his African ancestors; a secret fraternity among slaves of far-distant plantations, with words and signs,--the lifting of a finger, the twitch of an eyelid,--that telegraphed from house to house with amazing rapidity (as to-day in Africa) current news in old slave days and during the late Civil War; suspected, but never understood by the white master; which, as a superstition, has spread itself among our ignorant white masses as the "Hoodoo." Vudu, or Odoism, is simply African fetichism transplanted to American soil.