Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018

The Old Ways: What Child Is This? by Linda Raedisch
Yule

Linda Raedisch

THE FIRST COLONISTS TO venture into southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens were probably looking for farmland. They burnt off the bracken, cut down a few of the oaks, white cedars, pitch and shortleaf pines, gave it a go and quickly gave up. Some of them, like the native Lenape before them, left to seek greener pastures while the rest turned to hunting, woodworking, ironworking, charcoal burning, and the intensive gathering of all those wonderful Christmas presents the forest offers up each year: cranberries for the table and the Christmas tree; bayberries for making soap and candles; mistletoe, pine cones, holly and laurel for decking the walls and the windows, and long ropes of ground cedar for winding round the pewter plate on the fireplace mantle.

The wilderness that is the Pines is also a good place to hide. If we are to believe all of the stories told over the last few hundred years, you would think you couldn’t walk so much as a mile along one of the sandy tracks without running into a witch, ghost or monster. One of my favorites is Peggy Clevenger, a woman of Hessian extraction who kept an inn in Red Oak Grove and could turn herself into a lizard or hare. But there is another even more famous witch who has no given name. I suppose she must once have had one, but it was long ago eclipsed by the long shadow her youngest son has cast over the Pines. Today she is remembered only in relation to him, as Mother Leeds, or occasionally Mrs. Shourds, mother of the Jersey Devil.

She is not without antecedents. Like Norse mythology’s Angerboda, whose name means “she who offers sorrow,” and who gave birth to the wolf that will one day devour the sun, Mother Leeds gave birth to a monster whose fame only seems to grow with each passing year. And like the fearsome mother of Grendel, the monstrous villain of Beowulf, she inhabits a world of dense thickets and sandy bogs. In some versions of the story, she is a full-fledged witch, but the more prevalent view seems to be that she was an ordinary woman who simply had too many children. When she realized she was pregnant with her thirteenth, she snapped and declared that it could come out a devil for all she cared.

Leeds was probably not her surname; she was named for Leeds Point, New Jersey, which was named for Leeds Castle in Kent, back in the old country. Her infamous thirteenth child is also known as the “Leeds Devil.” If there was ever a Father Leeds (or Mr. Shourds) he has long ago disappeared from the story.

Few agree on exactly when Mother Leeds and her brood were supposed to have lived. A highly creative piece of journalism that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859 assigns the Jersey Devil a birth date of 1735. The article goes on to identify the Devil with Caliban, the unfortunate man-monster from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A tempest was supposed to have raged the night of our Devil’s birth, the newborn chimera flying out the window and into the storm, according to the article, instead of up and out the chimney as most other versions have it.

With a date of 1735 in hand, I am going to suppose that Mother Leeds would have celebrated Christmas, if she celebrated it at all, on our January 6. The American colonists adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, but I imagine someone like Mother Leeds, after a long life of hardships, would not have taken kindly to change and would have continued to keep Christmas according to the old Julian calendar. There are so many questions I would like to ask her: Was she born here in the Pines or did she come over from the British Isles? Was she a practicing witch like Peggy Clevenger or simply a neighborhood outcast? Did she utter her famous curse because she was worn out with caring for twelve children or because she was tired of giving birth to them only to have to watch them die as so often happened in those days? And what exactly did happen on that dark and stormy night when she gave birth to her thirteenth?

Since bayberry candles were precious, the birthing room would have been lit only by rushlights. Hopefully, Mother Leeds was not all alone but had a midwife or her older daughters to attend her. What did they see that night?

Descriptions of the Jersey Devil vary. Usually, it’s a pair of black bat wings that carry him up the chimney in the moments after his birth. Subsequent sightings have mentioned horse’s hooves and a horse’s face, sometimes a dragon’s face or a face that is a cross between a horse’s and a dragon’s. Whatever the truth of the matter, it must have been severely deformed. I am guessing that Mother Leeds was never allowed to see her baby, that the midwife folded it in a towel and whisked it from the room. Nowadays, such a child, if born alive, would have been rushed to the NICU, diagnosed, and hopefully gone on to live a fulfilling life. But that night, the horrified midwife would have had nowhere to turn but the fireplace. If there ever was a Mother Leeds, and if she ever did give birth to a thirteenth child, I imagine his tiny body was turned to ashes long ago. Perhaps one of her other children saw the midwife drop the sad bundle in the fire. Perhaps he or she ran outside in order not to witness such a horror, and, looking up, saw some winged creature flapping its way over the rooftop and away. “No, the baby didn’t die,” that child might have told anyone willing to listen, “He flew up the chimney and away.”

It has been suggested, quite plausibly, that the Jersey Devil is nothing more than a Great Blue Heron, a long-beaked wading bird that stands four feet tall and haunts the wetlands throughout New Jersey. Some believe he is a folk memory of the gargoyles that adorn the Gothic cathedrals of the Old World. An exorcism performed in 1752 was supposed to have banished the Jersey Devil for 100 years, but many of the tales have him popping up again every seven years. Seven was already a mystical number in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon colonists, but in the Pine Barrens it has a curious significance. Natural forest fires are common throughout the area, and in the mysterious dwarf forests deep within the Pines, they occur roughly every seven years. Could the dragon-like Jersey Devil be the embodiment of these fires which, though dangerous if you’re caught in the middle of one, help preserve the forest itself?

The Jersey Devil has long outlived his nameless mother. He still puts in an appearance now and then, most infamously in a week-long rampage in 1909, and most recently ... well, he can always be counted on to terrorize troops of Girl Scouts camping in the Jersey woods, even as far north as Morris County’s Great Swamp.

I like to think that if the thirteenth child somehow did escape up that chimney, that he never forgot his mother and that he might still have come to visit her once a year on Old Christmas Eve. How happy Mother Leeds would have been to see him! She would have put the pewter plate away, out of the candlelight, so he wouldn’t be startled by his reflection, and then she would have cut him a large piece of cranberry cake and told him how handsome he was.

Resources

Cohen, David Stephen. The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

McCloy, James F. and Ray Miller, Jr., The Jersey Devil. Moorestown, New Jersey: Middle Atlantic Press, 2005.

McPhee, John. The Pine Barrens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.