A curiosity of hoodoo magic for gambling luck, "Aunt Sally's Policy Players Dream Book" consists of nine separate alphabetical lists of objects and situations found in dreams with interpretations and lucky numbers for playing policy, an illegal (and now obsolete) lottery once popular in the black community. Also included is a reprint of a 19th century French divination system called the "Oraculum or Book of Fate," based on an old Arabic system of sand-divination commonly called geomancy.
"Aunt Sally's" was first published in the 1890s; this is a facsimile reprint of a 1920s edition. The cover depicts a thin, gap-toothed old black woman in a head scarf, shawl, calico blouse, and apron. Folks who collect psychedelic-era art may recognize this image as the swipe-source for a 1967 poster by Rick Griffin for a concert by Big Brother & the Holding Co. and Canned Heat. In the 1930s-40s a major hoodoo supplier, the King Novelty Company, not only sold the "Dream Book" but also manufactured a line of Aunt Sally's incense and other hoodoo potions. King's Aunt Sally was flipped right for left, and was younger and plumper, but she still wore the old slavery-days costume. She looked a lot like the then-current image of Aunt Jemima, seen on the pancake mix of the same name.
Policy was an illegal lottery first introduced in Chicago in 1885 by an operator nick-named Policy Sam. It soon spread around the country and, despite anti-policy laws, which started appearing on the books as early as 1901, it flourished everywhere in America until legal numbers games such as state lotteries supplanted it. Eventually the use of the term "policy" for this type of game came to imply an African-American clientele, for among Italian-Americans a similar illegal lottery was called "the numbers," while Cuban-Americans in New York referred to their lottery as "bolita." The name "policy" may have come from a verbal code that the numbers runners (ticket sellers) used when collecting bets on the street: "Would you like to take out an insurance policy?" they asked. One could also play at a "policy shop" or "policy office," where the bets were taken and the stakes held by "policy writers."
Policy bets were placed on groups of numbers from 1 through 78 (coincidentally the number of cards in a tarot deck). Borrowing from horse-racing terminology, a two-number betting combination was called a "saddle," a three-number combination a "gig," and a four-number combination a "horse." Gigs were the most popular play, but bets could be made in combinations of up to 25 numbers. Some gigs were so well-known that they had their own names, such as "the washerwoman's gig" (4, 11, 44) and "the dirty gig" (3, 6, 9). In the 19th century, a wager could be as low as one cent per number or three cents per gig; by the 1930s most operators set a three-cent or nickel lower limit on bets. The payout was usually ten-to-one, but higher payouts were made for groups of numbers.
Winning policy bets were selected several times a day, when those who ran the game spun a large wheel and "the numbers fell." Obviously, spinning a wheel left the operators open to charges of fraud. This did not stop people from betting, though. The "companies" that operated policy wheels gave themselves (and thereby their wheels) colourful names, such as "The Interstate," "The East & West," "The Red Devil," "The Dead Row," and "The Streamliner."
In New York during the 1920s, policy operators tampered with their wheels so often that an "honest" version of the game was established in which gig bets were taken on the last three numbers of the daily Federal Reserve Clearing House Report. The policy company that ran this game, known as "Clearing-House," was immune to charges of corruption, and offered the further advantage that the bettor did not need to contact a runner or return to the office to learn if he or she had won -- because the numbers were printed in the daily newspapers. In the South another "on-the-level" policy game, called "The Cotton Exchange," derived its winning numbers from the daily spot prices for cotton on the Chicago Board of Trade. At the highest levels, there were definite connections between the African-American, Jewish, and Italian-American mobsters who controlled both the policy companies and the numbers rackets; they sometimes teamed up to open new territories, and other times they killed one another to dominate gambling operations in certain towns or among certain ethnic groups.
Dream books -- of which "Aunt Sally's Policy Players Dream Book" is by far the best-known -- are part of the African-American hoodoo tradition. They link dream images (e.g. dream of a cook or dream of a locomotive) to divinatory meanings (e.g. "you will receive a letter" or "beware a strange man") and they also give numbers for betting (e.g. 5-14-50 or 65-41-55). In a typical numbers book, the dream images are listed in alphabetical order, with one, two, three, or four numbers beside each item, specifically designed for the convenience of those who bet on policy.
The authors of these dream books are largely unknown to modern players, but among the most prolific was a man named Herbert Gladstone Parris. Under the pseudonyms Prof. Konje, Professor Uriah Konje, and Prof. De Herbert Parris wrote and published a considerable number of lucky dream books during the 1920s and 1930s.
By the 1930s several brands of "lucky dream" incense were being manufactured for the use of policy players. Burned in the bedroom before sleeping, they were designed to increase a person's chance of dreaming lucky and remembering the dream long enough to get it interpreted in numerical form. In addition, they often contained their own sets of lucky numbers, intended to be taken up by sifting through the incense ash upon awakening.
Lucky dream incenses of early to mid 20th century fell into two major types: loose, self-lighting incense powders with a three-digit gig printed on paper and inserted in every package, and compressed charcoal briquette incense, which, when burned, revealed a hidden three-digit number in the ashes. Examples of the powder type included the King Novelty brand Aunt Sally's Lucky Dream Incense and the Sonny Boy Products brand Lucky Dream Remembering Incense. The briquette type was represented by Lucky Number Incense, manufactured by the Eastern Trading Company of Chicago, which came in a pasteboard box depicting Buddha. Inside the box, packed on top of the incense, was a tiny three-fold booklet that interpreted the numbers from 100 to 999 and gave the meanings for a few dreams.
The following description of a policy shop was written in 1892 by the journalist Thomas Knox, when the game was still in its relative infancy. In the shop Knox visited, the policy wheel itself was not seen by the customers because it was located at the company's "central office" on Broad Street. Furthermore, he estimated that only 30 - 40% of the policy players were African-American, but that percentage continued to increase until by the 1920s policy was almost exclusively the provenance of African-American gamblers:
"Playing policy" is a cheap way of gambling, but one on which hundreds if not thousands of dollars are risked every day in New York. Sums as low as three cents can be risked upon it, and there are policy-shops where bets of one cent are taken.
The play is upon numbers which are drawn daily, usually in Kentucky or Louisiana, and sent by telegraph. The numbers are from 1 to 78; the room where the game is played is, like those of other cheap gambling-dens, usually at the rear of a cigar-store, barroom or other place where it does not rouse suspicion if many persons are seen entering. A long counter extends the entire length of the room, and behind this counter, near its center sits the man who keeps the game and is called the "writer." He is not the proprietor, but simply a clerk on a salary, and his duties are to copy the slips handed up by the players, mark them with the amount of money paid, and watch to see that no fraud is practiced.
There are twenty-five plays every morning and the same number in the evening at the regular shops, and they all get their winning numbers from a central office in Broad Street. Near the "writer" is an iron spike or hook on which are the policy slips; each slip contains the winning numbers and is placed faced downwards so that nobody can see what it is. Let us now see how the scheme is worked.
I am about to try my luck at policy, and for this purpose enter a shop and pass through to the rear. If there are ten people in the room it is even chance that three or four of them will be negroes, as the colored brethren are very fond of this game of chance. The assemblage is promiscuous and not at all select.
Along the counter are numerous slips of paper for general use. I take one of the slips and write upon it five pairs of numbers [sic; he means trios of numbers, not pairs, as will be seen], using any numbers from 1 to 78. I give this slip to the "writer," with fifteen cents, and say,
"Put me in for five gigs at three cents."
Two numbers are called a "saddle" and three numbers a "gig." There are numerous combinations in the game, but "gigs" and "saddles" are the most popular. I wait until the other players have put in their bets, which the "writer" copies and records and then hands back to the players, just as he copies and returns mine. When all the bets are in he takes the first policy slip from the spike or hook aforesaid, writes upon a slate the numbers he finds on the slip and then hangs it up where everybody can see it. He writes them in two columns of twelve numbers, and if I have guessed two of the numbers in either column in one of my gigs, I walk up to the counter and present my ticket for payment, receiving ten times the amount of my wager.
But a man stands as good a chance of being struck by lightning as he does of winning at this rate. Nevertheless the game is full of seductiveness on account of its possibilities and also on account of its cheapness. Some of the shops have telephone connections, and a customer who is known to the establishment can play policy without leaving his office by simply telephoning his guesses. That a large amount of money may be lost at policy is shown by the circumstance that quite recently the cashier of an important law firm in New York city embezzled $125,000 of the money of his employers. When the defalcation was discovered and investigated it was found that this enormous sum had been spent in playing policy in a notorious shop on Broadway.
"Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life," by Helen Campbell, Thomas Knox, and Thomas Byrnes (A. D. Worthington & Co., 1892); pp. 639-640.
The mechanism by which the bettors' numbers in "Aunt Sally's Policy Players Dream Book" were assigned to the various dream images is unknown to me. It may have been arbitrary, it may have been cabalistic in some sense (e.g. derived from gematria), or it may harken back to a European -- most likely French -- system of divination.
Here is an example of dreams and their numerical equivalents:
cat 14So, say i dreamed that a surgeon was feeding a cat and a dog and he fed the cat first. If i wanted to make a gig wager, i would bet 10-14-4. But if i dreamed he fed the dog first, then i'd bet 10-4-14. Some dreams are given interpretations in pre-made 2-number saddle combinations and some in 4-number horses, but most dream images are given single numbers or 3-number gigs, as the latter was the most popular type of bet to place. For example:
dog 4
surgeon 10
butter (some good fortune, but mixed with sadness) 4, 7, 13Not-so-coincidentally, 4, 11, 44 -- "the washerwoman's gig" -- which signifies both "lottery" and "policy office," is the number-set that Aunt Sally holds on the cover of her "Policy Players Dream Book." It also appears on the label of a 1930s product called Magic Number Brand Three Number Incense, along with a black cat, a four-leaf clover, a horseshoe, and a pair of dice showing lucky number seven. "4-11-44" was also the name of a musical show by Bert Williams and George Walker, staged in New York in 1899 -- but despite its propitious name, the show was a commercial failure. The same gig was later used as the title of a blues song, Charlie Jackson's "Four-Eleven-Forty-Four," recorded in May, I926 (Paramount 12375).
fan (your mistress will be inconstant) 5, 23, 31
judge (you will overcome an enemy) 28, 50, 70
ladder (going up, wealth; coming down, poverty) 11, 31, 43
policy office (foretells riches) 4, 11, 44
From the 1920s through the 1950s, both the subject of policy gaming itself and the numerical combinations found in the dream books made their way into a number of blues songs. In the most clever of these compositions, a series of dream book numbers would be substituted for crucial key words. Jim Jackson and Bumble Bee Slim (Amos Easton) both wrote songs of this type called "Policy Dream Blues," and other blues artists who used policy number imagery in their lyrics were Bo Carter (Armentier Chatmon), Kokomo Arnold, Yodelling Kid Brown, Albert Clemens (Adam Wilcox), Elvira Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw. Typical of the genre is "Policy Blues" by Blind (Arthur) Blake, recorded in December 1930 in Grafton, Wisconsin, for Paramount Records.
Numbers, numbers 'bout to drive me mad I dreamed last night the woman i loved was dead I acted the fool and played on 3, 6, 9 I played on Clearing-House, couldn't make the grade I begged my baby to let me in her door I want 15, 50, and 51 POLICY BLUES
by Blind Blake
Numbers, numbers 'bout to drive me mad
Thinkin' about the money that i should have had
I dreamed last night the woman i loved was dead
If i'd have played the Dead Row i'd have come out ahead
I act' the fool and played on 3, 6, 9
Lost my money and that gal of mine
I played on Clearing-House, couldn't make the grade
Lord, think of the money that i should have made
I begged my baby let me in her door
Wanted to put my 25, 50, 75 in her 7, 17, 24
I want 15, 50, and 51
I'm gon' keep playin' policy 'til some good luck come
A seasoned policy player could theoretically decode the singer's meaning by referring back to a numbers book such as "Aunt Sally's" and reading it in reverse. Even with the book in hand, however, Blind Blake's code is not easy to interpret because the same numbers are used for many different images, so the numbers could be interpreted in a variety of ways. For instance, in the first example i gave, "surgeon" = 10. But so does "chocolate."
Still, there are some parts of the song that are fairly obvious: in the third verse Blake says he was a fool to bet on 3, 6, and 9, the "dirty gig." According to "Aunt Sally's," 3 is "anything filthy" and also "diarrhoea," 3 and 6 in combination are "any dirty filth," and 3 and 9 in combination are "brimstone" (sulphur), a common ingredient, along with "filth" such as feces and urine, in hoodoo spells for crossing and jinxing an enemy.
Taken as a three-number gig, 3, 6, 9 indicates excrement -- and humourously implies that Blake thinks it was wrong to bet on dirty symbolism.
The famously "filthy" 3, 6, 9 gig appears in a number of other songs about policy, most notably "Policy Blues (You Can't 3-6-9 Me)" by Albert Clemens (Adam Wilcox), recorded on April 2nd, 1935 (Bluebird B-5930) and "Policy Wheel Blues" by James Kokomo Arnold, recorded on January 15, 1935 (Decca 7147).
In Blake's fifth verse, a sexual double-entendre is engaged by singer's desire to put his 25, 50, 75 in his girlfriend's 7, 17, 24. These numerical sets refer to two separate and partially conflicting arrays of words.
25, 50, 75 are essentially male phallic numbers: 25 is a "vine" and 50 is a "cucumber," together making the male phallic symbol of a cucumber vine, reinforced by 75, which can be potatoes (i.e. testicles) or, even more to the point, "an elephant's trunk."
7, 17, 24 are essentially female and concave numbers: 7 is a "wine glass," a "grave," a "burying ground," a "purse," a "fish," a "coach," "butter," and a "tart" (prostitute), and it naturally combines well with 17, which is a veritable cornucopia of female imagery, including a "goblet," a "stove," a "boat," the "sea," a "burying ground," a "fruit," "earth," a "cup of coffee," a "quiver" (for arrows), a "fat pig," a "house of ill-fame, " and the verbs "digging" and "churning butter" (the last two are common metaphors for sexual intercourse in blues songs), Meanwhile, 17 and 24 as a combination are "old shoes" and 24 alone is a "red rose" and a "wreath."
The implications seem clearly "dirty," but Blake gets the last laugh on the listener, because an entirely different set of ascriptions shows that these numbers are demonstrably "clean":
The male numerals 25 and 50 can also be interpreted as "underclothes" (25), "washing," "scrubbing," and "washboard" (all 50), while the female numbers 17 and 24 can also refer to a "river" (17) and "a washtub" (24) -- and so Blake might just as well be saying that he would like to put his wash-board in her tub of river-water and scrub his underwear clean -- a symbolic coupling reminiscent of another blues song, "Rubbin' on That Darned Old Thing" by Sam Theard (Decca 7025, recorded in Chicago, September 10th, 1934) in which the "darned old thing" that Theard must "rub with care, while [his wife] sits in her chair," turns out to be, not her clitoris (surprise, surprise!), but an innocent scrub-board in her wash-tub.
Blake's sixth verse concludes with the singer declaring that he wants "15, 50, and 51" until "some good luck come." Like the previous verse, this one can also be decoded from "Aunt Sally's" as a double-entendre: On the one hand Blake is avowing his desire to "screw" (15) a "colored woman" (51) while "lying in bed" (50) -- but on the other hand he is merely indicating an innocent plan "to make noise" (15), "to sing songs" (50), and "to dance" (51) -- all perfectly appropriate activities for a blues musician!
There have been and still are many other policy players' dream books -- such as "Three Kings," "Kansas City Kitty Dream Book," "King Tut's," "New Gipsy," "Professor Konje's," and "Red Star" -- but "Aunt Sally's" has always been the best seller and remains the standard of its class. One long-lost competitor to "Aunt Sally's" was "The Mystic Oracle; or The Complete Fortune-Teller and Dream Book," published in 1893 as #21 in "The People's Handbook Series" by F. M. Lupton of New York. In a mere 32 pages, this pamphlet not only encompasses Oneirology (divination by dreams) and The French Oraculum or Book of Fate, but it also explains the secrets of Zodiceology (divination of lucky and unlucky days and hours); Palmistry; Naeviology (foretelling by moles, marks, and scars); Physiognomy (foretelling from hair and features); Cardiology (foretelling by cards, dice, and dominoes); Charms, Spells, and Incantations!
Related to dream and oracle books are the so-called "lucky books" -- many of them sales catalogues released by manufacturers of herbal patent medicines, especially during the period between 1890 and 1945. The sample shown here, "Dr. King's Lucky Book," was published in 1910 by H. E. Bucklen & Co. of Chicago, Illinois and Windsor, Ontario. In addition to advertisements for Dr. King's New Discovery, a remedy said to cure coughs, colds, and consumption (tuberculosis), the booklet contains a lengthy and typically abstract list correlating dream interpretations with gambling numbers, plus many pages recounting then-popular European-American folklore and superstitions. The uncredited author compiled and categorized hundreds of beliefs concerning good and ill omens connected to the realms of love, money, marriage, and career, and although these are presented uncritically and without annotation, they are so far-reaching that Dr. King's Lucky Book is almost as valuable as a scholarly study of the region's folkways would be, for it represents an accurate cross-section of Anglo-Celtic and Germanic folk beliefs in circulation in middle America before the First World War.
Other Dream books you can read about and buy:
Billy Bing's Dream Book
Acknowledgements:
And now, for the terminally bibliographical in
spirit, here is the full title and publication data for the
latter tome, in all its grandiose Victorian splendour:
H. P. Dream Book
Kansas City Kitty Dream Book
Madam Fu-Fu's Lucky Dream Book
Pick'Em Dream Book
Rajah Rabo's 5-Star Mutuel Dream Book
Rajah's Lucky Number Dream Book: Pick-Em for Hits
Stella's Lucky Seven Star Dream Book
Stella's Success from Dreams: Number Interpretations
True Fortune Teller: Dreams and Numbers
Thanks to Chris Smith
(chris@skerries.demon.co.uk) for discographical information
and the picture of Blind Blake, to Tony Whetstone
(tonus@thepobox.com) for help with my transcription of
Blake's lyrics, to Al Young (alyoung@iconz.co.nz) for
discographical information, to Mary Katherine Aldin
(MKAldin@aol.com) for discographical information and the
names of many singers who recorded policy-based blues, and
to Alan Balfour (abalfour@dial.pipex.com) for transcription
help and for supplying me with a copy of "Policy Blues"
(pages 128-147 from "Screening The Blues: Aspects of the
Blues Tradition" by Paul Oliver; Cassell, London, 1968).
Thanks also to Lisa Karch (awanderingjedi@aol.comhahaha) for the scan of Magic Number Brand
Three Number Incense, manufactured by the Curio Products Co. of Memphis, Tennessee.
Other sources consulted included "Inside Black America" by
Roi Ottley (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948) and "Darkness and
Daylight" by Helen Campbell, Thomas Knox, and Thomas Byrnes
(A.D. Worthington & Co., 1892) Knox was the credited author of Part II
of the book, in which the description of the policy game
appears; it was copied out for me by
nagasiva yronwode, who also helped out with the image-scanning.
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