Don’t You Know Your Skin?

I found about eight different versions of a folklore story of a witch that sheds her skin at night to ride and conjure folks. One night when she returns she is caught by someone who salts and peppers her skin so that she can not put it back on. In some versions, the witch is married and her husband or sister-in-law catches her; in others, she is old and alone and a passerby is the one to salt her skin. In most versions of the story she either bargains for her skin to be cleaned and returned to her but she loses her powers or she abandons the skin to escape with her power.

There is only one version where neither of these endings happens. It is also the only version where the witch is a white woman instead of a black woman. In that version, the woman is caught, tortured, and killed. This piece focuses on this outlier in this story's folklore canon and asks questions of the differences in this story on a larger societal reflection about power, race, gender, and social capital.