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Lasting Impressions

Some books change your life . . . others make you see things differently. Our “Lasting Impressions” series tells you about a book that someone will never forget.

WHISPER TO THE BLACK CANDLE:
Voodoo, Murder, And the Case of Anjette Lyles
By Jaclyn Weldon White
209 pp. Mercer University Press $16

Reviewed by Ann Hite

My weakness has always been a good thriller—you know, the kind that keeps you awake after you turn out the lights—and for me, a well-told true crime story will send chills up my neck for years. So when I read Whisper to the Black Candle by Jaclyn Weldon White, I knew I had a keeper.

In the early fifties, Anjette Lyles was Macon, Georgia’s resident Lizzie Borden without the blood, and with an added twist of black magic. Outwardly, Anjette projected a successful businesswoman in a time when most women stayed home and took care of their families. But Anjette had lost her husband to an unknown illness, so she didn’t have time to be conventional. She bought a popular downtown restaurant and ran it on her own. The town saw her as a strong, tragic figure. Even her mother-in-law believed in her efforts.

Anjette was so well liked that no one thought a thing about it when she got married again a pilot from Texas, who courted her in front of the customers at the restaurant. When he died shortly after their marriage of symptoms the doctors couldn’t relate to any known disease, the city of Macon rallied behind her. Once again, fate had dealt Anjette Lyles a terribly unfair blow.

By this time she had two young daughters and her mother-in-law, Julia Lyles, from her first marriage to support. She had no time to grieve, and she didn’t, outwardly anyway. The life insurance policy she took out on her second husband was used to buy a split-level house in a nearby suburb.

Friends, family, and restaurant staff only laughed when they caught Anjette talking to candles as she lit them, as if they had some kind of power. When she went to the worst part of town to receive a palm reading, they chalked up the visit to stress and superstition. Even her housekeeper Carmen shrugged when she found roots and white powder for spells in Anjette’s bedroom.

Anjette Lyles was a glamorous business owner that even the conservative Macon businessmen respected and took seriously. The town considered it justice when Anjette’s mother-in-law died and left nearly ninety thousand dollars to her daughter-in-law. After all, Anjette had supported and looked after Julia since the death of her son.

But when Anjette’s nine-year-old daughter, Marcia, died after experiencing the same symptoms as her father, her stepfather, and her grandmother, people, including Anjette’s doctor, began to question the series of deaths.

[Dr.] Leonard Campbell ... didn’t believe the rumors. He had grown to admire Anjette and couldn’t conceive of her, or any mother, harming her own child. But he still continued to puzzle over the case, frustrated by his inability to pinpoint the cause of death.

Officers charged Anjette Lyles and arrested her in the spring of 1958, six years after her first husband’s death, for the murder of her daughter. When the officers searched Anjette’s house, they seized financial papers, tins of ant poison, and rolls of negatives. The occult materials were left behind—a tin containing love powder incense, a box of good luck powder, scented salt for sprinkling around the house, a bottle labeled love potion, and strange looking roots in bottles of oil—they thought they were useless nonsense.

When Macon’s prosecutor was interviewed during a press conference, he spoke about the items used for black magic and voodoo. The press ran with the story. The case brought national coverage. Not only was a white southern woman going on trial for the murder of four relatives, but she looked like Marilyn Monroe and practiced voodoo. When the trial of Anjette Lyles began, there were record numbers of spectators attempting to enter the courthouse. Ms. Lyles became the most sought after woman in the South.

Could Georgia’s court find a white woman guilty of four murders? And if so, would they allow her to be sentenced to death by electric chair? Would the evidence be enough to set a new precedent?

Anjette Lyles’ case brings to mind that we tend to see the fifties as an innocent, romantic time and forget the battles that took place, the stereotyping of both sex and race. Ms. White’s book reflects the change in the South since the fifties. Whisper to the Black Candle reminds me there are lessons to be learned in our past, and for this reason, its prose remains with me to this day. Plus, it still scares the pants off of me some ten years later.

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Ann Hite is hard at work on Where The Souls Go, or, as she commonly calls it, The Beast. Where The Souls Go is the second novel in an intended series of Black Mountain Stories. When not in her fictional community of Black Mountain, Ann can be found hanging out with her family.

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