Father Mitchell George did the family talking. He declared that young Abram had been traveling the states as a part-time exorcist and full-time healer. The boy spoke no English, he said, but had other talents: chasing spooks from a Memphis mansion; healing rheumatics and cripples; and finding a ten-days-lost drowning victim 62 feet down in the St. Lawrence River. Young Abram had settled in upstate New York “ready to drive the voodoo man from the ill or solve any occult mystery.” This was only the hype.
Abram’s powers were of touch. He was a psychic masseur. He rubbed the ailing parts of his patient’s bodies with his strong hands and didn’t speak during the process.
Abram George was a husky lad with a thatch of jet-black hair and big, commanding eyes. (“A bright-eyed boy of sturdy physique and shy manner,” the papers said of “the little red doctor.”) His demeanor was strangely un-childlike. More than one observer was reminded of the boy-sage Krishnamurti who had recently come to the U.S. from India, likewise making a sensation. Both must have been old souls.
Abram never set himself up as a guru. He gave no lectures, made no prophecies, and claimed to do nothing but heal. There was no black art about his work and no trance-act or hocus pocus. The seventh son of a seventh son, said his father, he had inherited his powers because of his birth. Whatever their source, Abram’s gifts made believers.
A Rochester boy paralyzed from infancy developed muscle and even started to walk under regular treatments from “Doctor George.” A blind Rochester man claimed to see light and shade for the first time in 32 years. A near-blind woman from London, England, was so improved when she left Batavia that she sent presents – toys - back across the Atlantic.
Abram’s patients didn’t snap to suddenly as if a switch was turned on. It took regular treatments from those healing hands. (Upstate reporters seemed most impressed by the color-contrast, those hands of “the true bronze skin of his race” at work on his white patients.) And Abram couldn’t help everybody. A Rochester dame crippled in a fall reported little improvement. (She had seen Abram only twice, though, and said she still had hope.)
Another thing was strange: Neither Abram nor his dad charged for healing work. People would have been free to accept treatment and pay nothing. Abram ministered to many who had no chance of paying. All this is consistent with a good healer.
Abram also treated the affluent, with an agreement: If he healed a patient, the family would give him what it could afford. He must have been good. The father bought a truck in 1927 and plunked down $2,500 cash. The family seemed on the verge of riches and fame. But there were chinks in the armor, and folks were starting to probe.
The dad was a showman who clearly meant to capitalize. The first stop of his New York foray had been at the offices of the Batavia paper. Possibly hoping to keep mystery about Abram, Mr. George let on that he knew no English. (He spoke only “Indian,” according to an, alas, undereducated reporter. Who spoke only “European.”) Abram endangered no detail of his dad’s ad campaign and could have been mute for all he said to whites. But his Batavia teachers were sure he knew what they were saying, and that he could have spoken English had he cared to.
That bit about the “seventh son of a seventh son...” is worth a look, too. At least the first half of it was true for young Abram, one of eleven born to the George family of Hogansburg. As of 1926 his six brothers and a sister were alive. The business of associating the birth-order condition with Iroquois mojo is more problematic.
It was news to the Tonawanda Seneca, for instance. A Seneca tale predating young Abram’s birth does concern a magical seventh son, but it doesn’t imply the conferral of powers. One Batavia reporter - possibly the one who implied that all Native Americans speak one language - conjectured that it was either a superstition specific to St. Regis or “the Iroquois tribe,” not knowing that the Iroquois were a confederacy that included the local Seneca. This “seventh son” stuff might be some feature of American Southern tradition that made its way to St. Regis by the 1920s, possibly through contact with African-Americans or even an exposure to the blues. This is quite logical. The Iroquois have always been ready adopters, of both people and supernatural custom.
These may be minor points in judging a sacred gift, but any dissembling is a trouble-sign. Still, young Abram was a hit. The street outside the Georges’ Batavia home was busy in 1926. It was worse by Abram’s Rochester office, where such mobs came to South Avenue that the police were called to keep order. Abram seemed on the edge of stardom.
But something was getting to young “Dr. George.” He had fainted at a healing in Geneva and cancelled his first big Rochester gig because of “strain.” This should have been foreseen. No healer finds the work easy. No mature Medicine Person would sign on for the assembly-line healing Abram had been doing.
Trouble started in Rochester. The men who’d arranged one meeting for the Georges had charged admission fees at the door. The Georges may neither have known about it nor gotten a cent from it; but the no-longer free healings fell under a different kind of scrutiny.
Others were looking for trouble. Batavia neighbors complained about the mobs at the Georges’ home. The Batavia children’s court accused Mitchell George of being a poor guardian by keeping his son out of school. Medical organizations protested young Abram’s “quackery.” His own lawyers told George, Sr. that the state could indeed keep young Abram from working. The family went back to Hogansburg.
The move dodged some short-range trouble, but it was unfortunate for the prosperity of the George family. Batavia was halfway between population centers in Buffalo and Rochester. It was also in the core of “the Burned-over District,” where people had been used to prophets, healers, and would-be Christs for well over a century.
In 1929 the Georges came back to Batavia, proclaiming that Abram was now 16 and could do as he chose. (How he had aged four years in the two since they had left was hard to understand.) His second stay was short and frustrating, and his career was derailed.
In 2002 Batavia reporter Scot Desmit did some digging about Abram the healer. He tracked leads on the Akwesasne Reservation and found a woman of 82 who remembered Abram as a boy. He had asked her sister on a date.
They still talked about him on the St. Regis, curing lameness and eye trouble, even waking someone out of a coma. (For that a New York City family gave him the Cadillac he drove back to Hogansburg.) He was a shy fellow, they recalled, and he still worked with touch. They remembered him traveling often for healings. If someone on the St. Regis got hurt or sick he came over and did his thing. He got into drinking, said the St. Regis woman, and died young, in the 1940s. He was a great healer, though, whatever quirks he had, and he was respected on the St. Regis. It was natural for him to have gifts, the old gal said, even if they brought complications. He was, after all, a seventh son.