crone

But still the crone was constant to her note.

With black unseeing eyes the old woman, the crone, stares at him and through him. Over and over she mutters a word that he cannot quite catch, something like Toomderoom.

In traveling homeward, buy forty good crones, and fat up the bodies of those seely bones

The old crone [a negro man] lived in a hovel, in the midst of a small patch of potatoes and Indian corn, which his master had given him on setting him free.