Moniliophthora perniciosa is a fungus that grows on the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao. The parasite induces morphological changes, turning branches short, brushy, and eventually dry. In Brazil, it is called vassoura-de-bruxa, literally the “broom of the witch” who also curses with a devastating rot the cacao’s pods of sweet white pulp and valuable beans used to make chocolate. The disease swept through the Cacao Coast in the south of Bahia in 1989, begun, according to the Federal Police, by an act of sabotage. Over the course of a few years, nearly 30,000 farms folded, and an estimated 250,000 rural workers lost their livelihood. In this paper, I ask how to anthropologically engage this event, the roots of which stretch back to colonization and the latifundium system, and whose twisting branches still mark, but do not dictate, the region’s present. Drawing on Perdomo (2022), I turn to “the psychophysical sensations and techniques through which people feel they come in touch with the past.” Through the contemporary knowledge practices that characterize the region, I suggest, the past is made tangible and available to inquiry. The marks of the witch’s broom and its history are not simply narrated but taken up and enacted in the ways that indigenous, quilombola, and nativo communities live.