When the telephone company encroached further upon her yard, Sewell quickly applied more neutralization tactics: symbolic pieces of iron (a horseshoe and a plow part) and a vertical row of Xs paintedwith the traditional haint blue. Sewell explains, "Telephone company business office, they put a great big box to my telephone. It was a dangerous box. They put it there by that telephone post. And I knowed about that wire in the ground around that post. I made them got it off, take it down there by the fish pond. I made them got it away from my house because it was dangerous. I put a horseshoe on there, and a piece of iron, and some of them cross signs.”
