White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  BEFORE YOU ASK A QUESTION, REMEMBER

  A spell is different from a riddle. A spell is a set of words meant to invoke magical power; a riddle is a set of words meant to evoke intellectual power. A riddle relies upon veiled meaning; a spell pierces the veil between worlds.

  DOOR TO THE UNDERWORLD

  Inanna was the goddess of the planet Venus, and the story of her descent into the underworld and back to heaven is tied to Venus’s setting in the west and rising in the east. When Inanna disappears into the underworld, so does Venus, before coming back to the sky as the morning or evening star. When she travels through the underworld, so do we, over and over losing our protection in the land of the dead, over and over being hung on a hook to rot.

  On its way through the underworld, Venus makes seven conjunctions with the moon; on its way out, seven more. Each marks a gate. When Venus is in the underworld, stripped of all our protections, we are sacrificed. I read about the Venus cycle on astrology internet and became fascinated: Venus went into the underworld a few days after I met Carl and came out the day he broke up with me.

  That cycle is over and a new one is underway. Morning star Venus is descending. Soon, she will return to the underworld. And then, somehow, I will be hung on a meat hook, a corpse. But first, on the way down, I see what pulls me into the ground: every loss, every inheritance, every fear in my blood.

  GATE 1, AT WHICH INANNA SURRENDERS HER TURBAN

  A half hour’s drive from my dad’s hometown, a coal mine fire has burned for fifty-five years in Centralia. The fire started in 1962 as an intentional aboveground burning at the landfill. Improperly extinguished, it spread underground through abandoned mines. For years, the fire raged, largely ignored. In 1981, a boy fell into a sinkhole in his backyard; he was pulled out, but a hole remained, with a hot, toxic, smokelike cloud of carbon monoxide rising from it. Miners knew this as white damp, a gas that could kill them without warning.

  Eventually, residents were paid to move. Evictions of remaining residents began in 2009. A former resident told the website Cracked, “Every once in a while, you would come across a deer sticking out vertically with steam billowing out. They looked like they were crawling out. The poor deer had fallen into a sinkhole and had either starved to death or suffocated to death from the fumes. My friends would claim to see smoke coming out of its mouth, as if it had been burnt alive, but it was just the way the smoke came out.”

  In his book about the Centralia fire, David DeKok writes, “This was a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn’s.” Even as pits opened in town, people wanted to stay, and seven still do. After they die, the government will take their property.

  Most of the town has disappeared under government-sown forest. The zip code has been erased. The fire will burn for hundreds of years.

  GATE 2, AT WHICH INANNA REMOVES HER NECKLACE

  Growing up, when Dad played outside in some parts of town, anthracite dusted his skin. Boys’ sooty exhales clouded the air. Coal ash, not salt, was spread on slick winter roads pressed into gutted land. The coal veins had names like “Mammoth” and “Primrose,” and “veins” weren’t just vessels under the flesh: they ran under the earth in solid streams of shining gems whose beauty was in the eyes of those who beheld how hot they burned.

  A long time before Dad was born in the small Pennsylvania region defined by the presence of three-quarters of the earth’s anthracite, trees covered the hills and fish swam in luminous waters. Folklorist and Schuylkill County Historical Society member William H. Newell wrote in 1912, “When the early settlers looked beyond the Blue Mountains and saw a great wilderness of forests, mountains, swamps, and streams, they unanimously decided this was a realm of Satan and solemnly consigned Schuylkill County to the devil.”

  It’s said that Native people taught whites to ignite the glinting black rock studding hillsides. White men then stripped those hills of trees, gouged out the land, and cut hells into the earth’s crust. They sent other men down to make the deep, weeping lacerations. Rivers turned sulfur-yellow, coal-black, and shit-murky. Fish died. Creeks dried. The surface of the earth caved in.

  By the early 1950s, when Dad was born, the veins were tapped out. Strip-mining machines—“We called them walkers,” he said—tore into the earth.

  “It looked like the dark side of the moon,” he said. “Nothing could live there.”

  But five generations of my family did. I come from men with gleaming silver faces and women who kept the world in order while knowing that every man—and some of the boys—they loved might not come home from work: they might be buried alive under a crumbled mine ceiling, obliterated by an explosion of gas or powder, bone-crushed in the coal breaker, or run over by three carted tons of rolling coal. The expectation of a dead man could become habitual. In the pursuit of glimmering rocks burned to fight cold and darkness, the mines took all the men they were offered.

  GATE 3, AT WHICH INANNA SURRENDERS THE TWIN EGG-SHAPED BEADS AT HER BREAST

  An anthracite miner would wake before dawn, step into a cage, and descend into the earth. The mines stunk of rotting wood beams, noxious gases, sulfuric acid drainage from disturbed earth, and the shit and piss of miners and coal-moving beasts. Small lamps barely lit the fungus-crusted rock walls. Miners ate lunch with muck-coated hands and often worked while sick with parasite infestations, colds, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever. The men would die young, if not from accidents, explosions, and roof cave-ins, then from black lung. In testimony to the Anthracite Strike Commission, a miner said, “Of course I was hurt in the mines … I haven’t a safe bone in my body, only my neck. My back was hurt too, and I have a leg no better than a wooden leg, my ribs are broke, I have only one eye, and my skull is fractured.”

  No wonder the miners carried amulets and charms. Some talked to witches and bargained with the rats they believed had an otherworldly ability to sense impending cave-ins. They cast spells, even if they wouldn’t have called them that—they called it powwowing, their word for an old way of healing. To cure a toothache, for example, as folklorist George Korson described: “Stir the sore tooth with a needle until it shows blood; soak a thread in this blood. Then mix vinegar and flour well to form a paste, then spread it on a rag. Wrap the rag around the root of an apple tree, and tie it tightly with the blood-soaked thread, and cover up the root with earth.”

  This is how they maintained a sense of control in a place where corpses were dumped on porches and in kitchens after the mines took another body. The difference between hell and the mines is that in hell, you know you’re already dead. In the mines, they knew this was the rest of their short lives.

  GATE 4, AT WHICH INANNA SURRENDERS HER BREASTPLATE

  My grandpa, whom I never saw drink alcohol, watched the polkas on TV. From the living room in a house not even an hour from my dad’s hometown of St. Clair, a place we never, not once, visited, I would hear,

  In heaven there is no beer.

  That’s why we drink it here (right here!)

  and when we’re gone from here,

  our friends will be drinking all the beer!

  Years later, I liked to sing it alone in my apartment while I drank whiskey from a plastic jug. The song doesn’t make any sense. If there is a heaven, it must be intoxicating. If there is a hell, we’re in it, drunk so we can’t feel the cold.

  My grandma’s father, Edmund, didn’t die so young, but when he did, he left a body that had been harmed by mining: he lost a thumb in a coal car accident. His wife, Margaret, outlived him by twenty years. A woman has to be tough: I quit my Ancestry.com search because I was too confused by the dead babies’ names reassigned to new children, the households combined after the death of a man, and the names of saints used over and over again: Catherine, patron against fire, ills, and sexual temptation; John, patron of love; Margaret, patron of childbirth and dying people; Joseph, patron of fathers, families, immigrants, and workers; Patrick, patron of Ir
eland; and Mary, patron of basically everything.

  But not Barbara, patron of miners, locked in a tower like Rapunzel—not by a witch, but by her pagan father, who beheaded her. He was struck by lightning and burned to death.

  Never Paula, patron of widows, a rich woman who fasted herself to death.

  And never Bernadette, patron of the sick, whose asthma-inflamed lungs brought her constant suffering; who saw a dazzling figure rising from the flowers in a cave-grotto; who died in pain at thirty-five; whose liver remained soft and whole decades after her death; who said, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”

  To be canonized, a potential saint must have performed, after death, miracles in response to prayers. A miracle is a God-wrought event defying the known order of things.

  A spell is a set of words meant to make magic by calling upon a deity, spirit, demon, or other supernatural power. The spell is the request; the magic is the miracle.

  A spell, then, must be the same as a prayer.

  GATE 5, AT WHICH INANNA REMOVES THE GOLDEN RING FROM HER HAND

  The way Henry handled me didn’t seem that bad. So many men have shown me they’d do what they wanted. Sometimes the want is hidden so deep under the mantle of a man it seems he’ll never be satisfied enough to back off. Henry wanted no drama, no baggage, just like the rest of them. He would never let his deep desires slip out through the hole in his face. His want could encompass anything. When I slept next to him I’d catalog the edges of his anything: to hold me down and squeeze every pimple on my back, neck, and screaming face until I was covered in tiny open wounds; to fuck me in the hole I begged him to leave alone; to make me understand I was an idiot, I was too fat, I had a fucked-up gouged-out face. He could not love me. He did not emote. I learned to mirror his lack.

  Seven years later, I’m standing inside my little rental house in Ohio. The furnace breathes in the basement. Outside, a chill, and also men. I could go to the bedroom, alone. I could go outside. I’m standing in front of each door, always telling myself the truth as I understand it, always lying to myself, but I can stay here as long as I want. I am more alone than I have ever been, sharing no walls or rooms in this house, and in this safety, all my fear and suppressed memory burst from hiding places between bones.

  GATE 6, AT WHICH INANNA SURRENDERS HER MEASURING ROD AND LINE

  Last year, I visited St. Clair for the first time. When the mines were active, the town thrived, but the anthracite mining industry collapsed, earthmoving machines knocked out the sides of mountains, and St. Clair became depressed, full of shuttered businesses. Though, on the way into town, a convenience store seemed to be doing fine. I saw at the counter a product called SEX WITH A GRUDGE (TM), Made in the USA. Two pills were affixed to packaging printed with two sets of stick figures. In one set, a faceless stick figure with a hard dick stands over a faceless stick figure with breasts, poised on all fours, a cloud of smoke rising from between her stick legs. Below, it says, “1 To Hurt It.” In the other set, a stick figure with a hard dick, flexed biceps, and a wicked grin stands over a stick figure with breasts sprawled faceup. There’s a fire between her stick legs, a smile on her circle face, and white X’s where her eyes should be. Below, it says, “2 To Kill It.”

  Sometimes I think I’m near the end of my energy for living. I plot to travel to another world because this one seems too decimated by the white men who wanted money and skin, too dangerous to navigate because of the sentinels still roaming, raping, and gouging out the earth to maintain power. In St. Clair, the sulfur creek still coats the rocks on its banks with orange film. The churches still operate. The bars are closed, mostly, and outside a few houses, I saw garbage cans filled to the brim with empty Yuengling’s cans. In front of Saint Mary’s Orthodox Church, a white-lettered sign reads:

  CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST!

  HE IS AND EVER WILL BE!

  GATE 7, AT WHICH INANNA REMOVES HER ROYAL ROBE AND SURRENDERS HER LIFE FORCE

  In the movies, men like Henry are charming sometimes. He was only cruel and quiet. I try to make sense of how this happened and why I stayed, but maybe there’s just no sense. Maybe there’s nothing. Like my decade of dreamless sleep.

  THE UNDERWORLD

  In Coast Salish and Columbia Plateau cosmologies, there is no Satan. Our stories tell us there are dangerous beings. In 1929, settler anthropologist Melville Jacobs wrote that other anthropologists “translate the idea as monster; the Sahaptin natives do not seem to think the word monster gives an adequate rendition in English of the frightening, powerful, charged with magic power, dangerous being that a k'wa·li is; k'wa·li may be large, small, or any size; it is the evil power in a being that makes it a k'wa·li.”

  In our stories, the dangerous beings sleep on riverbanks, make mountain camps, walk trails, pick camas on prairies, and come for villages. They look like people. They can’t be devils because they don’t live in hell. There is no hell, but there is an underworld where ghosts live. Healers can visit. In the land of the dead, everything happens in reverse: rivers, tides, day, and night. All the earthworld’s springs flow from its river.

  All I know about the land of the dead comes from Coast Salish and Columbia River Plateau stories about Blue Jay’s visits. I’ve heard and read many versions, and this is my recollection of the one that has stayed with me:

  Blue Jay’s sister wants to marry a dead man. She goes down to the land of the dead with her dead man and stays there.

  In the land of the dead, there is a river belonging to ghosts. Blue Jay goes to the river, and his sister sends her husband by canoe to meet him. The canoe is full of bones and has a hole in the middle: it’s a burial canoe. Blue Jay throws out the bones, and he can hear his sister scolding him, because he’s thrown her husband overboard. She retrieves the bones, and, again, she sends her husband. Again Blue Jay sees a pile of bones. His sister tells him to keep his eyes closed so he won’t see the bones; only she can see this is her husband. He keeps his eyes closed as the canoe approaches, and the husband carries him across the river.

  He arrives at a place filled with bones. This is opposite land: eyes must be shut for vision, ghosts hear yawns but not speech. When Blue Jay closes his eyes, he sees flesh on the bones, fish in the river. But he wants to keep his eyes open. He throws out bones that are actually people who live down there, and so his sister throws him out, sending him home with five water buckets of different sizes. He can’t go home until he puts out the fires that spread across the prairies. The dead people tell him to use the smallest bucket on the first prairie, the second-smallest bucket on the second prairie, and so on.

  He first comes to a small prairie, burning, and he dumps the water from the largest bucket onto it. He passes through safely. He comes to another prairie, this one burning, too, and he dumps the water from the second-largest bucket onto it. He passes through safely. He comes to a bigger prairie, scorched by higher flames, and he dumps the next largest bucket onto it. He barely has enough water, but he passes through safely. He comes to a big, blazing prairie, and he dumps the fourth-largest bucket onto it. He’s half-burned, but he passes through. He comes to the fifth prairie, bigger than all the others and burning, and he dumps the water from the smallest bucket onto it. He can’t get halfway across before the flames consume him. He burns to death on a prairie that, to the dead, seems to be carpeted with flowers.

  The dead people are expecting him. Blue Jay sees the bones have people on them now, even when his eyes are open; he is their kind.

  Blue Jay says, “It’s so nice here now!”

  Blue Jay’s sister says, “That’s because you’re dead!”

  DOWN HERE, MORE DOORS

  How can I choose between two doors when I see so many left unguarded? Behind her mother’s door, Dorrie knows she’ll find a cauldron and a spellbook. Behind the doors in the wonderland hall, Alice sees a garden. There may be as many otherworlds as there are doors.

  I f
irst heard Blue Jay’s story from an elder who told me, “We go to the land of the dead all the time. We go in dreams.”

  DOWN HERE, DREAMS

  Stuck in subterranean limbo, Alice says, “I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!”

  But everything gets worse. Alice is put on trial. The queen wants to behead her. At the moment of crisis, Alice wakes up.

  Lewis Carroll wrote in his diary:

  Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as likely as the other.

  Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ends with the line “Life, what is it but a dream?” A dream built from riddles, maybe. He packed them into his letters and books. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” appears without an answer in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He added an answer in the preface to a later edition and wrote, “The Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.”

  The answer was, “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” But this unsettles me, because I always thought I knew the one true answer: a raven is like a writing desk because they both have legs. Did the riddle really have no answer? Or is a riddle a hallway, with its maker’s answer just one door?