Hoodoo

by Ronald L. Smith

  I nodded.

  She started snapping beans and throwing them into the pot. “Now go out back and get some firewood. I’ll cook these beans for supper.”

  I got up and went outside. The firewood was all stacked up behind the house. I wasn’t big enough to swing the ax, so Pa Manuel had to come over to do it now and then. He said stacking the wood right was just as important as chopping it. I bent down and picked up a few pieces.

  I gulped.

  Underneath that wood, a bunch of fat black worms were wriggling around in the dirt.

  Mama Frances made fried chicken to go with the green beans for supper, but I wasn’t hungry. I was thinking about that old black crow and the man called the Stranger.

  Danger comin’, Hoodoo. I was sent by your daddy. From the crossroads. He’s stuck.

  What did my daddy want with me? Mama Frances said he came to a bad end. I didn’t want that to happen to me. And I didn’t want no parts of his business, either.

  I looked at the food on my plate. Mama Frances watched me like a hawk. I ate one chicken wing and a little bit of the beans she’d snapped. The crow’s words—the crow’s words! How could a crow talk?—floated around in my brain, and I couldn’t get them out:

  He’s dead and alive at the same time. If you don’t stop him, he’ll bring terror and darkness on your people.

  I went to bed right after eating. My dreams were full of black crows squawking and screaming. They flew into the house and blocked the windows so no light could come in.

  And then I saw him.

  The Stranger. He was standing by my bed. I tried to scream, but he opened his mouth so wide he swallowed the whole room with me inside it.

  The Cliff

  An old truck tire hung from a low tree branch and swung back and forth over the water. The Alabama River snaked down below us. We called this place the Cliff, because when you sat at the top of the hill you could see the whole town.

  We weren’t supposed to go swimming in the river because a boy named Jimmy got drowned there one time. He fell off the swing and they didn’t find his body for three days. People said a gator took a big old bite out of him, but I didn’t believe that. People just liked telling tales, Pa Manuel said. “Hoodoo,” he told me, “most folks round here got both paddles on the same side of the boat.”

  I figured that meant Pa Manuel thought he was smarter than most people.

  Bunny raced back up the hill and spilled a bunch of rocks in front of me. She’d been carrying them in the lap of her dress. Her mama made her wear nice dresses, but Bunny’d get them dirty anyway. That’s what I liked about her. She wasn’t like the other girls at the schoolhouse. She did everything a boy did and some things even better. She knew how to toss horseshoes. She could run faster than me. And she knew how to play mumblety-peg. Mumblety-peg is a game where you have to throw a knife at somebody’s foot and see how close you can get without sticking them, if you didn’t know.

  She bent down and picked up a rock. “Look at this one,” she said, holding it up to the sun. “That’s gotta be gold.”

  She handed it to me. Little flashes of light sparked inside it.

  “I don’t know about that, Bunny. Pa Manuel said white people took all the gold a long time ago.”

  Her face soured. She sat down beside me and dug her fingers in the pile of rocks, every now and then picking one up and looking hard at it.

  I told her all about the crow, and she listened with wide eyes.

  “A crow?” she said. “It talked to you? That’s what that lady at the fair said. ‘Search for the black crow.’”

  “I know,” I told her. “She said to watch out for a stranger, too.”

  Bunny got real quiet. “Did you see a stranger, Hoodoo?” she finally asked. “Somebody you thought wasn’t right?”

  “I saw a man at Miss Carter’s a few days ago. He gave me the willies. All wrapped in black. I been seeing him in my dreams, too.”

  “That ain’t good. You gotta tell somebody. What if that crow’s telling the truth?”

  I picked up a broken branch and flung it out over the water. I missed and hit a tree instead, sending a bunch of birds into a racket. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Get your Mama Frances to help,” Bunny said. “She knows that magick your family does. And your Pa Manuel, too.”

  Bunny’s family didn’t use hoodoo, but they knew mine did. Everybody but me. Aunt Jelly told me I’d learn to conjure when the time was right. What if the time was never right? What would I do then?

  I looked out at the river, thinking hard.

  “Hoodoo?” Bunny asked. “You okay? What you thinking about?”

  “Mrs. Snuff,” I said. “Maybe she can help.”

  Bunny shook her head back and forth. “That lady’s scary. With her crazy old eyes!”

  “She was right about the crow,” I said. “I need to find her.”

  “Fair’s probably packed up and moved on.”

  She was right. After Colored Folks’ Day, most fairs left town.

  “Somebody’s gotta know where she stays,” I said.

  “Well,” Bunny said, still fiddling with her rocks, “if you find her, we can go see her together.”

  I chewed my lip and looked at the ground.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I have to go on my own.”

  “Why?”

  I scratched in the dirt with a stick. “Mrs. Snuff said my family was in danger. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “She said their fate was in my hands. That means I need to fix it. I don’t want nobody getting hurt. Mama Frances or Cousin Zeke or Aunt Jelly.”

  Bunny got a look right then like she was proud of me.

  “And you too, Bunny. I don’t want you getting all mixed up in this.”

  My face got hot.

  She smiled. “That is mighty brave, Hoodoo. That’s what my daddy calls selflessness. You just let me know if you need me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We sat there a little while longer, watching some blackbirds hop around on the tire swing and then fly away. A shiny fish splashed up in the air and then back down again, its scales gleaming like silver.

  He’s dead and alive at the same time. If you don’t stop him, he’ll bring terror and darkness on your people.

  By the time we were ready to leave, dark storm clouds were rolling in—big black ones, with jagged strikes of lightning flickering inside them. Bunny picked up her rocks and tossed them down the hill.

  A Bad Man’s Song

  Mama Frances scooped some grits out the pot and onto my plate. She sat down next to me and let out a big breath. She was tired. She was always tired, but never stopped moving. “No time to stand still,” she’d say sometimes.

  “I been thinking,” she said. “That crow came to you for a reason, Hoodoo. Spirits don’t just come to people and warn them about danger. You got some magick in you, but I think it’s buried. Way down deep. That’s why that bird was drawn to you.”

  “You really think so, Mama Frances? That I got some magick?”

  “Could be,” she said. “But there’s something else, too.”

  “What?”

  “That old crow could be a trickster.”

  “What’s a trickster?”

  “A trickster’s got its own reasons for doing things. They can be double-crossers. Especially ravens and crows.”

  “Trickster,” I whispered. I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “You just be careful, boy. You hear me?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I answered.

  “Remember what I told you? If you have any more dreams or see anything that don’t seem right, I want you to come straight to me. You understand?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said again. I thought about the dream with the Stranger and the crows but didn’t say anything.

  Five minutes later I stuffed a biscuit in my pocket, grabbed my pillowcase bag, and headed out the door.
r />   Like Bunny said, the fair was probably packed up, but I decided to try there first anyway. Mrs. Snuff had to know more about the crow and the Stranger. She was the one who told me about them in the first place. I needed answers, even though she gave me the willies.

  I came out through the woods and into the clearing. It didn’t smell like fried fish and roasted peanuts anymore. It smelled like animal doo-doo.

  A bunch of men with no shirts on loaded steel beams and big bales of wire fence into trucks. Some of the horses from the merry-go-round were lying down sideways. They looked funny like that, like they were sleeping with their bright eyes open. Peanut shells blew along the empty lot, swirling up into the air. I walked over to where Mrs. Snuff’s tent was. Nothing was left but the four wooden stakes. I was too late.

  “Hey, boy.”

  I turned around. It was the ring-game man, the one with the eye patch. Half his dang ear was chewed off. I hadn’t seen that the first time. I wondered how in the world that could happen to somebody. It just made him even creepier.

  “Yes sir?”

  “What you doing? Who you looking for?”

  I didn’t need to tell this man my business. But Mama Frances said I had to be respectful to grownups.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Snuff,” I said. “The fortuneteller lady.”

  He nodded his head and took a step closer. “You mean Miss Addy? What you want with her?”

  I didn’t like him standing this close. None of your dang beeswax, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “She wanted me to do something,” I said, “and I need to talk to her.”

  I guessed that wasn’t a lie.

  The man didn’t say anything, just looked me up and down and then spit on the ground. “Mm-hmm,” he said, smirking, like he didn’t believe me.

  “Hey, Luke!”

  The eye-patch man turned around. A white man was coming our way, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “We need to get them horses loaded. What you waiting on, boy?”

  He turned back to me and shook his head. “She lives out by the mill house, where they cut down trees. You know where that is? It’s a little red shack.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, sir,” I said, and turned to leave.

  “Hold up.”

  I froze.

  “You Curtis Hatcher’s boy?”

  I turned around slowly. What if this man was somebody my daddy wronged? “Yes sir,” I said. “He was my daddy.”

  He nodded. “You got his look about you.”

  People were always saying that. Aunt Jelly said I was the spittin’ image of him. That didn’t make no sense. What did spittin’ have to do with an image, which was another word for a picture? I turned back around and headed into the woods.

  I knew where the mill house was. Cousin Zeke worked there one summer. He used to bring me pieces of wood and the two of us would whittle. Sometimes, we wouldn’t talk for hours. We’d just be whittling away until the sun went down.

  The trees were crowded tight in this part of the woods and the sun was blocked by all the thick branches and leaves. After a while, I came out to a clearing where the ground was red clay as far as I could see. Somebody said it was red from the blood of all the slaves that died working the land. I thought that was a sad thing.

  The smell of honeysuckle rose on the air. I smelled chimney smoke, too, and passed a small rusted shack where a family called the Greens lived. Mama Frances said they were so poor their children didn’t have shoes. I’d seen them around before, but never at the schoolhouse. They ran around in their bare feet, whooping and hollering. I passed coops full of squawking chickens pecking at the dry dirt, people drawing water from a well, and one place where Mr. Green slept in the weeds with a moonshine bottle lying next to him. He looked as old as Methuselah. Methuselah was a man from the Bible who was almost a thousand years old, if you didn’t know.

  As I walked, I wondered who the Stranger was and where he came from. I kept hearing the crow’s words in my head: A demon . . . If you don’t stop him, he’ll bring terror and darkness on your people. I tried to shake off the heebie-jeebies but they stuck to me like pine needles.

  The sun was still high and bright, and gnats swarmed around my head. The closer I got to the swamp, the worse the gnats got. My cousin Zeke told me one time that gnats and skeeters liked any place there was standing water.

  My shoes made a squelch, squelch sound as I walked down a little bank and almost got sucked off my feet from the red mud. Blackbirds screamed in the trees and the deep songs of bull toads echoed in my ears. Big, fat bees were out too, buzzing in lazy circles. Little insects and butterflies were everywhere. One plant stood out from the others. I knew it was poison ivy because I got some all over my legs one time. When Mama Frances saw what happened, she mashed some herbs in a pot with a little milk and rubbed it all over my body.

  Something jumped into my path. My heart rattled in my chest. Just an old bull toad, I thought, relieved. Things got quiet right then. The bees stopped their buzzing. Even the wind seemed to die down. I heard myself breathing. A dog howled in the distance—a long wail that made my skin crawl. Something didn’t feel right. A splash in the water made me jerk my head around, and right there in front of me, a man rose up out of the swamp.

  It was the same man I saw in my dreams.

  The same man I saw at Miss Carter’s store.

  The same man the crow told me was a demon.

  The Stranger.

  A black hat sat on top of his head, and his eyes glowed red. Swamp grass and green slime dripped from his clothes. “Come here, boy,” he called. “Give it to me.”

  He reached out a long arm. A black snake coiled around it, a split tongue flicking out of its mouth.

  A cold chill went right through me. I shook my head and backed up. This wasn’t real. It was all in my head. It was like the dream I had the other night, but it was in the daytime, while I was still awake. Mama Frances said one time that people could dream even if they weren’t sleeping.

  “Go away!” I shouted. “You ain’t real.”

  And then the man laughed, and it sounded like dead leaves blowing across a dusty road.

  “Don’t you know who I am, boy?” he called. He wasn’t moving any closer. He just stood there in the swamp with the mucky water around his feet. “They call me the Stranger,” he said. “I’m the sword in the lamb’s belly. But you can call me Scratch. Or Crooked. You know my number, boy? It’s six six six, full of tricks.”

  I backed up another step. I didn’t like what he was saying. This was evil stuff from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Mama Frances told me about it: the Beast and the Lamb and the Seven Seals. It was all about the end times.

  And then I heard a voice inside my head, whispering. I saw your daddy, boy. He owes me a debt, and I come to collect.

  Something sour rose up in my throat. The back of my neck got cold. The Stranger was talking without moving his mouth! But I could hear it in my head!

  “Come with me,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to use that evil inside you to grow up strong.” He jabbed himself in the chest with a crooked finger. “Like me. You’d like that now, wouldn’t you? Hoodoo?”

  He knew my name!

  My heart pumped in my chest. It was beating too fast. I had to get away, but my feet were stuck to the ground. I didn’t want no parts of being mixed up in my daddy’s business. Why’d he have to go and put a curse on somebody!

  The Stranger smiled, but he didn’t have any teeth, just a mouth full of black, oozing swamp water. I could smell it from where I stood. His mouth creaked open like a puppet I saw at the fair one time, and he started singing.

  I sold my soul to the devil, and my heart done turned to stone.

  I sold my soul to the devil; he won’t let me alone.

  I live down in the valley, five hundred steps.

  Sold it to the devil, and my heart done turned to . . . eeeviiilll!

  My knees shook. My head felt like an apple hanging on a w
eak branch. The Stranger started walking toward me, the sound of his feet making squishy sounds in the water. The gnats buzzed all around me but I couldn’t wave them off. Somebody help me! I shouted in my head, but my mouth wouldn’t open. He was getting closer and his song went right through my bones.

  I sold my soul to the devil; he won’t let me alone.

  He stopped singing and just stood there. Flies swarmed around his head. He lifted his arm and pointed a finger at me. “Mandragore,” he said. “The One That Did the Deed.”

  “Caw! Caw!” A great shadow swooped down and blocked out the sun. Giant wings flapped and beat about the Stranger’s head. “Run, Hoodoo!” the old crow called. “Run, child!”

  The Stranger waved his arms in the air, but that old black crow pecked him all around the head. His hat flew off, and instead of hair, a nest of snakes sprung up from his scalp, squirming and hissing. The crow kept pecking the Stranger’s head, flapping its wings in his face, squawking and shrieking.

  “Run, boy!” it cried again. “Run like the wind!”

  I tried to move. I felt the sweat beading up on my forehead. Pain shot through my arms and legs.

  “No!” I shouted, and with all the strength I had, I lifted my leg.

  I could move again!

  And that’s when I took off like a bolt of lightning.

  Tree branches whipped out and scratched my face, but I kept running.

  My legs burned and my heart pounded in my chest, but I kept running.

  I tripped on a tree stump and a bunch of beetles scurried out, but still, I kept running.

  I ran and ran and ran, until finally, a little red shack by the mill house rose up in the distance.

  Pow-Wows

  I bent down and rested my hands on my knees. They were trembling. Sweat ran down my face like I’d just come out of the swimming hole. I took big gulps of air, trying to get my breath back.

  Give it to me, he’d said. Give him what? I didn’t have nothing of his! I just had my old pillowcase bag, and it was empty.