Then he did David’s gravelly voice: “Oh, my God, I live in a cul-de-sac. Oh, my God.”
“The driver of the snowplow doesn’t see you, and he runs into you and knocks you down. You can’t get up.”
“Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”
“No, I think you’re going to be all right. He just knocked a lot of snow on you. It’s just as well. That will keep you warm until you can get up. You’re okay. You’ll be able to get into the house in a little while.
“Oh no,” Ken continued, “I hear something coming. It’s the snowplow. He’s coming back, and, oh no, he’s broken your legs. Now you can’t get up.”
Ken’s victim started saying, “Oh no. Oh no. I’m going to be plowed to death. I’m going to be plowed to death,” which was a double entendre because they were in a gay bar.
“And people are laughing,” Ken said. “It’s sounding really crass at this point. He’s having a hizzy.
“And then I said, ‘I see you in the house.’”
“Did I get in the house?” David screeched.
“No, it’s earlier. You’re on the phone. Did you call the city and make sure they come around twice? Why did you do that?”
“Yes, I did that.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to make sure there was a parking place for the Cadillac.”
Then David asked, “How can I avoid this?”
And Myrna replied in her Brooklyn nasal tones, “It’s July. Buy rock salt while it’s still cheap.”
The story was over. Ken didn’t laugh. He never laughs, but he looked pleased in his deadpan way. I asked, “What happened to the guy?”
“He had a nervous breakdown, and he did a really bad thing. He hit his father and he had to move out. He had to move into the Y right down the street from me, and I had to avoid him every time I went out.”
“But he didn’t die from a snowplow?”
“No. He moved into a place where he didn’t have to have snow plowed. He didn’t even need the rock salt.”
Ken hadn’t spelled it out, but I’d always known that he was gay and his comedy was performed in gay clubs. One of his jobs was at an AIDS resource center doing prevention work. At the time we talked, Ken was thirty-two. During the worst of the AIDS crisis, when no medicine helped and people were dying by the thousands, he had been a kid just coming into his own sexuality. Now he worked primarily in an AIDS outreach center. I looked back through my notes. They were full of terrible ways for people to die. But nobody died of AIDS. Nobody wasted away terribly, weakening with one horrible affliction after another.
There it was. Die violently. Die with great suspense. Die in weird ways that no one can foresee. Of course they would laugh until they couldn’t sit up. It would be impossible not to, no matter how guilty you felt. Sitting in a dark bar, sex thick in the air. Take another drink. Anybody might raise his hand, volunteer to be the goat. It would all be so tense, so frightening, and such a huge hysterical relief. And who better to give you that release than Myrna, channel for Richard, the man who once sat across a bar looking so sexy, of whom it was said, “You don’t want to meet him. His T cells are 17. He’s dying.”
When I first met Ken and Myrna, I thought they were just out to terrify people for laughs. A lot of people saw him that way. Like Siva the Satanist and Tracy the Vampire, Ken hardly defended himself, thereby fitting into Siva’s Great Martyrdom Cult well. Like some great scary prophet of Jehovah, Ken held up doom as a warning. It had seemed at first that Ken’s allegiance was to fear and death, but that was the surface truth. The inside truth was that life or light or the good, whatever you want to name it, was calling Ken, and through Myrna, the potato on a stick, he was answering. Weirdly, yes, but it was an answer.
Here it was again—a paradox that I didn’t have a name for. Maybe it was nothing but good intentions, startling me because they weren’t clothed in the high-toned talk that usually accompanies noble motives. Outsiders wouldn’t call good intentions and good magic the same thing, but old Crowley might. Remember his definition of magic as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” Will. Intention. They seem close to the same thing. What Siva was doing, what Tracy represented, and what Ken hoped would happen when he used Myrna to warn party boys, it all seemed like good magic to me. I’d hoped for more, but this was good, and I was glad to find it.
Part Three
MIRACLES
AND WONDERS
Connect, only connect.
—E. M. FORSTER
9.
What to Do When the Mother of God Comes Calling
If I really wanted to know about hoodoo, I would need to talk with African American rootworkers, Cat told me. Hoodoo’s combination of African magic and Christian ideas is an oral tradition handed down from generation to generation since slave days. It has a Catholic flavor in Louisiana and a Protestant flavor in other parts of the South. As blacks intermarried and mingled with Native Americans, it sometimes picked up elements of Indian magic. When they moved during the Great Migration, it sometimes picked up elements of magic practiced in the eastern and northern United States. Each hoodoo doc taught things his own way, and although there have been white people who practiced the magic, it belongs to African Americans in a way that it can never belong to anyone else. It’s their heritage, running through their blood, showing up in their dreams, speaking to them in a voice they understand better than anyone else.
“You’ll have to go into black neighborhoods,” Cat said.
“I can do that,” I said, miffed. I’m afraid of disease, afraid of death, afraid of bad magic, afraid of airplanes, afraid of terrorists, but I am not afraid of black people, and I was touchy about somebody thinking I might be. I was raised in the South, and I sound like it. Southerners who leave home sometimes face assumptions about who they are—conservative, prejudiced, reactionary, stupid. To be fair to Cat, I also look like a white woman from the suburbs, because I am one, and white women from the suburbs are often afraid of black people. But I am not. Not even white women from the suburbs are only what they appear to be.
Cat was reluctant to give me names of rootworkers. She said I could find them myself if I wanted, but I kept hanging around, and finally she suggested I call Dr. Christos Kioni. This was before The Lucky Mojo Hoodoo Rootwork Hour started, so I didn’t know anything about Kioni yet. A former Pentecostal preacher who lived near Orlando, he was one of the best rootworkers she knew. Customers she referred to him were often so happy with the work that they called her to tell her so.
“He might talk to you,” she said.
I looked on the Web and quickly found his site, but Dr. Kioni’s Web presentation was about how to have prosperity. It didn’t mention hoodoo, and it seemed that I’d have to go through PayPal to talk to him. I didn’t do it. I’d had enough of moneymakers in Salem.
Luckily I had also signed up for Cat’s online hoodoo course, which was filled with people avid about magic. For a year I lurked, learning that a hoodoo wagon is a hearse and that if the spirits come in a dream offering food, don’t eat it. I learned that to keep a hag from riding you during the night you need to put screens on the window or a sieve near the bed. Hags can’t get to your bed until they have counted every hole, by which time it will be daylight. To get rid of a hag forever, find the skin she abandoned before she began to fly and salt it. Cat likes to tell of the hag who returned to find her skin so shrunken she couldn’t get back in. “Skinny, skinny, don’t you know me?” she wailed.
I learned when burning candles for magic to watch the flame. If it goes out or burns dirty, that’s bad. The buzzard is a sacred bird, and a line dance called the buzzard dance has great power. Brushing a buzzard wing over somebody will remove a jinx. The original Dr. Buzzard out of Beaufort, South Carolina, the most famous and powerful of all the hoodoo conjurers, was a white man, according to Cat. Lots of Dr. Buzzards have sprung up since. Legend says that when one of the most powerful African
American Dr. Buzzards from St. Helena Island died, his bones were buried in an unmarked grave because so many conjure docs wanted the bones’ power that they never would have been allowed to rest easy.
Dr. Kioni was in our class, but he wasn’t online much. One day, however, he answered a question from a new rootworker about how to deal with clients. At the end of the message he signed off by writing, “I wish for you all that I wish for myself.” A man with a spirit that large might be worth meeting.
So I e-mailed him. He sent me his phone number. I called. We talked. The next day Expedia sent me a message. I could fly straight to Orlando for $135. It seemed like a sign.
Over the years a number of women had volunteered to come to Kioni’s suburban Florida home to get to know him better. Unlike the others, whom he hadn’t allowed to visit, I kept all my clothes on. He had thrown the photos away, but a lot of women have sent him pictures showing parts of themselves they’d be better off keeping private.
“Some of these women are really bold,” his wife, Marilyn, told me. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
I probably wouldn’t.
Dr. Kioni, a tall, well-built man, shaved bald with a goatee, was dressed in an embroidered Mexican shirt and dark pants when he came out to greet me the first day of my visit. He spread his arms wide and said, “Welcome.” As well he might. Kioni had done rootwork two years before to bring a storyteller into his life. And there I was, sitting in his driveway with a notebook in one hand and a tape recorder in the other, believing myself to be the captain and sole director of my own destiny. He never doubted that I would arrive.
“I did the work right back there,” he said two days later, nodding toward his backyard, where I could see a frost-damaged banana tree and palm trees. “I asked for someone to come here and tell my story.”
The only clue that Kioni’s white stucco house contains anything mysterious is an eight-sided mirror over the front door. It’s easy to overlook. “That’s a bagwa,” he told me. “It’s to deflect energy.” Like many magical people, Kioni combines a number of different systems. The bagwa is feng shui.
A row of devil’s shoestrings is buried next to the walk leading to his door. That’s hoodoo, but no one would know they were there unless Kioni told them. Devil’s shoestrings are a powerful root, and Kioni’s are meant to keep ill-meaning people away. If anyone particularly unpleasant does get through his door, Kioni might ensure he doesn’t return by sprinkling salt along the doorsill after he has left, sweeping it out toward the street, and then placing the broom upside down at the doorway. His magic has worked against a pesky cable television employee and against a young woman whose attire suggested she might be a little too racy for his youngest son. Neither has crossed his threshold since.
“What would happen if someone came here who had ill will toward you?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t be able to get in,” he said. I wondered if he had watched closely as I approached the door that first time, speculating on whether I would be stopped, and if he would have shut the door against me if I’d stumbled.
One of the first stories he told me was about the evening Mary the Holy Mother of God appeared in the left-hand corner of his bedroom. It was dark but not late. He was in bed but not asleep. The other side of the bed was empty because earlier in the evening Kioni and Marilyn had argued. She was watching a sports program in the den and planned to sleep on the couch, as she sometimes did.
He was lying in their bed feeling sorry for himself and for his wife because of things he had said. He’d let his meanness come out, and it wasn’t the first time. Now his back hurt. His head ached. His legs twitched. He felt all the old scars rising, some on his body, many in his mind. They were thirty, forty years old and it didn’t matter. The ones on his feet, his ankles, the long gash up his shin, the crescent on his left hip were like puckered snakes slithering against the chocolate of his skin.
In his mind he heard a familiar hiss.
You ain’t never going to be nothing. Crippled little bastard. You lucky somebody took you in. Nobody want you. Those words had been said to him too many times to remember. He had tears in his eyes so that when the Blessed Virgin first appeared he had to squint through them to make her out.
“Why do women always leave me?” he was crying when she appeared. “Every woman I’ve ever loved has left me.”
If the Mother of God was in the business of bringing healing and motherly love, as she often seems to be, she’d picked the right bedroom. Kioni’s unmarried mother had abandoned him in the hospital when he was three months old and sick with polio. After the first of many operations, a second cousin named Pearlie Mae came for him. Legally blind, she wore dark glasses so that he never was able to look into her eyes. She took him to the boardinghouse she operated. As he grew he learned to mop and wax, to dust and change beds. The boardinghouse was over a bar, and prostitutes often rented the rooms for an hour or two. Kioni, who was called Ken then, would clank up the stairs in his leg braces, bringing them soap, towels, and a basin of water. After they left, he would throw the water out. If he displeased her, Pearlie Mae punished him in ways that he hasn’t gotten over yet.
Many operations followed that first one. Kioni can’t remember anyone visiting him in the hospital. Nurses and doctors wore masks, afraid of contagion. No one touched him tenderly. At twelve, he refused to have another operation. The only picture he has of himself as a child is from that year. It sits on the television in his den. His cheeks are round and smooth, but a line of mustache makes him look older than twelve. He is scowling.
When Kioni was sixteen, he teamed up with the popular boys at school and began robbing convenience stores. He held the shotgun while the other boys got the money. The gun was empty. At first, they didn’t have money for shells; later, when everyone in town was talking about the robberies, they didn’t have the nerve to buy them.
His criminal career ended within a few weeks when the other boys panicked and ran for the car one night. He couldn’t keep up. They circled back to get him, but not before the shopkeeper saw that he had a limp. Only two black teenage boys in Rockledge, Florida, had a limp. The other boy had an alibi. The city’s sole African American policeman visited Kioni not long after that to suggest that he could testify against the other boys and go free or he could go to jail alone. He agreed to testify. Before the trial came up, Pearlie Mae sent him to California. He never believed that she forgave him.
“Why, why do the women I love always leave me?” he was busily imploring when he noticed that a portal seemed to be opening above him. Light came through like a sunbeam through clouds, and in the middle of the light was the face and torso of the Blessed Virgin. Pentecostalism is not a branch of Christianity in which visions of Mary figure prominently, or at all in fact. But Kioni knew who she was. Anybody would.
She was looking at him tenderly. “I’ve never left you,” she said with exactly the tone he yearned to hear from a woman. He’d never realized that the Queen of Heaven was tracking him, but it would have been rude to say that.
She smiled again and said, “Do you remember when you were in the hospital and a woman came during the night? She was dressed in white like the nurses. She took you out of bed and held you in her arms. She sat in a rocking chair and rocked you.”
It was a memory that Kioni had forgotten until that moment. And then, yes, he did remember.
“That was me,” the apparition said. “I was always there with you.”
Kioni then asked her the question that he had never been able to ask his mother, who had died.
“Why did my mother leave me?”
“Your mother loved you. She always loved you, and she loves you still. She’s here with me now, and she wants me to tell you that she loves you.”
For Kioni, a middle-aged man with five children and a couple of grandchildren, those words fell like cool water on a fresh burn.
“Look into my heart,” the Holy Mother said. When he did, the front of her garment opened and
he could see her heart, plump and red, just as it is in Sacred Heart paintings. The heart was suffused with a dazzling white light that Kioni looked into. It filled his vision and wrapped around him until he was inside it and finally part of it.
And he felt wonderful—healed and happy and at peace.
I don’t know if Mother Mary comes in the night to many people who are alone and in sorrow. I’m willing to bet that if she does, most of them wouldn’t tell it. She’s never come to me.
But something has. Once.
I was lying in bed with my dog, Pogo, next to me. My husband was working in his study down the hall. I was thinking about how there isn’t any God. I wasn’t in a particular dither over it. On this night, believing in God seemed preposterous, and so I was turning the ridiculousness of it over in my mind when something came into the room. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. It was a presence standing to the left side of my bed about where my shin was. The presence was about my height, maybe a little taller, and as wide as an average person, not so big as to be scary. In my mind I heard the words, If there’s no God, what am I? What is it that just came into this room?
I didn’t answer. Something was there, and I didn’t want to disrespect whatever it was, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer, so I looked at the spot and said, “Ummph.”
About a year later I told a friend about the visitation. She asked, “What was it?”
Her question caught me off guard. It seemed obvious and strange to have to say it. But she had me cornered, so I did.
“It was Jesus,” I said. The name felt funny in my mouth, so I emphasized the first syllable the way evangelical preachers do. JEE-sus. I had considered saying, “God,” but that was too much of a reach.
My friend laughed and asked, “So what did you do?”
“I went to sleep.”
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