Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  Her teacher in Haiti does conduct animal sacrifices, and Sallie Ann has been to some of them. But Haiti is a far different place than New Orleans, she says. Sallie Ann believes that religions adapt to new circumstances. She believes voodoo deities will come to devotees just as forcefully when enticed by less bloody offerings.

  Sallie Ann invited me to come to New Orleans. For more than a year I couldn’t seem to get there. I’d almost given up when she sent an e-mail saying that her teacher, the Haitian oungan Edgar Jean-Louis, was coming to visit for a week. Anyone who wanted a head washing, which is a sort of blessing, could pay $50 and get one. It seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.

  The front of her house is plain and fits into the neighborhood well. Shutters give it the closed, blank look of many city houses in New Orleans. Lots of people were on the street during the early evening, and most were black. In the front room and the middle room that led to the kitchen, much of the floor was filled with two mattresses without bed frames. The beds were made up, and nothing about the rooms was untidy, but they made the place feel a little like a crash pad. A Bart Simpson doll sat on a shelf among more Haitian-looking figures. The walls were covered with bold colorful paintings that seemed Haitian. Two featured a woman who looked like Sallie Ann. In one she was looking into a mirror while spirits swirled around her.

  Edgar was a tall thin man of eighty-three with the look of hollowed-out, longtime hunger that is often seen in developing countries but rarely seen in the United States, except among AIDs patients or drug addicts. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and blue pants with stripes. His bones were so close to the skin that when he hugged me he felt loose and gangly in my arms. His hands hanging at the end of long sinewy arms were big and knobby. His smile was sweet under a well-trimmed mustache. His hair was grizzled and short enough that it was easy to see the shape of his head. On the back of his head was a big knot. After the ceremony he smoked, holding what looked to be a hand-rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, like a Frenchman or a stoner with a joint.

  There was an altar in the kitchen with plates of food set on it. Off the kitchen was the peristil, or temple room, with a black-and-white-checked floor and black walls. The apartment had high ceilings, which gave the room a grand feeling. Haitian drums sat at the edges of the room. People were expected to take their shoes off when they went into the peristil. I didn’t at first because no one told me, but no one corrected me or seemed to notice. Edgar didn’t take his shoes off either, and of course, no one corrected him.

  I wore black trousers and a white shirt. Sallie Ann was dressed in a white skirt and a lovely white sleeveless blouse that had a feminine touch of eyelet fabric in the front. She was thin, a tiny woman, and looked to be quite tanned, although that could just have been the color of her skin. She had reddish hair and a wide smile. She was soft-spoken and seemed almost retiring. She was not ordering people around or seeming to be in charge at all. She tended to Edgar assiduously, watching him and interpreting what he said in a low sweet voice. He spoke no English. Sallie Ann speaks French and taught herself enough Creole to understand him.

  When she saw my black pants, she said, “If you want a head washing, he’ll want you to be in white.” I knew who “he” was. There were only three other men there: one devotee with a white satin head covering, a film student making a documentary, and an anthropologist from the University of New Orleans. For a while it seemed as though there were more people studying the group than people in the group. The women were all dressed in white, and they wore long white cloths tied about their heads with the knot in the back. Sallie Ann opened a closet at the back of the peristil filled with white clothes. She chose a skirt with gathered tiers of filmy material. I went into one of the two bathrooms off the kitchen to put it on. Later a woman volunteered to tie a long piece of cloth around my head. She was shorter than I am. So I knelt while she did it.

  The peristil’s altar was dedicated to many spirits and had many images on it. In front of them were plates of food: a white cake, Turkish figs, vanilla cookies, bananas, watermelon, grapes, and cups of what looked to be coffee. There was also Florida Water. A replica of a human skull with the butt of a cigar hanging out of the mouth and the image of a very black woman with a long red tongue were also in the room. Edgar’s skin was almost as black as the statue’s, a shade of black that you see most often in Africans, of such a deep, rich shade that it seemed to swallow the light around it. He was the only black man there.

  Edgar began placing things in front of the altar, walking back and forth with a cigarette hanging off his lips. The head-washing liquid was contained in a metal basin on the floor in front of the altar. I was unhappy to note that the liquid looked something like vomit. It was grayish brown in color. A sludge seemed to have settled to the bottom, leaving a thick film of clear liquid on top. Something protruded from the middle of the concoction. It might have been an egg.

  Before the ceremony started, Edgar moved about the room as he counted a stack of bills Sallie had collected from us. Using cornmeal, he made a symbol on the floor to bring forth the lwa, or spirit, we would be seeking. Then he sprinkled cornmeal into the basin. I could hear the rough friction of his fingers, like sandpaper. He put an egg on the plate of cornmeal, rolled it around a bit, opened a bottle of Florida Water, and splashed a good bit of it into the basin. The hot room, which already smelled of candles, filled with a pungent smell like aftershave.

  Then he rose and began to shake a rattle as we stood watching from the edges of the room. Someone passed a short-legged, cane-bottom chair over the crowd. Edgar put it in front of the basin and sat. As people came forward, he made the sign of the cross on their heads, on their foreheads, and then on their lips. Each person took off the scarf, knelt before the basin, and put her head over it so that her hair could be splashed with the liquid. Some people ducked their faces into the basin. Others seemed to be kissing the floor. A few were crying. Afterward, the scarves were re-tied about our heads. One tall woman with a snake tattooed across her shoulders wore the beads that she had been given during her initiation in Haiti. Edgar took off her beads, piled them on top of her head, put the egg over them, and then bound her head in the white cloth. The egg would provide a conduit for the spirit to enter through her head, I was told. Afterward, he hugged her.

  Edgar then went through the room, shaking hands. He would take one hand, shake it, and then jerk it toward the ground. Then he took the other one and did the same.

  I had no idea what any of this meant. Before we dispersed, however, he spoke to us as Sallie Ann translated. She spoke softly and with great humility. But the praise he gave her made her proud, and she didn’t try to hide that. He said that she had never lied to him. He said that she had brought many people to be initiated and that they were his children now. He said it didn’t matter if you were in Haiti or the United States, you could still serve the lwa. This head washing would open up the way for the lwa to be with us. It might be the first step for us to become initiated ourselves. We would be changed, he promised. Sallie Ann told us to remember our dreams that night because they could be important messages from the lwa.

  We were told that boys were not to sleep with girls or girls with boys that night. There was to be no sex, in other words, and we were to keep our kerchiefs on. In the morning we might wash our hair.

  My head smelled awful that night, and the friend who was with me mentioned how happy she was to be across the room in another bed. “I didn’t let them wash my head because I was afraid of what it might do to my color,” she said.

  “Color?” I wailed. “My color? I didn’t think about that.” She meant those highlights we’d paid so much to have streaking through our hair. I hadn’t worried about the lwa doing anything to my soul, but if my hair was green in the morning I’d be out a fortune getting it right. Still, I kept the scarf on. To back out would mean that I’d never know whether the blessing could have changed me. I didn’t dream at all that night. I washed my
hair the next morning, and my color was fine.

  My friend wanted an authentic voodoo flag. To get one we walked over to Sallie Ann’s shop, the Island of Salvation Botanica, which is outside the French Quarter. Sallie Ann had first become acquainted with voodoo when importing flags, and she had a great selection, well priced. I didn’t intend to buy one, until I saw them. I knew the one I wanted immediately, but I didn’t say anything as my friend chose hers. We were both ready to buy when my friend said, “I think I’d like to have two. I could put them on my wall and they would match.” She looked around the shop and picked one. But Sallie Ann shook her head. Those two don’t go together, she said. The spirits aren’t compatible. “It would be better to pick another one.”

  My friend looked at mine. “I wish you would pick another one so I could have that one,” she said. “Yours would look so good with mine.”

  It was true. Mine was a perfect match, right size, right colors, right shape, and the spirits worked well together. I looked at all the other flags. There were so many I could have. I ought to give it to her. The old curse of the big banana was hanging over me, saying, Don’t be selfish. You’ll regret it.

  If you keep that flag, the sequins would fall off and the edges would unravel. I could hear the voice as loud as ever, but I shook my head.

  You’ll lose it. You’ll get it home and not even like it. Put friendship first. What kind of person are you? Is this the kind of person you want to be?

  But this time I didn’t give in. Something had changed. I could hear the voices, but they weren’t quite as sure of themselves. We spent an hour looking, debating. Again and again my friend urged me to take another flag. Again and again I almost did. I’d be on the verge of giving it up, and then I wouldn’t. It was completely unlike me. Who was this person so stubbornly holding on to what she wanted? What would Sallie Ann think of me?

  Then Sallie Ann said, “Every bead in these flags is sewn on with a prayer.” I looked at my flag. A ripple of light flashed across the sequins.

  “No,” I said. “I want this one.”

  Was that me saying so loudly, I want this one, as though I were a two-year-old child? Yes, it was me. I bought it. And all weekend my friend, like some force sent from heaven to help me cement my new resolve, kept giving me one chance after another to trade my flag for the one she had eventually bought. But I never did. And the sequins didn’t fall off; I didn’t lose it; I didn’t get it home and realize that I hadn’t really liked it. My friend didn’t get mad. She never reproached me. She just said, “Okay.” Nothing bad happened. Nothing at all.

  The curse of the big banana was broken. Maybe Papa Edgar was right about the head washing having changed us. I hadn’t felt any different afterwards, but I was.

  Was this good magic? How could it be? The curse of the big banana had tempered my selfishness. Without it, I would think of myself first instead of putting myself last. That’s bad, right? Not what Jesus would do. Even so, it felt like good magic to me. It felt like liberation and strength, as though I had been freed from always stepping to the back of the line, helplessly, wordlessly, inevitably. I could advocate for myself now instead of standing like a mute child hoping someone else would take up for me. The next time someone stepped in front of me in line, I would do more than shrug and wince. I’d say something. Nothing rude probably, but something. The next time someone said, “Do you want that last cookie?” I wouldn’t have to look away nobly and say, “No. You take it.” I might not be able to eat the whole thing, but I could take half of it. I felt like a doormat that had finally gotten up and walked away.

  It didn’t mean that I would never be generous again, but when I was generous I could be that way with a free heart and not because I was afraid. I had a choice. This was good magic for me, even if it wasn’t that great for everyone else. Well, that’s how magic is, I guess. That’s always how it has been, focused on one person at a time. I’d seen that again and again.

  I put the flag in my study and made a sort of altar around it so that I would never forget. In front of it I put my Buddha from Hong Kong, a crucifix bought in the French Quarter, a Madonna and child icon from Romania, photos of my family, and a Josefina Aquilar statue of a dama de la noche smoking a cigarette. The voodoo flag is near the door, and every time I go in or out of the room the sequins wink at me, like a blessing.

  I half expected that I would return to my former self at some point and regret my decision, reproach myself for greed and repent, but I never did. I e-mailed Sallie Ann to say that I was surprised I’d wanted that flag so much, and I wondered if it was the lwa who made me cling so tenaciously to that particular one.

  “It was the lwa,” she wrote back. “I’m sure it was.”

  16.

  Do This in Remembrance

  My magical experiences were too little to convince me and at the same time too much to dismiss. Together they made a pretty good list: the mojo bag that reassured me about travel; the Jesus dream in which I was paralyzed and the voodoo book with its ceremony of paralysis; the cold that had fallen on me when Michelle the vampire fed off me; the change in the werewolf’s touch when he put emotion into it; and the voodoo head washing that brought about the end of the big banana curse. What did it all amount to? I didn’t know.

  When Christmas arrived, I was in London with my husband, who was attending a conference. One of my oldest friends and her eleven-year-old daughter joined us for the holiday. None of us attends church, but Westminster Abbey was only a short walk from the apartment we rented, and so Christmas morning we went there for a service.

  Throughout the singing and the reading and the sermonizing, I felt puzzled and out of sync, as I often do in church. I remembered my days of fervent, unquestioning belief, but the emptiness I felt made those earlier times seem odd, like the imaginings of a child. At the end, when it came time to take communion, I went forward. My friends and my husband stayed in their seats. I suspected that the eleven-year-old was staring at me with disappointment and perhaps disdain. A tenderhearted, passionate girl of great idealism, she was in a terrible struggle with life’s inability to live up to what it promises. She was furious with Christianity for harboring so many hypocrites. Perhaps having learned that good is good and bad is bad and never the twain should meet, she was caught in disillusionment, as I have been so many times. It had taken a lifetime and a trip deep into the magical community to deliver me from that error. I hoped she would find an easier, quicker path.

  I was aware that my young friend might think me a hypocrite for taking communion, but, despite the coldness of my heart, I had some dimly understood aversion to sitting while others stepped up for that ancient sacrament, and so I took the blood and body of Christ with its promise of forgiveness and new life. To anyone who doesn’t share that heritage, it’s a strange thing to do, every bit as strange as any magic I’d seen. What happened next will seem like pure imagination to anyone who has never felt it, but anyone who has felt it will know precisely what I mean.

  After solemnly taking the wafer and the wine, I returned to a seat in that arching cavern surrounded by stone statues and tombs and other living humans who like me are only on this earth for one bright, burning moment and then will be gone. We were all completely alone in the universe with not even an echo to keep us company, and in the next instant I was connected. To what? I don’t know. It came into my consciousness like a shaft of light, only it wasn’t light; like warmth, only it wasn’t warmth; like understanding, only it had no content. The vampires might have called it energy. Siva the Satanist might have called it Kali. Kioni and I would call it God.

  Taking communion had been an act of magic for me, a technology of the sacred. I had believed just enough to step forward for the ritual, and that was enough. First, the voodoo head washing had changed a deep-seated part of me. Then Christian communion had connected me to something that was bigger than myself. Nothing happened until I took some action. Action and results—the two go together. You can call it religion,
you can call it spirituality, you can call it magic. Maybe what you call it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t settle for being cut off, that you take the power, that you demand the completeness of human experience. To taste fully of all that we perceive, to expand our hopefulness beyond the heavens is our birthright. We aren’t here only for confusion and disillusionment. We aren’t born merely for death. We are here also for transcendence, to savor the numinous, to wander through the shifting corridors of meaning, and to follow them wherever they take us. If we go too far, we can stop. We can backtrack, we can recant, we can be inconsistent, illogical. What we must not do—no matter what the scientists tell us—is allow ourselves to be cut off from our own experience of life as it presents itself to us. If we do, we will have lost the very ground beneath our feet.

  I am not saying that we must believe that a spell can turn a frog into a prince or that bewitched dolls will blink and move their heads. Many of the magical things I witnessed and even those I believed to have happened might have been coincidences or the result of suggestion. Those two factors could be enough to explain everything. But I believe it was no accident that Jesus showed up in my dream during the days when I was most avidly pursuing magic, and it was no accident that I interpreted his appearance as encouragement to go further. It was also no accident that Bible verses came to me again and again during my investigation. Those touchstones of my earliest faith led me forward when nothing else could have.

  One verse that hadn’t occurred to me would have helped me understand what I was seeing at the very beginning, on that night early in my travels when I attended Mistress Tracy’s Vampire and Victims Ball. It was something Jesus said. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”