Red Now And Laters

by Marcus J. Guillory

  My coarse cotton shirt was drenched by 11:00 A.M. We, me and other Boudreaux men, my natural kin, had been shucking rice for two weeks—bundling cut rice stalks with twine, then standing them up to dry with a layer of rice stalks, called “caps,” spread atop the bundles to keep them in place. We worked from “can see” to “can’t see,” measuring movement and time to the nearby cadence of cane cutting.

  The Boudreaux family grudgingly accepted me more out of fear than love, which was quite all right with me. I held to my agreement with Nonc Manuel and split my days between treating the ill and pulling tall café sauvage or “coffee weeds” in the Boudreaux rice fields in preparation for harvest. Within a few weeks of treating fever, gout, and various circulatory and digestive ailments, I had earned a reputation as a first-class traiteur in Rapides, Lafayette, St. Martin, and St. Landry Parishes. My methods may have astonished onlookers, yet I only utilized cool Rada-influenced4 treating learned from the wise houngan Etienne Delbeau of Léogâne. And despite what I did to my half brother, Claude, this was all I could remember—the right hand. This was light practice. The hot Petwo5 was a mile away in the cane fields. And it called to me.

  Despite numerous warnings of water moccasins cooling off under the rice caps, I preferred to work barefoot, connecting with the damp mud of the rice fields and its cool, invigorating charge of electric impulses tingling my feet that I’d begun to ignore for the past weeks. There wasn’t any form of electricity for miles, but I knew something was prickling my feet every time they touched the ground. It was the same prickling I’d felt when I entered the ounfò to make amends with Bondyè.

  “Eh, Sonnier! Dîner!” my kinsmen yelled as they broke for the noontime meal. I stood tall and watched as they left.

  The breeze blew through the fields, whistling between blades of leaves and stalks. When my kinsmen were far enough away to not witness, I squatted on the damp mud and listened. Nothing. I leaned my left ear to the soil and listened again. I was not alone.

  Azaka gwelí-o,

  Azake gwelí-o,

  O minis Azaka Mede,

  Na wè sa.

  It sang.

  Joy. That’s what I felt. The voices of Saint-Marc, silent since I stepped foot on the Jeannette, were awakened. Slowly, I began to remember. I had two heads, as they would say. I remembered the left hand. I remembered that things could be changed, and I began to hear the voices. And that song. I began to hear the red cicada.

  Grabbing two handfuls of Boudreaux soil, I stood erect and held the soil to Bondyè.

  “Par pouvoir Azaka Médeh, nègre montagne-la-voûte, nègre coueh-sih mangnan, nègre aroum’bla vodou, nègre Azaka-sih, nègre Azaka-Lah, nègre Azaka-Tonnerre,”6 I proclaimed at the top of my lungs.

  Later that night, I busied myself in the henhouse, stealing eggs, or rather, eggshells. And with mortar and pestle I ground the eggshells into a fine powder that I collected in a small jar mixed with cornmeal. Without the guidance of a lantern, I traveled into the woods until I found a clearing where moonlight shone upon the ground. There must be no interference or obstacle from the ground to the sky. I lit a cigar and poured rum on the wooded floor, then prayed. I had to remember. I must remember. Etienne said I would never forget, so I asked for the door to be opened:

  “Papa Legba ouvre baye pou mwen, Ago eh! Papa Legba ouvre baye pou mwen, Ouvre baye pou mwen, Papa. Pou mwen passé. Le’m tounnen map remesi lwa yo!”7

  I opened my eyes, and I could see it in the dark sky, littered with glowing baby angels that took form. Lines. Circles. Arcs. Dots. Code. In the air for emergencies. To the ground for the left. The right is between heaven and earth with mortal man. The right does not touch the ground. I remembered everything in the span of a breath, and I was overjoyed knowing that I wasn’t alone in this strange land.

  I cupped a handful of the eggshell and cornmeal powder, then began—

  When I finished, I looked at the vévé and took a long, satisfying pull from the cigar, thankful that Saint-Domingue’s gods had not forgotten me. The door was now open.

  A rotting pine branch cracked near the dark edge of the clearing. Edmund was watching.

  * * *

  1. lwa of agriculture in Haitian vodou tradition.

  2. Sacred posts in the dancing space of a vodou temple (ounfò) through which the lwa arrive among humans.

  3. Sacred sugar.

  4. The line of “cool” lwa or spirits in Haitian vodou originating from Ginen (West Africa).

  5. The line of “hot” lwa or spirits in Haitian vodou deriving from the Kongo and Diasporic slave experience, invoked by firing guns, cracking whips, pouring libations, et cetera.

  6. Invocation for Azaka in Haitian vodou tradition.

  7. Invocation for Legba in Haitian vodou tradition.

  twenty-three

  becoming

  Houston, Texas, c. 1985

  Our secrets are our strength and our weakness, which is why our secrets may only be told to those who will honor them, those who will use them. It must be passed down so that the lwa may continue to live. Nan san ou.1 It will reside in all who carry your blood with or without their knowledge. But if you tell them, then they must act. Their ti bon anj is awoken with responsibility. Once told, they must honor the lwa or they will offend the lwa. They must not ignore this obligation, for it is better for those endowed not to know of their gift than to ignore what Bondyè has given them. You must not forget this.

  —April 12, 1870. Translated from Haitian Creole. Advice given to the ten-year-old Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, FMC, by the legendary houngan Etienne Delbeau of Léogâne, Saint-Domingue

  Easter Sunday. Who needs it? Big hats. Dyed eggs (some rotten) hidden behind bushes. Streetside vendors sell baby chickens with dyed feathers as toys—only for them to be trampled or smothered by clumsy toddlers with Easter chocolate fingertips. Chocolate bunnies with big brown eyes and no lucky foot. Easter church services—the Hypocrites Ball—where pews are filled with the unfamiliar, making a showing for the big man Himself, piously attending the funeral-rebirth shindig with newfound conviction. Oba Kosso! God ain’t mad at ya if ya only show on Easta’. ’Least you went fo’ Easta’. Who needs it?

  Father took my cue and opted for a rodeo in McBeth about a half hour after Mother pulled out of the driveway rolling her eyes at me. Five minutes of yelling at me to go to church didn’t work. I leaned against the tree, who told me I should stay my ass put. She eventually stopped after her perspiration started causing her Easter makeup to run, so she left without me.

  I found a small magnifying glass in my pocket and started burning ants.

  “Ti’ John. Booger stole your bike.”

  I looked up. Little Donnie Carter stood before me awaiting a prize for his report, so I stood up and punched him in the mouth. I shouldn’t have done it, but he was only in town for the Easter holiday. He wasn’t part of South Park.

  He ran off screaming, “I’ma tell Big Momma!”

  “Well, you go on and do that! I’ll punch her in the mouth too,” I yelled.

  Ms. Johnson watched me from her porch, taking slow drags on a cig, jonesing on methadone.

  It was in that afternoon hour as families returned home from church with Easter guests, lit barbeque pits, music, laughter, families gathered, ice cream truck on duty, in that hour, I was alone under the tree—angry. J.C. came back from the dead and my bike got stolen. How the hell was that connected?

  It was too pretty an afternoon. A Sunday. The same kind of Sunday that Father, drunk and high, chased Mother and I out of the house with a shotgun. It smelled the same way, the air.

  My neck ached. I hadn’t raised my head since I sat down over an hour ago, so I only heard the hooves pounding perfectly against the pavement.

  “Get on. We gonna take a ride,” he said.

  Father returned home on TJ, quiet, pensive—both horse and man. I learned later that he had tried to rope calves at the rodeo but wasn’t able to jump off the horse like befor
e. His calf-roping career was over. His glory diminished. But that wasn’t why he was quiet.

  I climbed on his horse and wrapped my arms around his stomach. He made that clicking sound and we took off into the streets of South Park extremely fast like he’d done before, but this time he didn’t smell like alcohol, dodging cars then pushing onto MLK in the median. He stopped.

  “First, I want you to know that I appreciate you helping me with the treating and keeping quiet about it. You been askin’ ’bout Nonc and I know I’ve been avoiding it. I know you met him, and I want you to know that you don’t have to be scared of him if you don’t want to,” he said.

  “I ain’t scared of him, Daddy,” I lied.

  “I kinda wish you was scared of him, that way I ain’t gotta tell you ’bout him. But you just like me. You curious. I was curious too,” he said, then turned his shoulder to me. “You sure you wanna know about him?”

  “Yeah, if he ain’t gonna hurt me,” I said.

  “Well, Sonny. He might. And what I mean is ole Nonc is like fire. You remember what I told you ’bout fire when you was little?” he asked.

  “You said don’t touch it.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I might get burned.”

  “And what did you do when your momma wasn’t lookin’?”

  “I touched it. But I didn’t touch it after that.”

  “You remember when we was trail ridin’ and you made the fire?”

  “Yep.”

  “You used the fire, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you didn’t burn yourself, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you burn yourself like before?”

  “ ’Cause I learned how to use it. Like a gun.”

  “Exactly. Like a gun. That’s how Nonc is. You gotta know how to use him,” he advised, then made that clicking sound and gave TJ a heel. We started trotting along the median on MLK.

  He told me that I was becoming a man and that I would have to understand Nonc Sonnier, but I had to learn how to communicate with him. I listened.

  Every Creole doesn’t know voodoo or hoodoo or whatever the hell else they’re peddling in New Orleans. In fact, most Creoles are scared to death of the thought of it, as many unfamiliar people are. Many confuse it as pedestrian Devil worship, although I never learned of anything or anyone called the Devil or Satan with Nonc’s practice. Academics and ballyhoos in the French Quarter had sold the popular consciousness on the vague idea of New Orleans hoodoo, practiced by spell-casting quadroons who sought revenge or profit—all part of the bullshit associated with my people due to profit-seeking sensationalists in the New Orleans tourist bureau who marketed “Cajun” and “Creole” as basically the same thing and that gumbo is red unless you add filé. Many of those opportunists were Creoles who wrote verse after study after prose constantly explaining themselves, explaining their Americanisms, their Francisms, and even, strangely enough, their Africanisms—explaining their Creole. But not us.

  We were people of the land—the southwestern Creoles—Creoles of the Bayou Country. Azaka’s children. We felt no need to explain ourselves to any damn body because not many had been in the territory longer than us, save the Native Americans. We kept to ourselves and our land and our language and our traditions. We created zydeco and didn’t know what the hell was a “second line” until we visited our bourgeois couzains in Seventh Ward of New Orleans during Carnival.

  The vast majority of us grew up believing in the Holy Trinity and the Catholic Church, yet most everybody from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge knew somebody who was a traiteur, versed in the right hand practice. Yet very few knew anyone who was familiar with the left hand, and most spoke of those practitioners as evildoers. What Father told me on that horse ride was plain and simple. I am a Boudreaux man—a natural-born traiteur and sorcier born with two heads—whose ti bon anj (or little guardian spirit) could access the other side.

  Oh great, I thought, now I’m a fuckin’ witch. What else, Lord? But I tempered my cyncism and listened.

  The practice required adeptness in hand signs, drawing, and a working knowledge of basic Creole, Latin, Haitian Kreyol, and various phrases from the Native American and Dahomey tribes, particularly the Kongo. Hand movements and drawings were the methods to communicate with and to summon old Nonc Sonnier. Petitions cost. Grievances are free. On the ground for the left. Off the ground for the right. In the air for emergencies. A well-intended whisper is the loudest. The left hand strikes. The right hand soothes.

  I can’t tell you exactly what Father told me because it’s a secret and Nonc would get mad, but I can say that the sky is a notebook. A notebook with no lines or numbers. One big page. Just one page for petition or grievance. The ground is another page. One big brown page for requests. Please gimme gimme gimme. One page for gratitude. Merçi beaucoup, Bondyè. With both pages, I began a correspondence with the stars. It wasn’t being Catholic or even religious. It was about knowing that I belonged to something bigger than myself. More alive. More powerful. It was about knowing that some special thing was actually looking out for me. And I knew its name. Not a grand, sweeping name like Jesus, God, Buddha, Allah, Obatala, Muhammad, Krishna, or the like. I knew there was someone specifically assigned to my case. And I could ask him for shit. His name, of course, was Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, FMC.

  Movies and TV shows will have you think that such things, such interactions, are mere fictions, fanciful follies dreamt up by professionals to give humanity up to two hours of detachment from reality. As a result, we become desensitized, and not in a callous way, but in a handicapped, short bus way. We sincerely believe, most of us when being rational, that we can’t physically experience “otherworldly” phenomena. But I knew who he was because Father kept the newspaper obituary clipping of M. Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, FMC, underneath his St. Peter prayer card in his wallet. He showed it to me. That nigga been dead since 1953 and still had the nerve to show up, as if I didn’t have enough going on already, I thought. And how the hell do you explain this to anybody? You can’t. No one would believe you and you’d get carted off to Ben Taub Hospital psych ward in straps.

  Nobody ever tells you that it’s okay if you start seeing shit. They’ll say you’re crazy or touched in the head or on drugs. Old-timers in Louisiana might say you have a cauchemar. Spiritualists might say you have a guardian angel or a spirit guide. Truth be told, I had all of that shit and his name was Nonc Sonnier. I should’ve been scared of him because, when I first met him, he had been dead for at least thirty years. But then again, we were related by blood. Fuckin’ family.

  By dusk, we’d reached Buffalo Bayou, where Father got off the horse. He squatted over the dirt, then looked up at me.

  “What we do is secret, Sonny. You can’t tell nobody, not even your momma. Do you understand? Tu comprends?”

  “Huh?”

  “Tu comprends? That means ‘do you understand’ in our language, in Creole. Tu comprends?” he asked again.

  “Yeah, Daddy.”

  “Unh-hunh. Say ‘wee.’ That’s how we say ‘yes.’ Tu comprends?” he asked again.

  “Oui.”

  He stood slowly, legs still aching from his failed rodeo appearance, then held his hand out to help me off the horse.

  “Descends de ce cheval-là,” he said softly.

  I climbed down from the horse.

  Father took off his cowboy hat, extended a swollen foot forward, and bowed at the waist. I followed, then asked, “Why we bowin’? Nonc do that too.”

  He straightened up and looked at me like an adult and said—

  “Respect.”

  I felt like his equal. Like he had picked me for his kickball team. Picked me first.

  He grabbed my hands.

  “These are your tools, Ti’ John. Don’t ever forget that,” Father said, then he continued showing me the practice of Nonc Sonnier, both the right and the left. It was my birthright. When we finished that day’s
lesson, he told me one last rule—

  Dice Rule 6: Never trick or manipulate the dice in the company of those who also understand unless you are working in concert with such a practitioner. (I wouldn’t learn the wisdom of this rule until years later, when I was in my early twenties studying medicine in New Orleans and making an unwise but regular habit of fuckin’ women born with the veil.)

  “Where’s God?” I asked.

  Father stared through me with red veins of indignation webbing his discolored pupils. “God’s right here, Son. Right here with us.”

  Later that night in the bathroom, I searched my chin for hairs. Rien. Sonnier stood behind me examining my chin from the mirror too. I looked at him. He was tall and thin. His skin had unnatural discolorations that showed on his face and neck. God must’ve taken him in and out of the oven a few times. The undertone of his skin was a tan olive with darker patches scattered about. His hair was like Father’s—straight and long but tangled and unkempt. His eyes were small like those of a possum, beady, framed by long bushy eyebrows and dark circles underneath, sunken to the brain, where the lwa dwell. He looked sinister until he smiled, and then I knew. It was his smile, which he did while I checked my chin, that told me he would never bring me any harm, but I knew he had the capacity for Shakespearean tragedy at the snap of a finger. To operate with Sonnier meant a very close and considerate adherence to his rules, because Sonnier had no problem taking out a family member who lost his way. The Boudreaux tragedies over the past century were almost always attributed to ole Sonnier, and most times those accursations were accurate. Fire and the gun. Fais attention!

  “I know who you are,” I said with as much bravado as I could muster, voice still in the final stages of cracking.

  “That doesn’t change anything, kinfolk,” he responded.

  Now I was completely freaking out. My heart was racing out of my rib cage and my neck was on fire. Sonnier leaned over the toilet and cupped a handful of toilet water, then slurped it.