Advance Praise for
Will Do Magic for Small Change
“When I read Andrea Hairston’s work, there is always the danger that the plot will draw me so quickly into the complex lives of beings so different from the humans to whom I’ve grown accustomed that I won’t remember to slow down long enough to enjoy the richness of the writing itself. That would be a shame because the beauty of Hairston’s passionate language is more than equal to the telling of her insanely imaginative tales of time travel and truth telling; memory and magic. Drawing freely and fiercely from Native American, West African, and African American cultural and spiritual traditions, she creates new worlds as richly complicated and blindingly colorful as any you are likely to encounter in the work of the world’s best science fiction authors. But even as I write those words, I realize that while calling her writing science fiction assigns it to a specific and honorable literary neighborhood indeed, that label may also mean that some who do not consider themselves fans of the genre may not discover her at all, depriving themselves of the sweep of her creative vision simply because of arbitrary boundaries between what is real and what is fantasy; what is now and what was then; what is past and what is prologue. But Hairston’s work is not about boundaries and labels. It is about freedom, to live, to love, to fight, and to win. I have been a fan of Hairston’s work since Redwood and Wildfire. With the appearance of Will Do Magic for Small Change, she continues her quest to make us see more deeply, feel more authentically, and allow ourselves to consider the possibility that there are worlds still to discover. How lucky we are that when we’re ready to go exploring, we can count on Andrea Hairston to be our guide.”
Pearl Cleage, playwright and author of
Things I Should Have Told My Daughter and Just Wanna Testify
“It is hard to pull away from this world of aliens meeting orishas, ghosts appearing and conversing, fiery aje, and sea monsters rising, ahosi, king’s wives and warrior women, defending, gender fluidity resounding, blackbirds chronicling and ravens painting, lightning scorching and time travel transcending, wanderers flickering across dimensions and stillpoints grounding, storm fists and storm stories raining, ALL flourishing with incandescent poetic prose and shimmering song lyrics. Welcome to synapses pulsing, the flooding of ancient memories, and praise-song reframing when engaging in this neural decolonizing novel, an 1890s Dahomey, Paris, Atlantic ocean passages, New York and Chicago entangled with a 1980s Pittsburgh, emerging and becoming vibrantly alive!”
Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe), editor of Walking the Clouds
WILL DO MAGIC
FOR SMALL CHANGE
a novel of what might have been
by
Andrea Hairston
AQUEDUCT PRESS | SEATTLE
Aqueduct Press
PO Box 95787
Seattle, WA 98145-2787
www.aqueductpress.com
Will Do Magic for Small Change
Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Hairston
ISBN: 978-1-61976-102-5
This book is fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover illustration courtesy Nic Ularu
Copyright © 2016 by Nic Ularu
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent Kris O’Higgins, who believes in the stories I write, and also to L. Timmel Duchamp and Kathryn Wilham, who make sure we’re saying what we mean to say.
Every novel is a challenge, a journey through dangerous and marvelous territory. Writing Will Do Magic For Small Change was an epic, around-the-world voyage. Thanks to the good folks who danced in the dark and sang to the moon with me: Rowland Abiodun, Sally Bellerose, Paula Burkhard, Pearl Cleage, Grace L. Dillon, Jonathan Gosnell, Eileen Gunn, Daniel José Older, Kathleen Mosley, Susan Stinson; Wolfgang and Beate Schmidhuber and the whole Schmidhuber clan; Bill Oram and Micala Sidore; Joel Tansey and Kiki Gounaridou; Bobby, Mary, and Theo Welland.
Special thanks to Lucille Booker, Holly Derr, Erika Ewing, Kara Morin, Bill Peterson, Kevin Quashie, and Joy Voeth for generously offering me their impressions of growing up in the 1980s, to John Hellweg for his inspiring, unforgettable production of The Tempest, and to Nic Uluru for conjuring an image for the story.
Blessings on the Beyon’Dusa Wild Sapelonians: Liz Roberts, Ama Patterson, Sheree R. Thomas, and Pan Morigan, who sent power to my writing hand.
Pan Morigan and James Emery make the writing possible.
Contents
Public Display
Dedication to The Chronicles
CHRONICLES 1: Dahomey, West Africa, 1892 —Stillpoint
Guardians and Wanderers
CHRONICLES 2: Dahomey, West Africa, 1892 —Spirit Guides
Chicken Fun for All
Generous Spirits
CHRONICLES 3: Word Dance
Remembering
Notes (#1) to the Current Edition of the Earth Chronicles, December 1984
CHRONICLES 4: Dahomey, West Africa, 1892 —Books
CHRONICLES 5: Dahomey, West Africa, 1892 —Blood Oath
Mojo Working
Letter from Iris Phipps, December 1984
Notes (#2) to the Current Edition of the Earth Chronicles, December 1984
CHRONICLES 6: Dahomey, West Africa, 1893 —Return
CHRONICLES 7: Dahomey, West Africa, 1893 —Pretty Knots
CHRONICLES 8: Dahomey, West Africa, 1893 —New Life
Pizza and Spells
Theatre CPR
Acknowledgment for Temporal Gaps,
February 1987
Urban Fantasy
Untying Knots
Letter from Iris Phipps, February 1987
Notes (#3) to the Current Edition of the Earth Chronicles, February 1987
CHRONICLES 9: Coast of Dahomey, 1893 —Demons
Fire in the Eyes
CHRONICLES 10: Coast of Dahomey, 1893 —Masquerades
CHRONICLES 11: Coast of Dahomey, 1893 —
Fire from Elsewhere
Snowballs in Haiti
Glass Slippers and Golden Angels
Perspicacious and Intrepid
CHRONICLES 12: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —Monsters on the High Seas
CHRONICLES 13: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —
Light Show
Roller Coaster Ride
CHRONICLES 14: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —Warrior Dances
CHRONICLES 15: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —
The Color of Love
Contact Improvisation
CHRONICLES 16: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —
Dragon Slayer
Homeless Eshu
Hospital Blues
Not Over Yet
Born Two
CHRONICLES 17: Ariel and Abla
CHRONICLES 18a: Paris Fables —
Océane and the Aje
Baron of Badass
CHRONICLES 18b: Paris Fables —
Oshun’s Comb
Hormones
Disastronauts and Glamazons
CHRONICLES 18c: Paris Fables — Spirit Houses
The Iron Lady
CHRONICLES 18d: Paris Fables —
Masquerade
CHRONICLES 18e: Paris Fables — River Pirates
Secret Society Pact
Hillbillies and Country Gals
Hearing
Spirits from the Other Shore
Ear Worm
CHRONICLES 19: Carnival Visions
Hold All Of Me
Eleven (On a Scale from Three to Fourteen)
CHRONICLES 20: Father of Mysteries
Who Do You Mean To Be?
More Good News
CHRONICLES 21: American Dreams
Trying Times
Sweet Revenge
Note from Sekou, December 9, 1984
Bathroom Refuge
CHRONICLES 22: Chicago Dreamland
Heroes
Secret Stash
CHRONICLES 23: Chicago Nightmare
AC-DC
Flying
Chronicles 24: Tree of Forgetfulness
Knife Boy
CHRONICLES 25: Flash Flood
Mallemaroking
Danger Fans
Hoodoo Spell #7b
CHRONICLES 26: Final Entry —
Defying Gravity
What Do We Do?
Black Bird Take My Spirit High
Glossary
Biography
Dedicated to Liz Roberts (1959-2012),
dear friend and indomitable spirit
Pittsburgh, PA, December 1984 &
Dahomey, West Africa, 1892-1893
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Blackfoot proverb
Public Display
“Books let dead people talk to us from the grave.”
Cinnamon Jones spoke through gritted teeth, holding back tears. She gripped the leather-bound, special edition Chronicles her half-brother Sekou had given her before he died. It smelled of pepper and cilantro. Sekou could never get enough pepper.
With gray walls, slate green curtains, olive tight-napped carpets, and a faint tang of formaldehyde clinging to everything, Johnson’s Funeral Home might as well have been a tomb. Mourners in black and navy blue stuffed their mouths with fried chicken or guzzled coffee laced with booze. Uncle Dicky had a flask and claimed he was lifting everybody’s spirits. Nobody looked droopy — mostly good Christians arguing whether Sekou, after such a bad-boy life, would hit heaven or hell or decay in the casket.
“Why did Sekou give that to you?” Opal Jones, Cinnamon’s mom, tugged at The Chronicles. “You’re too young for —”
“How do you know? You haven’t read it. Nobody’s read it, except Sekou.” Cinnamon wouldn’t let go. She was a big girl, taller than her five-foot-four mother and thirty-five pounds heavier. Opal hadn’t won a tug of war with her since she was eight. “I’m not a baby,” Cinnamon muttered. “I’ll be thirteen next August.”
“What’re you mumbling?” Opal was shivering.
“Books let dead people talk to us from the grave!” Cinnamon shouted.
Gasping, Opal let go, and Cinnamon tumbled into Mr. Johnson, the funeral director. The whole room was listening now. Opal grimaced. She hated public display. Mr. Johnson nodded. He was solemn and upright and smelled like air freshener. Opal had his deepest sympathy and a bill she couldn’t pay. Dying was expensive.
“Why’d you bring that stupid book?” Opal whispered to Cinnamon, poker face in place.
“Sekou said I shouldn’t let it out of my sight.” Cinnamon pressed her cheek against the cover, catching a whiff of Sekou’s after-gym sweat. “What if there was a fire at home?”
Opal snorted. “We could collect insurance.”
“The Chronicles is, well, it’s magic and, and really, truly powerful.”
“Sekou picked that old thing up dumpster-diving in Shadyside.” Opal shook her head. “Dragging trash around with you everywhere won’t turn it into magic.”
Cinnamon was losing the battle with tears. “Why not?”
Opal’s voice snagged on words that wouldn’t come. She made an I-can’t-take-any-more gesture and wavered against the flower fortress around Sekou’s open casket. Her dark skin had a chalky overlay. The one black dress to her name had turned ash gray in the wash but hadn’t shrunk to fit her wasted form. She was as flimsy as a ghost and as bitter as an overdose. Sekou looked more alive than Opal, a half-smile stuck on the face nestled in blue satin. Cinnamon inched away from them both.
Funerals were stupid. This ghoul statue wasn’t really Sekou, just dead dust in a rented pinstripe suit made up to look like him. Sekou was long gone. Somewhere Cinnamon couldn’t go — not yet. How would she make it without him? Pittsburgh’s a dump, Sis. First chance I get, I’m outa here. Sekou said that every other day. How could he abandon her? Cinnamon brushed away an acid tear and bumped into mourners.
“God’s always busy punishing the wicked,” Cousin Carol declared. She was a holy roller. “The Lord don’t take a holiday.”
Uncle Dicky, a Jehovah’s Witness, agreed with her for once. “Indeed He don’t.”
“So Hell must have your name and number, Richard, over and over again,” Aunt Becca, Opal’s youngest sister, said. “This chicken is dry.” A hollow tube in a sleek black sheath, she munched it anyway, with a blob of potato salad. Aunt Becca got away with everything. Naturally straight tresses, Ethiopian sculptured features, and dark skin immune to the ravages of time, she never took Jesus as her personal savior and nobody made a big stink. Not like when Opal left Sekou’s dad for Raven Cooper, a pagan hoodoo man seventeen years her senior. The good Christians never forgave Opal, not even after Cinnamon’s dad was shot in the head helping out a couple getting mugged. Raven Cooper was in a coma now and might as well be dead. That was supposedly God punishing the wicked too. Cousin Carol had to be lying. What god would curse a hero who’d risked his life for strangers with a living death? Cinnamon squeezed Sekou’s book tighter against her chest. God didn’t take a holiday from good sense, did he?
None of Opal’s family loved Sekou the way Cinnamon did. Nobody liked Opal much either, except Aunt Becca. The other uncles, aunts, and cousins came to the memorial to let Opal know what a crappy mom she was and to impress Uncle Clarence, Opal’s rich lawyer brother. An atheist passing for Methodist, Clarence was above everything except the law. Sekou’s druggy crew wasn’t welcome since they were faggots and losers. Opal didn’t have any friends; Cinnamon neither. Boring family was it.
“I hate these dreary wake things.” Funerals put even Aunt Becca in a bad mood. She and her boyfriend steered clear of Sekou’s remains.
“The ham’s good,” the boyfriend said. He was a fancy man, styling a black velvet cowboy shirt and black boots with two-inch heels. Silver lightning bolts shot up the shaft of one boot and down one side of the velvet shirt. His big roughrider’s hat with its feathers and bolts edged the other head gear off the wardrobe rack. “Why not have supper at home, ’stead of here with the body?” He helped himself to a mountain of mashed sweet potatoes.
“Beats me.” Aunt Becca sighed.
Opal couldn’t stand having anybody over to their place. It was a dump. What if there was weeping and wailing and public display? Aunt Becca glanced at Cinnamon, who kept her mouth shut. She didn’t have to tell everything she knew.
“Some memorial service. Nobody saying anything.” Becca surveyed the silent folks clumped around the food. “Mayonnaise is going bad,” she shouted at Opal over the empty chairs lined up in front of the casket. “Sitting out too long.”
“Then don’t eat it, Rebecca.” Opal sounded like a scratchy ole LP. “Hell, I didn’t make it.” She needed a cigarette.
“Sorry.” Becca pressed bright red fingernails against plum colored lips. “You know my mouth runs like a leaky faucet.”
Uncle Clarence fumed by the punch bowl. His pencil mustache and dimpled chin looked too much like Sekou’s. “Opal couldn’t see the boy through to his eighteenth year. I —”
Clarence’s third wife read Cinnamon’s poem out loud and drowned him out:
Sekou Wannamaker
Nineteen sixty-six to nineteen eighty-four
What
’s the word, Thunderbird, come streaking in that door
A beautiful light, going out of sight
Thunderbird, chasing the end of night
Cinnamon joined for the final line:
What’s the word, Thunderbird, gone a shadow out that door
“Hush.” Opal turned her back on everyone. Maybe it was a stupid poem. “Sekou talked a lot of trash. You hear me?” She touched the stand-in’s marble skin and stroked soft dreadlocks. “When he was high, he didn’t know what he was saying — making shit up. Don’t go quoting him.”
Cinnamon chomped her bruised lower lip. “The Chronicles is a special book, magic, a book to see a person through tough times.” She threw open the cover. Every time before, fuzzy letters danced across the page and illustrations blurred in and out of focus. Of course if you couldn’t stop crying, reading was too hard. This time the pages were clear. The letters even seemed to glow. She dove right in.
Dedication to The Chronicles
The abyss beckons.
You who read are Guardians. For your generosity, for the risks you take to hold me to life, I offer thanks and blessings. Words are powerful medicine — a shield against further disaster. I should have written sooner. Writing might help me become whole again. I can’t recall most of the twentieth century. As for the nineteenth, I don’t know what really happened or what I wished happened or what I remember again and again as if it had happened. I write first of origins, for as the people say:
Cut your chains and you become free; cut your roots and you die.
CHRONICLES 1: Dahomey, West Africa, 1892 —
Stillpoint
Kehinde was fearless, an ahosi,1 king’s wife, warrior woman, running for her life, daring to love and honor another man above Béhanzin, the king of Dahomey. She saw me come together in scummy water tumbling over smooth boulders, my eyes drawn from rainbows, feet on fire, crystals melting into skin. Momentum carried her through the cave mouth toward me as bright green algae twisted into hair, and I sucked in foam and slime to form lungs. Even if she had wanted to run from an alien creature materializing from mist, dust, and light, there was nowhere to go. Enemy soldiers rushed past our hiding place, bellowing blood lust. Seeing me emerge into human form, Kehinde did not scream or slow her pace, but accepted the event, an impossible vision, a dream/nightmare unfolding before her as truth. Her disciplined calm eased my transition. Yet, nothing prepares you for the first breath, for the peculiar array of new senses or the weightiness of gravity. I was stunned by the magnetic field and the urgency of desire — for food, for touch, for expression and connection. The first experiences are paradise.
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