Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  That’s what almost anybody would do, I believe. There’s a scientific name for what happened to Kioni and me. It’s called a hypnopompic vision, which means a vision that occurs between waking and sleep. Such visions aren’t anything real, just a little glip in imagination. Ask the scientists, they’ll tell you. They’ll advise you to forget about it, just what they would have said to Florence Nightingale, who went to the Crimea and revolutionized nursing after she heard the voice of God calling her to take up his work. They’d have told Walt Whitman to forget about whatever numinous experience it was that changed him from an unheralded reporter to a man so inspired that he became one of America’s best-loved poets. They’d have told René Descartes to stop his ears when the Spirit of Truth told him that mathematics is the key to unlocking the secrets of nature. They’d have advised Saul of Tarsus to keep right on pitching Christians to the lions. They’d have told Joan of Arc that she was nuts to think a girl could lead France’s armies to victory. They’d have counseled Edison to ditch the idea that his hard work was supported by a universe that could be counted on to feed him one solution after another.

  And Kioni, if he’d been listening to the scientists or almost anybody else, would have gone right on to sleep, as I did. Eventually he did go to sleep, but first he let the experience change him. His family noticed in the next few weeks and months that he was gentler. For the first time in their marriage Marilyn didn’t feel she had to prove that she wouldn’t leave him as his mother had left him. He apologized to his children for times he had lost his temper or failed to come through when they needed him.

  A lot of people who turn to magic are helpless people, desperate people, and outcasts. Maybe all of us fall into those groups at one time or another. But never mind.

  “You have to surrender before you can believe any of this,” one of the magical people told me. To my ears that was an echo of evangelical conversion pitches. “You have to surrender your life to Jesus,” the evangelicals say. “You have to let go and let God.”

  One of the hangovers of having been in church so much when I was young is that churchy phrases and Bible verses still float around in my mind, which means that I’m constantly making holy connections out of the strangest things. It’s something Kioni and I have in common, but it’s worse with him—or better, depending on your perspective—because he knows more of the Bible than I do. Verses come to him more, and he’s bolder with his interpretations. If I were talking to him right now, he’d be thinking exactly what I’m thinking: “Raise a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” It’s from Proverbs.

  When I was told that to enter magical thinking you have to surrender, I thought that meant that you have to be humble, that you have to let go of ego and rationality. The woman who talked about surrender did mean letting go of the excuses that rationality uses to keep us down, but she didn’t mean humble. “It’s not a word I use,” she said.

  In fact, magical people are anything but humble. They don’t dwell on sin or fret about their shortcomings. They just decide what it is they want, and they go after it. They think the universe conspires with them. Some, like Kioni, who wears a silver ring with the name Jesus carved in it and says he loves the Christian savior with all his heart, believe they’re helping love to rule. Others have baser desires, but I never met anyone in the magical community who felt powerless or hopeless. Some were in quite a fix, and they weren’t dealing with it in the way I thought they ought to, but they weren’t feeling overly sorry for themselves. No matter what had happened to them, they were sustained by hope.

  How did they take so little and turn it into so much? That’s a task all of us face at one time or another, and we aren’t always up to it. They were deranged, maybe. But maybe that’s what it takes to have hope in this world. Were their lives more hopeful than mine?

  No doubt.

  Take Kioni, for instance. He did a spell to bring a storyteller to his house. And two years later, there I was. That proved his magic to him. The rest of us would be shaking our heads saying, “Wasn’t that just the strangest coincidence?” But not Kioni—to him I was a gift from God, a proof of magic and evidence that he wasn’t utterly helpless against the princes and principalities of this world.

  “Welcome,” he had said, his arms wide open, welcoming me and all the good magic he believed I was bringing.

  10.

  Hoodoo? We Do,

  in the Graveyard

  My magical explorations were taking me into some deep waters, deeper than I’d known existed. I was having to ponder things that I’d never thought much about before, which wasn’t altogether comfortable. So when Kioni mentioned that Zora Neale Hurston’s grave was in Fort Pierce only seventy miles away in a little segregated cemetery called the Garden of Heavenly Rest, all I heard were the immortal words of the Animal House frat boys: Road trip!!!!

  I said, “Let’s go.”

  Zora was a Barnard-trained anthropologist and novelist who studied African American magical culture during the 1930s. She is also one of hoodoo’s biggest names. Unlike other anthropologists of her time, she didn’t merely study conjurers, she became one, according to her books. White folks scoff at hoodoo and say it’s superstition, but “white folks are very stupid about some things. They can think mightily but cannot feel,” she observed. I wasn’t born when Zora wrote those words, but she could have been describing me. Anytime I start to feel, I try to stop and think. It’s so much safer.

  Graveyard work is important in hoodoo. Calling on a spirit while near a grave seems to increase the chances that it will respond. Cemeteries are also used for their symbolism. Anyone who wants to leave a bad habit behind can bury it in the graveyard. Someone who wants to control an enemy might put a baby doll or a mojo hand in a miniature coffin and bury it at the right hand of a grave.

  The most common kind of graveyard magic involves taking dirt from graves. The kind of grave the dirt comes from is crucial. Cat said the most common dirt taken from graves is from grandparents or other nurturing relatives because people mostly want the spirits to protect and guide them. But the grave of a murderer or an unrepentant sinner might also be sought for goofer dust, which is an Americanization of the Congo word kufwa, which means “to kill.” In some spells the method of dying is specified and reinforced by the spell. For instance, an enemy will be led to his death if his shoes are sprinkled with graveyard dust; then a trail of dust is laid from his home and a pinch of dust is laid at every crossroads to the nearest graveyard. An enemy will waste away if his hair and a bit of sulfur powder are mixed with the dirt of someone who “died bad.” The mixture is put in a bottle with nine pins, nine needles, and nine nails—three and nine are important numbers in hoodoo—and the bottle is then buried under the enemy’s threshold or pathway as the moon is waning. Goofer dust is such bad stuff that after handling it, hoodoo workers often cleanse themselves with a ceremony and special baths.

  A soldier’s grave might be good for a protection spell but could also be good for a killing spell because a soldier would be familiar with killing and accustomed to following orders. If the conjurer is dealing with a particularly evil spirit, he might be careful about how he comes home so that the spirit charged with killing doesn’t follow. One worker recommends crossing water on the way back since spirits may not be able to cross water unless invited. To be doubly sure that spirit doesn’t follow, Cat suggests standing in the middle of a bridge while reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  Kioni and I didn’t have a specific need in mind or anything to bury, but we would definitely take home some dirt from Zora’s grave. It could be used for all sorts of work: love spells, court work, breakup efforts. Kioni doesn’t do death spells. He won’t even do breakup spells unless he’s convinced that the cause is justified. Any dirt we took from Zora’s grave would most likely be used for positive purposes, which is appropriate because Zora was a positive woman. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is about a woman who
risks all for love. Zora herself had a good number of love affairs. So her dirt might well be used for love spells. For a love spell, dirt is sometimes mixed with Vandal root and then sprinkled on the desired one while the worker asks the spirit to help.

  For me, Zora’s dirt might be especially potent since she wrote some of the most wonderful work ever done on African American culture. Maybe her spirit would help me write well. Zora’s dirt might also have power simply because of her fame. Being a hoodoo celebrity could make it even more potent. Kioni and I wouldn’t mind being famous.

  Hoodoo doesn’t have many nationally known celebrities. Marie Laveau in New Orleans is the best-known hoodoo queen. Laveau, a hairdresser and voodoo priestess, was one of New Orleans’ most powerful women in the 1800s. Her grave is still a shrine to thousands of tourists each year. They leave offerings and scratch crosses on the tomb where she is said to be buried. Since New Orleans graves are raised and made of stone, the crumbled stone from the crosses might be used in rootwork instead of dirt.

  Kioni and I both hoped we would feel Zora’s spirit when we stood over her grave. She might talk to us, or she might come rising up and appear to us. To Kioni anyway. I wouldn’t recognize spirit if it punched me. I’d be too busy thinking, This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.

  Believers in spirits generally divide into those who think the dead are uncanny and those who think the dead are friendly, according to Cat. The uncanny camp, which does have its magical adherents, is usually from the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish tradition. To them death could be said to be a kind of defilement. Great saints and holy folk are exempted from the rule and might be called upon. But your run-of-the-mill dead person is to be avoided. Trying to enlist spirit might be considered trifling with demons. Hoodoo follows African tradition in looking kindly on spirits and believing that they look for ways to help the living.

  Before leaving Kioni’s house, I checked that I had a dime to leave at the grave. Taking dirt without paying would be a bad mistake. We could pay for the dirt with liquor or food or anything we knew the spirit especially liked, but money is always good. Zora had little money during her lifetime. She was never able to make a living off her writing and liked telling the story of the time she was so broke that she took money from a panhandler, saying, “I need it more than you do.” Later in her life, when one of her stories was published in the Saturday Evening Post, she was working as a maid for a Florida matron, who read the story and was startled to see that the author was her maid. Zora died penniless. Her burial expenses were covered by friends’ donations.

  Our first mistake was to leave home without getting a tool for digging. “No problem. I’ll use my fingers,” Kioni said. We also didn’t have a container for the dirt.

  “We can use my iced tea cup from lunch,” I said. It had a lid and was extra large. So we were set.

  When we drove into Fort Pierce, Kioni consulted his Internet directions; we seemed to be on the right route. Then we hit a dead end. We turned the other way, and after a mile or so we were lost. We were in an African American neighborhood, which was a good sign that we might be close, but we had forgotten the name of the cemetery, which might be a problem.

  Kioni cautioned me about asking just anyone for directions. Ask the wrong kind of person and we’d be likely to get into trouble. We might be directed to a crack house where the helpful citizen’s friends were waiting to rob us, he said. We turned down a side street and saw some street workers. They looked safe enough. I stopped next to a tall white man with a big grin. After listening to my question, he shrugged in a bewildered way and replied in Eastern European–accented English that he was not from around there. Across the street we saw an older black man in his yard. I pulled into the driveway next to a black sports car, rolled down my window, and called out to him.

  “Hi. We’re looking for a graveyard that’s around here. Zora Neale Hurston’s supposed to be buried in it. Ever heard of it?”

  The man looked at me as if I was speaking a language he didn’t know. He was shaking his head as he neared the car. Kioni leaned up so the man could get a good look at him and said, “How you doing?”

  Then he waited for the man to answer. I could tell that I had violated some law of African American pacing. Kioni was in no hurry. He told the man who he was, who I was, where we were from. He didn’t tell him what we were doing, thank goodness, but he did talk about how Zora was a famous writer. He grinned at the old guy. The old guy grinned at him, and then he grinned at me. He looked at Kioni a couple of times, and then he looked at me a couple of times.

  Then he nodded and started to talk. “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I know what you’re looking for,” he began, pointing first one way and then the other. He was directing us back the way we had come. We were getting more and more confused until a younger man in a utility company uniform got out of the black car and told us where to go. We’d been mistaken about the dead end. We needed to go around a barrier in the road and then go left.

  As we retraced our route, Kioni told me, “If you’d been by yourself, they would have never told you where it was.” Zora had a name for the overeager friendliness and fuzzy conversation that black people used to misdirect white America.

  “The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive,” she wrote.

  You see, we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

  Added to featherbed resistance, there’s another problem when white people try to find out about hoodoo. A lot of magical thought is secret, or used to be. When Cat went into conjure shops hoping to talk about hoodoo, she always looked for a particular picture, as a sign that the proprietor might be willing to talk with a white person. It had a yellow background and showed three heads: Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. If she saw that picture, she was usually able to count on a good reception. Cat now has one like it in her own shop.

  Being a Jew also helped, she told me. A lot of black people think of Jews as being allied with them, she said, especially in the days before some black Muslims began talking against Jews. In a way, her research and her hoodoo shop were the continuation of a long tradition. When Jewish pharmacists came to the United States in the 1800s, they were often unable to find jobs in white, Christian-dominated parts of town. Many of them opened shops in the black parts of town, and because their clients asked for roots, herbs, and oils used in African American folk medicine, they began to stock them. When the Great Migration north began, some of the pharmacists began mail-order businesses. One built a thriving company, and some of the traditional designs Cat adapts for her products come from his labels.

  She advises white people to go out into black neighborhoods, make some friends, be respectful, and listen. “If I can teach my white students one thing—just one thing, please, Jesus—it is to go over to the black side of town and make friends and listen. All right? You hear me? Make some friends and learn something.” White people are likely to run into cultural rules they don’t know about, but if they watch what’s going on, they can figure out what’s acceptable and what’s not, she said.

  As an example, she tells the story of meeting blues great Lightning Hopkins. She was still a teenager. He was playing at a coffeehouse where she worked, and she approached him at the same time that a big-paper journalist did. Lightning had a flask. He took a swig and said to the journalist, who was white, “Will you drink after me?” The journalist took the flask, but before he drank he wiped the lip of the bottle.

  “A look of pure hatred passed across Lightning Hopkins’s face,” Cat said. “I saw it.” Lightning took another drink and said to Cat, �
��Will you drink after me?” She’d never had alcohol, but when he passed it to her she took the bottle. “It was horrible.” But she managed a swallow and pretended to drink more.

  She saw Hopkins years later backstage at a folk festival. He said, “There’s my little girl who drinks after me,” and he hugged her.

  The Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery where Zora is buried sits past a little church at the end of a dead-end street. All the literature notes that it is segregated. Whether that means the black people are buried on one side and the white people on the other, or that there are only black people, I don’t know. We didn’t see a sign with the cemetery’s name or a line showing which ground has black bodies and which has white. There is not much to this graveyard, just a couple of acres.

  The cemetery has a dirt road along the side. I pulled in, and we saw a historical marker a little less than midway down and about halfway over. It’s a big metal sign with photos and plenty of text, impossible to miss. That had to be it.

  In 1973, when the writer Alice Walker decided to find Zora’s resting place, the grave was unmarked and the cemetery was covered in weeds waist high. By posing as Zora’s niece, Walker was able to get vague directions about the grave being in the center of a circle in the Garden of Heavenly Rest and went there guided by a local woman named Rosalee, who didn’t know any more than she did. Finding the grave seemed so hopeless that Walker began to appeal to the spirit herself. Here’s what she wrote in a story called “Looking for Zora”:

  “Zora!” I yell, as loud as I can (causing Rosalee to jump). “Are you out here?”

  “If she is, I sho hope she don’t answer you. If she do, I’m gone.”

  “Zora!” I call again. “I’m here. Are you?”

  “If she is,” grumbles Rosalee, “I hope she’ll keep it to herself.”

  “Zora!” Then I start fussing with her. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day. In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times.”