Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  On a clump of dried grass, near a small bushy tree, my eye falls on one of the largest bugs I have ever seen. It is on its back, and is as large as three of my fingers. I walk toward it, and yell “Zo-ra!” and my foot sinks into a hole. I look down. I am standing in a sunken rectangle that is about six feet long and about three or four feet wide. I look up to see where the two gates are.

  “Well,” I say, “this is the center, or approximately anyhow. It’s also the only sunken spot we’ve found. Doesn’t this look like a grave to you?”

  “For the sake of not going no farther through these bushes,” Rosalee growls, “yes, it do.”

  When Kioni and I arrived, a cold wind was blowing over the open fields. I put on a coat. Kioni had on a sweatshirt, but he shivered a bit as he pulled his forearm cane out of the backseat. We hiked over the ground until we were in front of the sign. It had a few photos of Zora.

  Next to it was the headstone Alice Walker bought. It read, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH, 1901–1960, NOVELIST, FOLKLORIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST. “The phrase “a genius of the South” comes from a Jean Toomer poem. I don’t know how they chose Zora’s birth date, because through her life she gave many, always ones that made her seem younger than she was. Scholars had some trouble tracking the right date down, but they finally did it.

  “Hurston was born on January 15, 1891, making her between seven and nineteen years older than she claimed. Neither was she actually born in Eatonville, as she claimed,” according to one of them. She did grow up in Eatonville, which was a totally African American town.

  A concrete cover was laid over the plot. On it were a doll and a couple of dead flowers. We wouldn’t be getting dirt from the top of this grave. Kioni knelt at the side of the concrete.

  “Zora, we’ve come from miles away to visit you and to honor you. We’ve come to ask your permission to take some dirt from your grave.”

  There was a long silence. Kioni’s head was lowered and his eyes were closed.

  “You’d be surprised how many people are interested in having it,” he said in a low voice, as though talking to himself, but I knew from the way he said it that he was talking to her spirit. Whether she was talking back, I didn’t yet know. “Lots and lots of people want it. People come from all around to honor you.

  “Oh, thousands of them,” he said, as though someone had asked how many. “A hundred thousand are expected to come to Eatonville this year.” Every year a Zora Neale Hurston festival is held there to honor her.

  Kioni crouched with his head lowered for a few seconds. Then he laid his hand on the concrete covering. Later he told me that when he touched the grave, he felt virtue flowing into him. The idea of virtue is biblical and magical. Knowing Kioni, I knew that his primary reference was to the story of the woman who was suffering from an issue of blood. She was behind Jesus in the crowd, but she believed that if she so much as touched his garment, she would be healed. So she did. Jesus felt the virtue flow out of him. He turned and asked who had touched him. Seeing the woman, he said, “Your faith has made you whole.”

  The virtue that resided in Jesus was so real that he could feel it leaving him, Kioni said, but Christ isn’t the only person who has such virtue. Everyone has Christ-consciousness virtue in them, Kioni believes, and so does every thing. The natural world is alive with special and specific powers that God has deposited and wants humans to use.

  In the case of Zora’s grave, Kioni felt the virtue flowing into him from her spirit—not out of him. That convinced him that it was all right for him to take the dirt.

  “Okay,” Kioni said, now talking to me. “Her feet would be facing east. Her head in the west. So this would be her right side.”

  Kioni stuck his finger under the grass, peeled it back and rooted around until he had made a little hole. He dropped the dime in before taking any dirt. That’s good hoodoo practice. Making the spirit wait for hers might not be a good idea.

  “We appreciate this dirt so much that we want to pay you for it,” he said. “Lots of people are interested in this dirt. Yes. Lots of them will be excited. We appreciate you letting us take it. We’ll take good care of it.”

  The soil crumbled easily against his fingers so that Kioni quickly filled the large-sized paper cup with dirt.

  “Where’s the dime?” he said, looking into the hole. “Oh no, I think I’ve scooped up the dime. It’s in the cup.” He stirred the dirt around with his finger, but no dime appeared. He poured some dirt into his palm. No dime. Taking the dirt and the dime might be a real bad idea, like trying to fool the spirit. Bad mojo.

  “Do you have another one?” he asked, still on his knees.

  “I’ll get my purse.” Clutching my coat against me, I ran across the field. Knowing Kioni must be cold, I didn’t want to take longer than I had to. Some teenagers on the corner stood next to a car with its stereo turned up so loud the earth was vibrating. They didn’t seem to be paying any attention to us. I grabbed my purse and ran back as I pulled out my wallet. It’s red, which Kioni had noted approvingly. Red is a good color for drawing money. I found a dime and handed it to Kioni.

  “Good. We’ll just put this in there. We wouldn’t want to not pay.”

  Kioni picked up the flowers and doll and put them neatly near the headstone. He turned toward the car and using his crutch on the uneven ground started back to the car at a pretty good pace. I started after him, but before I caught up he swung around and began to come back, muttering, “Yes. Yes. I see. That’s right.”

  He stood as though listening for a moment. Then he looked at me. “This is my path,” he said, meaning hoodoo. “I can’t get away from it. This is what’s right for me. Feeling her here is letting me know that.” He’d been moving away from hoodoo toward doing nothing but prosperity spells. Hoodoo is difficult and time-consuming, which he didn’t mind, but it also seemed to attract a lot of crazy clients. They took too much out of him, and so he’d been downplaying that type of magic. Now he would stop downplaying it and start practicing it again.

  I noticed that the teenage boys were gone, and at the same time I saw big black birds flying in circles high in the sky. “Buzzards,” I said. “Buzzards. Can you believe that? That’s good, right?”

  “I believe those are falcons,” Kioni said gently so as not to embarrass me. “There are a lot of them in this area.” Two more were at the other edge of the sky.

  “That’s four,” he said. “Seeing them is a good sign.”

  11.

  Be Careful What You Say about Zora

  Kioni and I drove out of Fort Pierce feeling good. We had enough dirt to share with others in the hoodoo class, and he was certain that he had felt Zora Neale Hurston’s presence.

  “I could hear her voice,” he said. “It sounded like Diana Kroll’s, whiskey-husky and sexy. The kind of voice a man likes to hear.”

  We stopped at a gas station near the freeway. Kioni mentioned that I might want some gas, but thinking only of a restroom break, I didn’t take the hint. As Kioni was buying our snacks and drinks, we swiveled a CD rack at the front of the store. It had several old rhythm and blues recordings. “Look at this,” he said, grinning. “Oh, here’s another one.” The CDs were a good sign. Kioni bought two.

  As we drove toward Kioni’s house in Port St. John, he gave a little shiver. “We used to call these Holy Ghost-a-sisms because they meant that we were being filled with the Holy Ghost,” he said. “But that’s Zora. She’s here with me.”

  As I drove we talked of hoodoo work. Kioni told me that 99 percent of his clients were female, but two he was working with at that time were gay men. A disproportionate number of gay men are involved in the magical arts.

  “Why is that?” I ask. “Why are they coming to you?”

  “They’re desperate,” he said. They’re moving toward middle age, he explained, and want what everyone wants, which is someone who will love them faithfully and well. They’re often hindered by falling in love with men who aren’t gay. Sometimes
they want hoodoo to help them turn disinterest into passion. One such client had befriended a straight neighbor in hopes of something more. The straight guy said he wasn’t interested and would never be, but he remained friendly. Kioni’s client felt he was giving mixed signals. He needed a nudge. Kioni told his client to make up a special powder. At night he was to go to the straight guy’s house and sprinkle it from his front door all the way to the client’s own bed.

  So he did, and the next morning the straight guy came over before the gay guy was even out of bed. As soon as the door opened he gave Kioni’s client a hug and turned toward him for a mouth-to-mouth kiss. Startled, the client turned his head.

  “He had morning breath,” Kioni said, “and he didn’t want to kiss him that way.” To the client’s delight, the neighbor groped him, squeezed him in another hug, and left.

  So it worked, Kioni said, and then abruptly, he stopped talking. I glanced over. His brow was wrinkled.

  “Oh,” he said. “She just rebuked me. That was Zora.”

  “She did? What did she say?” I asked.

  “Why? I don’t know why?” he was talking to someone other than me. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I do. I understand.

  “She just said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It was against his will.’”

  That was interesting coming from Zora, who had once boiled a cat alive to get a black cat bone. A black cat bone obtained in that way is supposed to confer invisibility on its owner. Being dead must have softened her nature. That seems to happen. I’d heard of many messages from the dead in my research, and the character of their discourse invariably seemed to have improved since passing over. Stingy, homophobic, mean people come back all apologies. I never heard one of them say, “I was a dirty SOB, and I’m glad of it.” Maybe only good people and repenters get an encore.

  Kioni had done all the things that he was supposed to do to make sure his work for the gay guy was justified—used his intuition, worked the Tarot cards, done it in the name of Jesus while saying, “Let it come to pass if it be justified.” He would not use magic to turn someone gay, but if the straight guy was already veering in that direction, the magic would work with the inclination, he said.

  I didn’t know whether it was Zora who disagreed with what Kioni had done or some part of himself that doubted he was doing right, but it told me that Kioni wasn’t as susceptible to some of the pitfalls of magic as other magicians have been. His conscience, his higher self, his Holy Guardian Angel, his particle of God, call it what you will, was working. In his new life it was having to work hard, maybe harder, than it ever had before.

  For a former Pentecostal preacher to be engaging the aid of Jesus to help gay men find lovers was an amazing thing in itself, an over-the-top example of what’s happening to many of us in less dramatic fashion. The old ways, which had kept his morality cryogenically preserved for much of his life, had failed him. Forced to enter a world filled with alarming and bewildering new ideas, he had resisted, been anguished, and then groped for new truths. He began to think in ways that he never dreamed he would, and as he did the old guidelines for what was right and wrong fell away. His old friends and relatives disapproved. So he made new friends. He looked to spirits, divination cards, his own intuition, and his own reason for direction in how he ought to behave. He still read the Bible, but now he read it differently. He prayed to Jesus, but now the savior replied differently, using new messengers. Sometimes Kioni stumbled on this strange new path, but that was nothing new. He’d always stumbled. The point was to get back up. And he always did. Within a year after Zora’s message, Kioni stopped doing any kind of love spell work at all. He wouldn’t make anyone fall in love, and he wouldn’t cause lovers to break up. He never criticized those who continued to do it; he just stopped doing it himself.

  About ten miles out from Cocoa, which is near Kioni’s home in Port St. John, the car’s fuel light came on. There wasn’t an exit in sight.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “We’re going to run out of gas. You said get gas, but I didn’t. What’s wrong with me? I haven’t run out of gas in twenty years.”

  I was waiting to hear the engine sputter when finally an exit came in sight and right beyond it a gas station. As we coasted in Kioni said, “It was all right. I knew we’d be fine. I checked with the spirits, and they said we had enough to get here.”

  He could have shared the news earlier, but I was too shamefaced about my own behavior to protest. I got out to pump gas. Would I have believed him if he’d quoted his spirits? No. But at least he would have been on record with his prediction. Would that have convinced me? No. I finished pumping the gas, pulled the nozzle out, and spilled gasoline all over my shoes.

  Back in the car with a haze of gas fumes rising from my soggy shoes, I asked again, “What is wrong with me? I’ve never done that in my life.” I couldn’t feel the spirits. I couldn’t hear them. But something had me discombobulated.

  “I hope I’m fit to drive us home,” I said. “Think we’ll make it?”

  “It’ll be all right,” Kioni said. I hoped he was talking for the spirits, but I didn’t ask. If he had some mojo working, I’d just let it work.

  When we returned to his house, Kioni pulled out a plastic container like people use for leftovers and filled it with dirt. That evening he wrote to members of Cat’s class about our day at the grave and said that anyone in the class who wanted some dirt should send him $3 for postage.

  “I wouldn’t charge for her dirt,” he said.

  Once the requests came in, he asked Zora who ought to get it and who shouldn’t. According to those who got the dirt, she accomplished great things and seems to be doing so still.

  I am careful what I say about Zora because her spirit appears to be much at work. She’s already chastised me once for being too flip. I’d mentioned to some people that there’s dispute about whether all that Zora wrote was truly as she said it was. There’s considerable evidence it wasn’t. She even wrote somewhat cryptically about the subject: “I am supposed to have some private business to myself. What I do know, I have no intention of putting but so much in the public ears,” she wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. And in another place she wrote, “The white man is always trying to nose into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.”

  Nevertheless, Zora the spirit didn’t care for me questioning her veracity. This message was relayed to me by the thirty-four-year-old white rootworker named Adele, who has some of Zora’s dirt displayed in tiny perfume bottles on an altar in her spare bedroom. The altar also has a photo of Zora smoking a cigarette and looking sassy.

  Zora wanted her dirt in those perfume bottles and nowhere else would do, according to Adele, who lives with two dogs, six cats, and a pistol grip shotgun in a log house on thirty-four acres at the top of a North Carolina mountain. Her land is protected by N O H UNTING signs and dollies. Dollies would be called voodoo dolls by those who don’t know the difference. Most people think dollies are used only for bad work. In hoodoo they aren’t. On Adele’s land they’re used for protection. Of course, protection can mean that bad things befall those who transgress, another case of the line between good and bad smudging in the magical world.

  Adele, who refers to herself as “just a little country rootworker,” had the dolls out not because she objects to hunting. Hunting is fine with her. “But I hate a sneak,” she said. When she suspected a neighbor was tearing down her N O H UNTING signs, she smeared ground-up poison ivy on them. A few more disappeared, and that was all. The dollies are to protect against poachers. One poacher left his truck at the edge of the forest and returned to find it stolen. Another shot a deer that Adele was certain had wasting disease.

  “I don’t know what he saw when he shot that deer,” she said, implying that some magical image had interceded so that the poacher would do himself harm by eating bad meat.


  It took Adele hours to force grains of Zora’s grave dirt down the tiny necks of the perfume bottles, but the rootworker was so determined to please the spirit that she spent an afternoon doing it. Adele has become quite fond of Zora since her dirt went on the altar and her spirit took over the house. I’m not sure exactly why, since as far as I can tell Zora has been nothing but bossy. She demanded that the living room furniture be rearranged immediately, and when Adele’s mother came to visit, Zora refused to allow her to share the spare bedroom, forcing Adele to put her mother in another room.

  Realizing that even as a spirit Zora’s temper remains quite fiery, I want to be clear that I am not insulting her by pointing out that she bent the facts considerably when it suited her. Lots of accomplished people have done the same. And, as Zora pointed out to Adele, who relayed the message to me, I wouldn’t be able to do nearly as well as Zora did if I’d been born a black female in Florida in the late 1800s who was soon motherless, deprived of education, and tossed from one relative to another. I can’t dispute that even though I am alive and she’s dead, which you might think would give me an edge. It would, of course, if we were not dealing in the magical world where spirits are quite accustomed to pushing live folk around.

  Magical people who embroider their beginnings don’t seem to be rare. It was once common to hear Wiccans claim that they were from covens that handed witchcraft down from generation to generation, back to the burning times, but as scholars began to debunk that possibility other witches began to snigger, and those stories have since died back.

  I heard so many stories of Wiccans who had stood up to the priests and nuns as children that I began to secretly sympathize with the adults, beleaguered witless by so many mouthy infants. These stories usually involved publicly matching theories with their teachers and besting them with superior logic or moral sense. They had something in common with the story about the boy Jesus awing the elders in the temple, except the magical people are usually insulting the authorities. Often the story ended with the nuns and priests never calling on these cheeky children again or banishing them from class. Such tales were repeated so often that I could have finished them myself, which caused me to wonder. Were these stories true tales or fables that represented what their spirits wanted to do? Either way, they were classic tales of the rebellion against authority that has been so important in magical lore.