Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  In Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, she tells a wonderful story about her beginnings. When she was being born, all the neighbors and the midwife were at hog killings. Her mother delivered the baby without help and was lying in bed, too weak to cut the cord, when a white man came visiting with fresh meat and vegetables. He cut the cord, wrapped the baby, and had a fire going by the time the midwife arrived. Zora goes on to tell of him taking her fishing later in her childhood, then giving her a nickname and advice about how to live with honor and courage. One piece of advice was not to be a “nigger,” a term that, she writes, was not meant to indicate race but rather an inferior way of being.

  It’s a perfect mythical birth that foreshadows the importance of white patrons in her later life. The story is too perfect, some have said. Zora almost admits as much in the first line of the book chapter. “This is all hear-say. Maybe, some of the details of my birth as told me might be a little inaccurate, but it is pretty well established that I really did get born.”

  In journalism such fanciful tales would be called fabrications, and any journalist would then disregard everything else said by that person. True and untrue is one of my profession’s most sacred distinctions. We might buy all sorts of excuses about all sorts of things. We might confess to all sorts of errors and mistakes, but making up stories, whether you’re a source or a reporter, is a bad, bad thing.

  In the world of the spirit, however, it may be different. Once again, the magical people were muddying the line between good and bad. James Hillman defends fanciful autobiographies as being more true than the mere facts, and in his book The Soul’s Code he cites a number of famous people who concocted biographies that matched their sense of true self better than what had actually happened. Hillman refers to this true self as the daimon, an idea he borrowed from Plato’s Myth of Er. This daimon is a calling, a soul companion, a doppelganger, or, in Hillman’s words, an acorn of the person we are meant to be.

  People with a strong sense of their daimon might invent fables that say, “I am not your fact. I will not let what is strange in me, about me, my mystery, be put in a world of fact. I must invent a world that presents a truer illusion of who I am than the social, environmental ‘realities.’ Besides, I do not lie or invent: Confabulations occur spontaneously. I cannot be accused of lying, for the stories that come out of me about myself are not quite me speaking.” Hillman gives a number of famous examples.

  Henry Ford liked to tell people that he had taken his first watch apart at seven and would sneak out of the house at night, steal the neighbors’ watches, bring them home, and repair them. When he re-created his family’s farm home, he put a little watchmaker’s bench and tools in his bedroom. His sister Margaret didn’t remember him slipping out of the house at night and said there had been no bench.

  Leonard Bernstein claimed that his childhood was one of complete poverty and that the Boston Latin School he attended from seventh to twelfth grade had no music program. In fact, his family owned two houses, with maids and at times a chauffeur-butler, and he was in the school orchestra, sang in the glee club, and was a piano soloist.

  Conductor Leopold Stokowski spoke with a Polish accent although he and both his parents were born in England. Only his paternal grandfather was Polish-born. He loved to tell the story of getting his first violin at the age of seven from his grandfather. But his grandfather died three years before he was born, and according to his brother and his biographer, no one ever saw him play a violin.

  All three men were constructing what Philip Roth calls a counterlife, a fantasy biography. Hillman says that reading a life backward gives us a clue as to why. They told these stories once they had fulfilled the destiny that their daimon ordained for them. Anyone who does that may feel that they were always “themselves” even in childhood and that their stories should reflect that.

  “Something in us doesn’t want to lay out the facts for fear that they will be taken to be the truth and the only truth,” Hillman writes. Everyone reads his life backward to one degree or another as maturity casts new light on personal history. Mark Twain said that the older he got, the more he remembered things that never happened.

  Kioni continued to feel Zora’s spirit quite strongly after our trip. She took up residence in his house and went pretty much everywhere with him. Once he hit a patch of dark depression during which he could hardly get himself out of bed. He felt shooting pains all over his body that he suspected came from pins being stuck in a poppet. His energy was so low that he couldn’t do work for his customers. He went to the doctor, who gave him a good report, but his symptoms didn’t go away. He felt as though he were dying. Candles he was lighting for his personal rootwork were burning dirty, full of soot. He was in despair when he heard Zora say that he ought to bathe with her grave dirt.

  “Frankly, I was thinking that I was a little off my rocker; but Cat being a wise Sage, urged me to pay attention to the impression I was getting,” he wrote in an e-mail.

  “After several days of prayer and meditation, I was given two initiation rituals I was to perform with Zora’s grave dirt. The first ritual was to be done under the waning moon…. Looking at the items Zora instructed me to assemble, I understood the first part of the ritual was to remove some quasi rootwork/voodoo being directed at me. The first part consisted of a strong herb root bath. After stepping from the bath Zora instructed me to rub myself down with her grave dirt! There I stood naked as the day I was born, wet and covered with dirt from my head to the soles of my feet. By the way, the dirt I used had been consecrated on my altar for several weeks and sprinkled with Florida Water—another of Zora’s directives.

  “After saving some of the previous bath water, I drained our oversize garden tub and filled it again. This time, I placed several scoops of Zora’s grave dirt in a stocking and hung it below the faucet. The floral and citrus scent of the Florida Water wafted through the bathroom, transporting me to another time and place. I began to hear drums beating far off in the distance. Caked with Zora’s grave dirt, I stepped into the bath again. The Holy Ghost fell on me and I began to speak in tongues as I alternately quoted Scripture and summoned Zora’s presence, essence and power. Then I felt a sensation like knives being pulled out of my body. I could hear popping sounds similar to when one cracks their knuckles or pops their bones as we say here in the South.

  “Sitting in the warm water, a dream from many years ago flooded to the surface of my mind. In the dream, I was crossing a wide river at the mouth of a beautiful waterfall; however I was not alone. I could see dozens of Africans helping each other cross the raging river by forming a human chain across it. A strong, dark hand took mine guiding me to the next person in the chain until I was standing dripping wet on the opposite shore. We were running to escape capture by the white slave traders.

  “Suddenly I shot up out of the tub like a Poseidon anti-ballistic missile. My arms were raised to the heavens and joys flooded from my soul like the water cascading down a waterfall. The drums were louder, or perhaps it was my heart—I don’t know. But I do know I heard these words, which cause me to fill with emotion as I share my story. I heard ‘Son of Zulu, welcome home. Son of Zulu, the heavens belong to you.’”

  Afterward, Zora instructed him to write down what had happened and to send it to someone trustworthy. When he asked why, she said, “You need to make a record.” He sent it to me. A few days later a member of our hoodoo class wrote the following: “As I learn hoodoo, I also learn more about the spiritual practices in South Africa through my aunt who lives with me (she’s a Zulu and believes in the ancestors and teaches me things even though she’s Anglican). I ask her questions all the time and she tries to answer them.”

  When Kioni read the word Zulu, which had never been mentioned in our class, he felt the hair rise on his body. This was the confirmation. This was the reason that Zora had asked him to write down his experience and to send it to someone. His experience wasn’t just his imagination. It was real.

 
Kioni later wrote in a public e-mail, “So, the rootwork done by that certain nefarious person has been removed. I feel pity for this person because I have never done anything to harm anyone, anywhere at anytime in my life.” Then, directing his attention toward the person who had tried to hex him, he wrote, “Jealousy of fellow rootworkers will be your downfall, mark my words. Also, from this day on be warned, I will fight fire with fire. Zora scolded me for not having done so sooner because I suffered needlessly.

  “I issue a warning here to all who seek initiation into hoodoo. Make sure you are right in your heart before you begin. If you are committing adultery and fornicating like a dog, you will be in mortal danger. If you cheat people in business, you will be deceived in like manner. If you lie, spread rumors and stir up strife online or offline, expect that energy to come back to you triplefold. However, don’t expect Zora or the Ancestors to greet you with open arms nor impart to you their knowledge and wisdom. The spirit world is not to be toyed with. Hoodoo is not a harmless game! You have been warned.”

  12.

  Every Time You Hear a Bell, a Muggle Has Turned Magical

  The magical and the muggle are separated by a river, wide and deep. I could see across, but I couldn’t get across, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out how other people did. There would come a moment in each interview when I’d squint, shake my head, and ask, “Why? Why do you believe this?” They would try to tell me, and gradually I came to understand some of it. I found four bridges that connect the worlds of the magical and the mundane.

  The first bridge is the way of the child. Many people experience magic in childhood. Until the age of puberty, children see the world in what adults would consider quite magical ways. For instance, they recognize no clear dividing line between animate things and non-animate things, according to Piaget. They may agree outwardly with adults who say that animals can’t understand and things cannot feel or act, but buried within them is their “true knowledge” of how the world works. Attuned to the spirits within stones and trees, clouds and wind, animals and toys, children believe that they can find answers to their deepest questions and access hidden forces of great magnitude in the world around them. Some outgrow such ideas; others never let them go. Perhaps the difference lies in the intensity of a child’s interaction with magical stories, or maybe it comes from experience.

  When Cat Yronwode and her friend did their rainmaking ceremony on that Berkeley rooftop, and the clouds came rolling in over the bay, and the terrible drought was ended, young Cat must have felt incredibly powerful. An older person might have quibbled about the link between Cat’s act and the resulting rain, but she was a child who had read books about magic since she was able to read. Those books were as important to her as anything that happened outside them and maybe more real. Her rain dance confirmed the truth of that perception.

  As she grew up Cat continued to read, and she remembered almost everything she read. Her husband calls her a polymath, which seems deserved. When she told me about the astrological reading that warned her something bad lay in the future for her first child, I did not doubt her experience. I wondered how she explained it.

  “How can planets affect individual humans’ lives?” I asked. I knew she would have thought about it and might have an answer that would go on for a long time.

  She replied, “I don’t know, hon. I don’t know. All I know is that they do happen.”

  As for magic, she said, “You can influence the course things are going to take. I’ve seen it.” In addition, there are connections between people and events that have no apparent cause, she said. “You dream about something, and it comes true. I’m just faced with these things happening. They happen. They keep happening, and they are directed.”

  For people such as Cat, accepting magic is merely a matter of acknowledging their own experience instead of accepting what others tell them. I suspect one reason more people are quietly opening up to magical and spiritual explanations is that the old verities are not holding. Doctors, scientists, preachers, journalists, and government officials have all told us that they know the truth without a doubt, but they don’t, and when we discover that, we are like betrayed children, suspicious of received wisdom ever after. We have all become Doubting Thomases, the disciple who had to touch the nail holes in the risen Christ’s palms. We want something we can feel ourselves. There’s nothing irrational about the choice. In a world where almost every day brings some new information to contradict facts we would have bet our lives on just yesterday, we fall back on what we’ve seen with our own eyes, felt in our own hearts. Our new perceptions may be wrong, but at least they are firsthand.

  A magician named Daniel told me he picked magic over science in the eleventh grade when talking to his favorite science teacher about a local woman who collected herbs and could heal cuts. He had known the woman for much of his life, and she had taught him about the healing power of plants.

  “It was a very eerie thing to see,” he said of her ability to heal cuts, “more so to actually feel if she was working on you. If you had a deep cut, she could hold her hands over it and chant a sort of prayer or bunch of syllables and the bleeding would stop, and it would sort of pull itself back together over the course of ten minutes or so. In another five to ten minutes, if she kept going, it would seal and heal to a light scar.” The science teacher dismissed Daniel’s story as impossible and declared it trickery.

  “I realized that modern science doesn’t actually study all things. Only those that fit within its current theories,” he said. “So I decided to follow magic rather than science, even if it meant washing dishes for the rest of my life to make ends meet.”

  The second bridge to magic is the way of suffering. Those who take this path, adults usually, come to magic after being so knocked down that they need something miraculous to lift them up. If something does, and it could be just some little piece of grace, some moment or message of solace that they would have ignored before, they grab hold. Rationalists will say their new openness is a pitiful kind of coping, but magical people and religious people have long understood that pain and hardship can be ways to reach another consciousness, to forge a new kind of hope that isn’t so reliant on whatever fortune may bring.

  When they train followers, mages and gurus of all kinds may try to create breakthroughs by putting their students into situations that will thrust them outside everyday routine and thus wake them up. American Indians use vision quests and ordeals. Zen Buddhists use immobility while meditating. Saints have used poverty, hunger, cold, and pain. Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, who settled in the United States, used work. His students would be put to some physically taxing task such as digging in the garden, and he would keep them at it through misery and pain. If they didn’t quit even when they felt they couldn’t go on, their habitual, predictable ways of being would break down and their subconscious minds would begin to work.

  For a woman I’ll call Joanie, life itself provided the impetus. She would not have followed a guru or listened for a moment to the idea that she needed waking up. She was perfectly fine, thank you, and her life was perfectly wonderful. When I talked to her, she never used the word magic, she used the word this, meaning her new belief system. Joanie would never think of herself among the magical people. She’s too normal, middle-class, suburban, and self-directed for that. She takes no classes, does no spells, reads no witch books, and belongs to no magical group. Nevertheless, she is among the most common type of magical person in America today.

  If magic hadn’t come to Joanie’s rescue, her story might have been a sad one indeed. She was married for twenty-seven years to a man she described as her best friend. They met when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. Romance developed slowly, which is, of course, one of the best ways if you’re looking for a long-term relationship.

  So they married, had a child, established careers, bought a home. There was little in their marriage to quarrel about, and so they didn’t. With regard to money, they we
re especially compatible. They were frugal, never left more than a 15 percent tip, and gave almost nothing to charity. This suited Joanie well since her mother had lived through the Depression and passed on all her fears. When Joanie was a child, her allowance was a nickel, which she saved. Eventually it was raised to a quarter, which she also saved. When she married, those nickels and quarters had grown to $1,200, which she was happy to bring into her marriage as a sort of dowry and testament to who she was. Her husband approved entirely.

  When she was a year away from retirement, they worked out all the finances. They would sell their home and buy a condo. With the money left over, they could travel more. They were planning with their usual foresight, agreement, and good sense.

  Then one day she noticed that her husband was a bit grumpy. He wasn’t a moody man. So when the bad attitude lingered for two weeks, she was somewhat alarmed. One weekend afternoon she invited him to lie down on the bed with her. When he did, she lay beside him, stroking his arm. She mentioned that he seemed out of sorts.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  Still stroking his arm, she reassured him. “You know you can tell me anything.”