Root Magic

by Eden Royce

  Dedication

  To my ancestors,

  including those whose names

  I’ll never know

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  When Gullah people die, babies in the family get passed over the coffin so the dead person won’t come back from the beyond to take them away.

  No one did that today with me and my twin brother, Jay, of course. We were about to turn eleven years old, and that was too old to get passed over the coffin. Instead, me and Jay stood next to Mama and my uncle, Doc Buzzard, in that graveyard, listening to the pastor say lots of good things about Gran. The noonday sun beat down on the back of my neck and beads of sweat dotted my forehead. Heat pressed in on me like an aunt I didn’t want to hug. Every so often, a rush of breeze blew in off the ocean and across the marsh. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me, cooling my hot skin.

  A huge, deep rectangle was dug into the moist, black dirt, and we all stood around it in a circle. Me, Jay, Mama, and Doc were in the front, and behind us stood other people from the island. Over my shoulder, I saw many of the people who weren’t family but came to pay their last respects to Gran standing nearer the shade of the huge evergreen trees lining the cemetery’s edges.

  Everyone was sad and crying, even those people who weren’t related to us. Gran had been the best rootworker for miles around, and she had helped all of them at some point. She could make potions to give folks luck to win a court case or to make their boss less angry. She could create compresses to draw out the poison in snake bites. Some people thought rootwork was from the old school, or even fake, but everyone who knew Gran and Doc knew better. Even the pastor said it was a great loss to the community that Gran was gone. He said it must have given her some peace to hear President Kennedy’s speech earlier this summer, on the radio. It called for all people in America, including Negroes, to have equal access to jobs and public school education. While Gran wouldn’t be here to see it, she’d left this world knowing that better days were coming.

  I looked at all the people here to celebrate Gran’s life. But my life felt like a puzzle I didn’t know how to put together. On one hand, I missed Gran so much, I wished she would come back and things would return to the way they were before she died. But on the other, I wanted better days. And I knew Mama wanted something better for all of us, something better than . . . well, just about everything that had happened since Daddy left.

  Early that morning, Mama wove palmetto leaves into roses for us to wear at the funeral. She tried to show me how to do it, bend and twist and pull the long, flat leaves into the spiral flower shape, but my fingers were too clumsy and I couldn’t get the leaves to do what I wanted. She had to take mine away and weave the rose herself. Then she pinned it onto the front of my dress like a piece of jewelry.

  Mama was in her best Sunday outfit: a black short-sleeved dress, white gloves, and black patent-leather heels. A wide-brimmed hat covered her black hair, which she had pressed straight with a hot comb off the stove that morning. She was patting the tears off her smooth brown cheeks with a starched white handkerchief. Doc, however, wasn’t doing any of that. He just held his good hat in his hand and let the tears run down his face and into his bushy salt-and-pepper beard.

  I couldn’t cry. I felt so much hurt inside, but it wouldn’t come out. Like the time I fell out of the big live oak tree near our house and couldn’t breathe. Mama said I just had the wind knocked out of me, and I would feel better soon. I hoped I’d feel better soon about losing Gran. Emptiness opened up in my heart, and I wondered if it would ever be full again. Her stories of Br’er Rabbit’s tricks on the other animals always made me laugh. She even told good scary stories, about haints and spirits, creatures that she said roamed around the South Carolina marshes where we lived. Some of those creatures used to be people; others were things that no one understood but everyone knew to stay away from. I loved her stories about boo-hags best. They were night creatures with blue skin that they could remove before slipping under doors and through keyholes. When I trembled, she would hug me tight and tell me she would always keep me safe from them. I hugged her back and told her that I knew they were only stories and not really real.

  After the pastor finally finished talking, the pallbearers lowered the wooden coffin with my gran in it into the huge rectangle in the ground. Each one of the family members in turn threw a handful of dirt into the grave after saying goodbye. First Doc, then Mama, then Jay.

  “Your turn, Jezebel,” Mama whispered, smoothing her hand over and down one of my pigtails. In the heat of late summer, the scent of her bergamot hair pomade was like sweet, sun-hot oranges.

  I walked up to the great big hole in the earth and looked inside. Sunlight reflected off the polished wood, almost blinding me. It wasn’t only a hole; it was Gran’s final resting place. The place I would have to come back to if I wanted to visit her.

  In the pocket of my good Sunday dress, the black-and-gray-striped cotton one, I felt for the doll Gran gave me and squeezed it. She’d made it out of crocus, a gunnysack fabric, and used scraps of bright cloth to make a dress and headwrap for her. Then, just before she died, she breathed into the doll and pressed it into my hand. She was too tired to do any more than that before she fell back on the bed. Later, Doc told me that Gran’s breathing into the doll gave it some of her spirit, and it would be a way she could be with me even after she was gone.

  I named the doll Dinah.

  Everyone was waiting for me now, so I crouched down and grabbed a big handful of dirt and sprinkled it onto the coffin. The dirt hitting the box sounded like heavy raindrops falling on the roof of our house. It sounded like an ending.

  “Goodbye, Gran,” I whispered, sobs clogging my throat. “I miss you already.”

  Only then did I finally cry. Tears hotter than the air around us ran down my face and neck, wetting the collar of my dress. But I didn’t care. These tears were the last things I’d ever be able to give my grandmother, and I wanted her to have all I had.

  Once the grave was filled in, we left small gifts on top of it. Jay brought Gran’s favorite cup, the one with a tiny chip in the rim from when he dropped it on the floor. I tied a strip of fabric from her apron around the handle, and we set it on the mounded dirt. Mama left a shell, polished smooth from the ocean water running over it. Doc kissed a tiny bottle of some liquid he pulled from his pocket and pressed it into the dirt.

  After the repast lunch the people at church made for us, we walked home along the hard-packed dirt path that led from the cemetery all the way to our house. We lived on a Sea Island called Wadmalaw, about twenty miles from Charleston, the biggest city in South Carolina, and our house was right on the water, next to the salt marsh. Our family had a part of those marshlands that was just ours and nobody else’s. We’d catch food there, like fish and shrimp and blue crabs. It was also a place for me and Jay to run and play. Our neighbors around us had their own p
arts of the saltwater inlet too, where they would also go fishing. We all respected each other and would always ask permission before going onto someone else’s land to catch food.

  I could taste the salty breeze from the ocean on my tongue as we got closer to home. Me and Jay walked side by side, a respectable distance behind Mama and Doc.

  “I don’t wanna start school again tomorrow,” Jay said. “I miss Gran, and I ain’t ready for summer to be over—”

  “Shh,” I replied, pointing at Mama and Doc. We were close enough to hear what they were talking about.

  Rootwork.

  I knew a little about rootwork from all the time I spent with Gran and Doc after school. Mama was always getting home late ever since she opened her roadside market stall. And on Saturdays, when Mama sold the sweetgrass baskets she made along with our extra vegetables at the stall, me and Jay spent all day with Gran. We helped her pick flowers and roots that she would mix with water and rum to make perfume. Once my hands got steady enough, she even let me help pour the sweet, flowery perfume into little clear glass bottles that Mama would sell at her stall the next day.

  Once, last year, I had asked Gran to teach me and Jay some root magic. “You already doing it by helping to make the perfume!” she said. But then she added that we would learn more when the time was right. I pouted while Jay sucked his teeth. But Gran laughed and said she would show us her biscuit recipe instead. Gran made the best biscuits: warm, fluffy dough with a fine layer of crisp butteriness along the edges. All my pouting was gone at the thought of getting to eat those perfect little circles, and Jay’s stomach rumbled. Me and Jay raced to get all the ingredients she said she needed while she added wood to our cast-iron stove in the kitchen.

  Now, Jay nudged me with his scrawny elbow, bringing me out of the memory. We were almost home.

  We turned onto the path that led out to the marsh. Dust still clung to his black shoes as he shuffled his feet along the path. “Don’t get your dust on me!” I told him. Most of the time I didn’t mind getting dirty. I loved running and playing outside, even sinking my feet into the marsh’s pluff mud, which was warm and soft as cake batter. But this was my best dress, and if it got too dirtied up, Mama would tell my head a mess.

  “You hear Doc and Mama say root?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I couldn’t tell what all they were discussing, though.”

  “Me neither,” Jay said.

  “Hice tail, y’all,” Mama called back over her shoulder as she and Doc picked up the pace.

  I knew what that meant. It was Gullah for “hurry up.” Gullah was a language of English mixed with different West African languages. It’s what the people who were forced to be slaves—my foremothers and forefathers—ended up speaking after they were first brought here to the Carolinas hundreds of years ago. It belonged to us. My family still spoke it sometimes, to each other and to other people on the island who knew the language. Mama wanted me and Jay to speak English; she felt it gave us a better chance to do well in school and get a good job later on in life. Gran spoke Gullah a lot. Hearing it just then made me feel closer to her.

  Still, Mama’s words were sharp. It was her I-mean-business voice, and so me and Jay ran to catch up. We were close enough to home now that I could see Gran and Doc’s rootwork shop—now just Doc’s shop, I supposed—and our little shotgun house in the distance, and we came alongside the start of our farm and our full, late-summer crops. Our vegetables were ripe and I could smell the scent of tomato leaves. Bees buzzed all around us, bobbing in the thick, steamy air. A few wide-winged butterflies soared over our heads, and I knew they could smell the fresh, green scent of the vines too.

  Rows and rows of fat red and orange tomatoes hung on our vines. There were lots of green snap beans, stalks of yellow sweet corn, Sea Island red peas, crookneck squash, benne seeds, and purple okra that looked like fingers reaching for the sky. Just last week we helped Mama plant collard and mustard green seeds and sweet potatoes to harvest later in the fall and into winter. We had eggs from our many chickens all year round. There was even a fig tree—sometimes, Mama had me and Jay pick figs for her to make into jam and sell. Along with rice and seafood from the marsh and ocean around us, the crops we grew and the eggs we collected were what we ate, and also what Mama sold to support us at her stand.

  “It’s too hot out here to argue,” Mama was saying to Doc. “We’ll finish this discussion once we get home.”

  Getting home wouldn’t take much longer. As we passed the crops, we came to the rootworking shop. It was a small cabin, with wooden clapboards blasted by the sun and sea salt air until they’d turned grayish brown. The cabin stood all alone by itself on the road to our house, and it was the place Doc did all of his business. Everywhere you looked inside were rows and rows of wooden shelves, and on every shelf was some kind of bottle or jar or basket filled with a liquid or a powder or even whole dried flowers or curls of shaved tree bark. The cabin smelled like a flower shop inside a forest: fresh-turned dirt, sweet spices and pine, surrounded by new blossoms. The customers loved that smell. They would come to buy a potion but would usually end up talking to Doc for a while. Doc gave good advice to the people of our community, and not just about magic or medicine. He had what Gran used to call “good common sense,” and people came from all around to ask what he thought about a certain brand of fertilizer, or what he’d heard about a company that was hiring workers.

  Doc’s advice made me think of Gran, and tears burned my eyes again. Before Gran got sick, she used to be the one everyone in town went to for her opinion. And she was always happy to give it to people in need. She didn’t like to take money for it either. But a lot of the local people—called binyas in Gullah—were so grateful they brought things anyway. People would come up the path to the house with bags of fresh-caught shrimp or a bushel of snapping blue crabs or a few whiting just off the fishing pole. Gran would give the bag to me and Jay and sit down with her guest at the kitchen table. At the sink, me and Jay would clean the guts out of the fish and take the heads off the shrimp while Gran listened. Once the person was done explaining, Gran then told them what she thought they should do about their problem. Her visitors would always get up and leave happier than when they came. I wanted to be able to do that for people one day.

  I was so caught up with what was in my own head that I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I ran right smack into the back of Mama. Since Jay was right beside me, he bumped into the back of Doc, and our uncle reached down and placed a hand on Jay’s shoulder to stop him from moving around and running up to the house.

  “What’s going—” I started to ask.

  “Hush now,” Mama said.

  That’s when I saw why both Mama and Doc had frozen all of a sudden. A police car was parked right in front of our porch. The red and blue lights on top of the car weren’t on, but it still made me nervous. The black-and-white car stood smack-dab in the middle of the path, between us and our house. And on our porch, up the rickety front steps Gran had made Doc fix a few months ago, was a policeman.

  Deputy Collins was standing there like he owned the place, hands on his hips, one of them near the gun strapped to his right leg. He had a rail-thin body, but with loose, floppy cheeks like a bloodhound. Sweat stains showed under his arms as he looked down at us. The porch overhang threw deep shadows on his pale face.

  Mama’s whole body was stiff next to me. Her hand shook as it grabbed mine a little too hard and pulled me behind her. When I looked over at Jay, Doc had a hand on his head, doing the same. Doc’s usually sunny, smiling face was blank as a chalkboard. A bead of sweat rolled off my forehead, stinging my eyes, but I didn’t dare move to wipe it away. I clutched at Mama’s hand and she squeezed it before letting go. She stood up real straight—putting iron in her back, Gran used to call it—and then she stepped forward.

  2

  “Can we help you with something, Collins?” Mama asked. She was keeping her voice calm, quiet. When she really wanted to yell, me
and Jay could hear her across the fields even if she was still inside the house.

  “You will show me respect and call me Deputy Collins, Janey Turner.” The policeman took his time and looked over each one of us as we stood out in the hot sun and he stood on our porch in the cool shade. “Or you know what’ll happen.”

  I could hear Mama gritting her teeth, but when her voice came out, it sounded polite. I might have been ten years old, but I knew Negroes could get arrested or beaten up for talking back to a white person or for saying a white person lied. Even if it wasn’t against the law for a white person to hurt a Negro.

  “What can we do for you, Deputy Collins?”

  He folded his arms over his bird chest. “You can get over here and open this here door so’s I can search this house.”

  Mama didn’t move an inch. “For what reason?” she asked.

  Deputy Collins sneered at us. “I don’t need no reason, Janey.”

  He was right. I knew about police barging into local rootworkers’ homes. Whispers at church and from the people who came to Mama’s stall or Doc’s cabin said that Deputy Collins was the worst one of them, that he was looking for reasons to bother rootworkers, even take them away. The Daniels, another rootworking family on the island, got dragged out of their house and away to jail. Nobody had seen them since. Now, people said, it was best to let Collins search. Refusing or asking why would just make the deputy angrier than he already was. And if he got really angry, he might drag Mama and Doc off to jail, leaving me and Jay alone.

  Deputy Collins wiped sweat off his face with the back of his hand. “Now come on and open this door before I force it open like I did that junk-filled cabin.”

  We all turned as one and looked behind us. The padlock Doc kept on the door of the cabin when he wasn’t in his shop had been pried off.

  My heart was pounding so hard I could hear the beat in my head. I wanted to tell him to go away, that we weren’t bad people, and that we just wanted to be left alone. But I couldn’t. I was so scared I just stood there. Stood there in our front yard with the sun burning down on my neck, sweat running down my forehead, my whole body tight as a drum. My skin felt too snug for me and I wanted to jump out of it.