Hoodoo for Little Fingers

As a child, magick had always fascinated me. I was five when I met the emaciated spirit woman shuddering in the corners of a chicken coop in our backyard. For a time I wondered why my step-father refused to have that dilapidated monstrosity hauled off. He hadn't owned chickens since before marrying my mother. Finally, he sat me down and told me, "I know you see her, 'cause she wants to be seen by everybody. If I tear it down she got plans to move into our house. None of us want that."

I hated that yard until my grandfather taught me how to summon something pretty out of the workings of something ugly. He taught me to close my eyes and envision the coop filled with whatever my heart desired. I settled on kittens. Would you know it, after about a week of sneezing and getting scratched the woman left. She took off—adios, sayonara. My mother said she had taken up residence at the homeless shelter around the corner. She could smell her open sores every time she stood at the bus stop. Mama said the spirit was somewhere sorrow and desperation welcomed, with open arms, her disembodied despair. According to Mama, she was the kind of spirit that made sane folks entertain thoughts of taking their lives. It was best she moved on, and even better if we never gave her a second thought.

I remember very early in life being nestled into the giant arms of my grandfather as he offered such delicious tales of how one could conquer any adversity with just the right amount of Hoodoo. I remembered visiting villages of the dead (cemeteries or graveyards), stopping to pour whatever concoction was in Grandpapa's Thermos onto the earth as I sashayed from corner to corner before dropping shiny coins bathed in Hoyt's cologne at the threshold. I remember the cool breeze tickling my cheeks and nostrils. Grandpapa would say, "No breeze means not today." He would explain that the breeze was a thank you, a kiss, a grand gesture, an unseen door opening. It indicated that the offering was not only received but that it was just what the Spirits needed. Sometimes in the absence of a breeze, we'd return home to retrieve a square of bread pudding or a small bowl of stew. We'd stand together, holding hands, awaiting the rustle of the leaves and then the ceremonial tickle.

I played often in these villages of the dead, sprinkling a handful of jacks along the cement walkway as Grandpapa's whisk broom removed fallen leaves accumulating near the base of headstones. Before leaving we would offer prayer, sing songs, and eat our lunch, and then I got to experience my favorite part of the trip: shaking candy-coated sprinkles from grave to grave as a reminder of how sweet life and rebirth are to each and every soul, equally as sweet to those encased in flesh as to those en route to the land of the ancestors.

Spookism Is Also Child's Play
When I sat down to pen the manuscript that would become Conjuring the Calabash: Empowering Women with Hoodoo Spells and Magick, I thought back to my earliest introduction to Spirits, which came with a deep understanding of how our lives are interwoven into a series of constant new beginnings. In order for each beginning to manifest one has to travel the course between birth and death. As my Spirit Guide, my maternal grandfather stood proudly at the foot of my bed as I jotted out the outline. We discussed what delicacies from childhood should make an appearance and which should be saved for future book bindings.

I giggled as my grandfather reminded me of the time he asked me to bring him my favorite doll. He told me to dress her in her best get-up, and when she was primped to perfection he placed her inside a shoe box. Imagine my horror when he covered her with soil from his garden and then topped the box. He told me to sit and conjure the thought of never seeing her again. My last memory would be of her in her fuschia ball gown smothered beneath the soil. He told me to think back to the last time I played with her, dressed her, and held her, and then he told me to think about how it would feel if those moments were all I'd ever have left for eternity. He asked, how would I go on without her? Would I ever find a doll to love again the way I loved her? Then my grandfather smiled and told me that that's what happens when people die in one physical form. He removed the box top, shook the soil from my doll, and returned her to me. I didn't even care that her gown was stained or that soil was wedged between her braids and scalp. She had returned from the dead and I was elated.

As I spit-shined her face, grandfather went on about ancestors. How they get to come back through us until the day that they can be reborn alive, flesh, blood, human. They watch over us, and sometimes when we least expect it they shake the dirt off as a warning. In times like these the ancestors need us to understand that death is nothing more than a veil of dirt that separates but it doesn't restrict their movements. Dirt does not restrict their love, their yearning to intervene. When the ancestors need to, they lift the veil. It's like a game of peekaboo for them, for us.

Grandfather and I laughed, and I ran my fingers through the soil before allowing my doll to sit atop the mound of earth. Grandpa called her Lucille Lazarus/Queen of the Dead, and then he went on to explain how spirits have the same disposition in death, that they possessed in life. Death doesn't make them any wiser or kinder. It makes them dead—so Grandpapa informed me that I should listen to what they say with a grain or two of salt. Take some ancestor's medicine in one ear and out the other. In other words, I should exercise common sense and ask him or Mama or Grandmama if I needed to weigh their truth. I promised I would heed his warning, but most importantly that I'd bury my fear of full-bodied apparitions, shadow people, or disembodied voices. We shared a shrimp and oyster po'boy and Grandpapa introduced me to the bay leaf in his shoe. He taught me how to consecrate my own leaf with Hoyt's cologne and cayenne pepper. Then we walked home, traveling a different path and scrapping our shoes at each street crossing. Grandpapa said, "We do this to confuse the Spirits who mean us no good, the ones mad as satan that death took them away from the chaos they infused into so many lives unwarranted. We do this so they don't think about infusing our lives with funny business and most of all we never look back."

Writing Conjuring the Calabash: Empowering Women with Hoodoo Spells and Magick allowed me to reconnect my practice with a world of black and brown women struggling to find pride in their own family's folk magick. So often folk magick gets a bad reputation because, in a lot of cases, there is no need to become initiated. One can open themselves up to rootwork and conjure by the sheer magnitude of their glorious DNA. Hoodoo is survival—a true working representation of what it means to have gone through the African Holocaust and come out on the other side a gumbo of truth, make-do, and perseverance. Writing this book has offered me the chance to wrap my arms around Hoodoo and love her something fierce.