Chapter One
I’m not looking for any trouble. I never am. But, somehow, I keep finding it anyway. Or maybe it finds me.
I’d thought New York, full of opportunity and chaos and possibility as it is, might be a place where a colored girl with, if I may be so bold, more than a little talent in the mystical arts could finally catch a break. But even here, talents like mine don’t seem to be worth a cup of joe these days—in fact, more often than not, they’ll put a target on your back.
As evidenced by the spectacle I’m currently witnessing.
I’m sitting in the corner booth of a no-name diner in Manhattan, trying to ignore the skin-crawl feeling of the white waitress staring at me while I watch the scene unfurl outside. Cops pour out of a nearby building, hauling out mages, using their silver billy clubs liberally whenever someone looks like they might want to put up a fight. The sidewalk is spattered red with the mages’ blood, but no one seems to care, pedestrians avoiding the flailing men and women, most of them colored like me.
“Finally rounding up those filthy ’mancers,” the waitress says, coming over and leaning to peer out the window as well. There’s a slight smile twisting her thin lips. “That speakeasy’s been there for over a year now. I’d been starting to think the coppers would never break it up, you know?”
“I . . . yes. Can I get a refill?” I say, pointing to my empty cup. The carafe is in her hand, but she still sighs as she pours half a mug’s worth of the oily brew they’re calling coffee. It’s not good, but at least it’s real, not some raveling done by an Illusionist. She waits for a moment at the table’s edge, probably expecting me to order food, but when I just give her a tight smile, she moves away, grumbling under her breath about moolies taking up space. The parade of jobless men and opportunity-seeking hucksters that were here when I arrived filed
out as soon as the job agencies opened their doors, leaving me alone in the diner, a colored girl at a dirty table nursing a mug of lukewarm coffee.
I lift my one worthwhile possession, a Brownie camera that Pigeon gave me a couple of years ago for my birthday, and snap a picture of the cops manhandling the mages just beyond the window. This is a thing I’ve done since I got to New York, taking these slice-of-life pictures, as though by documenting my days I can somehow make them worth more. Can’t tell you why, exactly. Maybe I imagined that at some point I would develop the photos and flip through them, a picture show of how far I’d come. But I’m right in the same place as when I arrived, more or less. The picture taking is more a silly habit than anything else.
I watch through the window until the last mage is pushed into the back of the police wagon, the portal inside zapping the mages to the local precinct. That could’ve been me, if I hadn’t overslept, if I hadn’t had to argue with my landlady about unpaid rent and the rat nesting in the wall of my room, the gnawing keeping me up all night. I could’ve been right there with the rest of them, spinning charms and raveling hexes, hoping the backlash wouldn’t hurt too much, when the police burst through the door. It was only a small disturbance in the Possibilities—a feeling of being watched, you might say—that slowed my footsteps and turned me away from the door of the speakeasy and its illegal charms, sending me into the diner across the street.
Lucky me.
I may have avoided the eager batons of the coppers, but I’m still in a pickle when it comes to my financial situation. I pull out my change purse and count my coins one more time. Two dollars and thirty-six cents. That is all the money I have left, and a dime of it has to cover the coffee.
I came, I saw, I failed spectacularly.
New York was a pipe dream, and now that I’m knee-deep in the muck, I can’t help but regret ever leaving Pennsylvania. My sister, Pigeon, always ready to be the voice of reason for her flighty younger sister, warned me that the city was no place for nice girls, but I only smiled and said that was perfect before promising that I’d write every week and send money when I could.
I’ve sent few letters, and even less cash.
Boy, she’s going to get a chuckle out of the mess I made of this one, I think, trying to cheer myself up with memories of Pigeon’s characteristic scowl. Once she’s through being vexed with me, that is.
Country living was easy. Nothing for Floramancers like us to do other than ravel charms for dairy cows and scry the future of a newborn every now and then. Sometimes we’d go out foraging for bits to change into other useful things—acorns and walnuts and the like, which we could ravel into milk buckets or flowerpots or the occasional potpie, nothing fancy. No one wanted Big Ravels in the sticks, and they definitely didn’t want the kind of gourmet creations I spent my free time thinking up: magnificent raveled desserts that few chefs, even those
trained in the mystical arts, could imagine. It was one thing to turn a walnut into a construct to help around a farm; it was quite another to use that same walnut to create a three-tiered cake that tasted of dreams and happiness. My mother and aunts were good with the Possibilities, and I’d learned a lot from them. But the kind of food I wanted to ravel wasn’t the kind you found in Pennsylvania.
And that’s why I came to New York. I’d hoped to get an apprenticeship at a bakery, the kind I saw in the food magazines that were sometimes on the rack in the general store. With a bit of training, I knew I could use the finest ingredients and my considerable talents in the mystical arts to create amazing treats, even something otherworldly. Tiny, light tarts raveled from pecans, cakes raveled from a handful of the best almonds, confection spun out of peaches that melted on the tongue and reminded people of their happiest childhood memory.
My plan was to work in such a place just long enough to get a sponsorship and get my license, as everyone knew it was impossible to get a mage’s license without a proper sponsor. Prohibition had made anything more complex than household charms illegal, and without a licensed mage to vouch for both my skill and character, I’d never be able to get my certification. Applying for a license from the government without a sponsor was pricey, and they didn’t take too kindly to colored folks, so impressing one of New York’s mage bakers was my best chance at opening my own treat shop.
That is my best, shiniest dream, the fantasy I spin when I have trouble sleeping. In it, my shop is fancy and cosmopolitan, and so popular that people like J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes demand my creations for their events. “Get me a Laura Ann Langston confection!” they’d yell into the phone, slamming their hands down on gleaming wooden desks. People from all over would line up each day for a chance to buy a pastry, twisting twice around the block. I’d be in one of those food magazines, and they’d say my treats were “life changing” and “to die for.” I’d wear the best fashions from Paris and carry around an ostrich-plume fan just because. Reporters would ask me what Shirley Temple’s favorite cake was, and I’d laugh and swat at them with my fan. “I never bake and tell,” I’d say with a gleam in my eye, and then lean in and whisper, “but it’s raveled from rose petals.”
I made the mistake of sharing this with my sister once and immediately regretted it. Pigeon thought it was a silly dream. Why would a colored girl work so hard to open something as useless as a bakeshop? Especially when I could have a comfortable life doing simple charms for the bumpkins in Shrinesville? The kind you didn’t need a license for, the kind that wouldn’t attract the attention of the Prohibition office’s enforcers? She couldn’t understand that I wanted Big Ravels, the kind that came with a license and an apprenticeship, the kind that would’ve been a given if I’d been born white. Pigeon thought I was a fool for leaving the safety of the family farm. She said as much the day of my seventeenth birthday, as I was packing up to head to the nearest Wayfaring station and get beamed to New York.
“Ain’t no one going to hire an unlicensed Negro mage, especially not one who happens to be a girl,” Pigeon said with a sniff. “All that struggle to make a bunch of fussy sweets?
Ridiculous. You’ll see. You’ll be zapping back here inside of a month. And when you do, I’m going to say I told you so.”
Pigeon knew what she was talking about. She usually did. But I couldn’t face a long, endless future raveling charms for crops in Shrinesville, Pennsylvania. So I gave my sister a hug and marched out of the house for what I had hoped would be the last time.
It wasn’t only big dreams that had made me leave. Pennsylvania was smothering me, keeping me small, and who wanted to live a tiny life?
But now, penniless and out of luck, there’s a part of my brain that thinks maybe I’d been wrong to leave. Maybe I should just head home. A few months in the Big Apple had shown me the worst thing they could: that I was a silly colored girl with outlandish dreams. If I’d gotten nothing else out of this grand New York experiment, at least I’d gotten knocked upside the head with some common sense. Because here I am, less than four months later, broke as a joke and counting pennies like doing so could make them multiply.
At least I’d lasted longer than Pigeon had expected. That was something.
“Did you want to order food?” The waitress reappears like an apparition and eyes me in that half-defensive, half-angry way white folks always look at Negroes, like I might turn her into a frog and then swipe what’s in the till. I consider telling her that the black don’t rub off and my ravels aren’t the spiteful kind, but that wouldn’t assuage her fears. Most likely she’s heard the stories, the ones of powerful Negro mages, men and women both, charming white women so they could have their way with them, savage in their appetites. As if the Jim Crow laws in the South would exist if colored folks were that powerful.
The energy that powers Negro ravelings isn’t any different than the small bit at the heart of the machines made by the white Mechomancers who ply their trade throughout the city, but somehow folks are okay with the science of Mechomancy and leery of the exploitation of Possibilities. They had been so even before the Great Rust, but when that whole disaster went down, colored folks were an easy scapegoat. How else to explain the Blights that destroyed all Mechomancy but didn’t have any effect on the mystical arts? Never mind that there was no evidence that anything we mages did led to the Blights that now dot the country; it was somehow fact that the mystical arts must be to blame. And ever since Congress prohibited the use of anything beyond basic ravels without a license, the cops and G-men have been happy to break the skulls of mages, usually colored, all over the country.
Even here in New York.
Either way, I wouldn’t be casting charms on anyone anytime soon, even if I wanted to. Big Ravels don’t happen without a few essentials like joppa seeds and jacaranda vine. And I don’t have the coin for either.
Instead of giving the woman a piece of my mind, I just smile. “I’d like another warm-up, if’n you don’t mind?” The rumble of my belly is mostly inaudible.
The waitress purses her lips, her pale brow furrowing as she moves off to grab the carafe again. At least her racism is familiar. It was much worse getting turned away by every
colored baker I’d asked about a job. For some reason I’d thought Negroes up in the Big Apple would be friendlier, or at least more understanding of my abilities and aspirations than the folks back in Pennsylvania had been. New York’s skyline might be dominated by the impossibly tall buildings Mechomancy makes possible, but everyone knows the city is held together with ravels laid over a hundred years ago, ones that prevented the river from flooding and the rats from taking over. Heck, it was just a few years ago that they were having a mystical renaissance in Harlem, folks finding new ways of twisting up old ravels into even better things.
But unlike the Negroes back in Shrinesville, who still relied on the same ravels our families had practiced for hundreds of years, most of the colored folks in New York seemed just as hostile to new mages as white folks. It hadn’t been this way before the Great Rust, when the mystical arts and technology still existed in an uneasy harmony . . . but that didn’t help me now. People still remembered that day in 1927 when a strange wave of energy washed over the United States, destroying great mechanicals and leaving Mechomancers powerless, their constructs failing in the ebb and flow of the Possibilities, the energy field that powered all ravels. The economy is still recovering a decade later, and with another war brewing in Europe between Mechomancy and the mystical disciplines, well, everyone is a bit on edge. And even colored folks seemed to buy into the nonsense that, somehow, the mystical arts had caused the Great Rust.
Nothing vexed me more than discovering this as I tried to make my way in the city. It didn’t make a lick of sense for colored folks to fear the mystical arts, especially in the larger scheme of things. After all, the European Necromancers hadn’t been picky about which Afrikans they’d grabbed and thrown on a boat heading west back in the old days, but that didn’t change people’s silly prejudices. And it wasn’t like the Floramancy I did was anything close to the Necromancy that the Ku Klux Klan and their predecessors were known for. But it didn’t matter. The whole country was in a quiet war with itself. White folks versus Negroes, the blands who embraced the science of Mechomancy versus practitioners of the mystical arts. It was part of the reason my grand New York experiment had fallen flat. “Mages need not apply” was second only to “Negroes need not apply.”
I would’ve been better off as a leper. At least sick folks get a measure of pity.
I count my coins again, wishing there were some kind of ravel that could duplicate them. But the coins are made of iron and silver—Mechomancy material, impervious to any kind of tinkering within the Possibilities. The only thing I can do is stack them over and over as my mind runs through my limited options.
I have four days until my landlady kicks me out for missing this month’s rent. Four days isn’t a lot of time, and I’m not even all that sure I’m of a mind to keep paying for the tiny rat-infested bedroom I rent in Miss Viola Swan’s Boardinghouse. Not that my preferences make a bit of difference. I need twenty dollars to stay, and I don’t have it. Miss Viola had assured me that anything less than twenty-five dollars a month was a steal in Harlem, but that was before
I’d seen the place. It is less a boardinghouse and more a kennel, complete with fleas. Walking in and seeing those faded curtains and crooked floors day after day felt like manifesting my failure. The only reason I even have curtains and a threadbare quilt is because of Simone. She used to live in the room next to mine, turned tricks for money—that is to say, she raveled without a license for questionable characters in shady places. I’d been a little sweet on her and thought maybe my feelings were reciprocated a bit. But the police came and snatched Simone up one day, so now it’s only me and the rats and a bunch of girls I don’t know, most of them hoodlums just crashing at Miss Viola’s until the heat dies down and they can get back into whatever skullduggery had landed them in the clink in the first place.
I sigh and stare at my tiny pile of coins. Maybe getting into illegal hexes is the way to go. I am fresh out of other options.
Outside the diner window, the morning foot traffic has died to a trickle, and I briefly consider going back to Miss Viola’s, packing my stuff, and heading home. Buck fifty and I could be back in PA by dinnertime, knotting fertility charms out of trumpet vines and casting chicken bones for a look at the future with my rootworker aunts. I’d never be a great mage, never see my desserts in the pages of Harper’s or the New Yorker. At most I’d be a hedge witch. But I could live a nice, quiet life. Comfortable, even. Pigeon would leave off of her “told you so”s after a few weeks. A year at most.
Just the thought makes me want to bawl.
The waitress walks by, and I try to wave her down. “Hey, where’s my refill?” I call, pointing to my mostly empty cup.
Her lips tighten, and she shakes her head hard enough that her paper hat wobbles. “We’re all out of coffee, and we don’t serve troublemakers here. I suggest you finish up and clear on out,” she says, before stomping back toward the kitchen, her heels making an angry staccato sound on the cheap linoleum.
I stare after her, trying to figure what it was that turned her so salty, but then I notice the sesame seeds scattered across the tabletop. While I was fretting about my options, I must have let my abilities roam, because the seeds—the remnants from someone’s sandwich, most likely—have sent exploratory roots skittering across the table, writhing with the energy of the Possibilities. I sweep the seeds into my hand, because I know better than to waste their potential, and stand to leave.
“Yeah, well, maybe you should keep a cleaner establishment,” I mutter to no one in particular. I toss a nickel and a dime on the table because I’d never let it be said Laura Ann Langston is a cheapskate, grab the rest of my loot, and make my way out into the morning.
It is nearing lunchtime, and the mechanical district is abuzz. Mechomancers in derbies and bespoke suits crowd the sidewalks. Their detestable machines glide through the streets, the air thick with the coppery scent of their power. One of Henry Ford’s new constructs rumbles past, and I have to keep myself from spitting for luck. Some might think Mechomancy is the other side of the coin to the mystical arts, but there is nothing natural about
it. Especially since, for most of American history, it was powered on the backs of colored folks.
Now good old FDR is working to make Mechomancy the cat’s meow once more, urging the Bureau of the Arcane to team up with Mechomancers to finally get the Blights under control. I read in the newspaper that Henry Ford is opening a factory in Queens and hiring hundreds of mages to craft his next line of automobiles. And then there’s Prohibition, slowly strangling what’s left of independent mages. If I wanted an apprenticeship to a mage at a Mechomancer firm, I could’ve gotten one several times over. But even now, flat broke and juggling pennies, I refuse to apply to one of the Mechomantic employment agencies. Some folks might think Mechomancy is the future, but it seems to me that no matter what anyone says about it these days, it’s just an unwanted relic from the past. I prefer work that won’t smother my conscience.
I loiter in the doorway of the diner, biding my time and reading the display page on a nearby paper. Negro Mages Head to Ohio to Quell the Country’s Largest Blight, the headline reads. Under that, pictures of colored folks lining up in a Wayfarer’s queue. They’re headed west into the Big Deep, the first, and still the worst, of the country’s Blights. The higher arts, as folks annoyingly call things like Mechomancy, might not work in a Blight, but the lower arts—the powers that draw from the Possibilities—always have, which is why the Bureau of the Arcane has been recruiting colored folks to help set the Blight to rights.
Good luck to them.
I step out onto the sidewalk, debating whether to head down to Central Park to gawk at the wyverns or maybe head back uptown to Harlem and try to catch up on my sleep, when I realize the sesame seeds in my hand won’t hold for later. The burst of potential I woke is anxious for release, tickling my palm with the Possibilities. Without a direction, all that latent energy is a recipe for disaster. Or at least an inconvenience.
A block up the avenue, a grizzled old white man holds down the corner, his clothing threadbare and ragged. “Powerless and hungry,” his sign reads. “Just another bland down on his luck.” He is covered in grime and barefoot, his face painted with a white scrub of beard. Normally I try not to get mixed up in the affairs of white folks, especially those who openly decry the mystical arts. It has a way of shaking out for the worst. But the man is even lower on his luck than I am, and I feel a measure of pity for him.
“Hey,” I say, approaching. The man looks up, his eyes rheumy. “Are you hungry?”
“What do you think?” he grumbles. He smells like a brewery, and I get the feeling that food isn’t what sustains him.
I shake the sesame seeds in my hand, cupping them loosely, and call on the Possibilities. I can see where the old man touches the ambient energy that connects all living things, and from there I can see what he desires. I can feel it, sudsy and bitter, running down my throat, easing hurts and filling my belly.
A couple of rolls of my wrist and each seed hits the ground with a hollow sound, like popping corn, raveling into a bottle of beer. A moment later, the man is surrounded by several full
brown glass bottles.
He jerks to his feet, kicking over a couple of the beers as the final sesame seed hits the ground. “Hey, hey! Girlie, you a mage?” There is fear and excitement in his voice, and I decide it isn’t worth sticking around to see which one wins out. The last thing I need is a copper collaring me for performing unlicensed ravels.
“Have a nice supper, mister!” I yell over my shoulder before beating feet out of there.
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