1.
On the day we all agreed that—yes, sure, okay, it’s time—my mother was dead, I went to the storage unit where my dad kept all her stuff. I told myself if I wanted, I could burn it. Take all the boxes and clothes and loved things out into the parking lot. Kerosene, matches, patience, ash. Instead, I decided I would sort through it, choose a few things to save, clean the rest out and save my dad some time and money. I am a practical person.
The unit smelled like Black & Mild Jazzes, but I wasn’t sure why. There were faint whiffs of her when I opened different boxes. Cedar. Mint. Rosemary. I want to be precise because every time I’m precise about her, she returns for a half-second. Her hands on the fork and spoon in a way where I can see the dirt beneath her fingernails, Saturday mornings that she spent spread out on the sofa, legs crossed and eyes on the ceiling, a forgotten book on her stomach. My mother’s hand on my forearm, her skin shining brown and telling me I need to get lotion, she will not have her child walking around ashy. Her fingers pushing my hair away from my eyebrows and saying, Just because your forehead is big doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful, look, there you are.
I said it aloud, again: “Yes, sure, she is, probably, no definitely dead. Say it again, like you believe it. My mother is dead.” My voice was flat yet hesitant.
A box marked “hair care”—pomade, flat iron, a wig I had never seen her wear. Synthetic smell. Her books and research. My mother’s biggest passion was researching our lineage. My great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt was burned for witchcraft: Birds that stilled, eyes that grew bright, their beaks and feathers following her as she spoke. A refusal to take a husband. The accounts about her disagreed.
The story my mother preferred: Our ancestor was just an ordinary woman. An ordinary woman in the wrong place, who upset the wrong man, and he used the laws of the day to teach her and all the other women in her village a lesson. Not a fun story, but an honest one.
The story my father, my grandmother, my aunt, everyone else in my life prefers to tell: My ancestor was a witch. Her burning took place on a beach, the heat from the fire so hot it turned sand into glass. My grandma has a bracelet made from the beads she swears came from that day that has been passed on from eldest daughter to eldest daughter. Our ancestress, when she couldn’t handle the fire any longer, flew off the pillar and plunged her scorched feet into the sea. The smoke and steam sifted and became a weeklong fog. It crashed ships, blanketed the town, made the people who had tried to burn her afraid to leave their homes. My grandmother’s records say this ancestor went on to the United States. Her older sister’s records say this happened on Oak Island in South Carolina. My other great-aunt says no, this was New York.
In school like everyone else, like you, I was raised to believe that witches are still alive and living among us today—although most have died in the great eradications. My family was divided. My mother believed witches were a hoax still perpetuated today to keep women afraid and oppressed; my worst cousins, the ones who are loudest on the internet, believe that witchcraft is maybe an illness, like if you’re in the wrong room at the wrong time, although for some it devolves into if you voted for the wrong person, you are a witch, if you vaccinate your children, you are a witch and are risking turning them into witches, and so on; and my uncles on my dad’s side say shut up about witches and get back in the kitchen, dinner should be served every day at 5:30 sharp.
My mother pointed to the laws: how women are “encouraged” to be married by thirty; how unmarried women starting at twenty-eight have to do quarterly check-ins with the Bureau of Witchcraft to be tested. And what did being a witch have to do with being married? Didn’t that seem suspicious? And what about how magic makes it tied to gender expression? How science can’t even prove any links? Doesn’t that seem a little too perfect? It seemed like that made it even easier to oppress two groups of people: women and anyone who did not conform to cisgender standards. She believed that most of what people believed was magic was actually just a way to wash out the accomplishments of women, make their hard work small.
All her books—medicine, gender, herbalism, art, protest—sitting in those wilting cardboard boxes, waiting for her hands to pick them up again, to flip the pages. Once one of my dad’s brothers asked him if he was uncomfortable with “the way Tiana thought about things.” Wasn’t he afraid she would be accused of witchcraft? And worse, what did he think my mom’s “nonsense” was doing to my brain? I love Jo’s brain, my dad would say, and often that would be enough to change the subject. I picked one of the books up, one with a blue cover, flipped the pages, and did what I used to do when I was a teenager—pretended for just a moment that my hands were her hands.
At home, my mom would look at my schoolwork and roll her eyes. “The burnings that happened were a very bad thing. You should never accuse a woman of witchcraft unless you have a very good reason to, like she was actually hurting your family. And most witches don’t even hurt people now! They are performers and artists. They stay away for all our safety.” She never hung any of my A-pluses on the fridge, the way other moms did. Once I heard her whisper to my father, “I’m not celebrating lies.”
I put the book down; it was a donate, not a keep. In my mother’s research box, my dad had thrown in some papers of mine from high school. A paper that had gotten a D- on where I had argued—now I can see that I was simply echoing her, trying to keep her close—that everything we knew about “magic” was a lie. On the back page, a longer note about how my teacher understood I was upset about my family situation, that it was normal to be angry and “act out,” but I had to write about actual, recorded—two underlines underneath the word “recorded”—history to do well in her class.
Below that, another essay I had written my freshman year, still grieving her, about a strange experience I’d had when I was eight years old. It was one of the rare times when my dad wasn’t around. He was up north with his brothers, they were hunting, he was sitting in the blinds next to them refusing to shoot.
My mom was on the phone. I was half in reality, half in my made-up world, Marmillion. Everything there was made of potato chips and pretzels and popcorn and salt. Upstairs, in the attic, I heard what sounded like a horse’s clip-clop. I wasn’t scared, I was thinking of a Pegasus made entirely of mall pretzels with a horn made out of caramel corn. I would fly on it, then eat its horn. My mom was making a sound and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.
I turned on the light to the attic. Sang to myself under my breath. Standing among the stacked cardboard boxes, the rolled-up area rug, was a deer. Its fur was bright white, its eyes shiny black. It was large, with a crown of shining antlers on its head. I took a step back. It took a step forward. My mouth was open, and it was so dry that my tongue felt like it was a piece of cut wood. The deer huffed at me. I could tell somehow that it was deeply annoyed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and walked backward downstairs. My mother was still on the phone. I tugged on her sweater. It was ugly—red, lime, black, stone-gray—and scratchy. I don’t know why she ever wore it. She turned to me and tears were running down her cheeks. I had never seen her cry like that before. She was the type of mom who would tear up sometimes when watching TV: wiping her eyes when a dad told his daughter he loved her in a long-distance phone service commercial; a couple finally (re)uniting on a sitcom or in a movie; a beloved rapper-turned-actor wishing for his dad to love him like a father should love his son. Those tears were soft, gone within ten seconds with the help of the top of her T-shirt or a cardigan sleeve.
These tears scared me, made me wish I had stayed upstairs. Since I didn’t know what to say, I took her hand. She dropped the phone and it dangled from its red cord, bounced in midair and then became a small bundle on the floor. I led her to the attic. Her shoulders were shaking. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and it was a dark squiggle on her shoulder. She looked taller and thinner, as if someone had grabbed her head and her feet and pulled them during the brief minutes when I had been upstairs.
My mother’s feelings were always a sudden downpour to me. I was always soaked with the intensity of them. If she was upset, my teeth were clenching. If she was crying, my eyes were watering. No one else has ever made me feel that way. I could watch a boyfriend gesture furiously at that dumb motherfucker, the driver in the red van who had cut him off, that piece of shit, listen to a girlfriend ask me why I couldn’t just take her side, why did I have to say well, they have a point, and didn’t I know that a good partner always took their girlfriend’s side, listen to my dad talk over and over about how he was so tired of people gossiping that he had killed Tiana, for the insurance money, how angry he was when he heard people saying things like a white man could never truly love a Black woman, so of course he had killed her, and I could empathize. Nod. But there was always an objectiveness that insulated me, always allowed me to stay cool and defuse the situation. It was better for everyone if I remained at least six inches distant. A space far enough for me to evaluate, assess, and then fix things.
But as my mother cried, I cried. I didn’t know what was happening. I was sobbing and shaking. In the attic—the lights still on—the deer stood. My mother stopped crying. She said that it was a sign but did not explain of what. My mother wiped her face with her sleeve. The deer clomped on the ground. Huffed.
“Oh sweetie, don’t be scared.” My mom reached for my arm but paused, held her hand out in the air. There was an edge to her voice. An anger. I didn’t put that in the essay, but I remember it still. I didn’t wipe my face or nose, I let emotions coat my skin. She told me to go downstairs. For a moment, I didn’t know why, I was sure she was going to kill the deer. I could see her treating it like a mouse, putting it into a box, dropping a brick on it with her eyes shut.
“No, I’m fine, I’ll stay.”
“Go. Josephine.” She rarely called me by my full name. “Go.”
The deer sat. It curled itself into a ball. I took that to mean, It’s okay, I’ll be fine.
In my essay, I wrote that no one could figure out how the deer got into our attic. My mother, the people from animal control who showed up, everyone who was involved in coaxing it safely out of the house, called it the impossible deer. In the two months that followed, other impossible things happened to my family. My mother bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and somehow won seventy thousand dollars, my father was hit by a car straight on and got only a small bruise on his thigh, and I won a statewide essay contest about what Martin Luther King Jr. meant to me, it would cover all my college tuition if I stayed in state for school. I wrote that this all happened because of the deer. Maybe, I suggested throughout the essay, it had been sent by a witch to repay a debt to our family. In her notes, my teacher wrote, “Good! But would be better if you supported this idea with pg 79 from The History of Witches. Look at the section about how a witch often brought her blessings by sending an animal familiar. Make it clear in your revisions that witchcraft should be feared.”
What I did not say was how my mother chipped away at the details of my story. The deer went from being a buck, an eight-point with its antlers shining black under the low attic light bulbs, to a doe. Its fur transformed over time from perfect moonlight white to regular old tan. The last time she told the story, it was a small doe, maybe even a fawn, shivering. Very basic. There was no majesty to it; the animal thrashed around, hissed, and was deeply afraid of being in the attic.
When I revised my essay, I wrote that my mother was crying because she had learned her best friend had cancer. The deer was a sign her friend would live despite the odds. I ended the essay with a brief description of a recent meal with that friend. There were effects from her cancer treatment, stuff I plagiarized from YA romance novels called things like You Will Always Have My Heart. The friend’s hair was now as white as the buck we’d seen, but she was alive. It was proof that the deer had been a blessing, I speculated, as if I knew anything real about magic. I was careful to make it clear that that magic came from no woman; it came rushing in and evaporated back into the air.
My mother was already gone, had been gone for years at the point I had written this. I never learned what she was actually talking to her friend about, why she was so upset on the phone. Later, I would try to connect the dots. Was the call what had set her on the path to leaving us?
For a while, everything I knew about her felt like a potential clue.
My teacher wrote me a long note that while this was an excellent personal essay, an essay was the truth. There had to be support for the claims I was making. Wasn’t I doing the assigned reading? A good academic essay is an attempt toward gathering all the pieces past and present and creating something real and true. We spoke after class. I was a good student, my teacher said, and she was worried I was heading down the wrong path. Just because things are tough doesn’t mean you can choose not to engage with the course texts. Her bright blue eyes were so sad beneath the ugly wire glasses she wore. I could tell in that moment that she thought in some way that she had failed me as an educator. In the class textbook was a chapter titled “The Protectors.” It was all about how women needed men to guide them and help them stay on the path of light. Marriage is, yes, for love, but also a way to keep us all safe.
“What is truth?” I asked.
My teacher reached a hand out to me. Realized at the last second that she should not touch me. “Questions like that are dangerous, Jo.”
Her lips were pulled flat. Her eyes were on the floor. Shoulders rigid.
“You’re arguing in this essay that magic is good, Jo. There are some teachers who, given your family’s history, would report you even for that implication.”
I burst into tears. I told her I still felt so lost from my mother’s absence. Nothing felt right. I cried and snotted and gulped at the air until she patted my shoulder and handed me a Kleenex.
“Don’t worry, Jo,” she said.
I blew my nose and didn’t meet her eyes.
“I’ll help you stay on the path,” my teacher promised.
I nodded and reminded myself to never again be so stupid.
2.
The paper was better than the C-plus-I-am-clearly-still-worried-about-you I’d gotten for that revision. I put it on the concrete floor of the storage unit, smoothed it flat. I considered how I cared more now than I had back then about the grade I’d gotten. At fifteen, I had thought it was more important to express myself than to do what the teacher asked me. Now I was indignant on my teenaged behalf. At least I had something to say! I was going through a rough time! It didn’t matter that my mom had been gone for only a year at that point. Everything was bad!
I stopped looking through the papers and shifted to sorting through her clothes. Blue high heels I’d never seen her wear. A shirt that read “I got cursed in Salem, that’s why I have this dumb T-shirt!” I took her jean jacket, her wedding dress, a red dress that had been hers and my grandmother’s before, and the cardigan she wore on Saturday mornings and put them in my car’s passenger seat. Put as many boxes as I could fit in the backseat and the trunk to take to Goodwill in the morning. It was almost fall, and the darkness was coming like a sweater being slowly pulled over my head. A couple was bickering while lifting an ugly floral couch, a car was mumbling reasons why it should rest rather than start, music leaking from a truck grumbling its way down the street with its terrible transmission, and there was my own slight wheezing from the dust.
My dad had called me twice. Angie had texted me: beef and bamboo? The man I slept with two to four times a month, whom I had in my phone only as Party City, texted me: scotch and eggplant emoji?
Kilkerran or Aberlour, I replied.
Cutty.
Eggplant yourself then.
I texted back to Angie: yes and fried dumplings, thanks for ordering dinner, know it’s my night to cook. Going to be here for another hour.
Where is here? she asked.
Mom’s storage unit.
Are you okay?
Even though my car was full, I was pulled back into the storage unit. In my mother’s papers I found a yellowed newspaper account of her other obsession—the only witch story she loved, about an island in Lake Superior that appeared once every seven years. On this island, it was always harvest season: golden wheat fields, trailing vines of large black grapes, squashes, and pomegranate trees. The air smelled like bonfire and cold water. Hidden in a cave in the island’s center was a vast treasure, riches collected and saved by generations and generations of witches. In her notes on the side, she had written, “Maybe it was witches or maybe it was wild rich people. What’s the difference?”
I kept rummaging. An old atlas, road and property maps she had clearly stolen from our small town’s public library, writings, a rune book, some tentative translations: a symbol that looked like a dying tree that meant transformation, a flare, a baseball cap with a flashlight installed in the brim, a bag filled with what looked like a perfectly preserved white lily and scraggly leaves.
I had liked that my mom was into this stuff. It made me sad sometimes when I visited friends’ houses and eavesdropped on their moms. They seemed to talk only about their kids, their husbands, what their houses needed. Anything interesting they had to say, they lowered their voices so it could barely be heard. My mom was always talking about her interests: exploration, survival, camping, red wine, genealogy, herbs. She was the only Black mom, and I wondered at times if it was a cultural thing. The white kids at school expected me to be able to dance well, rap, be interested in basketball and gangs. And I would think maybe what they couldn’t know was that the Blackest thing about me was how I was fully, completely me, despite them trying to tell me what to do and who to be.
It seemed like a trait all the women in my family had. I rarely got to see them, but when my mother was with her sisters, she was barely interested in me. Instead, she wanted to know what was new with them, Look at this photo I found. Did you read this? They cooked, they sang, they said to each other over and over: let’s watch a kung fu movie and have a beer. They would hand me a book and send me outside to the lawn while reminding me that I had to do my summer reading. This all took precedence over anything my father did, anything I had done during the school year.
My dad had complicated feelings about this. He was always disappointed when we would be somewhere and everyone else would be bragging about their kids and spouses—while my mother said nothing about him or me. Angie can speak Mandarin. My husband is researching bats. Meanwhile, my mother was to the brim with herself: she had made a new tea, yes, everything had been grown in her garden, and yes, of course, she had read that article, but had you read this one? Her tomatoes, the soil, the earthworm castings, the compost: those she could talk about for hours. And us: oh yeah, they’re great. If we came up, we were side characters in her anecdotes.
Yet, when it was just my parents, I could tell he loved hearing her talk. My dad would lean in, ask thoughtful questions that showed he was deeply engaged with the full of her. He was always encouraging her to say more. Her sisters had taught him how to braid hair, and sometimes he would braid hers and she would talk and talk. Sometimes, the braids were too loose; he loved her too much to pull as tight as he needed to. But my mother’s eyes would shut, and her face would relax as he separated and conditioned.
The dust in the storage unit was getting to me: I sneezed once, twice, three times. There were still two whole walls of things to sort through. I opened a shoebox; inside it were two soft dolls, the exact brown of my own skin. I lifted one up, and it looked like it was made to resemble me. Yarn hair turned into curls, a wide smile, my exact nose, small ears. I didn’t remember having seen this before. The other had hair like mine but a mouth made out of white glass head pins in a close smile. The eyes were small stitched black X’s. One ear was normal. The left was covered in a zigzag of red thread. Both were wearing a dress like I had worn in my second-grade photo: a big white-collared, black-and-white flowered dress.
“What the fuck, Mom?”
I put them both back in the box. It was probably one of her experiments, but she didn’t have to use me for it. I scratched my right eyebrow. Told myself they were just poorly made dolls. Touched my ear, my mouth, rubbed my eyes. They were fine. I had been fine now for years. I put the box under my shoulder to take home and show the dolls to Angie. I knew they would make her laugh.
Had my mother been happy? It was a question I’d never wondered when she was around. Now, it was hard to tell because adult unhappiness is so much more compact, so much deeper than child unhappiness. There have been times when I’ve been laughing, my head bent over a martini, my favorite song playing in the bar, people dancing and flirting around me, and a small voice inside of me would whisper, “I would like to bite into this glass, chew myself dead.”
Party City texted, Nikka Coffey malt?
My palms were gray and black from dust and dirt.
I texted Angie, more like two and a half hours.
* * *
I locked up and drove over to Party City’s apartment. He was one of those irritating people who preferred that men call him by his last name and women by his first. I called him Party City to my friends because every time he fucked me it was fun, but somehow the next day felt cheap, a little embarrassing. ...
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