Not In Kansas Anymore (8 page)

Encouraging the life force is important not only in magic but in many religions. So there are plenty of magical objects for sex spells. From India come linga or penis stones of the god Siva. These river rocks have red-brown marks at the tip, which represent his love-making with a goddess during her menstrual period. Cat has twenty-three penis amulets from Thailand, including a tiger on a penis and a bunnylike animal penis. She wore a necklace of penis amulets when she married her current husband. Raccoon penis bones hang on a rack in plastic sacks. Stored among the giant glass jars, High John the Conqueror roots resemble testicles and are thought to help restore sexual nature, increase power, and attract luck. They are among the most sought after plants in African American magic. The root is named after a legendary hero who helped slaves endure by playing tricks, making them laugh, and showing them a way to prevail when it didn't seem possible.

During World War II, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote an essay offering the root's power to the country at large. “We offer you our hope bringer, High John de Conquer,” she wrote. So “if the news from overseas reads bad…listen hard for John…. You will know then, that no matter how bad things look now, it will be worse for those who seek to oppress us. Even if your hair comes yellow, and your eyes are blue, John De Conquer will be working for you.”

When a woman calls asking for help to bring a lover back, Cat asks questions first. How long has he been gone? Do you know
where he lives? Have you had a period since he left? she might ask. If not, the magic has a better chance of working. If it has been two years and they were together four, Cat says, forget it. These are all commonsense matters. As improbable as it might seem, common sense does play a role in good magic, but the lovelorn rarely take Cat's advice. So when the case seems hopeless, she compromises and tells the customer, “I'll sell you products for three weeks, and then you're going to want to come back and want to do it for three months, and then when it doesn't work, come back and I'll tell you how to get over him.”

Cat wouldn't tell me how much her business earns, but customers order from all over the world. About 85 percent of her customers are black. I signed up for her Internet hoodoo class, which has more than four hundred students, about 50 percent white. She now has a second class and about five new students a week join. When she first began writing about hoodoo on the Internet, people didn't know what she was talking about. Now her site gets eleven thousand unique visitors a day.

 

C
at was also a good first choice in my search for good magic because she was pointed toward all that is idealistic and noble-minded before she was even born, and, at the same time, no one in her life was anywhere as noble as they could have been. She calls herself a red-diaper baby because her parents were ardent Socialists. Her father was an artist who went to work in the shipyards to avoid being drafted. He faked being an engineer and was soon employed as one. His obit called him a petroleum engineer although he never finished high school. Her mother, who came from Munich in 1932 fleeing Hitler, is now in her eighties and writes horror stories. One is about a town where all the people
except one woman are turning into dogs. The woman notices that everyone's teeth are getting longer.

Her father left the family when Cat was five. He sometimes invited her to visit, but he never took off work. Instead, he locked Cat in the house. She had learned some Russian at the Berkeley elementary school she attended, and she knew sign language. So when her father left, she escaped and went about town pretending to be a deaf-mute Russian. If she saw dead birds, she picked them up, then skinned and mounted them. An odd child.

Her mother was a librarian at U.C.L.A. and her parents owned an antiquarian bookstore. One of the library patrons was Aldous Huxley. He was so blind that Cat's job was to make sure that when he signed for his books the paper was under his pen. She followed Henry Miller about the shop and went home to play with his dog Skippy. Her first social protest was when she was in the sixth grade, against Woolworth's refusal to let blacks eat at its lunch counter.

Some of her magical books were those collected by her German grandfather. One, which she still owns, is a collection of German folk customs and magical beliefs. The pictures so enthralled her that she begged her mother to translate. They struck a deal. Cat would baby-sit her sister for fifty cents an hour, and her mother would translate the book for fifty cents an hour.

Cat has been so lonely at times in her life that even now as she's going to sleep she sometimes hears a sentence that makes her sigh with despair:
Nobody likes you
. If it comes out of nowhere, and it usually does, she suspects that it's part of a magical attack. She might get up and do something to counter it, such as lighting a candle or making some brushing motions with her hands. At the least, she repositions her body. If you don't do that, the thought will sink in unimpeded and take root, she said. You never want to let that happen.

I liked Cat's story. Magical attacks aren't in my experience, but bad thoughts are. It seems to me that I can recall every mistake I've ever made, every embarrassment I've ever suffered, every failure to be kind or generous or smart enough. When such memories worm their way into my perfectly happy life, they feel like an attack. So. Cat's tips on how to ward off such thoughts were more than I could have hoped for: an easy cure for the bad magic in my mind. I'd use them, and if they worked, I might believe in magic.

Magical attacks are pretty mainstream in hoodoo thought. One of the saddest I read was about a man who did some little thing that displeased a conjure woman. She was a thin-skinned old bat who scared all the children. So she “threw down” on the guy, said that he would never have another home and would wander for the rest of his days. His house burned down the next week, and he never was able to get another. He went from friends to relatives to living at the side of the road until the day he died. Mean old biddy. Somebody should have put a roach in her food.

Cat's exposure to hoodoo began early but in an indirect way. Her parents hoped that their child would become completely American. To that end they gave her three record albums for her fifth birthday. One was
Dust Bowl Ballads
by Woody Guthrie, and another was
Negro Folk Songs and Spirituals
by Leadbelly, and the third was
The American Songbag
by Carl Sandburg, which was mostly murder ballads. Those gifts began her lifelong love of rural American music and led her inevitably to one of America's great gifts to music, the blues.

Hoodoo is a big part of the blues. Ma Rainey's “Black Dust Blues,” for instance, is about a woman who is angry because Ma stole her man. “Lord, I was out one morning, found black dust all round my door,” begins the song. The singer starts to get thin and has trouble with her feet. “Black dust in my window, black dust on
my porch mat…./Black dust's got me walking on all fours like a cat.” This song deals with what's called “throwin' down” on someone. In African magic, the feet are thought to be a particularly vulnerable place for evil to enter. So “laying a trick” might involve throwing magical powder where someone would walk over it. Socks or shoes might be sprinkled with hoodoo dust. In a love spell, socks might be tied together.

In the “Aunt Caroline Dyer Blues,” the Memphis Jug Band sang of a famous Arkansas conjure woman:

She may be promising him good luck, but gambling hands are among the most popular mojos. So she might be telling him that he will be able to win with her help.

Spells to attract love are common in hoodoo, but in this one, recorded in 1928, the spurned woman seems out for revenge. Jim Towel sang,

One of the most famous hoodoo-blues stories is told about the great guitarist Robert Johnson, who was said to have met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul in return for his talent with the guitar. When Johnson was poisoned after drinking from an open bottle being passed around a bar, he'd broken one of the primary rules of hoodoo, which is never drink from an opened container. A woman who wanted to gain love and control a man by exciting his passion beyond all reason might have put some menstrual blood in the drink. An enemy might have put any manner of potion inside: a charm that could make snake eggs hatch in his belly, a powder that would cause him to go mad, an extract that would make his legs swell up and cause his hands to shake. But in Johnson's case, breaking the open bottle rule had even more dire results. According to the story, a jealous husband had poisoned the drink. Johnson died that day.

There are two problems with that story about the crossroads. One is that it didn't happen to Robert Johnson, Cat told me. It happened to a guy named Tommy Johnson, and who knows who he was? Not many people, which calls into question the whole deal about making pacts with the devil. The second problem is that hoodoo pacts with the devil don't involve selling your soul and going to hell. During a crossroads ritual, a black man does appear. Some people call him the devil, but most people in hoodoo call him the god of the crossroads. He usually grants a physical skill and taking it does not mean that the person's soul is going to be damned.

It was music that led Cat to the first conjure shop she ever visited. Shops in Berkeley didn't carry the music she liked, so one day when she was not yet a teenager she took the bus to Oakland, where there were many African American shops. She went into one and began to look at small bottles with strange labels. She was particularly intrigued by one called Essence of Bend Over floor wash. The name
made her want to laugh, but she was too polite for that. So she asked the shopkeeper what it was. It's something that people put in their mop water to help sweeten other people's temperaments, he said.

“Why would anybody want to do that?” she asked.

“Well, some people work for other people.”

She wanted to buy some, but he shook his head.

“No. You're a young person. You want magnetic sand. You want to attract attention.” And so she bought some and used it to attract the attention of a boy she wanted.

When she was fourteen, Cat heard a deejay say that a rain dance was needed to make the California drought end. So she pulled out her magic books, enlisted the aid of a friend, went up on the roof of her house, and did a magical ceremony for rain.

“While we were up there, I swear to God, the clouds came in over the bay. This white fog came right over our house, and I thought,
My God, this really works
,” she said.

Cat left home while still a teenager. Like thousands of other young girls in the 1960s, she became a street hippie. She worked carnivals doing various tricks, metal bending, fortune-telling. She learned plenty of ways to make magical beliefs work for selfish ends. She learned to do what's called cold reading, which means that the psychic is working from a script and from good guesses about human nature. Cat eventually learned such little-known facts as that most men of middle age have had at least one life-threatening accident. Most beautiful women have never been sure of their beauty. Most people believe they're smarter than their bosses. Many women have one breast larger than the other. She could have made good money doing cold reading, but she didn't want to make her money that way. She learned candle scams, which involve making a candle smoke excessively so that the client thinks some bad luck needs to be protected against, and pigeon drops, which involve getting the
customer to bring money that is switched to blank paper before it's given back. But she never did those things.

She learned astrology. When her first child was born, she did the baby's chart, which indicated that some kind of terrible trouble was ahead. The baby died of sudden infant death syndrome. Experiences like that, where she could see something unpleasant in the chart but was helpless to do anything about it, caused her to back away from astrology.

She did all the things that hippies did then—took drugs, had lots of sex with various people. She was arrested for growing marijuana and spent three months in jail. For a number of years she lived in a Missouri commune called the Garden of Joy Blues, which had no running water or electricity. She loved science fiction and comic books and folk magic. A lot of magic was going on during the 1960s among people who liked science fiction and comic books. Cat was among the groups of magicians and neo-pagans who laid the foundations for the burgeoning of magic that began then and continues today.

As it had one hundred years ago, an influx of Eastern religious ideas helped open people's minds to new ideas, but fantasy literature of all kinds would also play a part that has only grown with time. One that fired the imaginations of millions, J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings,
was published in paperback in 1965. Within a year American college kids were wearing T-shirts that said
FRODO LIVES
and
GO GO GANDALF
. What developed within the magical community came from something of a misunderstanding, a pattern we see again and again in the beginnings of magical groups.