She looked at me warily for a while. Then, grunting and shrugging her shoulders, she said, “Everyone needs help.” She tossed the bag to the curb, so that the few empty cans and other pieces of trash jangled resoundingly in the relative silence of the early morning. “Come with me,” she said then, returning to her shop.
I walked stiffly behind her. In the shop there was an unwholesome odor of musk and decaying things, which burned the back of my throat. A few candles gave light to the darkness, and overhead there were spices and herbs and what looked like small reptiles drying. There wasn’t a counter in the shop—only a central table, on which tarot cards and other paraphernalia of her craft stood in wait. The actual goods that she sold were scattered everywhere in bags, sacks and pouches. She sat me at the table, then sat down across from me. A candle was burning on the table between us, highlighting her face unsettlingly.
The story of my aunt’s demon possession came gushing out—I can hardly remember what I said. I’m sure I was crying by then, sniffling between words and phrases… Madame Evangeline merely nodded to what I said, waiting patiently for my story to unfold—and for the vital facts to reveal themselves. She listened as I presume she had listened to thousands of other clients, people who feared for their lives or the lives of loved ones; people who hated someone and came to her for revenge or guidance in revenge. She sat listening to me; after a while she took out a pen and pad and began to write.
I don’t know how long we sat like that-maybe only half an hour, but it seemed like forever. Eventually, when my tears began to subside and the horror of my tale dissipated into the darkness of the shop, she stopped me. “Okay, I think I understand you perfect.” She got up then, and went to the darkness of the shop—into one of her sacks. When she returned, her face was grave and I shuddered as I watched her. She sat down before me with a heavy sigh, then held out her hand to me. In her thick palm there was what she said was an amulet.
“Take this,” she said. “With this amulet in your hand, you’ll be magically shielded from all the forces of evil.”
“Really?” I said, amazed, a little terrified, and excited by the prospect of being emancipated from my fears.
“Yes, but listen closely,” she continued, looking over her shoulder as though checking for eavesdroppers. She leaned in closely to me then, whispering,
“Don’t lose this sacred amulet! If you do, the forces of evil will be able to take your soul. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, my mouth dry…
“Do you understand?” she demanded again.
“Yes,” I managed to whisper, my eyes wide.
“Good,” she said, a wide, unnerving grin coming over her face again. Then, presenting me with what she had written down while I retched out my story, she said, “Now that you’re protected from evil, here’s a list of things I need.”
I took the list eagerly, expecting to see “eye of newt” or some other magical ingredient, but all it said was, “Milk, bread, rice…” She gave me $10 and I left to go to the store.
As I walked to the store, I felt free and alive. Madame Evangeline, and the amulet that I kept clenched in my hand, were tangible objects of magic to protect me from all the demons of my imagination. It wasn’t until weeks later that I noticed that the amulet had the inscription, Banque Nationale de la Republique D’Haiti. Even then, as I couldn’t read French, and had never seen a Haitian penny before, I thought the writing was a magical incantation. Either way, as I walked to the store I felt as though I had received a reprieve of sorts. In a sense, my observations of my aunt had triggered my first pangs of maturity: a battle between reality and imagination. Madame Evangeline and her amulet had been a temporary loophole out of that.
Also, I suppose that these were the days before I lost my innocence. When I say innocence, I don’t mean the rosy-cheeked, oblivious version seen on TV. By now, of course, I had seen too much for that kind of innocence to apply to me. When I say innocence, I mean that inner sense that manifests itself in the belief that the world was fundamentally just; and that behind all human behavior was the wish for justice and the peace of mind it brought. It now occurs to me that everyone I encountered had tried to take my innocence from me. All the people that I knew, in their words and actions, set about trying to convince me that there was no justice—either to spare me from the unjust, or because they themselves, robbed of their innocence, wanted to justify their injustice toward me.
I remember that downstairs from me there was a sententious old man called Mr. Williams, who spent the summer months sitting on the stoop and dispensing advice to whoever came within earshot. Philosophical gems on everything from the correct way to wear one’s belt to geopolitical realignments that would ensure world peace came gushing out of his mouth. His dentures were too big and were always slipping out. He had a way of clicking his dentures against his gums that I found amazing for some reason. I almost looked forward to the day when I too would be toothless, so that I could click my dentures around in my mouth. I was excited when I began losing my baby teeth, but grew annoyed when new teeth began to appear under the gums. Mr. Williams had an arthritic mutt that seemed as old as he—and which never moved from the step once it had plopped down next to its master. The dog neither barked nor wagged its tail. Only when prodded by Mr. Williams’s heel would it show any signs of life; but even then, it would only meander quietly behind its master with an expression on its face like that of an old convict waiting for death to free him from the farce of life.
Anyway, Williams was always outside during the warm months, and after lecturing me on the correct way to part my hair, or some such nonsense, he would send me to the store to fetch him some snacks. When I returned, his instruction would begin. He would devour the entire bag of potato chips in front of me. Every once in a while he would throw a chip to the dog, and the poor creature would look at him with an expression that seemed to say, “Why don’t you let me starve to death, you old bastard, so that I can end this torture!” Half the time the dog didn’t eat. However, that didn’t concern Williams in the least. His eyes would be on me, twinkling in a strange way as he devoured the snacks. Somehow, I would never deign to ask him for some; and of course, he never offered. Instead, he kept up a constant commentary on how good they tasted; when he devoured the contents of the bag and/or gulped down the last of the soda, he would look at me with a strange new intensity, as if waiting for me to burst into tears. He watched my lips for the telltale trembling that many a neighborhood kid had betrayed during Williams’s career of instructive sadism. It was either complete guilelessness on my part or some morbid streak that kept me going on with the farce. Every time he saw me, he would send me to the store, and I would go without complaint. When I returned I would hand him the grocery bag and his change, then sit down and watch him eat, while he made his usual commentary on the snacks’ deliciousness. I presume that his goal was to teach me that people were greedy assholes, but I somehow refused to give him the satisfaction of teaching me. I’m not sure I was as brilliant and resolute as I make myself sound. All children, I’ve discovered since becoming a parent and retracing the motives of my own antics, instinctively know that the quickest and easiest way to drive adults insane is to refuse to learn what they are trying to teach. This is especially so when the child realizes that the lesson in question is idiotic—as I did with Williams. Day after day he repeated the lesson; day after day I returned from the store with his snacks, and watched while he licked his fingers and belched with forced fanfare. He would watch me for any sign of a plaintive expression. I would only stare. Soon, my morbidity grew so brazen that, when he was finished, I would ask him if he wanted me to put the bags and bottles in the garbage can. After weeks and months of this, Williams’ act of relishing the greasy snacks became strained. He would eat them as one ate straw, seeming at first enraged with me for not learning what seemed to be a straightforward lesson, then questioning others to see if I was retarded. Eventually, he stopped asking me to go to the store for him. Resplendent in victory, I asked him, after several weeks of mutual silence, why he no longer asked me to go to the store for him. Here, even the dog looked up, surprised for once; Williams, now thoroughly convinced of my madness, said that he wasn’t hungry.
I suppose that I must have had similar experiences with other adults in my neighborhood, because they all seemed to regard me as a madman in the making. “That boy ain’t right,” I would hear people whisper about me. Conversations between adults would always cease as I walked past. The same was pretty much true for kids. I was too young to be friends with most of the kids on my block and too indifferent to the unimaginative games of kids my age to find their company worthwhile.
Whatever the case, as I walked to the store for Madame Evangeline I was free. Even as the streets began to fill with people going to work (and that segment of people who never worked but instead stood about the streets all day) I went to the aforementioned Arab store (with the porn rack in the back). In front of the store some local youths had gathered, as was usually the case. I don’t know what exactly their relationship with the Arabs was, but like I said, the youths were always there; and several times an hour, cars would stop at the curb and one of the youths would go to the car to make a furtive exchange.
I had finished my shopping and taken about three steps away from the store (and the gang of youths) when a car rushed around the corner. I turned at the sound of the screeching tires and saw a man lean out of the window with a machine gun in hand. I stood there, frozen, while bullets and bullet-riddled bodies flew all around me. One of the youths (who had been shot in the chest) tumbled toward me and bumped into me as he dropped lifelessly to the ground. I looked around slowly (or so it seemed in my mind) digesting death, consuming the evil of it—yet from the distance of someone impervious to it. By now, all the youths were either dead or writhing in pain on the ground. Only then did it occur to me that it was a miracle that I hadn’t been shot as well. I took out the amulet and stared at it as the car rushed away. I can’t remember if I actually did grin, but a feeling of amazement came over me as I held the amulet and looked at the bodies at my feet. I was indeed impervious to evil, just like Madame Evangeline had said!
It was the police that finally chased me away; else I might have stayed there forever, reveling in my triumph over evil. The youths at my feet, broken and bloody, had seemed pathetic then, just like everything else in the adult world. I returned to Madame Evangeline’s shop in great spirits. She, on the other hand, was merely annoyed that I had taken so long; then, as my prattle and youthful ebullience began to exhaust the last of her patience, she chased me away.
Unfazed, I rushed home, thinking that maybe there would be some change in my aunt. She seemed the same, settling into her usual place on the couch, but I figured that maybe the magic of the amulet needed time to work. I smiled at her and left. I walked about the neighborhood again, then went to my playground, the vacant lot and, beyond that, the crack houses that served as my Aztec temples. It was while I was making my rounds of the basement (and imagining ancient dungeons) that I first came upon Tisha. She was about 13 and had transformed one of the basement rooms into a dollhouse. She had swept away the accumulated trash and drug vials, and laid a plush area rug on the floor. Pink curtains had been hoisted over the shattered windows, and as the sun’s rays shone through them, the room was suffused in a pinkish hue. There was a potpourri scent in the air that made me hungry for some reason—probably because it reminded me of cake. And there were dozens of dolls in the place—big, fluffy ones, stylish, diminutive ones—white ones, black ones. With my amulet in hand, this place seemed to be a direct result of its magic. First I had been spared from obvious death, and now I was meeting an angel in a sheltered paradise. Tisha had been tending to the curtains when I entered, but when I stopped in the open doorway the floor creaked, so that she stopped and turned. She was beautiful—so beautiful that I stared in amazement, and perhaps with that strange terror that people felt when they came upon something that encompassed both their dearest dreams and dreams they hadn’t dreamed yet, dreams they perhaps didn’t have the courage and foresight to dream.
“Would you like to play?” she asked me, smiling. She was from the South and had a melodious drawl that seemed to melt like butter in the summer heat. That drawl had reminded me of Madame Evangeline. It wasn’t that they sounded the same (because they didn’t) but that accents suddenly seemed to be a mark of magic.
I nodded shyly and entered.
Tisha was her nickname. She had one of those unpronounceable black names with multiple apostrophes and several capitalized letters inserted in the middle. I learned later that she lived in another neighborhood—in another hamlet where there was a (drug) lord no different from our own. I had seen many girls like Tisha during my explorations of the building, impressionable children taken in by the allure of easy wealth and older men. Even the boys were taken in by the allure, so I’m not entirely convinced that what attracted the kids was entirely sexual. The sexuality of children revolved not around the act of sex, but in finding safety and comfort with those older and stronger than themselves. Anyway, most of the impressionable girls became full-blown crackheads—and were turned out when their usefulness to the lord waned; most of the impressionable boys became low-level drug dealers/enforcers/decoys/messengers and either ended up in jail or dead. Of course, this is my view of it now. Back then, I knew only that Tisha was beautiful. Like I said before, a feeling of joy and panic settled over me—like when you’re walking down the street and unexpectedly come upon a treasure. After the joy of finding it, your second impulse is to hide it away lest someone (like the owner or another desperate wanderer) might take it away from you. Even as I stood there I was hiding Tisha away within myself. I actively conjured the fantasy that we were somehow separated from the outside world. In time, I even think I began to imagine that Tisha and this place were byproducts of my imagination—and that I would be able to conjure them at any time, like all the little childish fantasies that I kept to myself.