Finding Magic Read online

  One Sunday we woke up around six A.M. to the smell of frying bacon. Ruth put on her chenille bathrobe and slippers as did my mother and they went into the kitchen to see what was going on. Nobody was there. The bacon was cooking, the coffee was percolating, there were eggs in the pan, and the grits were bubbling. Orange juice was out and poured in the glasses.

  Ruth turned off the burners, and she and my mother waited until the staff showed up an hour later. The house staff had no idea who could have done this. They were terrified. Ruth was completely sanguine. She calmed them down. It was just the ghosts, she told them, and they clearly meant no harm.

  One summer when we were visiting, we came in for breakfast and found Ruth sitting on the divan in the parlor holding a shawl and weeping. She had dreamed that night of her mother, she told us, and her mother asked to speak to her. She wanted to let Ruth know that though she had heart problems, her mother was watching over her. Her mother told her that she would leave Ruth something in the parlor so that she would believe her. When Ruth went into the front room, she found her mother’s shawl—the one she had been buried in—on the divan.

  Ruth was uncanny in that she was able to predict people’s deaths, including her own. My grandmother Sally, her sister Ruth, my mother, and her sister, Maggie, were all psychic. Actually, I believe everyone has this potential. When I say psychic, I’m not talking about the person who hangs out a shingle and, for a certain amount of money, can look at a stranger and predict what’s going to happen. Rather, I mean people who are truly clairvoyant or who have extra senses, who see or feel phenomena beyond the reach of regular people. They are sensitive to the supernatural and often have extraordinary understanding or certain extraworldly influences and perceptions.

  The stories in my family of psychic premonitions run thick. My aunt Maggie was living in Florida when she foresaw a terrible plane crash in the Okefenokee Swamp. Through a well-connected friend who understood her abilities, she contacted the authorities and told them where the crash site was.

  All their psychic abilities were random. They never knew when they were going to see or feel something that was about to happen. Sometimes they would go through dry periods of foreknowledge, but other times, they were vibrating with psychic energy and could foresee all sorts of things. It could be very unsettling. Sometimes they were completely wrong, but most times they were eerily right. When they were in full psychic mode, it was as if their antennae just shot up and picked up signals that were meant just for them.

  To me, there was nothing unusual or even surprising about the stories of psychic prowess of many in my family. My sister, Donna, and I felt we had psychic powers too from time to time. We just took it for granted.

  I found myself looking at the stars and the sun and the moon. I wondered what they were doing up there, but never seemed to question that they belonged there and knew they had a purpose. I was especially mesmerized by the moon from a very early age. It became almost an obsession, but a happy one. I was always looking up. Only much later, once I began to study astrology, did I learn about the signs of the zodiac and my own sign, Cancer. Cancers are known to have psychic abilities, which fed right in to my family’s propensity for the occult. We are also ruled by the moon.

  * * *

  In the melting pot of Georgia, African, Creole, and European traditions all come together to inform spiritual practice. In this vein, voodoo is as much a part of my upbringing as Celtic mysticism. In many ways the voodoo part of my religious education is harder for people to deal with, mostly due to misunderstanding of its intent. There is good voodoo and bad voodoo. I was exposed to both. I also learned that good voodoo is the real voodoo: respecting nature, loving all creatures, feeling gratitude for all we have, respecting ourselves and others.

  The practitioners of occultism in our household were careful not to allow me to see any actual ceremonies, but I picked up a lot from just being around the kitchen or on the porch as we sat together, my bare feet dangling from the steps. I watched and listened closely. I would hear the singsong chants, see the candle lighting. I heard the dialects spoken, but never heard anyone speaking in tongues. I remember vividly some of the women talking to me about how to ward off evil. There are many different rituals in voodoo, many potions, and, yes, dolls with pins in them. Rituals were generally done in the evening because the spirits were considered to be more available then. I somehow came to understand that it was beneficial to have something that belonged to a person you want to be affected by the ritual, even a lock of their hair. Candles are essential to any ritual, for the light, for illumination, for transcendence. Certain herbs and oils are important and, of course, water, the “gift of life” in all religions, especially as a form of baptism. You have to master incantations as well. The most crucial thing about initiating spells or hexes on people is you must absolutely believe in it. If you don’t, nothing will happen. You can mix potions and stick pins in dolls, but it will be all for naught. I absolutely positively believed in it 100 percent. In those early years of my young life, I believed in it the way I believed in God. I believed in it the way I believed in Jesus.

  When I said my prayers at night, I got down on my knees and folded my hands together. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Then I would recite the names of everyone I wanted God to bless: Mama and Daddy and my baby sister, Donna, and Aunt Ruth. The other names varied according to my mood. It never occurred to me that God was not listening and that he would not protect those I prayed for. Nevertheless, I had a backup. Voodoo. I always put positive spells on those I loved. As for the negative spells, I was too scared to do them then.

  Although I listened wide-eyed to the voodoo stories in the kitchen, I remember thinking I would probably wait until I was older before I tried them. I was only about four when I first saw it work.

  We had a dachshund named Blitzkrieg. We called her Blitzie, and I adored her. She was my first dog and we were inseparable. My mother adored her too. Shortly before the war ended, while Daddy was still fighting in Germany, Blitzie got terribly sick. She became listless and weak, eating and drinking almost nothing. My mother and I took her to the vet in our blue Chevy that had a rumble seat and wide running boards. I sat in the back stroking Blitzie all the way. The vet said there was nothing wrong with her. All she needed was a little rest. Mama didn’t believe it. She said the vet was a “dumb son of a bitch.” She had a tendency to swear, which upset my father who only said “God Almighty” when he got really, really mad. We were up all night for the next two nights with the dog who just kept getting sicker and sicker. By the time we took her back to the vet, she was practically in a coma. He examined her again and said she would be fine, she just had to ride it out. We took her to the car and went back into his office for a prescription. When we got back to the car, Blitzie was dead. I had never seen my mother so upset. I was devastated. My mother grabbed my hand, pulled me back to the office, and started screaming at the SOB. “I hope you drop dead,” she sobbed.

  And he did. We heard about it a few days later. When we got the word, I was shocked that nobody in the household was surprised. “Uh-huh,” the cook said, nodding. Ruth just raised an eyebrow. My older cousin, Jane, had an odd little smile on her face. That would not be the last time I saw the power of a hex.

  * * *

  That gauzy, hot summer in Statesboro came to an end. Daddy came home. The war was over. He had been promoted to a full colonel, or a bird colonel as they were called in the army. He was a war hero. He had been in intelligence, or G2 in army lingo, and had distinguished himself in the war. He had been a part of Operation Dragoon and at the Allied landing in the South of France, had helped capture and interrogate Hermann Göring, and had arrived in Dachau the day after liberation. He had a staff photographer with him who had taken a huge number of pictures, some of which are in the Holocaust Memorial Museum today. He had had them made up into scrapbooks that he brought ho
me with him, full of the infamous pictures: ditches filled with naked skeletal creatures who once must have been humans, all dead. Hundreds of shriveled faces of emaciated people of indeterminate sex in striped uniforms staring blankly into space as though they had no idea what was happening. A few, but very few, slightly animated, if slightly dazed. The Americans, in uniform, looking almost equally shocked.

  When Daddy came back from Germany, we moved to Washington and bought a house in Arlington, Virginia, near the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery. He kept the scrapbooks in a small study off the living room. I was four years old when I found them. They were in black cloth covers with strings holding them together. I don’t remember how many. No writing on them. No explanations. Just the pictures. That was enough. The pictures seared into my mind. I was mesmerized. I had no idea what I was seeing.

  He and my mother had not discussed the war with me. All I knew was that the Nazis were very bad. I was too young to read the papers, the radio was just background noise to me, and we didn’t have TV then. I kept looking at the bodies. Why were they all piled up in a ditch? How did they die? They must have starved to death. I saw the glazed-eyed people in their uniforms. What were they doing? What were the soldiers doing? Why were they all standing around? Why did Daddy have these awful pictures in the first place? For a while I didn’t tell him I had seen them. But when he wasn’t there and my mother wasn’t looking, I would run into the study, slide the scrapbooks out of their semihidden space in the bookcase, and pore over them with curiosity, horror, and disbelief. I felt as if I were doing something wrong, that I shouldn’t be looking at them, but I was so disturbed by them I couldn’t stop. Finally I got up the courage to ask my mother about the photographs. She was upset that I had found them. She waited until my father came home and they went into another room to talk. When they came out, my father put me on his lap and we went through the scrapbooks together. He described what the pictures were and what had happened. He answered all my questions. There was only silence. After a bit, I asked him a last question. “Did God know about this?”

  “Yes,” he said. “God knows about everything.”

  “Then why didn’t he do anything about it?”

  “That’s part of the mystery of God,” my father answered.

  I got up and ran to my room, threw myself on the bed, and began to cry. I was hysterical. I couldn’t stop. My whole world had been shattered. God—kind, loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God—had let this happen. The God I prayed to every night on my knees had let this happen. Those people must have been praying too. Their children must have been praying. God didn’t answer their prayers. He let these horrible things happen to them. He let these evil people do these things. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t protect them, why should I expect him to protect me? Why should I think he loves me, cares about me, wants me to be happy? In fact, if there really were a God, the God I believed in, he wouldn’t have allowed this. No loving God would be responsible for this. Suddenly, it became clear to me. There was no God. There couldn’t be. It was impossible. I stopped crying. It was hard to accept but I had to. I quit saying my prayers. There was no God.

  Chapter 2

  Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

  —Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

  Moving around as much as we did, we became dependent on family unity in our small circle. All we had, really, was one another.

  Daddy had a leprechaun named Geronimo living in his ear. When he would come home from work—after he had fixed his bourbon on the rocks—we would clamber up on his lap and he would reach into his ear with his little finger and pull out Geronimo for us to have a conversation with him. It was kind of a Q and A. We would ask Geronimo questions about our lives—we always wanted to know where we were going to be stationed next. It turned out that these Geronimo sessions often led to talking about issues of morals and values. God was never mentioned.

  Geronimo was very wise. (Later, as a parent myself, I tried to bring Geronimo back into our lives, but I couldn’t match my father’s happy—and wise—blarney.) These conversations were where we were taught to be decent human beings with integrity and honor. Honor was my father’s favorite word. He was a West Pointer and the motto “Duty, Honor, Country” was engraved in his heart and mind, and over time—under his tutelage—came to be engraved in the hearts and minds of our family.

  Central casting couldn’t have done a better job choosing my father for an Irishman or a general. He was tall, handsome, and athletic with a ruddy complexion and a head full of thick black hair. He remembered jokes and told them better than anyone I knew. Raconteur was a totally apt descriptor for him, a word with his name on it.

  I loved my parents so much. And they loved me. I grew up believing I was lovable and knowing I was loved. What a gift. I’ve had struggles and defeats in my life and certainly have questioned my own actions or judgments at times, but I have never had a crisis of confidence. My parents gave me that.

  I once said to a reporter during an interview that I never walk into a room full of people thinking, Will they like me? I always think, Will I like them? She almost dropped her jaw. I later thought it sounded conceited, but it was true. I think that annoys some people. I don’t need flattery or praise or honors or awards. Those things have never mattered to me. I’d much rather celebrate other people than be celebrated myself.

  My mother was like that. She was always happy for my father when he was promoted or given medals (many medals) or new commands or awards. She was always happy for my success and that of my sister and brother, but she never drew attention to herself. She was not, however, the little housewife. She was a pistol. She loved parties and always had a glass of champagne in her hand. She loved people, and they loved her. She was the one who would walk over to the person standing alone at a party and bring him or her into the conversation. She made everyone feel good about themselves. She had a mischievous sense of humor and could give as good as she got. She was smart, but not an intellectual. She was very strong, but not steely. She was the quintessential Southern belle.

  The most important thing about my mother, though, was that she was the best mother in the world. If you asked her what she was most proud of and what her greatest accomplishment was, she would say raising her three children.

  * * *

  I was seven when my father got his orders for his new assignment and we moved to Japan in 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. By then my baby brother, Bill, had been born. Bill was extremely fat, weighing around forty-five pounds when he was six months old. His eyes were little slits in his enormous pudgy cheeks. He looked like the Zen monk Hotei, known in Japan as the “Fat Buddha.”

  Yokohama was like nothing I could have imagined. Standing on the deck of the ship as we docked, I looked down at the wharf and felt as if I had been plunked into the Land of Oz. Below were hundreds of men with funny hats and hairdos, strange three-quarter bloomers, and zoris or socks with toes in them. They were shouting in a language I had never heard as they pulled ropes and lifted gangplanks while other onlookers, women in kimonos wrapped in obis, stood shyly up against odd-looking buildings, giggling at the new arrivals. I was exhilarated. It was transformative. I knew then that what I wanted to do was to discover new things, new people, new ideas. I was overwhelmed with curiosity.

  Daddy’s first assignment was in Sasebo, on the island of Kyushu in the southern part of Japan. The officers lived on a bluff above the valley, in an area that was called Dragon Heights. The noncommissioned officers and enlisted men lived below in Dragon Gulch. I never thought much about that class distinction until I was an adult, when I realized what an appalling concept that was.

  We settled into a charming traditional Japanese house with sliding doors and tatami (straw) mats. My parents were out at official functions every night, so Donna, Butchie (our nickname fo
r Bill), and I would eat with the Japanese staff whom we came to adore. We all learned Japanese very quickly as only Emiko-san, the number one girl, spoke English. Her daughter, Mariko-chan, was between my age and Donna’s so she became our number one playmate. The staff all kept little Shinto shrines next to their beds. Only once did I ever hear them talk about God or praying or religion. The shrines were simply there as an extension of themselves. They never talked about the war. It might as well have never happened. I didn’t learn any of their stories. I never asked. Daddy said the Japanese had a lot of pride and that they would be ashamed to talk about it. I could understand that.

  I loved Japan and I loved the Japanese—their language and their food, their customs and their culture. Mostly though, I was awed by their rituals. They seemed so elegant, so precise, so thoughtful, so spiritual. I felt as if I had been Japanese in another life. The tea ceremonies, the bowing, the dressing, the honoring of every gesture, every word, every person. The Japanese took honor to another level. Honor was everything—a way to connect to the divine. The Shinto chants were mystical and mesmerizing. So many things were sacred. I learned about the custom of hara-kiri, where a person stabs himself and cuts out his guts in a formal ceremony to expiate shame. It seemed totally terrible but somehow beautiful at the same time.

  My first encounter with real shame was in Sasebo. It was the first time I questioned my own sense of honor. We lived next door to a very nice family who had a little girl my age. She was beautiful. Not only that, but she had a stunningly gorgeous mop of scarlet curls. She looked like Orphan Annie only prettier. Everyone commented on how beautiful she was and what spectacular hair she had. I liked her, but I couldn’t stand being around her with other people. I wasn’t exactly ugly, but nobody ever complimented me when we were together. It was always about her. I was jealous, really jealous.