Childhood Memory
My dad was 50 years older than I. His dad was a free Black man born in the antebellum south with roots from Hispaniola. His mother was Marabou. My uncles were born in the 1880s through the 1940s – sixty years of procreation, 21 children, 19 lived.
My mother was friends with several of the sisters who were close in age to her. They used to visit our house when I was little. Because my fairy godmother gave me a complete bedroom suite, the only place to put it was in the parlor. So when my dad brought my aunts to visit, they sat in chairs and on the sofa on one side of my 15’ cubed bedroom in the New Orleans style shotgun house. They put me to bed at 7:30. I was supposed to be asleep as the night wore on and they began drinking and talking about voodoo. What spells my grandmother put on people and how it was done. Secrets of catching witches who shed their skin to get inside a house. Curses with lasting effects.
My mother was no stranger in these conversations. Her own mother had lost her long beautiful Chinese/Native American hair to a curse. And her father had been hexed, which brought on a quick death, as determined by a medical doctor.
I stayed awake through all the tellings. After all, this was not my only nightly terror. The Catholic school my brothers attended offered Friday night movies of saints. Saint Aloysius and the devil behind the altar stuck in my memory. I pictured that evil creature every night as I focused on the skeleton key hole in the front door. Was there a witch out there removing her skin so she could come through? The flame from my nightlight, a kerosene lamp next to my bed, flickered as drafts passed through the room along with shadowy figures, imagined or real. My nightly dream was dismissed when I told it. How could they feel dread in swirling colors or taste my nocturnal vision? It would be over sixty years before I shared the recurrent dream with my son who said, “That sounds like a DMT nightmare my friend was telling me about. He said it totally tripped him out.”
No wonder I lived in fear of the night time and sleeping as a child.