Redemption.

I remember walking up through the dirt, the sun at my shoulders guiding me to the brick house, "the place where voodoo lives," as some called it. It had been a long day at church in Mississippi, the type of nowhere Mississippi where the darkest of black folks raised their hands to the clouds and swore they saw Jesus standing on the edge of my grandfather's collarbone. He was pastor of a sanctified church. He would stand there fumbling through the pages of Deuteronomy and planting the words in a more solid, physical step forward, beckoning the church folk to come to him, saying: "And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live" (Deuteronomy 9:3). He would pull a white handkerchief from his coat pocket and wipe his forehead. "Let the church say amen," he'd say. And the church said, "Amen." "His Word is the only true Word," he'd say, looking down into the Book for help. "God is not only the truth. He is the answer." I looked up at him, watching the verse fold over in my grandmother's lap. She had touched the pages so many times that they'd become dingy beneath her fingertips. And I smelled her down there. The place where the odor from her loins made a hole in her skirt when she sat down. It was a strange world to me. A black child who listened to the voices upon voices of old men, ladies, young children whining to their mothers, testimonials of wives who fell upon the benches when they got the Holy Ghost inside them. It was a strange, beckoning world, as I sat there on the next-to-the-last row eating the purple Now-n-Laters I had spent my church tithes on. I had sat there, holding a church fan in my hands, wondering what to do with it and if it would save me from the sin of believing that a voodooist, a trickster who had become my sin, led me into it like a drawn out dream of my own death. What cure I was looking for or asking for was unapparent to me, as was the gravel of being young, black, different, and unsuccessful in my own suicide. The church fan was an avenue for me to help myself begin to understand those concepts that were beyond what I witnessed there on the back roads of Mississippi. I had a more dutiful search to find myself, the creation of myself and the Creator, what part of the Emanator was a part of me, from whence did I emanate before I, myself, was emanated. I did not know the answer or why the old ladies fainted when my grandfather touched their foreheads with the white handkerchief dangling from his palm or what he had to do with my finding the main vein of a Spirit higher than myself, but now, as the leaves curve and twist their edges in the wind, I have become older in my journey. I can look back upon the strange connection among voodoo, the devil's eye, and the release of the Creator upon my creation.

It was midnight now in the town of Osyka, Mississippi. Summer. All the fans in the house could not rid us--my cousins, aunts, and uncles (who had not yet been deinstitutionalized from the syndrome of living in a small, magnetic town), the dogs, the cats that slept in the bed with us sometimes-of the Southern heat. It was a graveyard hot, the kind that rots the cancer deeper into the bone and keeps the heart, the spiritual heart that never leaves the body. It had been a long day for me. I had come down from the bus. The last day of school. I was a young student stepping into a strange, uncomfortable place that summoned me to it. Every piece of the earth had a dangling modifier, attaching it to a profound bed in my memory and calling upon my folly, as if it were mastering my ignorance. I saw Miss Susie on the porch, a nosy woman in her late forties, spreading cow manure over the dirt in her garden. The lilies in her one good skirt came down from the backbone in an uneven, round, fashioned-about way. She would p ut her hand in the air, and I would keep walking past her house, down through the ditch and onto my grandparent's place. The pens and slips of white paper were waiting for me. "Be sure to put your elbows into this one," my grandfather would say, holding a red pen in his hand that appeared to be almost out of ink. I knew the routine. I was to read the inscriptions on the notepad. Inscriptions like:

Put three tablespoons into your bath water.

Read the prayer.

Wish the good or the evil.

The word prayer confused me most. It was a demonic prayer. A sort of witchcraft that seemed so believable to the nonbeliever that he/she waited for "immediate" results to follow. I remember it vaguely. Something written in the following manner:

May I find God in this Glory.

Upon my enemy's sword will the blood take from [the person's name] the blood he/she so willingly took from me.

I wrote as clearly as I could write at that young age, searching for the conflict in those words. Of course, even then, I knew there had to be a conflict between the one who tempted (he whom we choose to call "devil" only when we become angry with our own decisions and wrongdoings) and the dweller of temptation. Upon discovery, one who is often a disappointment to the Creator causes the Spirit to reflect what he, himself, has summoned. I wrote with nervous fingers, going over the lines again and again, wondering how God got inside a vial of chemical composition--the red, green, blue, clear voodoo-scented liquids that went along with the "prayer." And how God may find glory in the death of an "enemy" that slept in his bed without a clue as to the conduct of the person who gave in to the "prayer."

It all began with sloth. It was too much for me to know that I was a part of the Creator and moved into my creation because it first moved within me. I had become a bastard of my Creator, holding the church fan in my hands, looking for an answer to give me what was a part of me to begin with. I was an embarrassment to my Creator because I demanded, as a fool often does, an answer from my conscience, although I had given birth to it. I wondered why there was not one, but many, who stood in line for the vials. They were not physically distorted. They did not bounce themselves upon the walls of my grandfather's house. They were inwardly, soulfully deformed. They were male lawyers who wanted to kill their wives because of infidelity, mothers of dying children, women who wished evil upon their husbands' mistresses, balding young men in their early twenties, money-seekers, parents who swore their children were possessed--all walks of life. And I was torn between loving, knowing God and visiting an almost uninterpre table land of deadly, so-called "blessed voodoo." I was torn between the writing on the church fan and figuring out what to do with that knowledge, in comparison with the forced paranoia of being a sort of receptionist, a called-upon "disciple" for a voodoo priest. There were many who tempted others into the mainstream of witchcraft and God and decisions.

I wrote the names and addresses upon the envelopes before putting the vials inside, sealing them. The believers came in droves, picking up the packages, some buying heart-shaped candles, stick pins to "magnify" the power of the prayer. I would hear my grandfather speaking to them, not knowing that he also spoke to me, telling them to be careful when they used what he called "the remedy." I cannot help but imagine myself looking down at the church fan, trying to find "God's business" inside the loins of a trickster. One who came from my familiar Source and maintained his creation through my judgment. What was this weight of good and evil inside my hands? Why had I emerged from such evil with a gifted hand, a receptionist's hand for a man who made millions of vials and "prayers" upon "prayers" of witchcraft? I sat there at my grandfather's desk pondering over the decision that was somehow, if not bluntly, forced upon me in order for the matter in my subconscious to become fertile.

The birth of the answer came to my eyes on one of those hot summer nights when a young boy, around the age of nine, picked up the rocks on the edge of my grandfather's house with his feet. His mother had called before coming. And I remember my grandmother's loose arms pushing me and my cousins into the back bedroom. I pulled myself to the window above the bed to witness the noise, the movements of the young boy as he struck my grandfather, time and time again, with those rocks still hurdling from his toes. It was like a test of my faith in the trickster. The night was bare, a funeral dark that lay inside the earth with a dampened blanket. I saw the young boy. I heard him out there howling from his lungs a most beckoning cry, calling out in tongues under the night light. My grandfather ran inside the house, and I heard him going through the filing cabinet, searching for the young boy's condition and the amount of liquid he would need to "get the devil out of him." He did that sometimes, when he was unsure of h imself and the power of evil. He held the Cross in his hands, waving it over the young boy's body, saying things in the wind with his backbone upright. Still nothing from the young boy. Just stronger words of the tongue and a beating of his hands across his chest. It took the strength of his mother, his aunt, my grandparents to drag him into the house. I heard them fighting him, the evil inside him and my grandfather opening The Book, saying: "And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies: but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not me, saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 9:3).

I have discovered that a trickster, supposedly, knows more about the Supreme than does a believer of the Supreme. He has succumbed to his being (or the ill-use of his own subconscious), albeit the evil, the words he uses to confuse the emanately baptized. I first gained the effect of that experience when my grandfather and the others put the young boy's naked body into the drawn bath water. Was it the Emanator or the bastard of the emanation coming from his lungs? Did evil cause him to silence himself upon those waters? What type of combination caused a cure and a question at the same time? My grandfather put the Cross upon him, but bathed him in a trickster's "remedy." Where did I, the author of "the remedy," come into play? It plagued me. It affected me greatly. I questioned the purpose of my own being, because I, as he, utilized the context of my ignorance by first giving into that ignorance. I, upon hearing the young boy, loosened myself from my Emanator, a powerful transition that can really never be don e since I am of it and from it and cannot understand the magnitude of God's power and His ultimate displeasure with me at times. I held the answer and was of the answer before I asked the question. How does one actually not become what he already is? How is it that I, in hindsight, knew, at such a young age, that the church fan, my authorship with the Author was of my own emanation and a part of my ignorance from and of myself?

I could not sleep a wink that night. I began trying to count the dots on the paper-thin ceiling, until they all ran together into a mirror of their own intricate space. I was afraid to go to the bathroom for fear that I had put a certain amount of trust in the fact that the young boy's evil, my grandfather's connection with God, and voodoo would save my life, help me to discover why I pinched the veins in my wrists for a good while. I asked myself questions, many questions, after the young boy had calmed down. How it was that a trickster's paradise, a devil's "remedy" had quieted him? I knew not. Oniy that I held the church fan, my fingerprints upon it as though it, itself, had been my Emanator. What I had thought my soul to be was not mine. If God and evil had summoned the young boy, as it had summoned me to write the letters upon the envelopes, what part of these factors created me? If I had come from dust and rib and bone, what part of them created my emanation? If, in fact, the words of my grandfather's " prayer," a trickster's "prayer" were true, then where was the blueprint for my bastardism, my ill-knowing of my own judgment?

There were many questions. I went head-to-head in a fight for the answer with my grandfather. Him who possibly knew because he had been trained in knowing how to become well-acquainted with my emanation in order to purposely take from me what I most needed to merge with my Emanator. I waited. The night was long, but I waited to speak with my grandfather the next morning, rubbing my fingertips over the letters on the church fan. Words that carried weight with God and took up no time with evil. I waited to talk to the trickster, my grandfather, to ask him if the vials had anything to do with God, if He was inside them and if He or he was the one who healed the young boy. Time goes by very slowly for the ignorant. It wastes away into a surge of anger, fear, redemption, power, refuge, mind-boggling questions that accompany the ignorant in his wait.

I awoke to hear my grandfather in the next room reading aloud, as he did each morning, from I Corinthians 10: "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification." I knocked on the bedroom door. My grandmother pulled her teeth from a glass jar and pulled her sagging breasts inside her gown. She left the room, because she knew that he had business for me. She had nothing to do with it. It was easier for her to ignore the evil in her house, sort of become numb to it so there would be no blood on her hands. He sat there at the desk he had ordained for me. The edges were rugged. An old jar with the eggs of a rattlesnake soaking in vinegar sat upon it. The smell of his voodoo filled the room. It was a mixture of "melody," as he liked to call it. But if I had been blindfolded and without any sixth sense at all, I would have recognized the smell of poison, battle with the Emanator inside that room. He pulled the glasses from his nose and wiped his weak eyes. I stood there in front of him with the hairs of my caramel skin stretching across my arms. There was a long line of cars in the driveway, people waiting for the vials, the powder, candles and things.

"What is it?" He folded his arms above his waist, watching me with a trickster's eye.

"I don't know the difference." I shook beneath my clothes.

"Between what?" His thin legs were crossed, as if to make a bargain with me between

God's truth and his own.

"Good and evil." I pointed to the church fan and the white Jesus on the cover, toward the rattlesnake eggs.

"It's the same." He looked deeper into me. I no longer gazed into his eyes, but felt myself embarrassed asking the question.

"Then why the images?" Again, I showed him the two with my index finger.

"They are separate," he said.

"Which one saved the boy?"

"Both," he said.

It is a partial remembrance of that morning, as I walked away from the conversation more confused, angered about the terms of the meeting, the manner in which I had asked a preacher, voodoo priest, trickster to aid me in my journey, my connection with God. And I came from that meeting feeling like, as the rabbi says in his voice, a "murderer." Had I known that my Emanator had suffocated me because I had, in turn, suffocated my Emanator, I would never have asked the question.

Olympia F. Vernon lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her novel Eden is forthcoming.