Black Girl Magic

It was a typical enough, overcast Friday for a late September afternoon in Oakland. Kayla Holmes was doing what she typically did on afternoons when she didn’t have extra-curricular activities or plans with friends, tucking herself up under blankets and curling into the arm of the big red chair to read.

Her peaceful, snuggly reading time was rudely interrupted by frantic banging on the front door that came on so suddenly that Kayla shrieked out loud.

“What kind of crazy?” Kayla muttered to herself as she made her way over to the door, opening it just the length of the chain to see who it was, “Leon! Have you lost your fool mind?”

“Please! It’s urgent!” Leon was covered in sweat, not at all looking like himself. His jeans were torn and his knee was bleeding, his usually tidy braids were frizzy and coming undone, “like, life and death. Please, Kiki! Open the door.”

Leon was usually too cool, like nothing could ever phase him—but just now he was frantic and half mad. Kayla shut the door just long enough to let the chain down and open up wide.

“What’s the matter? You look like hell.”

“There’s no time to explain—take this,” Leon’s hands were trembling as he handed over a small, puffy leather-bound book, cross hatched with swirls and striations like the palm of a hand. Embossed in gold letters, the cover read WISH BOOK, the two words stacked into an almost perfect square, “write your name on the inside cover under mine—here, I’ll pay you to take it! Here!”

Impatient with panic, Leon pushed the book into Kayla’s reluctant hands before dropping his backpack off of his shoulder and grabbing up bundles of cash, still bound by the paper sleeves from the bank. Leon pushed the bundles of blue-faced hundreds into Kayla’s arms with the book before she could object. She could clearly see more bundles of cash stuffed haphazardly inside Leon’s backpack.

“Did you steal this?” Kayla asked, horrified.

“No! It’s mine, I wished for it—it’s just… it’s not right!” the sound of blaring sirens were growing closer and closer, Leon opened the book to the inside cover where a list of five names were scrawled down the page, the first four crossed out down to Leon, “here—write your name, hurry!”

By now the blue and red lights of the police cars were reflecting down the rows of buildings and the sirens were almost too loud for Leon to be heard—likewise, Kayla’s frail objections were drowned out by the sirens and chaos. His desperation and the noise made Kayla frantic too, so much that she did what he was asking and wrote her name inside the cover and crossed Leon’s name off the list.

“What is all this?” it was so much all at once that Kayla’s eyes were already welling up with tears.

“I’ll explain later—thank you!” Leon shouldered his bag again and started to run.

“Wait!” Kayla called after him, but her cries were drowned out by the police as they jumped out of their patrol cars and drew their pistols.

“Drop the bag and freeze!” one of the police officers shouted.

All four guns were pointed at Leon who was stumbling down the concrete steps back to the sidewalk with his hands raised above his head, bills whipping out of his backpack on the wind. Gramma had come downstairs at this point and placed a reassuring hand on Kayla’s shoulder, closing the door part way.

“You’re making a mistake! I didn’t do anything!” Leon shouted.

“Don’t move!” another of the police officers shouted.

“Look! I didn’t do anything, this money is mine—here, look at the —” despite his better judgment, in his panic Leon reached into his backpack, presumably for a receipt or a bribe or something that might prove his innocence.

“He’s reaching!” someone shouted.

“No!” Kayla and Leon both screamed in unison.

As muzzle flairs lit up the street, Gramma slammed the door closed in front of Kayla who was screaming. Gramma wrapped her granddaughter in a warm hug despite both of them trembling and sobbing.

After a few moments that felt like an eternity, the screaming and shooting subsided and there was an eerie silence that swept through the house with the same type of efficiency that the police officers demonstrated in taking Leon down.

“They—they—they—“ Kayla was stammering, unable to process the tsunami of emotions she was feeling at once, “they killed him!”

“Calm yourself, child. Everything isn’t as it seems…” Gramma said calmly, her voice warm and comforting, like honey melting in tea, her eyes focused on the little black book in Kayla’s hands, “that boy was cursed, and if you’re not careful, that same curse gonna snatch you up too.”

Gramma reached down, opening to the inside cover like she already knew what she would find. She sighed faintly when she saw Kayla’s name hastily written there. She’d hoped she was wrong.

“What you got here is a monkey paw, child. You haven’t wished anything have you?”

“W-wish? No. I just wrote my name like he said… before they…”

“Don’t fret, child. We need to help you, then maybe we can help your friend too,” Gramma was examining the four, small pages within the clutches of the black-bound book, “four pages, four wishes…”

“You think I could wish Leon back?” Kayla sniffled hopefully.

Gramma just looked up into Kayla’s eyes and shook her head somberly.

“No, we can’t use the monkey paw to wish your friend back—if we did, we’d be in worse trouble than we are now, and that poor boy wouldn’t be the same. The monkey paw never gives you exactly what you wish for and it always takes what you didn’t realize that you couldn’t afford to lose—that’s how it works. It grants a wish that turns out to be a disaster, then you tryin’ to fix that wish with another wish and before you know it, you’re in too deep and out of wishes.”

“Then what do we do?” Kayla asked, welling up with tears again.

Then there came a loud and insistent banging on the front door. It was the police. Kayla was too frightened to move, but Gramma knew what to do. She just opened the door as wide as the chain would go and announced through the narrow gap, “I ain’t seen nothin’, I ain’t know nothin’, I ain’t got nothin’ to say!” before slamming the door back in the officer’s face.

While Kayla worked on putting herself back together, Gramma gathered the two bundles of cash.

“Leon gave me—” before she could finish explaining where the money had come from, Gramma was tossing the stacks of cash into the burning fireplace where they folded, curled and burned away to ash in a matter of seconds, “hey!”

“You didn’t want that money,” Gramma reassured Kayla, “anything you get from a cursed item bares that curse with it. Better to burn this tainted paper than spread it around.”

Kayla just nodded and sniffled a bit.

“Come on, get your coat, girl. We’ve got a curse to break!” Gramma clapped her hands, sending Kayla up the stairs to wash her face and put on some warmer clothes.

*-*-*

Gramma was once fairly well-known among witches, fortune tellers, palm readers and voodoo doctors. Born of old Creole ancestry, there was once a time when she was living in New Orleans that Gramma was known far and wide as the premier fortune teller in the south. When the levees broke she was forced to leave behind her practice and her home, moving in with Kayla and her mom.

Despite the change of scenery and circumstances, Gramma always retained certain habits and superstitions from her supernatural roots. The way she’d use a raw egg, rolling the shell along Kayla’s brow before cracking it into a bowl under her bed when she had a fever, or how she’d cross the street suddenly because she said someone had “bad juju,” or how she’d leave a whole rock garden of gems and crystals out on the porch overnight when there was a full moon.

What it all amounted to was the fact that Gramma was exactly the person you would want on your side when dealing with a curse.

Worrying the little, black book in her hands the whole time they walked, Gramma eventually led them to Linden Park, where she seemed confident they’d find what they were looking for.

“What are we looking for?” Kayla asked, tugging up the zipper on her lavender jacket against the fall air.

“Somebody knows something…” Gramma answered, searching for something or someone all the while, “about where this came from. We need to use the book to destroy the book.”

“Couldn’t we just wish the book away?”

“Not yet… we need to find a way to erase it from existence, one wish to make it so that this book was never created in the first place. A curse is like a weed—you need to pull out the root. This way…”

Gramma led them away from the path, into a small cluster of eucalyptus trees where a wizened old man with a long grey beard hunched over a small fire that he was burning in a hubcap. His apparent home consisted of a cardboard box with a blue tarp draped over the top. He had bags of trash piled around him and dingy clothes hanging up to dry.

At first, Kayla was scared and she hesitated, grabbing Gramma by her sweater sleeve.

“Gramma…”

“Don’t worry, child. His juju is good. Sometimes the people who have the least know the most.”

“Who’s there, what do you want?” the old man seemed startled, Kayla could see now that he was blind—sightless eyes clouded over with white.

“Go on, give it to him, child.”

“Um, my Gramma thinks you might know what to do with this,” Kayla resolved to be brave, this was for Leon after-all. If Gramma thought this blind man could help, she had to be brave. She slipped the small book into his rough, cracked hands.

The man’s bearded chin began to quiver and within moments he was weeping.

“This was where it all went wrong…” the old man muttered, turning the book over in his hands, “I never should have killed that poor, innocent ape. Ever since then nothing’s gone right…”

“That’s it!” Gramma exclaimed, hurriedly handing Kayla a pen, “the monkey—the original evil. If you can stop them from poaching that innocent animal this cursed object would never have been made!”

“You can do that?” the old man seemed desperate with newfound hope.

“Wish it!” Gramma nodded, seeming full of confidence.

It was hard not to hesitate. What if they were wrong? Would this curse hunt her down like it had Leon, rend her blind like this old man? Kayla was terrified of what might happen, but she did as she was instructed. With a trembling hand she wrote “I wish the monkey used to bind this book had never been killed.”

Suddenly there came the sound of a snapping twig, the cover of the book melted away like it was being burned, then the pages too glowed gold until they floated away as ash. An adult chimpanzee scurried through the clearing of trees and in the blink of an eye, Kayla was back in the corner of the big red chair with her book.

She rushed to the door before the knock even fell.

“Leon!” Kayla screamed, throwing her arms around him when she saw him standing outside her door.

“What’s with the big welcome, Kiki?” Leon was back and smooth as ever.

Fortunately, that was the last they heard of the Monkey Paw Curse.