Mechanics and Farmers

I was desperate. You must understand that.

It was harvesting season. For many, many months no crops grew among the 10 acres of land I till and live on in rural North Carolina. My great grandfather left the farm to his son and down the line it went. Each generation of Thomas men before me worked the ground til their fingers bleed, til the sweat collected in rivers down their cheeks. Somehow, when granddaddy died and Dad couldn’t work anymore because of a bad back from a life in the fields, the land fell to me. Asa Toniko Thomas. I studied economics and comparative religion , not horticulture. I didn’t know the first thing about maintaining 10 acres of land and avoided the trade to keep my head in the books. Mother’s orders. Now was my time and I was squandering the legacy of Thomas men who migrated from the island of Hispaniola to North Carolina with an inheritance built in the rice and sugar cane fields of Port-au-Prince and even on the beaches of Jacmel. The land reigns in the Thomas family.

“Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will?”

I was sweating in unmentionable places and Dad was spitting bible verses at me while I surveyed the shoots eaten from root to stem. I could’ve cried but wouldn’t give Dad the satisfaction. He wished me success in the field that I had a birthright to as a Thomas man but somehow figured the path to my success was through gloating and rounds of I told you so. I wiped my brow.

“And will?” Dad pestered.

I relented.

“And will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.”

The air was thick between us, muggy humid July air.

“Dad, you know we should be switching to a more eco friendly pesticide and hiring out local farm hands looking to make--”

“And why would you entrust the land Papa Julien gave us with strangers. Use your brain for more than economics, Asa.”

I nearly ripped a stalk from the earth. “I’m just saying. We could use the help and I could delegate--”

“Or you could stop looking for all the ways to excuse all the ways you have failed this season and figure out how you can fix this.” Dad’s face was strong and taut, dark brown and regal. His eyes had a way of looking at me and through me with one look. I lowered my head.

I could almost hear the stem borers feasting on the harvest before I replanted.

Economics was the safe major, the one I thought my Dad would most approve of. He wasn’t born in the Caribbean but had all the sensibilities of one, being a grandchild of Papa Julien. Julien was tough, historically hard-working and good with his hands. A Thomas trait. The most I used my hands for manual labor was during college presentations in business marketing class, during lunches at internships with Goldman-Sachs and Merrill Lynch. I was the product of the product of the product of an immigrant with a dream. An immigrant who moved his wife and children to the outskirts of what they call the Bull City for a life among the land and the American Dream. I assumed taking that dream and capitalizing on it, almost literally, would please my father. It only tightened the grip of his disappointment on my shoulder.

Don’t ask me why I chose comparative religion as my minor. Another choice that met Dad’s consternation. I have also been fascinated by the practices of the world’s faiths. So much so that while studying so fervently for the MBA, I spiraled in an metaphysical chasm and found solace in the eightfold path of Buddha one week, prayed face down to the Hindu deity Ganesha the following month with a handsome fling who happened to practice the faith and rounded out the experiment with several weeks in the Bahai temple. I became so infatuated with my minor that it became my central focus beyond the second half of my third year. There was, however, one practice I was weary of exploring during my time in undergrad. Not weary, hesitant. Terrified.

The way of the Orisha, a Yoruba practice rooted in a pantheon of African deities. The deities, or Orisha, can be prayed to, given sacrifices and ultimately are known to guide all of creation. Some believe they exist among us as human beings. As for the number of Orisha, there are many more than you can count. To me, they are the mechanics of humanity. The power of ashe, the life force of all, is a major tenant of the practice. I chose to invoke to Oshun.

Please remember that I was desperate. The land was dying and so were our resources. After giving up on the business sector, I returned home the summer after I graduated and took my place as a Thomas, a land man. Dad was overworked. No one lived on the farm anymore, save him when Mama let him. She was an instructor at Durham Community College and pushed for education about all else. She preferred we sell the land and get our money’s worth. Dad nearly killed himself more than once in attempts to do the work of 10 men.

“Am I a disappointment? To him?” I asked Mama once sweltering afternoon.

She just looked at the land, brows furrowed, mouth screwed in disgust.

“I wish it would all burn.” She was serious. “The money doesn’t grow in the ground, Asa. Please don’t let your father’s foolishness cloud you.”

She took my hand and held it, still looking at the land, seeing fire.

“Love you, Ma.”

“I love you too, son.” She rose, heading back toward her car. “There’s no money in that ground. Let it burn.”

I watched her pull away then ran for my old research.

Oshun is considered to be one of the Orishas of material wealth. I chose to pray to them both. I didn’t have much to go on but since moving back home and moving into the house directly on the land, I lugged all of my research with me. A book of Santeria lay in a storage chest, waiting for me. I found them. I needed them. I needed to prove something to my Dad, to Papa Julien, to the Thomases. To myself. Hell, maybe even to my mama who didn’t believe that money can grow underground.

I would need a sacrifice, a relic, something to offer to the gods. I had no pets and we kept no animals on the land for fear of losing the little crop we could salvage. I was creating a ritual offering, for prosperity. For exceeding abundance, more than the Thomas clan had known since the days we slept near different waters in Petion-Ville. Oshun required oranges, a yellow candle, a white plate, cinnamon, honey and something representing her. If she could bring wealth, I would need to give wealth. One thought raced through me. I couldn’t do that.

“God forgive me.” I went to the fireplace in the living room, adorned with images of a home I never called home, of people long gone. Of red, white and blue decorative pieces. I wanted to know how it felt to know where I came from. The best I could do is hack away at a new legacy with the tools I had now. I lifted the mahogany urn from the fireplace mantel. It was heavy.

The urn was filled with coins, the only remaining coins Papa Julien brought with him from Haiti. I could cry and cuss and knew I would disowned if my Dad ever discovered what it was I was doing with the sacred, not-to-be-touched currency that would sustain our line for generations and generations and generations’ generations. The coins were never to be touched. Papa had fought almost to the end of his life to hold onto every coin he had. One night just before they were to leave the island, my people were attacked by wild dogs that roamed from the mountains looking for food and flesh. One particular beast had teeth so wild, so jagged, so deadly. Papa Julien was able to beat them all away, including the alpha mutt that managed to bit off the smallest corner of a bronze 20 centimes coin. That was Papa’s favorite. Not once did he try to convert and not once did he miss an opportunity to tell that story.

It sat in a small wooden box by itself. I left the other coins and took only the bitten one, replacing it with one from the urn. Nobody ever opened either the urn or the box and no one lived there but me.

I pumped a pitcher of fresh water from our well. I stood at the beginning of the growth.

I buried the coin.

Invoking the spirit of an ancient deity is full-bodied work. I dug and dug and dug until a cavern opened before me in the very soil that Papa Julien loved and tilled and obsessed over. I took the coin from my pocket. It was slightly rusted but not much. It hadn’t seen much sunlight. Nobody was to touch it, remember. I kissed it. It felt the right thing to do. My upper lip was cut as I separated the coin from my face. The jagged, bitten off piece caught a piece of my flesh and took it into the earth. I dropped it quickly, sucking the blood from my lip in rapid pulls. I covered the soil feverishly, patting it over to give the appearance of smoothness. I lay the oranges on the white plate and poured honey over top, followed by sprinkles of cinnamon. I poured the pitcher of water over the mound and left some in the bottom and sat it to my right. I lit the candle.

I repeated an incantation of my own making.

“Oshun, orisha of fertility and prosperity.

I seek you. Give me and my family wealth.

Greater than we have ever known. We need it.

And...we need it...now.

Amen.”

I repeated this no less than 10 times, each time growing more incendiary and impatient until my throat was dry and the early August heat shot into the smallest parts of my skin. I cried.

What happened next is still unexplainable.

I was pulled under by the very ground itself. The roots of the 10 acres before me all seemed to join and race underground. The earth cracked with their speed. I heard snapping and ripping as if the center of the universe was beneath me, eagerly awaiting my entry into its mouth. A vine burst from the soil, snatching my wrist. My eyes bugged, mouth agape. A second vine caught the grip of my right hand. Slowly, I was being pulled into the mound, into the earth where the coin lay. And somehow I went further than that. I was everywhere and nowhere. I smelled the sands of Myrtle Beach, the asphalt in Nairobi, the tarps that drape Sydney’s chinatown. I was infinite. The soil, the land, gave me new sight. I was not only in the earth but in the minds and hearts of the people who walked those streets and whose souls yearned for more.

It was something to believe in that they couldn’t touch that didn’t sound like God. The hungry, money-hungry, status-hungry, wealth-hungry, in the mountains of Nevada, the villas of Florence, the townhomes of D.C., they wanted something different. A new kind of wealth. It wasn’t their desire I smelled in the earths they did or didn’t till. It was something I had smelled in myself, in my Mom looking at the land, in my Dad’s bible verses as he looked at me looking at what I couldn’t accomplish with the harvest. It was desperation, you must understand.

I rose from the earth, new and whole and somehow hollow. My mind was burst open. I ran to my computer, to my old economics notes. I barely had time to notice the oranges had bloomed into massive trees behind me.

I apologize if you were looking for succinct answers to how I created what I created. All I can truly tell you is I did what I did for my family. I named it not after the Thomases, I named my inspiration from the divine orisha after the coin Papa Julien fought so hard to protect on his way to the states. I named it after the buried, bitten coin.

Inspiration from a source outside of yourself gives you an insight, a new pair of eyes, new visions that you never could have imagined. Never could I have fathomed registering a website in honor of that buried coin less than a week after the grounds showed me the world. Never could I have dreamed that I would create a system that Orisha Oshun would be so gracious to allow to bear much fruit in the agricultural and digital arenas. The Thomas Grove was incorporated less than a month afterward. I wrote a paper about my findings and created a system that could never be traced. It was linked to the land in a now heavily secured grove in the South. I prayed for more and more wealth every day and I believe those prayers were heard.

My parents. They were in disbelief. They were beyond proud, beyond any conceivable emotion. Mom just looked at the land with that look, saying words that could encourage you but with eyes that distrusted everything. Dad danced around with his bad back and hips anytime he came by the grove.

One day, soon after the election of the nation’s first Black president, he stood with me observing the fruits of my labors. I intermittently checked my phone for the latest article on my creation. So much attention. It was intoxicating. The coin rested just beneath us.

“Herein is my father glorified--” Dad was beaming.

I obliged without hesitation.

“That ye bear much fruit.” He clasped my hands in his. His eyes heavy and light all at once.

He and Mom were moving. He wanted to go back to the land that raised that grandfather we never truly know beyond boyhood. Mom was happy to leave for some reason. She came by my side the day before they left. The winter winds were whipping our faces. It was January 2, the day before it would all become more real.

She looked at me, hard and unyielding. “I won’t ask how.”

“How what?

“If it’s what you want.”

I knew what she meant.

“Be careful. Whatever it is. Be careful.” She kissed my cheek, a warning one wrapped in goodbyes.

I wanted Papa Julien to be proud of his lineage. The buried coin was my legacy as much as his. I prayed to it just as much as Oshun. The earth was my friend and my desperate peers were eager for the bitten coin. I lived for a year in unimaginable, untenable, unexplainable wealth. I can’t fully explain it because it doesn’t quite belong to me, does it? I took it from the man who fought for something different than this. It belongs to a deity I’d never prayed to before of a faith practice I’m not sure I believed in, even today. I lived for a year, I said in that wealth. I created a system that was underground and part of the cryptic canon because that’s what everyone wanted. That’s what you want, right? To be tethered to something all for yourself that no one can touch but you. To have wealth like you’ve never. To have belief in the unknown. To prosper.

Then, there was January 2010. There was the earthquake that took so much. The earthquake that took my parents. I was hollow, empty.

Then, nothing mattered. Life was still happening in inconceivable ways, in ways that unearthed my darkest pains. I mined coins, they say. It was my creation anyway. I had prayed to a goddess that gave me much, my family much. I was snatched up by the vines of material possession. I had it all. Still do in some ways. I write this confession from the hills of the country that Papa Julien toiled on. I returned to the lands of Haiti and roamed almost every day for years. I tried to do my best to give my money back to the people who needed it more than I did. But I couldn’t touch. I don’t mean that conceptually. I literally couldn’t touch the money anymore. It was never mine. I created an empire rooted in the struggle of my ancestors that I’m still not sure honors them. I had enough to start a living here. Now, I teach. Economics. I have a garden. The growth is slow. I miss them more than anything.

One day, I will return to Thomas grove. I will remove the coin. I will unbury the bitten coin.