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  Back home, I pulled the door shut and put my pillowcase bag on the kitchen table. It was full of rocks, pecans, some old bottle caps, a broken piece of chain, flattened pennies from the railroad tracks, and the skull of a baby bird I’d found under a tree.

  Mama Frances eyed the bag on the table. “You know that don’t belong there, child.” She stood over the old stove, her smooth forehead dotted with beads of sweat. It was hot out, the middle of June, and even hotter in our house. I picked up the bag and set it on a chair.

  “Not there either, Hoodoo. Upstairs. In your room.”

  Not everybody had an upstairs in their house. Most folks had one big room with a coal stove and an outhouse in the back. An outhouse is where people go to do their business, if you didn’t know.

  The reason we had an upstairs was because my granddaddy used to live here with Mama Frances, and she’d wanted a whole bunch of children. His name was Emanuel Hatcher. People had to call him by his first and last name or he wouldn’t answer. He’d just sit there and pretend like he didn’t hear you. I called him Pa Manuel, though, and he seemed okay with that. He didn’t live with Mama Frances anymore because she said he was ornery as a yellow dog, so he moved out. I didn’t see how somebody could have enough money to buy two houses but I guessed he did.

  Mama Frances never did get all those children. The only child they’d had was my daddy, Curtis Hatcher. That made them my grandparents on my dead daddy’s side. I was an only child too. Mama Frances said my real mama died because she didn’t eat enough white clay when I was in her belly. I asked her why somebody would eat white clay, and she said it helped ladies have babies. That just sounded plain crazy to me.

  I grabbed my bag and headed up the steps, keeping my eyes right in front of me. I didn’t want to look at the picture of my family on the wall because it gave me the shivers. The reason it gave me the shivers was because when I looked at it, my great-aunt Eve stared at me with eyes that blazed like fire. Sometimes I thought I saw her lips move, like she was trying to talk to me. The picture was old and wrinkly and the wooden frame around it was falling apart. There was some fancy handwriting on the bottom, and this was what it said:

  Hatcher Family

  Sardis, Alabama, 1919

  Mama Frances said a white man came out to the country one time to take a picture of the whole family. It looked like a right nice day, because the sunshine was coming down through the leaves, making shadows on the ground. Everybody had put on their best church clothes and stood real still. My daddy was in that picture, standing between Mama Frances and Pa Manuel. This was before he married my mama. A tall hat sat on top of his head. Sometimes I’d stare at his face and ask him what he did that got him killed. He never answered, though. He just looked at me with those dark eyes of his until I had to turn away.

  Most of the folks in that picture were dead now, buried over at Shiloh Baptist Church. Mama Frances called them “our people,” and they all used hoodoo, or folk magick, as most people called it. They used foot-track powder that could go up through your foot and make you sick, a black hen’s egg for getting rid of evil spirits, nutmeg seeds for good luck at gambling, and all kinds of other things.

  But even though Mama Frances named me Hoodoo, I couldn’t cast a simple spell. I said the words over and over like she told me to, but nothing ever happened. “You got to believe, boy,” she’d say. “That’s the first step. Believing.”

  I thought I did believe, but I guess I wasn’t trying hard enough.

  Everybody else in my family could conjure, though. Conjuring is using words to cast a spell, if you didn’t know. One way to do it was by using a mojo bag. A mojo bag is a little cloth sack stuffed with roots and herbs and oils and sometimes a picture of somebody’s face or words written on paper. Mama Frances gave me one that was supposed to be for good luck, but that didn’t stop people from picking on me. Jessie McGuire, Otis Ross, and J.D. Barnes called me Hoodoo Doo-doo every time they saw me. They said I must’ve been cursed because of my birthmark. “Somebody put their mark on you,” they’d said. “You got the evil eye.”

  But it was summertime, and the schoolhouse was closed, so I didn’t have to worry about being picked on for a while.

  Upstairs, I took all the stuff I found and put it in an old steamer trunk that used to be my daddy’s. There was some writing on the side that said 20th Century Limited. I figured that had to be some kind of train. Each corner of the trunk had a brass cap, and if you wanted to open it, you had to unfasten some wide belts and click a bunch of locks. I liked the sound it made when it opened. It’d give a big old groan, and the smell would rise up and greet me. I didn’t know what that smell was, but it always made me think of my dead daddy.

  I picked up the bird skull and turned it over in my hand. It was a tiny little thing, bone-white and clean. What could’ve happened to it? Did it fall out of its nest? Did its mama try to save it? I tucked it in a corner of the trunk on top of some old papers and then headed downstairs for some of Mama Frances’s Hoppin’ John.

  I dragged the broom across the floor, tidying up in the back room of Miss Carter’s store. Big bags of rice, flour, and sugar were heaped on stacks of wood, and boxes of candy lined the shelves. I didn’t know who Miss Carter was and didn’t think anyone else did either. Most of the time there was a blind man who ran the counter out front. He knew right where everything was, and if you tried to cheat him he’d know it. Somebody said he could tell the difference between a five-dollar bill and a one just by feeling it. I didn’t know about that. I’d never even seen a five-dollar bill before, anyway. To tell you the truth, he gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  My cousin Zeke worked at Miss Carter’s once in a while and let me sweep up to earn some pocket change and candy. People came to buy groceries, tobacco, liquor, and medicine, but in the back—if you knew how to ask for it—you could get stuff for conjuring. I was more interested in the Mary Janes and hard candy under the glass counter out front.

  Hot air blew in from the open window and sent dust balls floating around the room. I was playing make-believe that they were big twisters when the cowbell on the front door clang-a-langed. I stopped sweeping and peeked my head around the open door.

  “Mornin’, sir,” I heard Zeke say. “How can I help you this fine day?”

  I crept a little closer and saw a man standing at the counter. He was dressed all in black, like some kind of holy-roller preacher. His wide-brimmed hat shaded his eyes, and his long cloak trailed on the floor. I knew it was called a cloak because I saw one in a book at the schoolhouse. People used to wear them all the time in the olden days. I wondered why somebody would wear a cloak in this hot-ass weather. I wasn’t supposed to say “hot-ass,” but that’s what popped in my head because I heard Mama Frances say it one time when she was fanning herself.

  The man leaned forward, and I could’ve sworn I heard a creaking sound, like he was made of something besides flesh and bone. A cold chill crept across the back of my neck. I didn’t like him, whoever he was.

  “Mandragore,” he said. His voice was so deep it boomed inside my chest.

  Zeke cocked an ear in the stranger’s direction. “What’s that, now?”

  The stranger looked up and sniffed, just like an old coon dog. “The One That Did the Deed,” he muttered. “Main de Gloire.”

  Zeke backed up a step, like the man had stank breath. That was a sign that something wasn’t right. Zeke shook his head. “Afraid I can’t help you with that, good man. Never heard of it.”

  The man took one look around, sniffed again, and shuffled out the store. He had to duck his head so his hat wouldn’t get knocked off on the way out. The door banged shut, and the cowbell rang for what seemed like minutes.

  Cousin Zeke laid his hands palm down on the counter and stood real still. Finally, he let out a big breath and took a hankie from his pocket. He wiped his face.

  “Who was that?” I asked, coming around the corner.

  Zeke jumped like he had ants in his pant
s. “Hoodoo! Don’t be sneaking up on people like that!”

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” I shot back. “I was here the whole time.”

  He balled up the hankie and put it back in his pocket. “Ain’t nothing for you to worry about.” He let out another breath and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You better get yourself home for supper.”

  I’d never seen Cousin Zeke have a conniption before, but that’s what it looked like. Having a conniption is when someone gets all jumpy, if you didn’t know. He gave me a little half smile and reached in a jar for some Squirrel Nut Zippers.

  “Here,” he said. “Take some of these and have them after supper.”

  I held out my hand.

  “And don’t eat them on the way home. You hear?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  I took the candy and stuffed it in my pocket.

  On the way home, I wondered about the strange man and what he was looking for. I couldn’t even remember the words he’d said. He walked funny too, like a big old bug. I’d seen a hat like the one he was wearing on a preacher man one time. But this stranger sure didn’t look like no preacher. We knew everybody in town, and he wasn’t one of them. I put him out of my mind and made my way on home. By the time I got there, I’d eaten all the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

  “You been eating Zeke’s candy, boy? What’d I say about eating all that sugar before supper?” Mama Frances scolded me with a shake of her head.

  I stared at the food on my plate: big fat butter beans, a piece of bread, and a pork chop fried up in bacon fat. My stomach twisted.

  “I only had a couple,” I said.

  “Mm, hmm,” she said, smirking. “Boy, you better eat that food. Every bite.”

  She then proceeded to sit down and watch me clean my plate. It was good, but I felt my stomach getting bigger with every bite. By the time I was done, the sun was going down and I heard some night birds whistling.

  Upstairs, I flopped down on the bed. My stomach hurt, like someone was churning up my insides with a big old spoon. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but when I did, I had a dream. It was about that man from Miss Carter’s store. Little dust devils swirled behind him as he shuffled down the street. He stood in front of me and opened up his cloak. I looked inside and saw the dried foot of a squirrel, a heart in a glass box, a bundle of twigs tied together with string, and a little bottle of hot pepper juice with a cork stopper. The man’s eyes blazed with two red flames. “Mandragore,” he said. A few long hairs poked out of his wide nostrils and his breath was bad. “The One That Did the Deed.”

  And that’s when everything went black.

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  About the Author

  AUTHOR PHOTO BY ERIK KVALSVIK

  RONALD L. SMITH is the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award–winning author of Hoodoo, his debut novel. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

  Learn more at www.strangeblackflowers.com