There's not much I can say about my tradition. Like much contemporary magic, it's a mishmash of styles and schools, a compendium of folklore and myth that the teachers mostly called Voodoo (Vodou if they were feeling Frenchy) along with a smattering of ceremonial magic borrowed from the Brits and a healthy dose of atavistic shamanism for flavor. It's not even fair to call it a "tradition" really - it's a personal style based on many traditions, but a personal style so rooted in history and tradition that sometimes it feels as old as those that inform it.
Most people would call me a sorcerer, I imagine, and my street tag coming up was "Zobop," a nonsense word I made up (or at least thought I did) based on my love of bebop jazz and affinity for scat singing. My oldest aunt said I was born with a caul and my granny warned people to be careful around me because I had a way of knowing people's secrets and lies.
When I was a kid I dreamed people died the night before they did. My grandfather and I went fishing two days after they put him in the ground. It was no grieving hallucination or active imagination - old man Cromer who ran the ferry took us across, even asked my grandfather how he was feeling. "I heard you been doing poorly," the ferryman asked. Granpére stood silent. He was never much for words, so Mr. Cromer didn't mind.
On the other side we left the ferry behind and walk upriver to our favorite fishing spot. An ancient magnolia tree hung low over the water here and gave cover to the fish in summer. Bees and other insects hovered near for the flowers in spring and summer. We fished in silence all afternoon and I walked back to the ferry alone, leaving him there where he likely wanted to be for all eternity. Mr. Cromer asked if my grandfather had already gone on home and I told him yes. I don't know if he ever realized he'd ferried a ghost across to the other side of the river.
At the age of nine a star-shaped blemish appeared on my left cheek. It started small and grew to be the size of my small hand. Granny took me to visit an old woman they called Sister-Woman, who lived alone alongside a long dirt road in St. Mary's Parish, with a herd of cats and a giant dog she called Tristan. She took me into her house and washed my face three times before she took a look at the mark. "It's the mark alright, I reckon," she told Granny. She rubbed an oil that smelled of lemons and cinnamon on my cheek. It burned and I began to cry. "Don't weep, boy," she told me. "The tears will wash away the oils and you'll be stained like that all your life." She smiled and showed snaggled teeth that looked like over-toasted corn kernels. "Don't you want to be able to fetch a girl when you're grown?" Before we left her house Sister-Woman told Granny to make sure and take note of any dreams I had.
None of these things were strange to my family. After the way I came into the world, nothing seemed strange to them. Hurricane Hilda struck land in 1964 just as my mother was giving birth to me at the house of my grandfather in St Mary's Parish. As my granny washed me in a stainless steel basin, a twister suddenly appeared and took the tin roof from the back of the house. The violent wind lifted the basin and my tiny body into the air so swiftly Granny was unable to grab hold.
Granpére would later tell that the women wailed like banshees as the twister and its package disappeared into the darkened sky. Everyone was certain I was dead. The next morning a notice appeared in the local paper that a newborn child had been taken by the storm. The story has been sent out over the wire and every radio station in the South reported the tragedy.
That afternoon, my family received a call from the sheriff of a small town in Georgia: they had found a baby tangled high in a tree. Granny said Granpére collapsed on the floor, imagining my poor body torn up in the high branches of a live oak. She took the phone from him and listened as the sheriff recounted a miracle.
"They said you was hollering up a storm," she would recollect later. "They heard you near two miles away." Two young boys scaled the height of the tree and carefully carried me down from the branches. They took me to their mother and called the local sheriff, who had been listening to the story on the radio that morning. The sheriff called the radio station, whose manager put him in touch with the Morgan City newspaper editor, who passed along the name of our family (which had been kept out of the radio reports). Later, of course, the stories of the miraculous event would find it necessary to use the name: there's just too much of a ring to "Po' Baby Poe."
