Redemption - Short Story

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Olympia F. Vernon

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).