Hello, Goodbye Again

It all started in 1979, after my mother, Annie Winter, paid the voodoo lady twenty dollars to read her future. We sat in a small back room with a window that opened onto a street somewhere in the French Quarter as people walked by and a trumpet or two played off at a distance, sad and happy tunes drifting past old doors and littered streets and a man ambled up a narrow side street as I guessed right that he was a beggar. As this woman examined the lines of Annie’s palm, pointing out with her long charcoal painted fingernail, she spoke of seeing adventure and true love. Her shockingly green eyes darted from my mother to me and I was mesmerized by how much she seemed to know about us. Speaking in a Creole accent, she said, “You’ve been on the rowid for a while now. Never in one spot long enough. Like a boat wit no anchor. Gone wit de next wind, am I right?”

Annie nodded yes.

“And I see here you’ve been seekin’fame and richesse.”

“It would be nice.” Annie’s right foot tapped nervously beneath the cloth covered table. I glanced outside noticing how this city was like no other place I had ever been before, its old brick buildings and people gazing down from balconies with wrought-iron railings, and along one narrow street after another there were sweet and sour smells spilling out of the old doors, but there was also filth, even a small dead animal or two, and people who stank underneath it, like a bad taste after a delicious meal.

The voodoo lady had a smell that reminded me of what it was like to sleep on a leather seat with the bus windows open overnight. Her silver hair was braided into a coiled crown as if she were a queen, only her face and arms were wet with an un-queenly amount of perspiration, as was Annie’s and most of the people in the immediate vicinity. I heard a woman passing by exclaim that she was bathing in this humidity.

I watched the voodoo lady closely as she held onto Annie’s pale hand. Her skin appeared even darker next to my white mother’s, though the voodoo priestess was not much darker than me. She drew up her face as if she saw something that she couldn’t speak about. Then she looked again at me, pulled her thick, pink lips in like she considered whether or not to tell it. “You sure you want to know everything?”

Annie’s foot stopped. Her forehead wrinkled and she looked to me before saying, “If it’s not too bad. I mean, my little girl, I don’t want anything to frighten her.”

I was tempted to speak up and say that I wasn’t afraid, I wanted to know everything, but the voodoo lady released Annie’s hand and took up what she called a deck of tarot cards. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her hands as they shuffled and cut and placed five evenly down in front of us. Looking over each card, the voodoo lady said, “I sees a twistin’ rowid ahead of you.” She pointed to a picture of a falling tower and told us there’d be an unexpected upheaval. She saw doubt and failure and certain men Annie needed to avoid. Annie needed to get control of her life, “C’est votre vie…c’est votre vie…c’est votre vie,” the voodoo lady repeated while tapping the card with an upside down woman. “But the main thing is this; you’ve got to go home. You know what I mean by home?”

Annie shook her head deniably, saying, “I can’t go back there.”

The voodoo lady didn’t argue. She put away the cards and said, “If you don’t remember not’n else I tell you today, remember that the world is always even. The gain of one thing leads to the loss of something else.”