Free The Killings by J.F. Gonzalez, Wrath James White Page B

of the special collections room, but you can look at it, as long as you wear gloves.”
    “Sure,” Carmen said, nodding. “Fine.” And that’s how Carmen Mendoza had been able to page through one of the rarest volumes of occult folklore and voodoo published in the United States.
    The book was called Yoruba Magic in Georgia, and there was no author listed. The publication location was listed as Atlanta, Georgia, but there was no publishing company listed. A vanity press effort, for sure. The binding looked like it had been done by hand. Probably no more than a hundred copies had been printed and bound, maybe fewer. And why it was considered rare and valuable was beyond Carmen’s comprehension. The weirdest things could be considered valuable. She supposed the volume was valuable because occult practitioners sought it out. Regardless, Carmen paged through it in the special collections department. What she read fascinated her.
    According to the book’s anonymous author, Yoruba/Vodoun had been practiced in the United States by African slaves since the arrival of the first slave ships to the New World, in the late 1600s. The belief evolved into a robust philosophy. It held that all human beings possess what is known as Ayanmo - destiny and fate - and each human is expected to eventually become one in spirit with Oldumare, the divine creator and source of all energy. Yoruba originated with the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the adjoining areas of Benin and Togo. As many of the Yoruba people were sold into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by tribal enemies and European slave dealers, they were transported to various parts of the New World, where they transported their faith to their new homes. During this time the Yoruban people came in contact with other tribes, specifically the Gba speaking people from the same region Vodun originated from.
    Carmen carefully paged through the book. After the brief introduction of the history of Vodun, which was the proper spelling of the religion most commonly known as Voodoo, the unknown author set forth various anecdotes of the faith’s influence in the greater United States, most particularly the South. Carmen knew that slaves transported from Africa brought their religion to the New World, that Voodoo was a bastardized version of this old faith mixed in with other faiths from other African regions, as well as Catholicism. Several pages further in, the writer documented stories and folklore of various voodoo practitioners from the Greater Georgia area.
    The librarian stayed close by, observing as she looked through the volume with latex gloved hands.
    “Does the library have any record of how they received this volume?” Carmen asked.
    “I can check with the directors,” the librarian said. “Most of what we receive for the special collections department comes from donations. Occasionally the library buys books that later turn out to be valuable. That book over there” - he gestured to a glass case that housed modern first editions - “the Stephen King book The Dark Tower ? They bought that brand new from the publisher thirty years ago when it first came out. It was never put out for lending but instead was placed back here. I think our head librarian at the time knew a good thing when he saw it. That book is worth more than a thousand dollars now.”
    Something in the book she was carefully paging through caught Carmen’s attention. Her heart skipped a beat as she paged back carefully to read from the previous paragraph.
    “One such feared queen of the black arts was Sable, a female born in Tennessee and sold by her owner when she was a child of five to a plantation owner in Cobb County, Georgia, in 1804. By the time Sable was fifteen, rumors of her dreaded, dark power were already circulating among her fellow slaves ...”
    1804? Carmen thought. Did I read that correctly?
    “Sable was described by the Whites who ran the plantation and her fellow slaves as