Free Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker Page B

they had at first. Pick a thin, wispy cloud, he advised them, and send all your energy to disperse it. It’s amazing how often those clouds just fly away, he said. I later heard that this is a common practice among student magicians.
    I didn’t say much about that story, but everything I thought was insulting. Wispy clouds disperse all the time. Even big clouds do. They are insubstantial, drifting with the wind, always moving. They disperse whether you look at ’em or don’t look at ’em. The reason I didn’t say much was that my interpretation was so obvious that I knew it wouldn’t do any good to point it out. He wasn’t an idiot. He and his wife run a magical shop and seem to be staying in business. He was well read, had a good vocabulary, was well spoken and apparently sane. So what was going on? Somehow he was analyzing this event in a way that was utterly unlike my own analysis. They all were doing that.
    The outer facts of the magical people’s lives, the verifiable ones, often made little sense to me. The outer facts of Shawn’s group were summed up by Penn Jillette in a Penn & Teller broadcast titled succinctly “Bullshit!” After Shawn and his friends, dressed up in witchy gear, sneered at the camera, waved their hands about, and told their life theories, Penn was again succinct. “Whack jobs,” he called them, so pleased with his mean-spirited fun that he was practically snorting.
    Nobody watching could blame Penn for his assessment based on the observable facts. That’s the outer truth of it, and that might be all there is to any of the magical people. But Penn was also giving his audience another message, an inner truth that they could not fail to understand. His ridicule warned listeners that they had better stick to what he and his kind would allow them to believe, or he would have the same kind of snorting fun with them.
    Shawn told me that he and his friends hadn’t known they were going to be on Penn & Teller . But considering everything, he thought they came off pretty well. If someone can call you a whack job on national television and you can feel pretty good about that, maybe you are magic.
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    M y introductions to magic sometimes came in somewhat mysterious ways, which is only to be expected, I guess. One hot summer day when I was in Memphis flogging my book at one of those little tables that sits at the front of the bookstore, a woman came up to me.
    â€œI was in here last week,” she said. “I saw this book, and it seemed like I was supposed to have it. Then I saw the sign that said you were going to be here, and I thought that I had to meet you.”
    â€œIs this the way you live your life?” I asked, grinning to show that I was a friendly smart aleck.
    â€œWell, yes. It is.” Someone interrupted us then, and she walked away. When I looked for her again, I saw that she was standing in another aisle waiting for my attention.
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    A writer, she said, writing a novel about a woman who uses hoodoo on her lover.
    â€œHoodoo?”
    Not voodoo, which is a religion. Hoodoo, which is an African American magical system that was brought over during slave days and is making a comeback with blacks and attracting whites around the country, she said. A lot of black people won’t talk about it. They call it “that stuff,” or “that mess,” as in, “I don’t fool with that mess.”
    â€œBut ask them if you can have some of their hair,” said the woman, who was African American herself. “They’ll say, ‘No way. I am not giving you a piece of my hair.’”
    We laughed.
    â€œI’d like to know more about hoodoo.”
    It’s difficult to get black conjure docs to talk about what they do, she said, especially to a white person, which I am. Practitioners ofhoodoo aren’t likely to be arrested anymore, but memories of a time when