“…please blame it on the Son of the Morning”
– Jay-Z
“I don’t want nothin, I just want to come home. Is it time yet for the good Lord to take me?”
Mary Smith was literally on her deathbed, in the home her husband had bought in the sixties in northeast Ladoga. It was a nice house, two stories with a covered front porch. Mary enjoyed watching the family she and Sam had made fill the house and the yard. The house wasn’t remote, but it had an ample lawn in the front and back. Mary had five children, and by the nineties, she and Sam had almost twenty grandchildren, and they would all gather for holidays and cookouts, including extended family. Mary Smith had lived a long and full life and after her husband died of a stroke in his sixties, she made peace with death and waited patiently for the day she could be with Sam again, and in the meantime she loved every second she spent with her family.
But the joy of her life was noticeably absent as she faced her death.
“I feel it too, but keeping me here won’t do nothing for nobody. That beautiful child that Zora had belong to evil now. All we can do is hope the love of this family can keep him from the worst.”
Mary hadn’t lived in her home alone after her husband’s death. Many members of the Smith family had lived in the house over the years, most for a short time while they transitioned to a new phase of their lives. There was always someone else living permanently in the house, and her eldest daughter, Dorothy, was always at the house even though she lived in a house close by with her husband. Dorothy had made breakfast, lunch, and dinner at her mother’s home since her father passed away and any family member in the area was welcome to sit down for a meal.
The day that Mary passed away, Dorothy had been making chicken and dumplings for lunch. The hospice workers had been called the night before because Mary told her daughter that she felt herself slipping away, and she started having a conversation with someone who apparently hovered over her bed and only Mary could see. The discussion was intense, though Mary seemed fine to interrupt it when her daughter or her grandson, Timmy, who had been living at the house for the past year trying to turn his life away from drinking so he could be a better father to his children, sat at the bedside. The hospice nurse stayed the night and Dorothy called all of her siblings because she was sure that her mother’s end would come soon. She mostly stood in the doorway of her mother’s room listening to the conversation she was having. When Dorothy talked to her sister Rebecca, she told her the things their mother had said about Zora, Rebecca’s daughter.
“I told you that boy was too nice,” Dorothy said to Rebecca after she had informed her of their mother’s impending death. “Something about his eyes, like they dead. And he done put the devil in your grandbaby.”
“You better shut up with that,” Rebecca said defiantly. She had always been the feistiest of her siblings though she was the youngest. “Y’all done stressed that girl out from the first time mama started talking all that bullshit. Zora got two beautiful sons and ain’t nan one of them the devil. If I hear either one of y’all say it again, I’m gone act stupid, Dot. And that’ll be my right too, I don’t care if that crazy old woman dying or not. She was always like this to me, telling me that I was the devil’s child cause I wanted a life outside Ladoga. She been mad at me since I moved to Charlotte, her and daddy.”
“You ran off with Sam like you was running away, girl, and everybody know what kind of mess he was in back then. You know they loved you, they was just worried.”
“I should’ve left and never looked back. Never let Zora move back down there, anyway. She love her grandmama, though, and since she moved into her house, she learned to take her word like it’s gospel. I bet mama don’t even know how bad she ruined Zora with all that devil mess. Zora a smart girl, but she believe all that nonsense cause her grandmama saying it. And it ain’t good for my grandbabies.”
“But what if it ain’t nonsense, Becca,” Dorothy asked sadly. “You know that Richard one of them Barneses. You know they messed up, probably been into some devil stuff for a long time.”
“Them people ain’t no different from any other people live in the Bottoms,” Rebecca said defiantly.
“Them Barneses different. That policeman back in the eighties that everybody thought was a hero and then found out about all the awful shit he had done in Ladoga after he died, he was a Barnes. They said they found that man’s journal and it was full of confessions, all the people he killed or helped other people kill and hide. They said he was writing devil stuff in there too, like he was sacrificing people…”
“Do you hear yourself? You sound just like mama. I heard that man was a worse criminal than the ones he was locking up, but why he gotta be worshiping the devil and sacrificing people? Why can’t he just be a regular old criminal? A man that had a lot of power that went to his head?”
“Cause your daughter married into that family and that evil is trying to take her son, your grandson. I been talking to people, and them Barneses is into some hoodoo it turn out. How you think they got all that stuff they had in the seventies and eighties, one working as a police Captain when you know the Ladoga police is racist, one of them owned that fish store near downtown, another one of them had that car repair place. They was all riding high for a while, even some of them illegitimate ones that didn’t have the last name, but now they ain’t got hardly nothing? It’s cause the older ones was doing hoodoo, serving the devil, and the younger ones didn’t learn it cause chaps don’t listen to they parents, praise Jesus, but them poor young people adrift in the world now.”
“Sound like to me, they was all making money from that policeman’s crimes and they used it to start businesses that they kids couldn’t maintain. I’ll say it again, I don’t see what the devil got to do with none of this. Human beings don’t need no devil to fuck up they life, we do a good enough job of it all by ourselves.”
“Listen, Becca, my friend Netty…”
“That crazy bat, she been crazy since she started smoking that refer…”
“Netty ain’t crazy. That woman touched by a angel. She spiritual, she have dreams, she sensitive to people feelings is all. She do that hoodoo, said she had to learn to keep evil off her and her family cause you never know who going around spreading evil. And I know three, four people who swear somebody put some roots on them and they went to Netty to get it off. She say them Barneses been in that hoodoo back to the first Afonso…”
“Alright, Dot, I ain’t got time to hear no Fonso the Terrible stories. I swear people in the Bottoms talk about that man like he was famous all around the world and could walk on water or something. All he did was have a bunch of kids and leave them to go join the circus. That’s it.”
“That man traveled all around the country, but he only made babies in Ladoga, Becca. Letty say he was spreading his seed just like the devil told him, so he could have more power here. That’s why this town been going down for so long, it’s some voodoo curse Fonso the Terrible put on Ladoga. They say he was trying to find a way to get a body for the devil so he could walk on Earth and in exchange, the devil made it so he couldn’t die.”
“Well obviously that didn’t work out too well.”
“Letty say Fonso ain’t dead, Becca. His body long dead, but his soul come back in his babies, grandbabies, great grandbabies. You can kill the body, but the soul find a new one. Letty say Fonso finally made a baby that the devil could take over and use to walk the Earth. She say Fonso in Richard now, and he married Zora cause she was a sweet, Christian virgin. That’s what the spell took, Fonso dark soul and a pure soul and body together could make the right vessel for the devil himself. Letty say he been working his magic to bring the devil to take over that boy.”
There was a long silence after Dorothy told her sister what she’d heard from her friend.
“Dot,” Rebecca said finally, “I’m sorry but I’m not gonna make it to see mama…”
“She dying, Becca, she probably gone be gone by the morning…”
“I just can’t. Y’all so brainwashed in all that religion and fairytale, y’all can’t see how y’all hurt people with your stories. I’m gone tell my daughter to stay away too, but I know she won’t, she love that crazy old woman too much. Tell mama I love her. You can tell her I think she crazy and I want to hate her for cursing me and my daughter like she did, but I know you won’t. I love you too even if it seem like you care more about nonsense stories than you do about me or your niece…”
“I love my niece, I love Zora, and that’s why I’m telling you all this. I’m gone find a way to save my niece and her baby from the evil mama saw coming a mile away. It’s all she been talking about Becca…”
“It’s too much, I can’t deal with it. If you do love me, if she do, then y’all will understand that it just hurt too much. I’m sorry.”
Dorothy was sad when her sister ended the call, but she resigned herself to helping her niece. It seemed to be what her mother wanted more than anything.
She called Zora while she stood in the doorway of Mary’s room. Zora cried on the phone and promised to be at the house as soon as she could make it.
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