Anesu “Wendy” Chimutengwende was seven years old the first time she ever laid eyes on a ghost, only she did not realize it. She was in a park with her aunt and a couple cousins one weekend and back then, Wendy loved the slide. When they pulled into the parking lot of the neighborhood playground, she swung her car door open and bolted for the slide where she was disappointed at the line. The other equipment at the playground was unoccupied and her cousins busied themselves on the swings. They liked their cousin Wendy a lot, but they didn’t share her enthusiasm for the slide and on that day in particular, both stared at her strangely as she waited patiently for her turn.
Wendy didn’t mind waiting, but the line was long enough that three children were on the ladder waiting to climb to the top, and two more waited on the ground. She looked around, curious if they were with an adult, and then she assumed that they must not be because what adult would let their children out of the house in the clothes they wore? They all looked dirty, but not brown. They were covered in a black dust that was soot or smeared ash, and if Wendy had examined the ends of their tattered clothes, she would have noticed that many of their hands or feet were missing, and those who still had hands were missing fingers. All of the children were long dead, victims of a bomb that had been planted by a white supremacist under the slide in the park of the colored neighborhood, as it was called in the late 1950s.
As Wendy got closer to the ladder, and two of the children that had taken their turns lined up behind her, her aunt approached her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Why don’t you go on up?” she asked with a worried smile.
“When it’s my turn,” Wendy said, and then one of her cousins fell and hurt himself at the swings and they were forced to leave before she even made it to the ladder.
As they drove away, Wendy stared longingly through the window and waved at the line of children who all smiled and waved back at her.
She didn’t know anything about the manifestation of ghosts, nothing real anyway. At that age, her only familiarity with ghosts was Casper, and that is an unrealistic portrayal of the experiences of the ghosts that dwell the Earth. Maybe some lead purposeless existences, but most are on a mission. Some contact their ancestors with important business, others are reminders of trauma that is hard even for the land to forget, and other still are pawns of bad people.
In this second installment of the adventures of the Brave Chimutengwende, we meet a powerful spirit who was kept in check by Wendy’s ancestors until the first Alia seemingly did away with it for good. And we meet the witch who seeks to control that spirit today.
The Witch Stirs the Ngozi
As Wendy struggled to comprehend the experience in her home on that Saturday night, there was a teenaged boy sitting in front of his computer screen on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in the vicinity of the Great Dismal Swamp. A neon glow covered his face as he stared intently at the article on the screen. His index finger tapped his mouse furiously when it wasn’t scrolling, and his leg jumped underneath his desk.
“An ngozi, or vengeful spirit,” the teen read nervously, “can be controlled by granting it access to the source of its vengeance. The soul of a wife killed by her husband will be forever indebted to the one who delivers the husband for the spirit’s vengeance. If you endeavor to use a spirit to your own advantage, you must have knowledge of its desires and be able to deliver them.”
A glass shattered against the wall of the boy’s room and he winced down like shards of the glass had hit him.
“Happy now?” a woman asked bitterly. She had thrown the glass in frustration and she leaned down over him as she spoke. “You should trust me, I know more than that computer. Just listen to me and I can help you with that lion in the corner of your room.”
She indicated the corner behind her where a huge lion slept noisily.
“When he wakes up again, I’m going to disappear, so if you want to avoid being eaten, you’ll listen to me about how to control it.”
The teen turned nervously in his chair and nodded at the woman. She had appeared to him early in the morning when he had just rolled out of bed and silenced his alarm. He hadn’t noticed her as he stumbled over the clothes and grime of his room that included old fast-food wrappers and cups, to the small bathroom that was a quick right turn out of his doorway, and as he brushed the sleep from his eyes and ran a toothbrush over his teeth. It wasn’t until he plopped back down on his bed and he yawned, and his eyes opened wide for the first time that he noticed the woman standing before him in a plain, dark blue dress that hugged her fit body around its ample curves, and the headdress that looked like a glowing hat, but was actually the body of a tiny jackal that curled up in a deep sleep. Her belt was also glowing, and it was a snake that wrapped her waist twice and the tail rested down toward her leg, the face prodded the air of the room cautiously behind the woman.
“I am Miriro. I will call you Rhode,” she said with an accent that those in the know would hear and assume correctly that spoke mostly the Shona language. The teenager’s name is Josh, but he never corrects the woman. The name Rhode was definitely cooler and more unique than Josh and he was happy to force his friends to use it later in the day after he had explained to the woman why he needed to go to school even though he was eighteen and lived on his own. His father had used the apartment that he called home to have affairs with various women he met out in bars, and when Rhode stumbled upon it, he was happy to extort his father and moved out of his parent’s home to live in the apartment at his father’s expense. He was a slob, but no more so than any other male his age, and the apartment made him much cooler to his classmates during his final year of high school.
The lion had roared to life at Miriro’s request, after Rhode refused her explanation for who she was, why she was a black woman who looked just like his white mother, and why she had come to stand in his bedroom that morning. The lion was a glowing blue, just like her animal accessories, and he was almost as tall as the room on all fours with the sharpest teeth that he liked to bare as his low growl rumbled Rhode’s body.
Having convinced Rhode of her bona fides on that Saturday night, Miriro explained that she needed him to remind the Ngozi of its true master before it was trapped away by the first Alia. Right now, it is under the thrall of an ancient evil that Miriro had only ever heard about in legends.
“If you will help me, you will be its physical master. I am only a spirit,” Miriro explained to the gullible Rhode who could only imagine how much better his life was going to be now that he realized that he could see ghosts, and he could make one his slave. But Miriro is a seasoned manipulator.
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