We all begged old man Bertrand in turn, sitting in a circle with the smoke between us. But come
Sunday morning there he was again, legs up in the old wooden chair, the polyester cushions showing through him.
“It’s time you moved on, Bert,” Nana Margaret said, but he stared straight ahead.
I tried sitting atop him on the chair. He grumbled. “Sorry, Papa,” I said, as if I hadn’t seen him. I turned on the television to the morning news.
“Damn hippies,” he said, like I wasn’t there.
We only got him to leave, three weeks later, after Nana found him snooping through her jewelry in the bedroom. She threatened to sell the house on Camero and move to Orange County if he didn’t reckon with himself. Papa finally rose from their bed, hatred in his eyes, and floated into the living room, out the back door. When we went to check that he had really truly gone, we saw him disappear through the oak tree.
“About time,” Mom said.
Word got out in Los Feliz that the Janisse women were getting good at coercing the crotchety old folks into making their peace. It was my own fault, bragging about it to my twelve-year-old sister Bess. And Bess having too many friends at Sunday School.
Mr. Everett, Nana’s friend from church, called us up on Saturday to say that though his mother had passed ten years ago, she was still in the garden weeding tomatoes. He asked us to come by—his grand-niece had heard good things from Bess. Nana covered the speaker with her hand to ask Mom and me if we’d do it.
“We should charge him,” I said, only sort of joking.
Nana shook her head. “Josie, a good neighbor does whatever she can for her community.”
Right around noon the same day, the three of us piled into Mom’s blue 1964 Mustang. The car was twenty-one years old now, exactly my age, but still going strong. She called it Fred.
“Let me come too!” cried Bess, standing in the doorway. The yellow door frame looked like a boxy halo around her little brown face.
“You aren’t old enough. Soon, baby girl,” Nana said. “Lawrence!”
Lawrence was my older brother, home from college. He poked his head out the living room window.
“Keep your little sister entertained, you hear me?” Nana yelled.
“Damn, stop screeching at me,” Lawrence grumbled. He sounded a little bit like Papa Bertrand. Then he disappeared back into the house. Lawrence was all in his head, practicing his tunes. He never minded that he wasn’t like the rest of us, that he didn’t see or hear the things that we did. He saw music in the air instead—like colors, he said.
Bess pouted, still there on the front step, but she knew better than to run after us. I felt guilty for a moment, realizing she felt left out. She’d likely thought that by telling everyone and their mother in Los Angeles, we’d have so much business we’d ask for her help.
It only took us about a five-minute drive to get to Mr. Everett’s place, the green cottage-looking house halfway down winding Clayton Avenue. Ordinarily we would’ve walked, but Nana’s knees had been hurting her since Papa died.
Mr. Everett was rocking back and forth on his porch. It was the most glorious summer we’d seen in the decade, and the whole community—aside from Lawrence—couldn’t stay inside for a minute, though we kept to our neighborhood.
It was 1985, and boys had stopped dying in Vietnam and started dying on the streets. Summer was expected to bring it on even worse. Sometimes they got into scuffles with uniforms and came out in body bags—a horrendous sight, no matter how many times I saw it—but we also heard about the nighttime drivebys, the lives snapped in two.
Mom even had to testify two months before, when she heard a man in the alley behind the house beg for his life, before the two bullets hit the brick wall that separated her from the dying scream.
Lawrence and I were away at college at the time, and nothing woke Bess up. Nana was at the hospital that night, the nurses having called to say her husband was dead.
“Come on, ladies, I’ll take you back,” Mr. Everett said, and I stopped thinking about the bad parts of summer.
We went through the white fence next to the garage. “Momma!” he yelled.
The old woman, shimmer-thin, waved at us.
He sighed. “She don’t talk or nothing, and she makes a good soup on a cold day, but all of a sudden, the vegetables are turning rotten. It’s a sign from God that He wants her to join Him.”
We nodded, went over to the tomatoes, and held hands. Mom laid out the stones and opened the prayer circle. I lit the sage and smudged, watching the curls lick the red fruit. Nana recited the spell—Psalm 91. It sounded like a lullaby on her tongue.
It turned out that Mrs. Everett liked her circumstances just fine, thank you very much. She was mighty hard to get rid of. We had to come back and do it again twice, but finally, moon hanging low above us one bright evening, Mrs. Everett handed us her basket and said she had a meeting she was late for. She didn’t walk into the trees like Papa did, just disappeared into the moonlight.
Mr. Everett was no secret-keeper, and even though Nana didn’t charge him (he wouldn’t have paid anyway, he said, what with it taking us so long) and told him she didn’t have time to be doing this all the time, neighbors or not, soon everybody and their mother was offering to pay us in pies and gossip for their spirit-shuttling needs.
Within a week, we were getting almost as much praise at Sunday Mass as the Lord Himself. Nana, who everybody knew to be in charge of our trio, even got the attention of old Depression-era choir ghosts, known to be tied to their benches. They looked down from the balcony, some hard-hatted and nervous, others hopeful. They got to wanting to move on.
Lawrence rolled his eyes.
“You’re just jealous,” I teased him, feeling like between these white pews, I was famous. “I’m a real Ghostbuster, not like those white men with hoses and contraptions and whatnot.” I swung back on my pink kitten heels, even feeling pretty, too.
“Don’t play,” Lawrence scoffed. “Like I wanna be seeing dead people all the time and getting taken advantage of by these so-called good Christian folk. I plan to economize my talents.” Lawrence was twenty-three, just barely, fresh into life. I was home on summer break from Xavier and found him singing hard, loving soft.
“Oh, you gotta gig yet?” I said, smiling. Since Lawrence had graduated—from Xavier too, though all that time in supremely haunted New Orleans had done nothing to spark up any latent ghost-seeing genes—he’d been back in his bedroom, surrounded by us women. His light skin had got him a job waiting tables in afternoons and evenings at the Brown Derby off the freeway. I was not so lucky.
Lawrence looked at me, annoyed, opened his mouth to say something, but began coughing instead.
“What’s that there?” I said, my eyebrow going up. It happened without my control.
“Got that summer cold that’s been going around,” he said.
“You’ve never had a cold in your life. You sure you not dying?” I said, still teasing.
Lawrence shook his head. “Stop playing,” he said again.
“Well, don’t give it to me, is all,” I went on. “I got a job to do.”
I was bored out of my mind that summer. We were halfway through the decade. I was just entering a new one of my own. I had no boys on retainer, and most of my friends were working retail jobs during the day. Only reason I didn’t have one myself was because we only had two cars (and even that was lucky, in those days), and Mom worked early weekday mornings, checking bags at the airport, so she and Lawrence were on different schedules and couldn’t carpool.
This day was a Sunday in June, and the long summer stretched before me. Might as well catch ghosts. But that night, Mom decided it was the right time to give me a lecture instead.
“You are the eldest of my girls, which means you got the gift, and your siblings ain’t,” Mom reminded me as I sat at the kitchen table before me. “Now, the best trick for getting rid of tricky spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, apparitions, imprints, demons, and any which way bad energy, is to smudge, and to do it properly,” she said. Her soft black curls were piled up in her favorite green hair wrap. She’d told me something similar when I was young and seeing the dead for the first time.
I was told of my gift when I was five years old and my imaginary friend turned out to be a nineteenth century Mexican girl named Teresa, who’d died of smallpox in the Mission San Gabriel. Teresa haunted our upstairs bedroom, the one Lawrence now slept in (this was naturally decided after I started complaining of her cries keeping me up, Lawrence being the only one unbothered by ghosts and all.) I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, but this was never a problem with Teresa, who’d been taught all her Catholic rites in English and, to Mom’s delight, was happy to practice with me.
I was told sometime later that I’d had the gift nearly my whole life, since Nana put her thumbs upon my eyes at baptism and I gained sight and salvation all at once.
Papa Bertrand was the one who moved the family out here after the war, looking for integration, and found white people didn’t like him there anymore than they did in Opelousas. Catholic witches were as common as the ghosts themselves in Louisiana—they called us voodoo queens—but there weren’t as many black and Cherokee people practicing the original faith out in East Los Angeles. We went to church with the Trinidadians, the Mexicans, the other displaced, mixed-race French Creoles. It was the place where we all got along, even as our men refused to make friends with each other.
Nana made a better impression on the community. Not long after the move, her cousin Tony’s mother-in-law, Beatrice, got her a job alongside Beatrice as a seamstress for wealthy ladies on the West Side. Beatrice had grown up on a Choctaw reservation and could speak to the dead as well, and when they were done piecing black dresses together, they would hold seances for the customers, so they could speak with their dead sons.
They’d put on a bit of a show, of course, and bought a glass ball to pass off as crystal but said they could really hear them when they called. The boys. They were still dying on the fields.
I’d heard my fair share of spectral screams by now, but Bess hadn’t, not at all. Though I was the eldest and expected to do the most of the gift (shuttle lost souls to their afterlife, rid the tortured living of their door-slamming, ring-stealing poltergeists), at twelve, Bess should’ve at least been able to speak with Teresa. Especially seeing as she was always carrying around some kind of sage or crystal totems and asking for a Ouija board. Bess’s dreams weren’t caught in any webbing but knotted in the back of her head, where she disremembered them. The ghost-girl had been so offended, in fact, that she’d gone off somewhere else to mope, and we hadn’t seen her in a couple years.
I never told Bess so, but I was honestly a bit embarrassed for her myself. Even Mr. Everett and all our other neighbors could see the spirits still lodged into the corners of their old, earthquake-bitten houses.
“Now, I know you know this,” Mom went on, “but we had to try so many times with Mrs. Everett because you’ve been distracted in your head.”
“Have not,” I said.
“Tell me the prayer, again,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. We were sitting at the dinner table, late, Lawrence out with his friends and Bess asleep. Papa still dead and gone.
“If you can perfect this prayer, you’ll be able to call any spirit to you,” she said. “So long as they haven’t moved on yet.”
“Like Papa?” I asked. Sounding like a child.
She looked at me for a moment, like she’d been hoping I’d never think of it. “It’s been ten years since he passed, Josephine.”
“He didn’t pass. He was shot down.”
“Maybe his spirit never left Vietnam,” Mom said. “Who knows? Either way, it’s too far.”
“I know,” I snapped. “He’d never leave us. He’d always come back. He told me so when he left.”
“Josephine . . .” she said, but she looked like she didn’t know how to finish.
“We’ll find him,” I said.
She sighed. “We’ve been called on to help these people get to God’s good place. If you spend all your time looking for one soul, you gonna neglect them. Some of them just don’t know how to see the light and you can help them, baby girl.”
We sat in silence for a moment before I went to get the notebook. On television, witches had grimoires. We didn’t have nothing so ancient but my mother’s old college notebook, where she wrote down the rituals she made up. Nana kept the real deal locked up, safe from the neighborhood nosebiddies looking for free love potion recipes.
I recited the old cleansing prayer again—You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday—until Mom was satisfied with the rhythm.
“I’m ‘bout to lay my head down,” she said, finally. But I knew she never went to bed before midnight, unable ever to rest, not for missing Papa but because the man she was seeing at the time was a policeman and she was always thinking he’d meet his end too. She wasn’t too paranoid, really—until she’d started to prove herself useful in the community as of late, there’d been some grumbling about her dating a Stormtrooper, even if he was Black and grew up just down the street from Mr. Everett.
Mom knew the moment Papa’s breath stopped, kicked out of his chest—she said she opened her eyes at four in the morning and it was like she was in Vietnam in orange light, her nightgown wet with blood, his heart a blooming rose. He said goodbye, and she told him to stay with her.
He didn’t, she said. He beamed up like Captain Kirk.
But I knew souls didn’t go that fast. They liked to linger, attend their funerals, slow the grieving process with their moans and shakes. And with three children home and Bess only two at the time, Papa was the type to linger hard.
My mother had given up on his ghost, moved on with other men. But I lit the candle each night, said spells to entice him, told him if he came back Mom would give them up, and I’d find the rhyme to make him living again.
Ten years after he died, ten years of souls crying for more time on this earth, I’d grown up and didn’t put so much stock in reincarnation. But I knew Papa was still out there. I could almost feel his hand on mine when I woke.
And my rituals were paying off. “You gettin’ real good, baby,” Nana told me at Mrs. O’Leary’s the next day. We had been called out to Pasadena to rid the sweet old lady of a boy who climbed into her bed every night to ask for stories. He wasn’t potty-trained, Mrs. O’Leary said. Every night there was spectral urine in the bed, and her dogs wouldn’t come inside anymore, not even to eat.
“Tell me the one about the princess,” the boy asked me when I found him in the laundry room, hiding from the spells. He was sandy-haired and looked to be about seven.
“Aren’t you too grown for fairy tales?” I said. Mom was dusting baby powder on the floor. We found that this worked better with the younger haints, especially if they’d died in the last century. Children before then had had to do without such luxuries.
“No. You got a sucker?”
I shook my head, and he frowned at me.
“Where’s your mama at?” Nana asked him. She was trying to distract him, seeing as he was staring at Mom now and dipping his finger into the rim of the white circle.
“I don’t know. Baltimore, last Daddy told me,” said the boy.
“You’re gonna see her real soon,” I said.
“I don’t wanna,” he said and began to cry.
◆
Lawrence said he was going to the movies that night.
“How come you never invite me?” I asked him, slung across a kitchen chair.
“You wouldn’t have fun, Josie,” he said.
“How would you know?” I said.
He dropped his keys into the pocket of his dark denim jacket. “I’m just gonna see a movie with my boy Jasper. You should go out with your friends, take a break from the exorcisms.”
“But I’m getting real good,” I said. “I might be able to do it on my own soon.”
Lawrence looked at me for a moment, then down at his keys. “You still lookin’ for Dad?” he said. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“I don’t know.”
“Girl, you can’t lie for shit.” He sighed. “You let me know if you find him,” he said quietly.
After he left, I blessed the half moon and lit light blue candles. Nana hated Wicca, calling it the magic of the colonizers. She didn’t know that sometimes I went to the meetings downtown where they taught middle-aged white women to read tarot and charge quartz. I was the only one of my kind there, and I thought I needed reminding to be grateful for what I had back home. The community, the community.
I was almost done with the spell when Mom walked into the bedroom.
“Don’t let your grandmother see you doing this,” was all she said. “I don’t want her telling the ancestors you’ve been disrespecting them.”
“But it’s working,” I said. You’re telling me I’m just supposed to depend on these old Cherokee and voodoo rituals? I can’t explore a bit? I’ve been writing my own spells.”
She sat down in the middle of the circle, closed her eyes. The candles went out. Then a sudden wind pushed me halfway across the room.
“Ow.” I stood back up. “That was some spooky shit. And passive aggressive.”
Mom dusted her hands and pointed at me. “You don’t need nothing but what your grandma and I have taught you,” she said. “And I don’t want to see you bringing that dark magic into my house anymore. We’re supposed to be helping these poor souls move on, and that’s all. And stop calling them spells,” she added as she got up. “We’re not witches. We’re Catholics.”
She walked out and I lit the candles again. I was still up when Lawrence came home. I could hear him coughing across the house, and when he walked past my room I got up, knocked on his door.
“It’s late, Josie,” he said.
“I think I’ll be able to find him,” I said.
“What?”
“I was reading the cards. They were about Papa.”
Lawrence moved past me, into my room, where he saw the ring of dripping candles, the tarot card that had fallen from the pack. He picked it up. “Death,” he read.
“We never knew for sure if Papa was dead. This could be about him. At the very least, we’ll have closure.”
“It could be about one of us,” Lawrence said after a minute. “I don’t like this.”
I was confused. “Superstitious, now? I thought you said tarot was ‘mumbo jumbo’ anyway—”
“I don’t want to hear about this anymore,” he said, and the card floated from his hand down to the floor. “And don’t you talk about closure. That’ll never be enough for you. You’ll always be looking for that man’s ghost.”
He left, and he didn’t come out of his bedroom until late the next day. I wondered about him for a while. His cold wasn’t getting any better, and he stopped laughing at the ghost stories.
Before the war, before Papa died, Lawrence was my best friend. I was closer to him in age than to baby Bess, and I used to think to myself, here is a boy who knows how the world works. Lawrence would stand stock still in the face of bullies, waiting patiently for them to
We both had trouble making friends. Mom spent her savings on Catholic school for Lawrence to get bullied for not being white enough, and for me to get bullied for not being Black enough. Despite the loneliness, I was relieved. My brother didn’t seem to need anyone, but he never left me alone.
It was strange, then, his keeping secrets from me. He was hardly home, not just this summer but the ones previous, ever since he’d left for college. It was like he’d grasped a new life and was panicked, constantly, that someone would steal it from him. It was the reason I’d followed him to Xavier when I could’ve gone to USC or UCLA. But once there, I discovered that his reserve was not specific to Los Angeles, but to our family. I was never sure I really knew this new version of him.
◆
Soon enough I was distracted from my brother, because finally Bess started seeing things. She was too old to have an imaginary friend, and so when she told us she had met a girl in the attic who braided her hair and sung to her in Spanish, we were surprised to find that she was just a late bloomer. I was proud of her, and relieved to be so.
“She’s very nice, but her hands get too hot, and then she starts crying,” Bess said, as I went to look for Teresa. I found her sitting on a box of Papa’s old letters in the tiny attic, whistling a hymn.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” I said to the girl. “What brings you back?”
“Well,” she said. “I have to take him on home.” She put her hands on her knees and watched me expectantly, as if I were the one meant to deliver this soul to her.
“Who?” I asked excitedly. “The soldier?”
She shook her head. “No, but I think I’ve seen him before.”
“Are you sure?” I asked slowly. Ghosts were notoriously unreliable. They often had something to gain from the living, something we couldn’t see with our own eyes and which we couldn’t understand. “You must remember my father. Theodore.”
“Will you read me a story?” she asked, eyes black and bright.
I sighed. “Wouldn’t you like to be free, finally? Aren’t you getting bored with us?”
I was frustrated with Teresa and wanted her to leave already. She still held a soft spot in my heart, as my first playmate and my first friend, but she was trapped in a rotating loop, repeating the same day over and over, the day her mother died and Teresa inherited her smallpox. But she was no use to anybody, least of all herself, musing on some unfinished business she couldn’t even remember.
“Maybe in a little bit,” Teresa said and went back to singing.
◆
Lawrence’s cough turned bloody, and eventually he resigned himself to a hospital bed. It was still August, no season for sickness. I waited for the coughing to stop.
The doctors, faces wrinkled, took him into a room to ask him questions, and afterwards, told Mom that they had a few tricks up their sleeves but he’d gotten himself into this mess and it was hard to get rid of.
I still thought, Lawrence is different.
But when Jasper came to visit him one night, tears bright and holy, they shook together like wounded animals. I watched them, knowing myself an intruder, not knowing my brother at all. All I knew was that boys were dying again, not in war but in love, and that Lawrence wasn’t getting any better.
Mom and I sat in the ward night after night, willing him to try just a little harder. I wandered the halls after Mom fell asleep in her stiff plastic chair and I saw boy after boy, gray and sweating like Lawrence or hit by knives and bullets. None of them looked a day over thirty.
On the third night, I heard a mother’s shrieks reverberate through the halls, and I saw a bright flash outside the window. A boy lost, but wise enough to move onwards.
Nana had told me a story once about Beatrice’s father, the son of a slave and a Choctaw healer. When he knew death was approaching, he went off into the mountains to rest and to die, and no trace of him was ever found. I was never sure if it were true, always thinking it must be some kind of story from one of those old-timey Westerns. But now I could see that Lawrence was turning his face from his family, trying to prepare us. The kind of goodbye that doesn’t suit a soul.
The next night, I was driving home to trade sentry-seats with Nana, to lie to Bess about how Lawrence was doing, hot fries in the cup holder next to me. Suddenly, I noticed Lawrence sitting next to me in the passenger seat.
“Can’t be sneaking on me like that, brother,” I said quietly.
“I had to tell you I was leaving. It got me,” he said. I couldn’t tell what he was wearing. Not those weeds no more. He’d gone fuzzy, slipping into a new, spectral state. “Wanted to ask you to pray for me.”
“Don’t go, Lawrence,” I said, though I knew he was already on his way. “Don’t be like Dad. ”
“I don’t think they’ll let me stay.” Lawrence touched my head. “But I’m gonna keep an eye on you for a bit.” He melted.
I thought of Mom. I took the offramp to the hospital, wondering if she was there yet, if she’d been holding his hands when it happened, if she lifted his soul from his body herself. Or maybe she’d been sitting in the wrong place too, gone during those last breaths, given only a rising spirit as Teresa came to take him away.
Nana could barely move herself, but she arranged the funeral because Mom wouldn’t get out of bed. “I spent so much time ridding others of their dead, I didn’t even notice my own son dying,” Mom said, her bedroom beginning to smell of darkness and fatigue.
If ever there was a time for my father’s spirit to come back it would’ve been now. He would’ve held her hand and told her it wasn’t all that bad, this death business, that he’d take care of Lawrence and they’d visit however often she liked.
But he didn’t. It was just us, three women with power and none at all, and Bess who wept so hard her hair turned white. I began to think she might have it the worst of the four of us after all, carry the weight the hardest. But then one day she told me that she couldn’t see Teresa anymore and hadn’t seen Lawrence though she tried and tried. The day after Lawrence was buried, her hair went black again, and it was a long time until she’d speak of ghosts around any of us.
I didn’t sleep, knowing that if I waited too long, Lawrence would move on and, gift or no gift, I wouldn’t be able to find him again.
Nana caught me spreading lavender and crying on his grave one day, the day Bess’s hair turned back. “Honey, you can’t be raising the whole world back from the dead,” she said. “You keep calling these ghosts back and they won’t ever leave you be.”
“I can’t help it,” I sobbed. “I tried to turn it off as a kid, but they just kept showing up, wanting to tell me their stories. Said their burden was mine, now. Then I have to absorb everything, and it’s weighing me down. All their heartbreaks, their rejections, their murders.”
Nana shook her head. “Josephine, you don’t think I’ve had these spirits unloading their baggage on me and my cousins for decades now?”
I had thought of that, but didn’t want to admit it, and so I said nothing.
“You know how I got your mean ole Papa to leave us, after he’d been dead near two months?” she asked.
“You told him you’d let the bank foreclose on the house, or something,” I said, sniffling.
“I did no such thing. That was just what I told y’all because nobody would stop asking. I told him I was sorry for every which way thing he’s accused me of over four decades. Anytime I forgot something at the grocery store, or got my hair braided, he’d scream hell and high water at me that I was worthless, I was ugly, I didn’t love him or my children or nothing.” Her face looked like it was full of aches and pains.
“You really felt bad about stuff like that?” I asked. “Getting your hair done?”
“Not anymore, of course not. Took me long enough but I got right in my head. But I told him what he wanted to hear, to get him to go. And I’m crossing my fingers that when I go myself, I go quick, I don’t hang around hoping somebody needs me still. And I pray to the Lord above that he don’t take me to the same place where your Granddaddy went.”
“Well, I can’t even find Lawrence anyway,” I said. “Even if I wanted to talk to him. I have no idea where he is.”
She pressed her finger against my temple. “That’s because you in your head again. Grief and craziness got you all tangled up into knots. You been looking for your daddy so long that you forgot why we been doing this.”
After that, I didn’t call Lawrence from the mist, though I sat on his earth every day and waited for a sign. “I’m sorry for what I said. You can move on, brother,” I cried. One day I found Temperance on my bed, reversed. Only my brother had known I kept tarot cards under my mattress, safe from the traditionalists. A sign.
I knew Wiccan purists used new candles for each spell, but I put out the same ones I’d used to try to contact my father. When I opened the circle, I called for him. He sat down next to me, blue denim-clad again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You tell Dad I said hi, if you ever find him.”
“I don’t know what I’ll find over there,” he said. He was frightened.
“You’ll be alright,” I said. “I know what I’m talking about. It’s my job to help people move on.”
Lawrence nodded. “You put your talents to good use, Josie,” he said.
We held hands for a minute. “Now don’t you come back here,” I said.