Each time Augusta awoke offered another battle with gravity. Earth had held onto her loosely in her youth, occasionally grabbed her by one of her belt loops or gripped a sleeve, but it had never stopped her from leaping high when her body so wanted. Never tripped her up. With age, gravity’s company had become ever present. It tried to keep her in bed, shoved her back down in the mornings. She only hoped that by the time this enemy had gotten full control of her, overpowering her feet, her arms, and her head, she’d already be dead.
This recent fatigue aggravated Augusta, who had such a determined desire to carry on yet an inability to do very much. It wasn’t like her inability to speak, which she’d eventually acclimated herself to after the strokes. Still, often she missed the sound of her own voice, the underhum to it like an organ.
If she had her voice, she’d use it now, as they sat around the table, to tell her granddaughter to make her another drink. Willow had stirred together a batch of tea with several shots of whiskey to perk up Nickie’s birthday dinner. Augusta would also tell her to stop with the yammering.
“He was good-looking, Nan. And smart. Didn’t you think so, Vic?”
Willow, ever the circulator, had started in again about the visitor who’d come and gone while Augusta had slept, a young man there for Nickie. Aside from Victoria’s therapy clients, she couldn’t recall the last time they’d received a guest. It had become the norm, their isolation, not even the neighbors coming over to warn them to move a car parked along the curb on street-sweeping days. Sometimes Augusta considered finding her way over to the seniors’ center, how nice it might be to play cards with a group of ladies, to get lunch or even a drink with a girlfriend. But none of them had friends, not even Nickie, whose invitations to slumber parties or trips to the mall had fizzled away years ago, back when the girl was in middle school. This development had seemed fine with Victoria, who never encouraged playdates and such like other mothers. She empathized with her granddaughter, knew it had to bother her to take such an extreme stance.
Victoria stayed silent as if she hadn’t heard her sister’s question, but that didn’t faze Willow. “Tell Nana how fine that boy is, Nickie.”
“Auntie, no!” Her great-granddaughter’s eyes grew big. “I mean, he’s a very nice person, Nana. He’s really smart. He’s an artist.”
Victoria cleared her throat.
“I told him that story about you meeting Madonna at your retirement party. He thought that was cool.”
The singer had been at the same restaurant as they celebrated Augusta’s last day as a billing clerk with South Bay Counseling Services. She’d seen the woman’s photo in a magazine before, Michael Jackson’s date to the Oscars one year. Someone had taken a picture of her with Augusta, the singer’s lips painted a stunning red, but Augusta didn’t know where it was anymore.
“He really wants to meet you, Nana. I told him that you are the most important person in our family,” Nickie said earnestly.
Sometimes the way her family spoke of her worried Augusta. Her reputation approached sainthood in their home, Victoria at times even hinting at her eventual idolization as a loa, just like Lanora, a great-great-grandmother of hers. But her past knew better.
Hearing about Nickie and the boy made Augusta think back to her seventeen-year-old self in Louisiana and how infinite life had seemed then. These days, it was difficult for Augusta to recall what she’d had for breakfast sometimes or when her favorite TV shows aired, but those long-ago days were clear, almost tangible. How adventurous and confident she’d been, and how boring and unimaginative she’d believed her mother to be. There was no reason, Augusta had felt, to go to college or supposedly culture herself with haughty books or piano lessons, only to become a miniature version of her mother. On misty summer evenings, she often slipped away from the coziness of her parents’ home and headed down to the club in the Quarter on Conti, the sound of hard bop filling her ears, jazz twisting itself in a swanky new way.
She’d gone to the club—the Dew Drop Inn—for the first time with a man named Clarence who was seven years her senior and father to twin girls living with their mother in what was then the Iberville. He had a narrow gap between his front teeth, always on display with his roaring hyena laugh. She liked that he took her places, showed her off. But she didn’t consider him attractive. After declining his many requests for blow jobs in the bathroom, he’d given up and left her high yellow ass, as he’d said, alone. But she’d returned to the club without him one night, bribing the stubby fellow at the door to let her in with the coins she’d lifted from her father’s desk drawer.
The second time without Clarence was when everything changed. It was a stormy night, the sky ripped to pieces by fingers of lightning and fists of thunder. As she entered the club, her eyes searching for a dark nook, a piece of wall to blend into, a fiery voice made her jump. “You alone tonight, pretty young girl?”
Augusta looked around for the source. Wisps of stage light floated through the dusty air, carving out a face a few feet away. A woman moving toward her, with shiny eyes, penciled-in lips, and woolly hair long enough to swing on. She came close, too close, the mint of her breath not concealing the smoke on it. She didn’t smell much different than the club, its walls soaked with nights of booze, cigars, and reefer. The woman drew near enough to kiss Augusta, and for an instant, she thought the woman might do just that. But she laughed with tiny yellow teeth, then turned and beckoned for Augusta to follow. The brightness from the nearby coat-check window revealed a silky red scarf and a chaotic print of spirals on her purple dress, a pairing that might have seemed odd on anyone else. But it was right on this woman—the red, a color Augusta eventually wore every day, for it brought love and energy. Passion.
Augusta trailed the woman out of fear as much as a bizarre attraction, a magnetism pulling her along. The door in the corner where the woman sat some nights watching folks opened to a narrow set of steps leading to her workshop. Once upstairs, Augusta took off her damp jacket and sat down on a shopworn chair as instructed. The room flickered, lit by a few hundred candles, it seemed, both tall and melted down to their roots.
“Look at me,” the woman said after introducing herself as Bela Nova, and Augusta did, the tiny fires all around them reflecting off the shapely bottles lined up on shelves. The walls were dark, with painted pictures of Catholic saints and snakes and odd symbols, and what looked to be a shrine in one corner. The woman’s eyes widened, her lids and eyelashes smeared with makeup, blues and smoky blacks. “You know why I called you here.”
She couldn’t be sure if this was a question or statement, the woman’s inflection oddly placed in the middle of the sentence. When Bela Nova raised one of her eyebrows and leaned in close, Augusta shook her head no.
The woman laughed. “Of course you do. You know why you’re here. You just don’t know that you know.”
The young Augusta gripped the side of the chair, still not averting her eyes from the woman.
“You are Augusta Marie Laurent?”
“Yes. I am.”
“I know you are.” And the woman began speaking, foretelling. As she did, her hands kept busy, reaching out to touch Augusta’s hair, then emptying a velvety bag onto the table: some sort of root, three dried-up peas, a playing card. She lit a candle without breaking her gaze from Augusta, poured oil over it from a tiny green bottle. She did these things naturally, effortlessly, the way fingers that know how to play the piano don’t hesitate.
“You weren’t born to live your own life, Augusta Marie. No. You’re a daughter of Lanora. A blessed one. A special one. Not all are.” The woman waved a crooked finger back and forth close to Augusta’s nose. “Your life, like mine, belongs to the people. For the right price, yes. But doing work for people, our people, who deserve to get a splinter of happiness in this dreadful place we call a world, you hear? Your life will be dedicated to helping them.”
Against her judgment, she nodded. She could discern a sparkle of truth in the older woman’s words, confirmation that what her mother desired for her was a future she’d not been intended to live.
“So you will come here. Stay with me. You’ll be my student.”
And right then she agreed to be Bela Nova’s apprentice. That choice, to learn from Bela Nova both the religion of Voodoo and the practice of hoodoo magic, all in the name of serving their people, was one she wished she could revisit. Not the part about helping others. But everything that happened because of it. Might she have done differently with her many decades of life now behind her? Perhaps. But of course, one of the first lessons she’d been taught by her mentor was that folks didn’t really have choices, just their fates. Even if she hadn’t said yes that night, she would have said yes someday.