It rained the last Friday in August, a week after Nickie brought over a boy for the first time. According to the fancy people on Augusta’s television, this rain was news. Long time ago, back home in New Orleans, talk about a summer shower might doom a conversation, make people consider you odd. Rain was what it did in the summer. But in California, folks sent text messages about the weather. Made phone calls and wrote poems. A late-summer rain hardly troubled Augusta, but it did remind her to think about the world. Made her wonder if the seasons, the sun, or the clouds were all imagined, and if she’d been a sucker to believe in it all, just like everyone else.
Propped up in her leather chair by a couple of pillows, watching the heavy mist fall, she thought of late-August days from before, when it hardly made sense to bathe, the muddiness of the day crawling over your skin even before you had a chance to wake, returning just moments after washing it off. Fans spinning in each room did nothing but push the air from one space to the next, kept the flies from settling anywhere for too long. Her last summer at her parents’ home, she would sit out on the porch and read, her bare feet stretched out in front of her, drops of rain falling in spurts. When she noticed, her mother would come out to fuss, telling her she needed to be inside helping with dinner, the clothes, the ironing. And if she was going to read, it should have been something captivating. One of the classics. None of that poetry nonsense she’d gotten hold of.
The day Augusta left home for good, her mother had worn a fuzzy blue dress. Felted wool, perhaps. With it, she donned pearls and inch-high heels as she vacuumed. When she finished, she would start dinner, a pot roast or a meat loaf with potatoes and carrots. Her parents lived life straight out of the magazines, glossy and finespun.
Her father was still at work when she told her mother, clutching a large paper bag that held all the belongings she required. She’d been with Bela Nova the evening before, when the woman confirmed she had Lanora’s gift, an ability to perceive people. “It’s in your eyes, I know it. You can look in my eyes and feel my emotions, can’t you?” She hadn’t known this ability, but once Bela Nova said so, it became her truth.
Her mother shut off the chromed-covered machine and put one hand on her side.
“Young lady, your curfew is ten o’clock and not a minute later. Or didn’t you learn anything from the thousand standards your father had you write about returning home at the proper time?”
The standards, she knew, had not been her father’s idea. “Yes. I did.”
Her mother smiled in rosy red. “Good. So I’ll see you back home before ten. No later.” She turned the vacuum back on, her gaze steady on Augusta for just a moment before turning it off again. “Where is it you’re going this evening, anyway? And Augusta, why are you carrying that greasy bag? Is that what this is about—you want me to lend you one of my bags?”
“I don’t want any of your bags. I said that I’m leaving,” Augusta told her mother.
“I heard what you said.” Her mother stood straighter, heels planted more firmly into the plush carpet nap. She raised her nose and rounded chin.
“I’m not coming back.” She sounded confident, Bela Nova having forced her to rehearse the statement, but if she’d been honest with herself, Augusta figured she’d be gone no more than a week.
“Of course you are. You have school in the morning. You’re lucky I’m letting you stay out until curfew after pulling this kind of game.”
“Mother, you know what I’m trying to say.” She took a step toward the door, another past her mother. “Please tell Daddy that I love him. And that I’ll call soon. Don’t try to find me.”
“Augusta Marie, you best have yourself back here by ten, you hear?”
Making her way south in the dusty heat, she wiped away the rush of tears she hadn’t thought would come, still tightly gripping her paper bag.
The door at the top of the landing opened before Augusta got a chance to knock. She marveled at the woman’s ability to sense her presence, until she realized someone was exiting, a client curiously bundled up and covered in the heat.
“Come in. Excuse me for a moment,” Bela Nova said, stepping out with the other woman and leaving Augusta alone in the dark blue room, filled with the smell of anise hyssop, fresh blooms that Bela Nova would later use for tea.
On the workbench, she noticed an open book, a nearby pillar candle erasing shadows from a page. The title at the top beckoned her: “Too Bad Love Hex.” Beneath it, she read that the user of the spell should be ready to deal with dreadful, even violent, repercussions, that one should think not once but tens of times before employing it. At the bottom of the page were the names of two women for whom, Augusta would learn, Bela Nova had cast the spell.
“It will work, but it won’t be pretty for her.”
Augusta dropped her paper bag of belongings, Bela Nova’s voice thwacking her from behind. She turned as the woman walked toward her, sullen moonlight from the small window finding the whites of her eyes.
Bela Nova pointed to the door with her thumb. “But she has a lot of money. She’ll be fine in the end. I wouldn’t advise using this one.” She touched the book. “Matter of fact...” Bela Nova ripped the page out and halved it four times before slipping it into her cleavage. “Best to keep some distance between a strong hex and the steps to uncross it. A medic doesn’t keep the venom with the antidote, does he?”
Augusta hadn’t even considered that a person stocked venom, but her naivety kept her from asking, her thoughts still stuck on the lady who’d left and the possible reasons why she might need the spell.
That first night, the two settled down to a dinner of turtle soup, dirty rice, and chicken fricassee. Before they ate, Bela Nova lifted up names of loa that Augusta would eventually come to consider family, not corporeal beings but real all the same, their bodies invisible but their spirit outlines ever present. “We bless our almighty Creator, first off, and give thanks for this abundant table. And next, to the comely and wondrous Oyá-Yansan, who has shown grace with my request, praying on my behalf to increase my influence, to double my power.” Augusta tried to keep her eyes closed as Bela Nova spoke, but she couldn’t stop them from fluttering free. The purple sheen on the woman’s lips shone in the candlelight, her gummy mouth open wide, arms out.
“How grateful I am to you for shedding me of the burden cast by so many others. I know you spoke words in my favor, pushing YeYe off my back, reminding her of the many years I revered her, willing to offer everything I had. But now she indeed is sweet and tender, and I am in service to you, Oyá, for your intercession.”
Augusta clamped down her lids again as the woman paused, less concerned about the prayer itself as she was the cooling pots and platters of food. Her mother had never been very successful in the kitchen, letting meals oversimmer or understew, adding double the salt required or forgetting to use any at all. The food would sit and wait, however. Bela Nova’s routine of thanking the loa was not to be rushed or skipped for fear of pissing them off. Once she added a new loa to the lineup, the name stayed, drawing out each evening’s prayer even longer: Oyá-Yansan. YeYe, also called Oshun. Papa Legba and Erzulie Freda. Erzulie Dantor when her finances needed help, and the Marrassa. In time Augusta would learn to be patient.
“And to the divine Lanora. If you are able to see, I am now raising the first of your daughters, helping her to use her gifts.”
Augusta had a feeling that if she opened her eyes again, she’d catch the woman’s strong stare. But she soon learned that Bela Nova kept her lids shut when petitioning the loa to show them respect, that her mind was focused only on them.
“She is well-suited for this work, and she will elevate your name in the spirit world. I pray that you will bless me accordingly, spreading far and wide my name once I am gone. That women who are desperate, who are not secure, who are not right, will call out to Bela Nova when my body leaves this world just as they seek me out now.”
After dinner, Bela Nova handed Augusta two pieces of paper, a fountain pen, and a small canister of Raven’s Blood ink made with a rare essential oil from Japan. “You need to learn Lanora’s song. I’ll sing it, and you write it down.”
Augusta filled the cartridge without a problem, but when she pressed on the nib, a rush of ink flowed, a large blob soaking the sheet.
“Try again.” Bela Nova picked up the second piece of paper and placed it on top of the first. “Once you can recall it without my help, you’ll write it in my book, daughter of Lanora. How fortunate I am to have you to here to do it.”
The woman began with a hum, long and resonant, an unexpected, beautiful sound. The lyrics haunted Augusta—she missed whole phrases trying to get the words down while absorbing the details of Lanora’s tragedy, her eventual purpose, her found peace. There were more details in the song than her own family had ever spoken to her about the woman. With the exception of her father, who had told her she was related to a well-known saint but not about any kind of gift or song, the Laurents, it seemed, were ashamed of Lanora, not associating themselves with the lore about her spoken in the streets. Nickie’s mother had called the woman foul Voodoo trash.
Once she finished to the best of her ability, Bela Nova looked over Augusta’s shoulder at what she’d written. “It doesn’t appear you understand the value of this song. I don’t need it. And if I did, I already have it, here.” She put a finger to her forehead. “Young Augusta, Lanora lived to give this story to you. You’re the first daughter in her bloodline.”
She began blowing out candles, gray shadows swelling to black, the room disappearing. The smoke tickled Augusta’s throat. She restrained herself from coughing.
“That song’s more powerful than you could imagine, especially with you coming here to join me. Singing it can thwart horrible consequences for you, young Augusta. I wish I had the same advantage, but I’m not a descendant of good Lanora. Don’t disappoint her.” She blew out the last candle, leaving Augusta to feel her way in the dark to the nook where she’d sleep. She lay down on the hard mattress, covered herself with a small blanket, and listened to Bela Nova’s voice from a distance.
“I will make you great in her name. And for that, one day I, too, will be a mother loa.”
She hadn’t anticipated this sort of pressure. It scared her. But unlike the ideas her mother had for her future, her mentor’s expectations also exhilarated her, even if she wasn’t quite sure she was the right person for the job. How did Bela Nova know about her lineage, her relation to Lanora? She didn’t dare ask. All she could do was try with all of her might and energy to believe.
The smell of garlic, onions, and simmered meat tickled Augusta awake. As routinely as she napped, she hadn’t meant to doze off, wanting to catch Judge Mathis from the beginning. By now, she’d missed twenty minutes and so she called it a loss, refusing to rewind the show the way Nickie had taught her. On the coffee table, she noticed a packed plate, rice and a piece of shrimp having tumbled off, sauce dripped on the floor.
Willow had been in the kitchen for a couple of hours, taking a virtual cooking class. She came into the family room with a fistful of paper towels and a glass of water. “You try it, Nana? It’s Puerto Rican food.”
Augusta leaned forward to make out the items on the plate.
“That’s mofongo right there. You’ll like that, with the shrimp. And that’s arroz con gandules—peas and rice, I think. Arroz is definitely rice. And empanadas. I’m trying to branch out, you know? I’m going to do a French bistro class next week...” Willow went back into the kitchen, still going on. Augusta couldn’t help but note she hadn’t actually cleaned up the mess she’d made.
Nickie walked in from the foyer, light on her feet. She appeared to be en route to the kitchen but stopped after glancing at Augusta. “Nana, what happened?”
Nickie picked up the bits of food that Willow had spilled, then dabbed the spots of sauce with the paper towels. She’d always been a sweet kid, but watching Nickie, Augusta noted how mature she’d become, with her lovely freckled eyes. She’d slimmed down, lost some of her musculature from her basketball days. Give it another decade, and she’d get curves like the rest of them, though Augusta wondered if the girl’s feet would continue to grow; they already had difficulty finding shoes in her size. Long feet like her father, even though he hadn’t been very tall.
If she had the chance, she might take Nickie aside one Saturday afternoon, come up with a way to communicate with her about love, share the things Victoria never would, not that Augusta had a lot of experience with it. If her great-granddaughter was in love, there wasn’t much she or Victoria or even the loa could do about it. That first love—that young love—was resilient. Even now, Augusta hadn’t shaken all the emotions ignited by the first man she had loved.
She’d apprenticed with Bela Nova for a year and a half when she stole the woman’s son right from under her.
It puzzled Augusta how someone like Bela Nova had raised a man like Dudley Lee. He didn’t get the business, had no clue about money, how to make it, how to get it out of strangers’ wallets like his mother did. He was a heart man—he stuck it out and let it make his decisions for him. Not a very finicky heart, fond of all kinds of women. He had his pick of them too, taking Bela Nova’s less interesting features and making them handsome—her square chin, her sagging thin lips, her narrow nose. These, along with his stretched-out frame and ruddy brown skin, kept Dudley Lee’s little black book fully stocked with names and numbers. But he was a sweet young man, an earnest man, similar to her father. He cracked a lot of jokes, as if he was a budding stand-up comedian, and though she didn’t laugh much, she always found reason to when he came around. Her favorite times in the shop always involved Dudley Lee. She was in love for the first time and had a hunch that he was attracted to her, physically and emotionally. More than a hunch, really, her body reacting, the palms of her hands tingly when she spoke to him.
But Dudley Lee was dating the only daughter of a Creole couple, up-and-comers in the local political scene. She liked the girl the moment she saw her, Bela Nova would tell folks, though Augusta recalled a grimace, a precise upturn of her nose when she first stepped inside the workshop, clinging to Dudley Lee’s bicep, delicate with lanky appendages, a grasshopper of a young lady with a personality to match. When Bela Nova learned how loaded Genevieve Broussard’s parents were, however, she could hear the crunch of dollar bills in her fist, and soon after, she’d urged Dudley Lee to propose with a ring that had belonged to a famous jazz singer who’d swapped it one evening for one of Bela Nova’s pricey luck oils. It was a beautiful twisting of gold and cerulean gems.
Hearing that Bela Nova was a local entrepreneur, the mother and father approved of the match. With the marriage, Bela Nova’s plan was to move her business out of the Dew Drop Inn to a storefront. Legitimize herself. Sell perfume and smoothed stones and lavender soaps made in her bathtub. Those more traditional pieces would pay for themselves and do the favor of bringing in clientele, people with money—no more of those light-pocketed club folks, always wanting a hex on loan.
But Augusta, ultimately, would get in the way of her grand plans.
The wedding was scheduled to happen once the weather warmed—nobody wanted a wintry wedding. Which bought Augusta time to win Dudley Lee over, not that she was sure what she’d do with it.
Change her hair, perhaps. These were the days when the earth spun slower, held on longer to rainy autumns, miserable winters. But it was muggy all the time, like the town was shoved inside a clammy locker room, and Augusta had taken to wearing her hair naturally. It never really needed all the relaxer chemicals, but her mother had seemed not to be able to get it straight enough. She preferred the edges flush with Augusta’s scalp, even running a hot comb through it on Sunday mornings, weeks before a touch-up was needed. After moving to the Quarter and ditching the relaxer, she stopped worrying about her hair getting wet, walked down the streets on misty days and soaked in the city, even if it meant a frizzy do. She liked her hair the way it was, but the men, for some reason, seemed to prefer it long and straight. Maybe that’s why her mother had aspired to it. It had become endemic, women with chemically treated hair. Lots of men laying their hair straight too. It was something to consider. Changing her hair and getting some new clothes, a halter dress or two, tops that flaunted her bosom, revealed more than did her collared button-ups.
With early spring came a softer, more dollish Augusta. If he did notice the changes in her appearance and the way she carried herself around him, Dudley Lee didn’t acknowledge it. He even had the nerve to keep bringing the girl around the small apartment adjoined to the workshop, where they planned to move once they married, showing her where they would sleep, where she could set up her coin collection. The kitchen, where she would make his meals. How could Augusta survive sharing the wall of her small room with the two of them, forced to listen to their lovemaking?
It wasn’t until a few weeks before the ceremony that Augusta made a substantial move, summoning the nerve when Bela Nova stepped out to the Marigny in need of herbs. Strange, the risks women take for a handsome face. Dudley Lee’s was near immaculate, so what choice did Augusta have but to go against her better judgment and stack a stool atop a chair and climb her way up to reach the book? Never before had Augusta removed her mentor’s hefty book of spells and enchantments from the shelf. She’d watched Bela Nova consult the text, hovering over it on her workbench the way a housewife might pore over a cookbook. But Augusta never dared reference it without Bela Nova’s consent. Wouldn’t even look at it, afraid her eyes might be plucked straight from her head if she did. The only time she’d touched it was when she’d written Lanora’s song inside, two blank pages right in the middle of the book saved for the words, as if her mentor knew all along that Augusta would arrive one day and pen them there. After getting the song down, she assumed she’d be given access to the text, the act of remembering all the verses an initiation, but Bela Nova continued to withhold it. And while it had always been there for her to steal a peek at, Augusta had instead accepted things as they were and chose to believe that Bela Nova would show her what she needed to know and when. But the situation had become urgent, and now there was no way around it.
The book was weightier than she’d anticipated, and she lost her balance, fell from the stool and onto her back. It hurt, but she would be all right. As she flipped the pages in search of love spells, she could easily find something for the pain too. A healing spell using a doll, the one Bela Nova kept in her collection case that looked just like Augusta down to the small brown mole left of her chin, the wide-set rusty eyes, though it surely wasn’t wise to work magic on your own doll.
When she sat at the workbench and opened the tome, it was as if her insides spun around, each and every organ inside her taking its own fun-loving rotation, reckless and fast. She tickled all over, and that made her giggle, despite being afraid—of what she’d read, about the power she’d soon have. About Bela Nova walking through the workshop’s tattered wooden door, home early.
It was a leather-bound volume, its spine ribbed and worn and sprouting threads. The pages were thick and brittle. Almost burnt, but still well intact. The strip of bright light shooting down from the room’s single bulb illumed long handwritten notes, an ornate typeface in squid-ink black, smudged here and there, spelling out recipes for fortune, love, revenge. It was as if anything could be had on earth, just turn to the right page.
Hours zoomed by like jet planes, whistling winds shaking the heavily draped window as she studied, her fingertips catching a prickle when they ran across a fix that suited her situation well. When the door to the shop finally opened, Bela Nova scatting her way through, Augusta had only seconds to finish scribbling down the items she needed to gather and return the book to its spot.
Arms heavy with bags, the woman called her over. “Young Augusta, come get these. I need you to find jars for the herbs from the apothecary. And label them mandrake root, camphor, and rose otto. I want the dandelion in the ice box. Same with the eucalyptus and the mint. And please toss that old, rusted kettle on the stove. I traded Mo Alarcon my malachite talisman for a new one.”
Augusta got to work, stowing her teacher’s goods in the cupboards and the baskets and vases at the back of the workshop. The book that day, and in the days to follow when Bela Nova left to run her daily errands, had overwhelmed Augusta. She’d learned so much from her mentor in all this time yet barely knew even a little. And that wasn’t good enough anymore. Not if she would one day get from under Bela Nova’s thumb. Not if she would even sooner take the woman’s son for herself.
“Go on ahead and use that kettle for water. My bones are aching from the trip. Soon, you’ll take over the shopping. I’m down to five stops on a good day.”
Once Bela Nova rested, they began infusing oils using the herbs and plants she’d purchased from the farmers’ market or picked from the yards of wealthy, white homeowners in the Garden District, tinkering with a new blessing oil steeped in frankincense. Then they polished pieces of lapis lazuli, and all the while Augusta’s armpits perspired as she concentrated hard to still her nervous hands. She only hoped that Bela Nova wouldn’t discover her plan, wouldn’t cross it before it had even had time to ripen.