SPIRITS AND DEMONS

My first Halloween was the year I was five. Somehow the others had gotten past without my catching on, my brothers and sisters being too old for the spectacle, or merely less intrigued by what it promised. But the year I was five, my best friend planned to go trick-or-treating dressed as Raggedy Ann. Once she’d explained to me what to expect—the costume, the candy, the weeks-long pirate booty of sugary bliss—I cajoled my parents to let me go along. From the moment they said yes, all I could imagine was a bounty laid out like a road to infinity: Tootsie Rolls, peanut butter cups, candy corn, lollipops, and more, offered freely by stranger and friend alike on one night only.

I imagined going as a whole host of things: Bugs Bunny would have been near the top of the list. I thought he was so clever and debonair and quite nearly handsome, at least for a rabbit. I had a stuffed fox named Rascal that I’d carried around dotingly since I was three, and he would have made a nice model for a costume, too. But the animal costumes would prove to be time-consuming and expensive to make, with a discouragingly wide margin of error. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for the Easter Bunny or a red dog. My mother said she could sew up a ghost costume from a white sheet in just an evening, and since the time was drawing near, it seemed the most reasonable choice to make.

“When will my costume be done?” I asked for the tenth time and with Halloween just a few days away.

“Don’t worry,” she replied again and again, though with increasingly less assurance than I was used to hearing in almost every other thing she said. I found it strange. Mom had sewn me dress after dress in no time at all, and she’d made curtains and bedspreads, quilts and pillows. There seemed to be nothing out there she hadn’t made or couldn’t learn to with the ease and skill of a true seamstress, but she was dragging her feet with the ghost costume. I couldn’t help but worry.

Part of the bang of Halloween was bound to be muffled by the fact that October 31 was also my father’s birthday. Instead of traipsing through the neighborhood in costumes, we usually gathered around the dining room table for roast beef or pork chops. After dinner, we’d adjourn to the family room for Star Trek reruns and slices of my mother’s homemade pound cake, a staple in my family, which my father liked to place atop a bowl of vanilla ice cream that had just begun to melt. It was important to mark the occasion, even with something as simple, as unceremonious as this: a good meal followed by the silence that signals generalized contentment. Hugs and kisses. A pair of pajamas and a necktie or two. My mother would buy packages of white handkerchiefs as gifts from me to him, and I’d present him with a card I made myself: HAPPY BIRTHDAY DADDY floating above a drawing of him and our house. The year I was four, I drew our backyard and our dog, Sebastian.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to something indistinct coming out of Sebastian’s stomach.

“That’s where he…defecates,” I’d explained. “And that”—here, I’d pointed to a dark spot on the otherwise green lawn—“is dog mess.” (I couldn’t figure out just then how to get from a verb like defecate to whatever the product of such an act should be called. Our parents didn’t believe in babyish nicknames for perfectly normal bodily functions. We never used words like poop or pee, and it would be years before I’d discover there were worse words out there in circulation, words like shit and piss.) My father thanked me, gently suggesting that in the future I didn’t need to bother with “every last anatomical detail” in my art.

To ignore the occasion of my father’s birthday, even if we only ever celebrated it modestly, would have been hurtful, not just to him but to the idea of us as an invincible unit, as something to cleave to even if it meant missing out on what everyone else in the world was doing. However, this year was different; it marked the moment when I’d asked for and been granted the opportunity to have both.

It may well have been that my mother was busy shopping for Dad’s birthday dinner and had gotten temporarily sidetracked from working on my costume. Or maybe she was overwhelmed with plans for the party in my kindergarten class. She was, after all, the room mother, and on the day of the party, she planned to bring in cookies, punch, and a whole six-foot-long “snake” sandwich for all of us to eat. (She also informed me that bobbing for apples, which one of the other mothers had agreed to facilitate, was unhygienic and that I should put some serious thought into whether I really wanted to participate.) Nevertheless, I was beginning to suspect that something else altogether was holding up my costume.

“I don’t believe in ghosts and monsters,” she’d said when I asked her if such things were real.

“What about witches?”

“Witchcraft is real, but God doesn’t like it.” I’d heard the word witchcraft before but never given it much thought. I’d been under the impression that it was the made-up stuff of fiction, like the harmless bits of magic Samantha the witch performed in reruns of the old TV show Bewitched or the more wicked but equally unlikely feats that set fairy tales into motion.

“What about skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns?” My best friend’s parents had toasted the pumpkin seeds after carving her jack-o’-lantern, and we sprinkled them with salt and ate them. They were so delicious I’d persuaded my mother to let us do the same at home. My father had even carved a smiling face into my pumpkin and put a nub of a candle inside.

“We’re Christians,” my mother reminded me. “We believe in God and Jesus.” She made her face expressionless and relaxed in a manner that hinted something heavy might be on the way. “And, as a Christian, I don’t think God is very happy on Halloween.”

I wondered how one night of kids in costumes out trick-or-treating could bother God.

“I know dressing up and getting candy is fun,” she continued, “but what Halloween celebrates, things like evil spirits and demons, are the things of the occult. They belong to the devil, and they can be dangerous.”

I’d heard those words before, too—spirits, demons, the occult. They came up at church, in stories where one of God’s followers must remind his foolish and forgetful people of God’s commandments. Like Moses, when the Israelites went to such lengths in order to worship a golden calf. Or Jesus, casting out demons from the possessed. Though I had never personally come up against an evil spirit or a demon and doubted that I ever would, my mother was asking me to understand that such stories were warnings I ought to take seriously. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. The stakes my mother was hinting at were far higher than they appeared to be.

I sensed that she was torn. She wanted to make me understand the bigger picture, but she also wanted to make me happy. She was most concerned, I’d guess, with the symbolism of a night like Halloween, the things our costumes and make-believe fright seemed to glorify. But she also understood how excessive it would be to argue that a single night of trick-or-treating could have had heavy implications for my everlasting soul.

And I was torn, too. I knew she wanted me to make the right decisions in all things, just like the children in Little Visits with God, decisions that would glorify God. She would probably have been very glad if I had then and there decided to retract my request and skip Halloween altogether, but I couldn’t get the candy out of my mind and the fun my friend Kim had assured me of. I wanted to push harder, to make her see that I understood the danger (I thought I did) and that I would be careful to keep my heart and spirit attuned to God and all that was good (I would certainly try). But I also sensed there was a good chance that if I questioned Halloween any further, her sense of moral duty might require her to put on the brakes, to shut down the Halloween machine entirely, so I nodded and forced myself to say nothing. She eyed me a moment, thinking but choosing not to speak, and the conversation dwindled away.

The thirty-first fell on a Monday. The snake sandwich was really just chicken salad on long submarine rolls, which had been cut and laid out so that the whole thing looked like a huge wriggling serpent with two big black olives for eyes and a mouth propped open as if about to strike. Everyone in my kindergarten class was thrilled, except for one girl who exploded into loud sobs that didn’t subside even after my mother knelt down and explained to her how the sandwich was made. There were cookies in the shape of pumpkins and a punchbowl of 7Up in which floated a whole half gallon of orange sherbet. I was so proud that my mother had thought of everything—she’d even rigged the punchbowl with dry ice, so it seemed to fume like a witch’s cauldron. Yet I was confused, too. It all seemed so scary, so real, yet she’d made it clear that none of this Halloween stuff met with her actual approval. Was it for me? Was it a way of telling me she understood that I understood and that we could do this for fun, without believing any of it and without fear that it bothered God? Or was she sad inside from all of it, sad in the way God would have been sad about the smoke and the snakes and all the ghoulish to-do? With my eyes, I kept trying to ask her what was going on, why she had given in so wholeheartedly to the spooky affair, but she was too busy making sure everyone had gotten enough to eat and drink.

After lunch, we lined up at the apple-bobbing basin. I stood behind Jimmy Higgins, who, when it was his turn to go under, splashed around like a cat someone had tossed into a well. Even after he came up for air, he was still slobbering, and a thick trail of yellow mucous slithered out from one of his nostrils (it took a moment before he noticed and sucked it back up into his head). Watching Jimmy had made me want to forfeit my turn, but backing out would have given credence to my mother’s other admonitions, both uttered and implied. So I put on the plastic smock and stood peering into the cloudy water. I closed my eyes before descending into the murk. It was unpleasant and cold, and the apples shied away like darting fish. I’d been blowing bubbles out through my nose so as not to choke down there, but there came a time when I ran out of air. I opened my mouth, though I knew in my heart of hearts that it wouldn’t land me an apple. It didn’t. Instead, water rushed down my throat. When I came up, I tried not to look as punished as I felt, but I couldn’t help sputtering. Someone came at me with an already-wet towel, untying the plastic apron and handing it to the next child in line. A long, dark hair that was not my own stuck to my tongue. Finally, after so much searching and waiting, my mother’s eyes at last met mine, only now I was in no mind to reassert my question or risk reading I told you so in her gaze. I went and stood beside her, not looking up, only leaning my head into her side, watching as the number of children with dry hair and clothes dwindled down to none.

“The party was so nice,” I beamed on the ride home. A popcorn ball and a caramel apple had long since taken my mind off the indignities of the bobbing pool. “I didn’t know you knew how to do all that, Mommy.” And watching her watch the road for the few blocks it took to get back to our house—watching her hands calm yet firm upon the wheel and the way she looked down at me from time to time, letting me smile up into her face and returning the smile with real warmth, with love I could see and feel—I could tell that no matter what she believed in, right at that very moment she and I were alone together, Kathy and Tracy, just our two souls in the car moving surely toward home, full and intact with something bigger and more real than any of the questions or beliefs we might struggle to fit into words. I knew, just at that very moment, that she was glad in the way every mother who makes her child happy is glad.

Before dinner, my mother sat down to finish stitching up my costume. It wasn’t merely a sheet into which eyeholes had been cut but a two-piece affair with bell sleeves and a removable head. The holes for my eyes had stitching around the edges so the fabric wouldn’t fray. At the top of the head, the mask wasn’t as round as I’d envisioned it would be. In fact, it was rather pointy. I wouldn’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost at all, yet it did remind me of something I’d seen before but couldn’t quite put my finger on. No matter. My heart raced at the prospect of venturing out into the night.

Conrad’s eyes got bigger and rounder when he saw me in my costume. It seemed to remind him of something else, too, and because he was older—fifteen and already in high school by then—he surely must have known exactly what it was. He looked at my mother with what appeared to be bewildered disbelief. There must not have been too much riding on it, though, because she merely shrugged him off with a cryptic smile.

“Remember your manners,” she told me as I stepped up onto the landing by the front door. “And don’t wander off from Kim and her dad.”

Outside, the evening was warm. I saw plenty of superheroes bought right off the shelf and packs of homemade Star Wars characters pieced together by all the kids whose parents had taken them to see the movie. (I recognized them from the lunchboxes and stickers my friends carried to school, though I didn’t know them firsthand or why they’d caught most everyone else up in an intergalactic frenzy.) Older kids out on their own in hastily conceived costumes scared me, they were so riled up with freedom and lust for candy. One had thrown a paper bag on his head like the Unknown Comic; others were draped in makeshift togas or parents’ bathrobes.

For every three or four times I shouted “Trick or treat,” one person handing out candy would point at me and ask what I was supposed to be. When I answered that I was a ghost, most seemed relieved, though one or two appeared to remain skeptical. Once, looking up for an explanation of all this adult confusion, I caught Kim’s dad shaking his head, an expression of mild exasperation plastered to his face. I knew this had to do with me and with the silent conversation that had taken place between Conrad and our mom, but I couldn’t figure out what the precise terms were. What if I asked Kim’s dad what the fuss was all about, and his answer was that I had done something wrong? Or what if my mother had made a mistake in her rush to be done with Halloween? Wouldn’t it be worse if all the to-do revealed that the error was hers and not mine? It didn’t even occur to me that no error had been committed, only a subtly calculated act, a trick instead of a treat, directed not so much at me but at the very ethos of the holiday itself. If I had, my child’s mind could not have unraveled the convoluted logic that had driven a black woman from the Jim Crow-era South to dress her daughter, even only allusively, as one of the most despicable emblems of racial hatred, as someone worse than the devil himself.

I’m not sure I can claim a clear understanding even now. My mother was in her early forties that autumn, nearly the same age I am now. The KKK, with its flaming crosses and its lynching sprees and the ghastly apparition of those white hoods, would have been real to her—not merely symbols of an earlier era but artifacts of a time she had known, specters from the real-life stories that would have haunted her childhood. Was stitching up a mini Klan costume for her unsuspecting five-year-old a way of depleting the image of whatever lingering private terror it might have held for her? I suspect she wasn’t fully conscious of what she’d done until she’d done it, at which point the only thing to do was remark to herself, “Ain’t that a blip,” and then get on with things. Of course, none of this occurred to me then. At the time, I did what any five-year-old would do. I continued along, holding out my bag, smiling my biggest, most exemplary smile, even though nobody could see it behind my great big pointed white hood.

“Is it okay if I take this off?” I finally thought to ask, lifting the top part of the costume off over my head as we turned into the last cul-de-sac of the evening.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Kim’s dad answered, sensing it might be easier that way for all of us.

At home, I wasn’t given access to any of the loot until it had all been spread out on the family room floor and examined. We’d been hearing rumors of kids eating Halloween candy that had been spiked with hallucinogens. One child, the story went, had even been given a candied apple with a whole razor blade inside. (In one version of the tale, he’d sliced his tongue open biting into the treat. In another, he’d bitten into the apple just shy of the blade.) Anything that had come open in my trick-or-treat bag was relegated to the trash. A box of raisins was discarded, too, just in case. What was left was a confectionary spectacle: candy enough for all seven of us and then some. My parents laid claim to anything with coconut: Mounds and Almond Joy bars and the chewy tricolor Neapolitan squares wrapped in clear cellophane. My siblings cozied up to their own small share of the stash even as the last witches and robots of the season climbed up our stone-speckled front steps.

Where exactly was the occult? I wondered, staring out the storm door into the finally quiet evening. Was there really a place where spirits and demons—all the beings God disliked—came from or congregated? Who made them and what did they want? Had they been good at first and only turned bad, like the Klansmen still alive in my mother’s memory, the ones who must have watched quizzically from the margins of her mind, not knowing whether, at the sight of me, to feel a sense of victory or defeat? They must have been far from God, but how could that be, if God was everywhere? Maybe they hovered between Him and us, though that, too, seemed wrong, for didn’t God live in the hearts of those who believed? What was it like for God as we went about our lives, doing the things He loved and the things He hated, sometimes without even knowing the difference between the two? And what was it like for the strange in-between beings, the ones we pretended to run from on Halloween? How many worlds were there, and what did they want from us, there, in our houses, under the low roofs of our lives?