Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker

left, she escaped and went about town pretending to be a deaf-mute Russian. If she saw dead birds, she picked them up, then skinned and mounted them. An odd child.
    Her mother was a librarian at U.C.L.A. and her parents owned an antiquarian bookstore. One of the library patrons was Aldous Huxley. He was so blind that Cat’s job was to make sure that when he signed for his books the paper was under his pen. She followed Henry Miller about the shop and went home to play with his dog Skippy. Her first social protest was when she was in the sixth grade, against Woolworth’s refusal to let blacks eat at its lunch counter.
    Some of her magical books were those collected by her German grandfather. One, which she still owns, is a collection of German folk customs and magical beliefs. The pictures so enthralled her that she begged her mother to translate. They struck a deal. Cat would baby-sit her sister for fifty cents an hour, and her mother would translate the book for fifty cents an hour.
    Cat has been so lonely at times in her life that even now as she’s going to sleep she sometimes hears a sentence that makes her sigh with despair: Nobody likes you . If it comes out of nowhere, and it usually does, she suspects that it’s part of a magical attack. She might get up and do something to counter it, such as lighting a candle or making some brushing motions with her hands. At the least, she repositions her body. If you don’t do that, the thought will sink in unimpeded and take root, she said. You never want to let that happen.
    I liked Cat’s story. Magical attacks aren’t in my experience, but bad thoughts are. It seems to me that I can recall every mistake I’ve ever made, every embarrassment I’ve ever suffered, every failure to be kind or generous or smart enough. When such memories worm their way into my perfectly happy life, they feel like an attack. So. Cat’s tips on how to ward off such thoughts were more than I could have hoped for: an easy cure for the bad magic in my mind. I’d use them, and if they worked, I might believe in magic.
    Magical attacks are pretty mainstream in hoodoo thought. One of the saddest I read was about a man who did some little thing that displeased a conjure woman. She was a thin-skinned old bat who scared all the children. So she “threw down” on the guy, said that he would never have another home and would wander for the rest of his days. His house burned down the next week, and he never was able to get another. He went from friends to relatives to living at the side of the road until the day he died. Mean old biddy. Somebody should have put a roach in her food.
    Cat’s exposure to hoodoo began early but in an indirect way. Her parents hoped that their child would become completely American. To that end they gave her three record albums for her fifth birthday. One was Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie, and another was Negro Folk Songs and Spirituals by Leadbelly, and the third was The American Songbag by Carl Sandburg, which was mostly murder ballads. Those gifts began her lifelong love of rural American music and led her inevitably to one of America’s great gifts to music, the blues.
    Hoodoo is a big part of the blues. Ma Rainey’s “Black Dust Blues,” for instance, is about a woman who is angry because Ma stole her man. “Lord, I was out one morning, found black dust all round my door,” begins the song. The singer starts to get thin and has trouble with her feet. “Black dust in my window, black dust onmy porch mat…./Black dust’s got me walking on all fours like a cat.” This song deals with what’s called “throwin’ down” on someone. In African magic, the feet are thought to be a particularly vulnerable place for evil to enter. So “laying a trick” might involve throwing magical powder where someone would walk over it. Socks or shoes might be sprinkled with hoodoo