Magic and Miracles
A Black Eyed Story
Hundreds gather for a vodou ceremony. Photo by Ramon Espinosa
Please enjoy an unedited audio reading of this essay.
Much Bigger… Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant… Even Greater Than We Dreamed…
There’s a small notecard on my desk. It reminds me, “YOU ARE MAGIC”, with no punctuation, no razzmatazz, no razzle-dazzle:
YOU
ARE
MAGIC
Just muted gold-ish letters on black card stock, stacked in the bottom right corner of 4x4 inches.
It’s a miracle bound, a little mini-mantra. It’s a random act of kindness that came tucked inside a mail-order splurge on some essential healing oils.
Once upon a time, this purchase of healing oils would’ve branded me a witch soon to be tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, drowned, hung, or stoned.
Look how far we’ve come. From witch trials to affirmations: YOU ARE MAGIC.
I keep this little card on my desk to pay homage to our dark past when being magic was akin to being possessed by evil.
I keep it on my desk as a daily reminder to reclaim the shadow work of fearful minds who shapeshifted the true goodness of innocent words.
Haitian women join in a voodoo bathing ritual in an undated picture.
In the 1920s, William Seabrook, a White journalist (and yes, his race does matter) traveled to West Africa intent on eating human flesh. When he arrived he found no true evidence that such rituals occurred and if they did occur, he wasn’t invited to partake. But he couldn’t come back egg-faced and empty-handed. So, he did what many “explorers” did and wrote an imagined truth in his book, Jungle Ways:
It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.
His words were so convincing but turned out to be a complete fabrication. Well, not entirely.
He did eat human flesh, just not with a tribe in West Africa. Seabrook satiated his cannibalistic yearnings at Sorbonne University in France when he convinced a medical student to bring him a cut of meat from a recently deceased body. Having not yet had his fill, he accepted an invitation from a French socialite to attend her party. On the menu was a piece of human flesh of which all the partygoers would partake.
Later, in 1929, Seabrook published a book titled The Magic Island about his travels in Haiti. In it he talks about some of the Haitians being zombies, describing one as “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.” He claimed Haitian bodies were being esurrected from the dead with magic – thus the title of his book. It became a bestseller, but there’s no magic in Seabrook’s bestseller like the magic possessing the notecard on my desk.
One reviewer wrote: Only an observer of Mr. Seabrook's tolerance and sympathy could have gone to Haiti and have emerged with a book on native life as penetrating as THE MAGIC ISLAND.
Remember this accolade is for a guy who became famous for eating human flesh.
Another reviewer wrote: [This book] reeks with sacrificial blood, the odor of cadavers, the sinister breath of witchcraft, the horrendous exaltation of unholy terrors slaked in the steaming passions of human animals. It is a grim story of Voodooism, this The Magic Island, filled with sickening mummeries, repulsive rituals, orgiastic expiations and propitiations…
Pleas note the reviewer’s depictions of Haitians as “human animals”, meaning Seabrook’s vivid descriptions of Haitians led him, as a reader, to believe they weren’t completely “human” but also not completely “animal”. One thing for damn sure, the reviewer didn’t believe the inhabitants of Seabrook’s Magic Island were magical.
But there was magic.