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239 pages

English

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The year is 1928. May Skinner Bell has serious problems. She feels deeply the evil of the Alabama plantation where she, her husband and sons have fallen to. The family is very poor although May's enchanted beauty and education keep them separate from the nearby town. May was raised in Indian Territory by French nuns. Her friend and tutor was an old ex-slave and soldier. This gives May two natures. The result is a troubled young woman given to frightening rages and eccentric visions. Surrounding her is the plantation community of black workers, in desperate circumstances, and the Klan. The Klan never forgets that May's grandfather served as a Union soldier. Those whites around never forget that he was murdered by them on his return. From Murder to murder, violence to violence, May must cope with fear, ignorance and hate. Voodoo gives her Mojo, a gift which helps her survive and stay faithful to her family.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	15 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781622876617
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Our Lady of Mojo
Jonathan Wesley Bell

First Edition Design Publishing
Our Lady of Mojo

A novel by
Jonathan Wesley Bell
Our Lady of Mojo
Copyright ©2014 Jonathan Wesley Bell

ISBN 978-1622-876-61-7 EBOOK

June 2014

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ─ electronic, mechanical, photo-copy, recording, or any other ─ except brief quotation in reviews, without the prior permission of the author or publisher.
Brief Encounter With The Biographer

Myth and magic are part of how I see my unknown grandmother. At death she left a very old voodoo mojo bag to my father. This connects me to her directly because in turn at his death he left the amulet to me with instructions to always wear it. I do so now. How does it feel against the bare skin of my chest? The small bag is warm and strangely comforting. I would never willingly take it off. It seems to gently pulse as if grandmother holds me close to her heart.
In writing my grandmother’s biography I tell one day in her life. I chose Annunciation Sunday for the day, an important Christian myth day when a wondrous virgin heard she would conceive and bear the child of a God. I chose a Virgin Day because one of the few things known about grandmother is that she was raised by French nuns on the prairie of Indian territory. The year came automatically, 1928, the last before the hard winds of the Great Depression blew this family asunder and away.
Otherwise, my father’s mother hovers faceless, shapeless, and without history. When a child my curiosity about her became intense. No longer living yet very much with my father, grandmother it seemed reigned over the ages. I would ask about her. Nothing of significance came in reply. Did he keep his mother away out of shame or dislike? Was he protecting himself, or her?
She was a veiled presence as well at my father’s family gatherings, of his five brothers and one sister, while their father, also dead, came to life in their conversation. We did not live in the American South nevertheless these were southern people in exile prone to much telling of stories from their shared heritage. Rarely the word ‘maman,’ the French name they curiously used for her, arose among them. But then she came forth in a way I thought could be dread.
I knew my father’s people were from Alabama, of the blighted Wiregrass Region, a whisper away from the Gulf, from a family poor and proud, intelligent and well mannered. What made them alllike that? Odd too I heard them occasionally speak some French to one another, rough and uncertain. Where they then speaking of her?
This grandmother unlike other women in my family could not be buried. Early on I understood that whatever, whoever, she was formidable and unorthodox. My father’s family died off one by one and left no memories of her, of ‘Maman.’ The absence where I thought she ought to have been became like rippling heat over our western roads that never went anywhere.
In childhood I began creating her for myself, a woman who raised such giants of my earth. Her life came to my mind in pieces.
Gustave Courbet the French painter created a work he titled “l’Origine du Monde.” This painting hangs in the Musee Quai d’Orsay in Paris. It is a realistic study of a nude woman’s torso. The view is from between her legs with the curves of buttocks rising in foreground to a carefully rendered vulva at center. Above this is a venus mound dense in pubic hair and then a soft lovely tummy that seems anticipating caresses or ready to rise with child.
Finally at top are the breasts, one covered, the other bare with an aroused pink nipple. The naked breast is in equal parts sexual and for suckling. Its nipple caps the work at center. This nipple is the one point of vivid color, small and far off like an Italian hill top town in a Renaissance painting
Courbet’s painting captures the eros of woman, beyond doubt, especially I expect to pubescent boys. But to others, many, it is surely painted from the viewpoint of a lover, while some, perhaps, see it at core as an adoration of the source of human desire and life, the vagina and womb. This painting then becomes a landscape of our conscious and subconscious selves—sexual, reproductive mythical and imaginative.
Courbet painted his masterpiece purposefully without head or face. What face could go with such a body? Seeing it for the first time brought my grandmother fully to mind, so well known and yet anonymous. It set me directly to writing about her. My image is her, I think. Except, also, it is not.
Yet again she might well have been what I see. Who is to tell when so little is known?
The mythic illuminates her story, the blur to the ends of reality that I can not fathom.
While writing I have felt my fingers guided at the keyboard by a sure, soft touch, a Gulf Water
Breeze, making the words I see on my screen about her show mysterious, vague yet emotive. I’ve come to intuit why her children, in awe and from a painful love, so rarely spoke her name, ‘May.’
1928: March 25. 9:20 am. Geneva, Alabama
Plantation Sainte Elisabeth
Spirit Of May

From out of emptiness Lucky Lindy spirals down to her. The plane lands on the plantation in a field of wild flowers. Motor idles while he waits for her. Propeller whirls on and on. Tail swerves left to right to left. Flowers go mad in a wave of pointillist red, yellow and blue. The plane trembles, as does May.
Dazed by the kaleidoscope of colors May stands spellbound at her kitchen window. Tentatively she touches the glass with her fingertips checking for reality.
Beckoning to her the flyer jauntily raises a leather clad arm adjusting his goggles with the other. “Come along May, don’t keep me waiting,” he shouts to her, impatient to fly off again to France, this time with her.
May comes to him quickly. Her hands still wet from the dishes. She scrambles up into the back of the plane.
“Here, put these on.” He hands her a pair of goggles.
“Thank you, Charles,” says May. She knows she can call him ‘Charles.’ “I hope I didn’t make you wet.”
Then up and away they dart, Sainte Elisabeth is soon lost below. Between immense banks of cloud they swing. An ocean soon appears below heaving at them, wanting her. Ocean of life—older than land, older than man--from where her tins of tuna come from. Pondering this May studies seething waters for hours.
A shore arises on the horizon, nears. They cross the border from Ocean to another land waiting to be discovered. She comes a pilgrim to this land below, creator of the language in her mind, the frame of mind that guides her. All her life it enchants her. The actual home of her home, of the Mission, her nuns. Stories fill her of its history, kings and queens, grand intrigues and great thinkers.
Their flying shadow casts down becoming an exotic bird motoring loudly across the magic land of France. They fly in their own silences awed by fields of bloody poppies and the tragic sprawl of crosses. Visions abound in this land of sorrowing mothers. Holy Mothers appearing, revered.
The plane, the handsome navigator youth, they bravely proceed toward the volcanic core of her phantom homeland. Her spirit dress woven there by a vulgar couturiere. Night coming up over the planet and before her a wondrous molten lava burns in the dark, a great glowing plain.
Alabama wild flowers exchange for molten embers marking the glorious City of Light, Paris. Dancing, laughter, art. Another kind of Rome of which she also dreams. Science, literature, philosophy. Another final refuge for the thinking, imagining world.
She wants to linger, honor it. Paint it on canvas. Light a Gauloises, drink a glass of wine, dance on a café table.
Back on Sainte Elisabeth gruesome seagulls are fighting for the offal of the field workers' misery. The birds jeer her return. Their screaming shatters her thoughts, her triumph, dishonoring her flight--‘The Spirit of May.’
All May ever learned from her flights, measuring them in her mind by the first one of 700 miles from Oklahoma to here—the view from her kitchen window, the sink of dishes—from Atoka and the nuns to Sainte Elisabeth and the Bells, is to her amazement what she already knew. Not to trust human nature, even her own. It will let you down.
Wretched Indians in Oklahoma, subjugated Negroes in Alabama, poor Whites in Geneva County, abrogated women kind in general. Odd she could not really change worlds. Never escape the cruelty and bigotry that beset them alike.
The leather amulet stirs against May’s skin where it lies hidden under her blouse. A turning of her head to regard the wretched kitchen makes it come alive. Among her most demanding secrets, dark and dangerous, the amulet is her personal bag of protection.
The plane disappears. No more wings. No Lindbergh. No luck.
Our Lady

Today, in 1928, age 27, May is lovely. Unknown to her she is discussed in the speakeasies of Geneva, Alabama, in its barbershops, High School gym, the town’s garage, its clubs. May has the power to replace the men’s lingering angry talk of those Godless foreigners Sacco and Vanzetti, even of their awe for the Yankees, however they might detest the club’s name. She can displace rumors of the Great Mississippi Flood that some of the denser fear threatens the Choctawhatchee River and the cotton gin.
Model Ts and a few new Ford As slow to watch her walking on the sidewalk. The cockier lads whistle at her, ‘Ain’t She Sweet.’ Those who returned to Geneva from the Great War glance furtively after her, for them she revives troubling memories of fine ladies promenading on the boulevards of Paris. Hers is a perfect posture and grace unknown before her arrival. Her old clothes mean nothi