I saw Chi again after I had debuted in a television comedy that was about a woman who lost her union job at a plastics factory, took a series of minimum wage jobs, opened and lost two businesses, then her husband, and at her lowest point, began to write about a woman who wins the lottery and buys the town’s plastics factory.
Chi came to New York to visit me and told me all about how she had been living in a village in South Carolina, where she had been made an oruban priestess. I already had been a mystic since I was very very young, and I was excited to hear more about everything.
We walked all over the city, and we saw a street fair, I picked up a voodoo dolly and she took a picture of me holding it up. The next time I saw her was when she summoned me to San Francisco, where she was living back amongst Black Lesbian good graces there.
We walked the streets smoking cigars dressed in black all night long for a few days.
Gangsters approached us, and remarked on how we were vulnerable. I will never forget chi looking at the leader of the group and saying very softly…”Your choice“. She was scarier than DeNiro in taxi driver, and with that only, the guy backed off, and so did the ones with him. The Power of Presence is not well known to women. Mostly we know about the presence of absence, because demurring to power is all that was ever shown to work on our behalf.
She taught me how to grab people’s thoughts as they passed by. I was a fast learner, and stand up comedy had helped me hewn that part of my awareness. We picked a man on a bus and when he got off, we got off. It was three am. We circled him slowly and clockwise saying nothing. “Slow his heartbeat“. she demanded, and I did, after some resistance on my part to believing that it was so simple to do that.
“Why“? I asked over and over again, regarding a number of subjects. “I will tell you why“, she promised, and after we left the man, humbler than before, and never to dare ever again to think he understood women, we went to the docks that overlooked Alcatraz. She told me there… “ONLY VICTIMS ASK WHY” I recognized that that was the truth, the deepest truth of all.
“I have a solution for all the shit that separates you and me” she said…”I will teach you, but then you will become a worthy opponent and we will never be able to see each other again.” I sat stunned because I did not want to lose her again. I wanted to learn more than any other thing, though. I absorbed all that she taught me, and at the end of our last weekend together, she said to me..”Now when you walk down that hall and out that door, you are taking my ancestors with you and you are leaving yours here with me too.” Everything of race and class and religion that ever separated us in any way was healed, and when I walked down her hallway that night, I felt all the African and all the Yoruban ancestors settle into my blood and make themselves my own. I could feel all my jewish forebears getting comfortable in her body, and at last leaving the exile of the western world for darker soil that felt like home.
