By Kayla Hardy
SYNOPSIS: When a young black boy discovers he is a shapeshifter, a power known as the “Change” on his eighteenth birthday, he must contend with his budding magic and sexuality while navigating the very real horrors of the Jim Crow south.
1955, Little Orchard, Alabama
Lonnie DeWitt didn’t know what the Change was or why Grandma DeWitt seemed to think it was so important to talk about it, the lines on her big brown face creased like freshly tilled soil. Lonnie only knew for certain two truths: that today was his eighteenth birthday and that, like every other poor soul in Little Orchard, Alabama, he wanted out of this town of dead sticks and cotton.
“Like this,” Grandma DeWitt said. Then her black eyes were bright gray-blue, certainly not a color one expected to see on a Negro woman. Grandma DeWitt only smiled impishly, flashing crooked teeth. “You see the magic now, don’t you?”
He could see it, alright. It scared him—all those possibilities. For the first time in his life, Lonnie could see all the possible angles, lines, avenues, and colors that could come from this one moment. He could be anything. Anyone. It was a dangerous feeling.
His grandmother’s face seemed to say, now you try. He did. Something flashed beneath his skin, the feeling cool and quick like cold metal had pressed itself into his veins. Lonnie closed his eyes and tried harder. His nose tickled. Grandma DeWitt snickered.
“Concentrate, boy. You’ve got to learn to change more than your nose.”
So, he had changed something. A sliver of pride started to rise in his belly. Lonnie tried harder, using all of his strength to summon this magic his grandmother was so sure that he possessed. When he opened his eyes Grandma Dewitt clapped. He glanced down and realized he now had a headful of coils that trailed to his waist.
Lonnie held up a piece of hair and felt the curl between his fingers. He marveled at the Change, at the power that now hummed in his bones like bird-song.
The humor had swept from Grandam DeWitt’s eyes, leaving only a stark warning in her gaze. “Be careful now, Lonnie. The spell never holds real long.” She swept her wrinkled kerchief from her head, unloosing a wild mane of frizzy hair, and swung it out at him as he passed, lashing him on the behind as he stumbled from the house with a new lightness to his step. “Now get.”
#
When he was seven, he’d ran home from the schoolyard in a sniveling panic. Grandma
DeWitt had taken one long look at him and had seized his chin by the hand.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?”
“They...they called me a sissy.” He paused, chewed on his lip as he thought of the way his stomach had turned pleasantly when Johnny-Joe’s eyes had held his a little too long. “And they probably right.”
“Oh,” she let out a pass of air. “Oh.” Nothing much had managed to rattle Georgina Rae DeWitt in her seventy-two years of life and neither did Lonnie’s confession. “You different, Lonnie. Always have been. Always will be. Your Grandma done known that since the day your momma and daddy brought you up those front steps and let me hold you. And it’s just as well, ain’t it? All us DeWitts is different.” Her big face lit up as she thumbed away a tear from his eye.
“But you? You, Lonnie DeWitt, will be something real special.”
“How you know?”
“Because your magic says so,” she said simply, the matter settled.
#
For as long as Lonnie could remember, Little Orchard had always been an awfully white place. From the people, to the blinding summer sky, to the masked men that rode in on horses during festival season, to the cotton fields, he’d known early on that he was the wrong color.
And though Grandma DeWitt had gotten them a plot of land just outside of the Negro part of town and had done her best to shield her lot from the angry white men who loved any excuse to be riled, and from the white women whose honor they risked offending, Lonnie was told to best mind his tongue in public because not even Grandma DeWitt had enough magic to keep him from getting swung from a tree. And when she’d heard what happened to that poor boy down in Mississippi for whistlin’ at a white woman, Grandma DeWitt didn’t much let Lonnie leave the Big House on his own anymore. And when she did, it was high time to get down to the fields and start pickin’.
It was down in the fields where he met Sam Pritchard. Sam was a white boy that sharecropped down the road and whose parents Grandma DeWitt was real friendly with. He was also the boy who’d touched his hand when they bent down over the same tuft of cotton. Since then he’d touched him plenty other places too, but none as risky as his heart.
I just want out, Lonnie had said to Sam one night down in the fields. He hadn’t meant to blurt that bit out no more than he’d meant to change the size of his thumbs to pick the cotton easier, but just like his magic, his words had a way of pouring out of him when he was with Sam. Especially like this. Hot and sticky and flushed up against the cover of the smoke shack.
Sam only snickered. You want out your skin don’t you? You can get out of this town. Maybe. If yer lucky. And you lucky alright, Lonnie. Got luck coming up out yer eyes the way you glowin’ just now. Sam looked him over, all appraising and such. Lonnie’s stomach did a flip. But
you ain’t ever getting out of that skin. Ain’t no kinda luck in this world for that. And if there is, it sure as hell don’t live in Little Orchard, Alabama.
Lonnie’s stomach dropped. A flicker of something dark passed through him. His magic smelled different. It had a smell, he’d learned. Grandma DeWitt’s smelled like roses and tobacco. Jim-Jim’s smelled straight like cat piss. But his own? It smelled like daisies. Too sweet. At least that’s what those church ladies liked to whisper at his back when he’d pass them on the way to the alter to get the preacher’s oil painted on his forehead. That boy too sweet, I tell you. Got too much sugar in his tea.
Lonnie was just fine with being sweet. Better that, he supposed, than hard and bitter like the rest of them.
But now?
The smell of his magic had changed. Downright stank. Sharp and coppery, like lantern fluid had been spilled all over him. Lonnie watched Sam go. Maybe that kind of luck didn’t live in Little Orchard, Alabama. Nah, it lived up the way in the direction Sam was walking, on his part of town. Lonnie’s fingers itched. A bolt of lightning shot through him to his hands. All that possibility just humming at his fingertips.
Lonnie DeWitt didn’t have that kind of luck, no sir he didn’t.
But, he did have magic. And that, he’d wager at any betting table, was worth more to a boy like him than any ounce of luck.
#
Lonnie never believed in the magic Grandma DeWitt was always going on about,
especially when she had too much moonshine in her, the golden spirits she bottled once a week using Granddaddy’s famous recipe. Grandma DeWitt liked to say that her brew wasn’t the same because Grandaddy’s people had a different magic in their bones, a magic made of earth, root, and passed on pain. She also liked to say that it was that—the pain—that made Granddaddy’s brew so sweet, but Lonnie didn’t know about that either. How could something that hurt you taste sweet?
But Lonnie knew the Big House had a magic of its own. When he was little he could hear it in the floorboards, moving through the rotted wood like trapped worms. Once, he even saw a woman in an apron and tattered head rag pass on by him one dark night. She looked at him, smiled a little sadly as if he were the thing out of place, and passed right on through the wall. When he’d told Grandma DeWitt what he’d seen, she kept on laughing through her breakfast of smoked sausage and corncakes, a bit of yellowed crumbs on her lips.
“Boy, that ain’t nothing but the slaves a’talkin,” she’d said. “They get a little restless during market season. Suppose they think they can yield a better harvest is all.”
Now he and his Grandmother sat across from one another at the kitchen table, a tidy feast of fried chicken, ham and collards, hot apple slices between them. It was the meal she made for Lonnie every year on his birthday and everything looked exactly the same as the year before, except this time she’d allowed one change: Lonnie could have a glass of Granddaddy’s moonshine. The drink, he learned, was another tradition that came on the day of the Change. It tasted damned wonderful, like sunshine and brown sugar. He tasted the pain too, a taste steeped in centuries of the ancestors’ tears. Now he understood how pain and happiness could exist together, arm in arm like old friends. He understood from one drink that this was a riddle in black folks blood, that in order to solve it, they’d learned to bottle the tears and the laughter together.
“You a man now, Lonnie. And men leave home sooner or later. Led by the bottle or the skirt.” Lonnie knew very well that he wasn’t led by either of those notions, but Grandma DeWitt had a way of talking that made everything seem like a sermon. So, he did what he did when the preacher down at the shack church got a fire in his eyes and went on tellin’ folks that men was made for women and that if anything else shared a bed, they was worse than sinners, what he called “abominations.” Lonnie stayed silent. And it was just as well because Georgina Rae kept on about the other changes he could expect: the girls that might chase after him which he could chase right back (unless they was white, then well, if he so much as looked at one of them, then there’d be a whole parade of white boys chasin’ him); more duties down at the fields; and more drinkin’ should he find the taste.
But she hadn’t mentioned his other tastes, and maybe, Lonnie thought, that was her way of wishin’ he lost them. Lonnie thought of Sam and his stomach did a flip. Well, he hadn’t.
He knew Georgina Rae had had a hard life, harder than most Negros ‘round these parts, and had hoped to spare her grandson of any of it. He also knew that she didn’t want to change him or it, these tastes of his, but she didn’t want him swingin’ from no tree either. Lonnie swallowed a mouthful of chicken and licked his fingers. He didn’t know why he felt suddenly guilty, or why his throat felt like there was an apple being pushed up in it, or why his eyes felt so wet and hot.
“I’m sorry Grandma.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry for, boy. Ya hear? The only thing you need to know is that this world is sorry—a downright sorry sack of piss. But it’s the only world we Negroes got. For now.” It was the way she said for now that made his tears suddenly stop, like she knew a secret that only her ears could hear. Lonnie supposed it was one of those secrets that came from
Granddaddy since his people had the magic of the eye and could see things—sometimes a few steps forward into the coming days and sometimes, he heard, a few steps back. But why in the hell would any Negro want to look back? It was bad enough for black folks now, let alone when the days were filled with hellish sun, chains, and whips. Lonnie glanced out at the cotton fields, the blur of white and green that knitted together in a sad quilt. Well, he supposed it wasn’t much different now, at least for the DeWitts.
He didn’t want to pick cotton forever. It was the one thing in this downright sorry sack of piss of a world that he knew for certain.
“Listen here, Lonnie. Every man in this family with the Change done used they magic for one reason or another. I like to think each one got their own purpose. Your great-great- granddaddy Elias used it to fool his master into freein’ him. And your cousin Jim-Jim used it to swindle some good ole’ boy out of his share of the biggest harvest Little Orchard done ever seen. So, you gotta decide what you gonna use your magic for. The sooner the better, since the magic is downright feral as a porch cat—can’t listen lest you feed it somethin’. So, what you gonna’ use your magic for, son?”
The thought startled him. He hadn’t given the matter much thought if he were being honest. Lately, all thoughts seemed to turn to Sam Pritchard and his ridiculous smattering of freckles and strawberry hair.
“I want to...,” he trailed off, thinking long and hard about the great men in his family who’d come before him—the uncles and cousins and great granddaddies who’d used the Change to swindle and sway men none the wiser. But he knew enough about himself to know that his ambitions weren’t that big. Not yet, anyways. He’d need to set two feet outside of Little Orchard to really know himself, and, he guessed, to know his magic too. He thought of the way Johnny-
Joe had purposely held his eye then punched him in it and the way Officer McDowell had sneered at him on the drive into town. Lonnie felt something white-hot jab at his ribs, like one of them story book swords pulled from the forge.
“I want to use my magic to live,” he said at last. “But not just living to breathe and sweat like the rest of them folks down in the fields. But really live. Fully.” He paused, a breath of hesitation between them. “Differently.”
Grandma DeWitt blinked, a stunned silence passing between them. Only the sounds of Uncle Earl’s banjo stirred from the front porch, Mary-Grace and Lipsey’s laughter tinkling through the window. From the look on her face, Lonnie knew it wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting.
But, it was an answer Georgina Rae liked. After a long moment a smile tore across her face. “And that you will, my boy.” She sipped her tea, eyes crinkled. “That you will.”
#
The Police, or the Blue Boys as Grandma DeWitt preferred to call them, liked to sit up on
the main road and watch for trouble. Though the Blue Boys didn’t have any magic that he knew of, Lonnie knew that they could change faces too. You didn’t need any spellwork to cut some white cloth, shear some holes in it for the eyes and noses, and to sew the fabric into the face of a ghost.
“We gonna’ get a real good price for this here cotton, Lonnie,” Sam said, green eyes shining. “Real good.”
Lonnie glanced at him, his stomach in knots. He knew Sam was using the money for his own schoolin’ and had dreams like everyone else in Little Orchard to get out of it. But he often wondered at times like these was he a part of that dream too?
Lonnie glanced in the mirror above him and realized there was a Blue Boy following them. He was waving now for Lonnie to pull the truck over. So, Lonnie did. It was Officer McDowell, a big burly white man who’d just last week shot a colored boy dead for stealing apples. Lonnie wondered what he’d do to two sissy boys. But mostly, Lonnie wondered what he’d do to him.
He didn’t wait. He felt his magic take over, running through him like boiling soup. Next thing he knew, when Officer McDowell stuck his big red face into the window, he was staring at two white boys instead of one.
“Oh, my mistake boys.” McDowell looked between them, clearly befuddled. “Thought I saw something...”
“And what might that be, officer?” Lonnie asked.
Sam elbowed him in the ribs.
McDowell grinned. “You know how them niggers be. All crafty and such. We got to thin
they herds in this town or they gon’ be like just running on and over through the place like flood- water.”
McDowell tipped his hat and left. Lonnie glanced in the mirror. He was himself again, deep chestnut brown. He realized then that the Change was a trick of the eyes, like Grandma DeWitt’s favorite card sleight. The moment there and gone.
Lonnie could feel Sam’s eyes on him. “You a monster,” Sam breathed.
“Nah,” Lonnie said, as he fired the engine back up again. “The monster out there in the rearview.”
END
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
The arts and the humanities remain a cornerstone of empathy and human connection, a reminder that despite our differences we are all tethered in some way. I believe The Creative Process, and really all storytelling is intrinsic to this tether and that we must continue to champion the arts as a means to explore our commonalities and to provide a salve to hate and bigotry.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
I was inspired by the true and tragic story of Emmett Till and wanted to explore the vulnerability of black youth during the harsh realities of the Jim Crow south in a speculative way.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
In a black spiritual context, the natural world is so often intertwined with the notion of spirit and the body. From rootwork to farming to ancestral ritualistic practices, black folks have long revered the earth as a catalyst for growth and healing. I hope everyone remembers to revere this tether to land and nature, to always root ourselves in its history.
