October 21, 2020

Dear Ms. Sharon,

In our last communication, I said it was a matter of urgency that you realize how alive we dead are. I do not believe you realize you are involved with we lost and disappeared dead in a matter of repair that is urgent–to us and for your life purpose. You continue to resist. I beg you to relent. 

There is much you do not understand. We dead agree now, prohibitions within you exist that you do not want to loosen.  If you yield to a deeper partnership with us, there is a possibility of mending what has been violently torn apart.  We wait.

Mr. AJ Byrd

Natchez, MS

***

It is a Cadaver moon that awakens those who slip easily between the worlds. The fortunate ones are those who recognize the path they are to walk—the one of pulverized bone fine as hourglass sand.  I was summoned under the cold white eye of such a moon already high in a black sky. Patches of desert scrub and mesquite dot the bone-dry earth beneath my feet in every direction. When the call came, I set my bare feet down on the bone ash road stretching out ahead and began to walk, one foot in front of the other, leaving perfect prints behind me. On the night of first summoning, it was an old, old woman I followed, one I had seen many years before this night in a particularly dire time.  She was bent and of very small stature and dressed in tattered black clothing. I watched her collecting mesquite scattered across the desert floor. When I tried to help her collect the mesquite she refused my assistance with a coarse, almost dismissive, gesture that communicated: keep to your place.  Therefore, I heeded, staying a few paces behind—though irresistible currents emanating in her wake, that first night and all the nights thereafter, bound me to her.

After some time walking a dark, high desert landscape rose up ahead of us into the sky to the North. Wind currents picked up as I followed her up the rocky mountainside. In the climb I became a song whistling moonlight and wind back into every lost river and canyon into which I was born—a woman now to herself returned.

Upon arriving at her dwelling near the summit of the mountain, the old woman let the mesquite tumble from her arms then laid a dry piece onto glowing coals on the cave floor before seating herself on the earth in front of the fire. I sat across from her near the mouth of the cave, my back to an immensity of pitch black, black.

Soon, a fierce and faraway look overtook the old woman and she reached for a small pile of stones and bones at her side and began rhythmically to cast them, over and over, onto the packed earth. Patterns emerged which she read. She was divining for rents in the world in need of repair. When she found what was torn, she mended it. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was clear to me that this is what she was doing. Day and night without cease she repeated this ritual—never eating or drinking—there were no provisions or cooking utensils in the cave—nor was there a bed mat—she never slept. I understood she was a spirit. I called her Bone Woman.

Without a word spoken, I was summoned as an apprentice to Bone Woman though I was never certain how this arrangement came to be except for the feeling of being beckoned, then following her many nights to the cave—though I can’t say I felt any choice in following her. I could not resist her powerful magnetic pull—

Year after year I followed Bone Woman and grew in the work—particularly in ways of divination, until on a night I was in physical distress and afraid, I travelled up the mountainside to her cave. Her activity of throwing stones and bones eased me and so I went to her.  Uncharacteristically, Bone Woman briefly ceased attending to her realms and motioned me to sit by the fire with my back to her. Wrapping her arms firmly about my waist, she told me she had placed stones in my belly—that the distress I was experiencing was related to this. I learned then that when not casting stones and bones, she wandered the desert and other unknown regions collecting bones of the lost dead.  Later, in a sacred manner she placed stories of these dead into stones so their spirits might return to the living.  Until now, I knew nothing of this activity.  A ripple, a wake tremored through me. At that moment, I understood there were stories of lost and unknown dead that I was carrying—that had been placed in me. They were waiting for a permeable moment to return.

For thirty-two years, I have been under Bone Woman’s tutelage. Over time, I followed her deeper and deeper into the realms of the lost or disappeared dead.  One of these dead is a Black man from Natchez, Mississippi, Mr. AJ Byrd, who in 1944 was drunk when he stumbled his way into my parent’s home in the middle of the night in the antebellum section of town. I was two months in utero. J. Edgar Hoover had assigned my father to the Natchez FBI Field Office to help handle some “racial tension” cases in the region, in fact, all over the state. Seventy years later, on a night in 2015, near the time the Bone Woman told me she had placed stones holding stories of particular dead inside me, the man who had stumbled into my parent’s home appeared in a dream announcing that he had come to help me set something right from long ago—that he was a character in a story I was writing.  At the time, I was not writing any story. I did not know his name. His story, the barest whisper of it that I knew of growing up, and my father’s work during WWII as an FBI agent in Mississippi though, have disturbed me—as if someone was tugging on a thick rope from the bottom of a well asking to be pulled up. I have felt the pull ever more intensively across my lifetime.

Through dreams, visions and a life-threatening pancreatic cancer in 2016—stories of what I have been carrying over a lifetime have emerged into the light of day.  An acute longing to know what is mine to mend with regard to these stories is now pressing as I understand the Dead wait.