One night, as Mamatha began one of her conversations, I finally mustered the nerve to poke my head from underneath the quilts. Sure enough, there was something standing in the bedroom doorway. Faceless and backlit by the tiny night-light in the next room, it stretched its arms across the doorway as if to brace itself between two dimensions. I opened my eyes wide to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Mamatha confirmed my fears when she addressed the thing by name: “Joseph? Joseph? What you want, Joseph?” I watched and listened, terrified, until it vanished into the darkness.
Mamatha talked about the visit matter-of-factly over biscuits and bacon the next morning, like she always did—the meetings were completely ordinary for her. I wonder now how much of the activity she solicited. There weren’t any Ouija boards or special incantations I ever heard, but I’m not sure Mamatha ever denied the visitors passage into her world, either. For years stories of ghosts and spirits were simply a part of nightly routines and family gatherings. Almost everyone had seen, heard, or felt something. Ghost horses and mystical mules galloped invisibly around houses. Children saw death angels and died soon after. The appearance of glowing green orbs and encounters with things that bumped and thumped in the night were expected. Even Daddy, typically a stoic tower of reason and rationality, told stories of inexplicable phenomena that gave me second thoughts about walking around anywhere on the Home Place after dark.
Daybreak was a welcome relief from the spooky socializing. Not that the magic stopped with the light of day—it simply changed form to something less frightening. Mamatha, like many other older people, depended on an assortment of drugs to quell various ailments. She took a familiar cocktail of pills, to keep her high blood pressure in check, her heart rhythm regular, and her back from aching. But Mamatha supplemented the standard stuff with remedies no store sold. She preferred out of the ground to over the counter.
A bounty of innocuous-looking plants grew right outside the back door and provided free and often effective alternatives to what the doctors prescribed. Things most would call weeds—mullein with its soft, wooly leaves; pokeweed, which grew head high and had purple berries; and feathery-looking dog fennel—all of it had a higher purpose in Mamatha’s world. Mullein tea and pokeweed, properly prepared, were both general tonics for whatever ailed a body. The pungent green plumes of the fennel, crushed and rubbed on insect stings, eased pain and swelling quickly. Mamatha removed unsightly moles by tying them off with cow’s-tail hair tourniquets and quieted coughs with a warm shot of whiskey and honey. A teaspoon of sugar did help the medicine go down—but even when sugar preceded a dose of turpentine to clear congestion, there was little to feel delighted about. I was often plagued with painful tongue ulcers that Mamatha diagnosed as lie bumps. She prescribed truth as the best cure, but beyond that she would either painfully snatch them off with her fingernails or paint my tongue with nasty-tasting tinctures that hurt as much as the malady itself. She boiled roots to make salves for my fungal infections and believed that ardent prayer could heal anything.
Being a growing, feral boy, my demand for calories was constant. What with all the running, jumping, climbing, exploring, wood chopping, hay stacking, and fence mending that might fill a single day, I needed as much fuel as I could get. I never met a cookie, pie, cake, candy bar, or slab of gravy-covered meat I wouldn’t eat. In truth I was a greedy kid, putting away as much as Mamatha would feed me and then scarfing down more for good measure.
But a half dozen butter-soaked biscuits swimming in molasses, accompanied by enough bacon, grits, and cheesy scrambled eggs to feed three people, can cause problems. Sometimes things bubbled and boiled inside me and became painful beyond what my physiology or anything from a bottle might cure.
Mamatha’s solution wasn’t pink and couldn’t be delivered by the teaspoon. Instead she turned to a different prescription—one filled from somewhere “out there.” The treatment began with a series of circles drawn on my bare belly, spiraling outward from my navel. With the abdominal art completed, Mamatha started tracing lines in the air to make two or three imaginary crosses. As my paunch rumbled she muttered words that I never understood. After the incantations, she drew an invisible string gently upward from my belly button, until the pain was gone. That magic never failed.
When I’m in an old field full of things most others simply bypass as weeds, I see healing. I can’t help grabbing a piece of dog fennel just to smell its pungent perfume. A mess of poke salad is better than any pot of gourmet greens, and a piece of cornbread alongside brings back vivid memories of times with Mamatha. I tell whoever will listen of the curative qualities of the botanical apothecary that grows all around us. Some relatives used to say that Mamatha’s cures and incantations came from ancestors who brought healing traditions from the Motherland or learned them as slaves. Other relatives claimed they were born of some American Indian connection. I call it a mystery: I’m not sure where her magic came from and probably never will be.
I grew up understanding that the mysterious things I experienced didn’t all need to be explained. Not knowing everything was OK. But since I last fell under any of my grandmother’s spells, I’ve been trained extensively. Some might even say I’ve been overtrained, brainwashed to think critically about the natural world. As a scientist, I was taught that the unexplained is to be pursued relentlessly and hell-bent on publishing. My training suggests that if mysteries can’t be unraveled, then perhaps what we see isn’t “real”; if the results aren’t publishable, then the observed isn’t believable.
Mamatha’s alchemy wouldn’t have passed the muster of peer review—but she wouldn’t have cared. In the midst of amazing advancements that saw flight evolve from fantasy to commonplace, she believed unshakably that some things existed beyond explanation. But her magic wasn’t just about the metaphysical. It was most evident in her ability to turn bad to good, to see life through death and hope through despair—and to see the Home Place through history, becoming a refuge for my family.
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold.
IN 1928, THE YEAR MY FATHER WAS BORN, HERBERT HOOVER completed his tenure as Secretary of Commerce and was elected president. J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Bureau of Investigation, which he would help turn into the FBI seven years later. It was a good time to bestow the name “Hoover” on a son for whom you had great hopes. But when the reckless abandon of the Roaring Twenties came to a screeching halt, “Hoover” rapidly lost its currency as a name. The presidential Hoover, Herbert, was the man in charge as the nation sunk eyeball deep into the most miserable years of the Depression. The law-enforcing Hoover, J. Edgar, used and abused the law to the furthest extent of his eccentric will for almost fifty years. These were poor namesakes; “Hoover” was not an auspicious star under which to begin.
James Hoover Lanham, however, was my father. There were other names people called him: “James,” “James H.,” “Trap,” “Ish,” “Big Chief,” “Daddy.” According to Mamatha her Hoover was something of a prodigy, sitting in his father’s classroom at Bettis Academy among much older children. Hoover must’ve been a sponge, soaking up everything he could from schoolbooks and at Daddy Joe’s side. He read, ciphered, and studied his way into joining the best, brightest, and boldest that black Edgefield had to offer.
The Lanham boy probably wasn’t ever a hell-raiser. In all likelihood he was obedient to a father-loving fault. In the Lanham family dutifulness is a valued commodity. It can be traded for all sorts of highly sought-after things otherwise difficult to gain: praise, freedom, and favor. Daddy Joe and Mamatha heaped a shit-ton of all three on their only son. He could do no wrong; he was dependable, respectful, intelligent, and strong. He was