the many lives and secret sorrows of josephine

'Confessions?' my sister Catherine asked. I drank a magic potion and I'm filled with woe.Ī note Aunt Désirée enclosed with her gift read: 'A little book in which to record your wishes and dreams, your secret confessions.' I shook the book over the table. So this is confession number one in this, my new diary, sent to me all the way from Paris by my beautiful Aunt Désirée: I drank a magic potion and I'll not tell Mother. Mother says the Devil sent her too many girls and is hungry to get one back. Mother says the Devil is hungry for girls like me. Mother says the Devil speaks through the mouths of the voodoo spirits. I regarded the liquid cautiously, for it smelled vile. Mimi pushed the coconut bowl into my hands. 'Euphémie David - the teller of fortunes?' The obeah woman, the voodoo priestess who lived in the shack up the river. She'd knotted a red and yellow scarf tight around her head. 'Something manbo Euphémie made for you,' she whispered. It's the voodoo, surely, the bitter-tasting quimbois Mimi got me to drink this morning, a drink of secret spells. I felt strange up there - peering out at my world, enveloped in gloom on my happy day. I could hear Grandmother Sannois and Mother arguing in the front parlor, the slaves chanting as they pushed the cane stalks through the rollers in the crushing hut, a chicken scratching in the honeysuckle bushes. Is not the celebration of one's birthday supposed to bring one joy? After dinner, after eating too many doughnut fritters with guava jelly, I took my leave and climbed up to my special place in the kapok tree. Without a dowry, what hope is there? Mother says the wind takes hope and dashes it into the sky, just as the big wind took our house, picked it up and dashed it, leaving nothing but debts in its place. In which I am told an extraordinary fortune

The many lives and secret sorrows of josephine