I
Years ago, when I was an undergraduate student, I befriended a young woman of whom I had the unfortunate opportunity of knowing by face and attitude in high school. Back in high school she was two years ahead of me and was one of those conceited types who thought the sun did not shine until she cleaned the crust from her eyes. She would often say “Any boy that don’t want what she got in her drawers is either gay or on his way to being gay and he just don’t know it yet.”

Anyhoot, we had a music appreciation class together in college and realized from across the room that we had something in common - that particular day, it was the high school sweat top bearing the emblem of “Cohen’s Green Hornet.” She jumped up after class and giggled her way across the room, “You went to Cohen, I know you right?” She waited for me to give an account of her reputation as a staunchly hated B.I.T.C.H.

 However, I simply smiled and retorted, “Yep, you know me but only because I was the one in class while you were the one with her back pressed against the lockers as some basketball playing six footer launched his shot rimming try at your squat. I remember YOU, twirling your hair around your number two pencil with fake laughter while teachers taught.”

She smirked, “Right, you the one who went to that catholic school before Cohen. You wore both straps of your book sack on your shoulders; now that was some white shit, if ever I did see any.”

I said, “Yep some things never change,” and we both give a slight grin and smacked outr lips. The next day and the day after that we continued to exchange potshots until finally we ended up eating lunch in the university cafeteria together and from then on we were an uneasy alliance.

What I had come to realize again about this young woman was her inexplicable need to treat others like manure for her personal enjoyment. It was as if the thrill gave her an orgasmic high and I was foolish enough to believe that in college the in and out crews did not exist. People are adults and are prone to act like adults, I often told myself, because the venue has changed - no room for childish idiosyncrasies.

I was EXTREMELY wrong.

And the more I allowed myself to think I was going to change this woman into a half decent person by showing her that people from all walks of life are in college and that we should embrace the opportunity, the more that “afterschool special bullshit” got old. She managed to create this persona of the world was against her because she was cute.

The last straw of our acquaintanceship came when she had been ill with the chickenpox virus and needed her assignments brought to her. The professors had told her that she could complete her exams at home and that I could transport them back and forth. I agreed to help her because at this time in her life she was petitioning her husband for divorce. She had caught him in bed with two women from his job. He was at the time living with his mother and my cohort of the uneasy alliance, cried like a baby that finishing college would give her the independence to raise her own babies. Therefore, on top of my own eighteen-hour class load I found the time to gather her lessons.

Moreover, every time I dropped off or picked up papers from her home, I noticed the gloomy atmosphere trapped in her domicile. I literally felt as though I could not breathe, it was as if unseen hands were wrapped around my neck and my nostrils were being denied free air. My head felt heavy and I wanted to vomit. While inside her home, her mother was always trying to whisk me to a secret corner of the house to tell me how awful her daughter (the woman in question) was to her - always cursing her and she was sure it took her so long to bring prepare her dinner because she was spitting in her meals.

On one occasion her mother even whispered, “She drove her husband to those women. See, with her sex has a manual. Do not do this or that but she was the one who wanted the threesome taped, you cannot blame him for liking it more than he should have."  Needless to say I started leaving the papers in her mailbox and requesting the mailbox as the pickup point.

When the young woman got well enough to reappear at the university, she was even more venomous. Everything was stupid and she would speak out in the middle of lectures, “I’m here looking for my next baby's daddy, this college shit is for ugly chicks who gotta make their own money to survive.”

One day I questioned her as to the logic behind that statement, being hurt by your own life does not give you the right to shit on the decisions of others. She laughed and whispered to me, “I do not give a fuck about ugly chicks. I’m here for a fine ass niggah to set me up good.” And I walked off from her shouting, “You a special king of bitch, the kind who gets everything she deserves and then some.”

As the days went by I realized how erratic my own life had become being in this woman’s company. My periods had become more painful, I had begun suffering anxiety attacks, and migraine headaches, my sleep patterns were thrown off kilter and at times, I was a walking insomniac. When I sat down and thought about it my problems were all attributed to having allowed myself the misfortune of befriending a pompous idiot, a toxic vampire. I thought about why I had allowed this to happen. Me, someone who is usually so particular about her inner circle and came to the conclusion that it was out of a need to find a substitute “girlfriend” since my best friend had left town to attend the University of Michigan a semester ago. I was in need of sisterly chats and that bond from the girlfriend society.

I also realized at that moment that I needed to rid my mental and physical space of this woman’s energy and fast. I had purchased a book sometime prior to meeting this young woman. It was the day of my best friend's going away party. I was standing on Canal Street waiting for her bus to arrive and this woman walked up to me asking me how clean I thought I was. I squinted my eyes and informed her that that was a weird question to ask, and then we started talking about toxic people and places. Then she hit me with it - Psychic Vampires. This Sistah from college had for ME become the poster child of the psychic vampire.

She was draining the life from me. Things that I had been passionate about were struggles and I was agitated by the littlest of missteps. So I cleansed, internally first with a tea made of garlic skins and cinnamon. This would bring a state of calmness to my spirit and remove negative thoughts. Then I sat in a chair about to begin my self-fumigation. Before covering myself in a white sheet, I placed under the chair Benzoin and allspice incense. The Benzoin to free me from spiritual difficulties and the allspice to create a more harmonious relationship with others.

After the self-fumigation, I proceeded to the bathtub to spiritually bathe in parsley and honey. Together, it is known that both parsley and honey in a bath will provide a joyless life with opportunity for a journey of sweet discovery. Once I steeped from the tub, I rubbed fresh whole eggs along my forehead, temporal, the space where my soft spot was in my infantile stage, my throat and the nape of my neck. This is done to remove future negative thoughts directed towards you and it relieves you of any attachment to emotional disturbances. Lastly I proceeded to cleanse my home with floor wash made of first morning urine, crushed eggshells, Florida water, eucalyptus, cinnamon and crushed seven AfriKan Powers incense. Then I mopped and asked the creator/tress to release me from the grasp of psychic dysfunction and allow me to breathe the free, fresh air intended by nature.

My prayers were answered and the young woman never spoke to me again on or off campus. Three months after that I fell in love with my future husband of sixteen years and still my spirit is clean and breathing the freshest of air.

II
A few months after Hurricane Katrina my mother and stepfather came to live with us in Shreveport, Louisiana. A year later, my father transitioned the day after Christmas, it was a devastating loss to my family but most especially my mother. She had spent thirty-three years married to my stepfather who at the time of his death was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. A couple of years of solitude went by and my mother decided to seek out spiritual comfort in the folds of a quaint Baptist church. What she found was a place where con-artists and drug addicts came hoping to find elderly widows and or widowers to finance the remainder of their existence in this plane. Even the preacher was a self-professed addict and on occasion (even to this date), a womanizer whenever his Lucifer alter ego takes possession of his mind and heart.

My mother was drawn to this church and all of its soap operaish drama, which manifested four days a week. Eventually she succumbed to the foolishness and in her need to find love at sixty-three she allowed herself to become entangled in a psychosexual relationship with a crack addict/alcoholic. It was as if someone had stabbed me in my heart, the woman whom I always looked to with admiration and the highest of self-esteem was now being a crony for a man who did not even have the funds to buy himself a can of Vienna sausage.

My mother is a grown woman so I dare not tell her what to do but I have told her what I thought and although she prefers to continuously engage in this tangled web of enabler, I have to be vigilant as to the type of energy I will allow inside my home. Now the man is under no circumstance welcomed but when my mother spends days away with him at his apartment, I have to protect the atmosphere of my home upon her return. This brings me to very potent and powerful cleanse that rids the air of HIS negative stagnation.

I mop my home and spritz the walls with a solution of tobacco, coffee, cinnamon and Florida water. I then place raw eggs in the corners of each room that divination sees as a hotbed for retaining the energy carried on my mother’s person or in her overnight bag. I place bay leaf in the four corners of all other rooms. This cleanse acts as a force field against any intentional and unintentional negativity.

III
I, like I’m sure a lot of folks, enjoy indulging in garage sales or flea markets but I find myself having to be extremely cautious of items purchased at these venues. It is because of the energy that lies dormant on these objects and how that energy has a tendency to manifest in our daily lives. One case in point was my sister who had found an old television stand, which was placed on a trash heap, after the new owners of a house abandoned during Hurricane Katrina decided to renovate. My sister’s thinking was that this stand would go extremely well with the decorum of her daughter’s room and thus decided to load the television stand into the bed of her pickup.

Days later, the television stand became the centerpiece for a string of paranormal incidences. These incidences centered around a woman about forty years of age in a long satiny yellowish nightgown with antique lace trim. She had scratches all over her body that bled profusely and when she tried to speak a river of blood poured from her mouth. My niece who was seventeen at the time said she could not scream out for her mother when she saw the woman. She swore she tried to scream but it was as if the woman had taken her voice. She told me that the woman just stood there near the stand, watching and then this woman would sit on the floor with her ear pressed against the stand trembling. After questioning my niece and my sister, I found out the whole story behind the item’s previous place of residence. My sister is known for getting in folk's face to find the underlying cause of a story. Therefore, she went back to the house and demanded to be told about the former occupants.

Apparently, what she did not know until later was that the home had been set ablaze by the husband who had tried to make the police believe that his wife had drowned during the storm. He had prayed that her body would wash away but when her body was still very much dry, inside and not in a state of watered down trauma he panicked. Shortly thereafter, he tried to burn the house down to remove any and all evidence, which would pinpoint him as an abusive murderer. My sister unable to pass up a deal unknowingly welcomed this woman’s energy into her home and for a period of two months endured moans, bloody apparitions, and nonstop pleas for help.

When she finally telephoned me, she was literally ready to pull her hair out. So I asked her how attached was she to the item. Moreover, she assured me that for a goodnight’s rest she would gladly get rid of it but she felt sorry for the woman and in a way did not want to turn her back on her. So we settled on cleaning the t.v. stand. I divined and told her to wash it with a concoction of black soap and Florida water. Then she was to smudge her entire house and the stand with sage. Lastly, she was to sprinkle sea salt in every room and cover the door seals with red brick. Once this was achieved, she could speak to the woman bidding her to leave and find peace in the next realm. My sister sung and cried for the spirit and lit a white candle, which stayed in the room until morning. The next day she covered the candle with a saucer and the woman was never seen or heard from again.

There are instances in our lives when we clean ourselves, the people and the things we love because we feel a sense of obligation for their health and well-being but how often do we think about spiritual cleansing and the psychic dirt, which accumulates as a result of simply existing? Sometimes what we cannot see with the naked eye will outlive a dial soap bath or a Paul Mitchell shampoo.  Sometimes we need to believe that what we cannot see can dirty our destiny for as long as we so choose to remain filthy.

Odabo.

Olorisha Aboyade Bomani (Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani) is a native New Orleanian and Omo OYA. Mawiyah’s writings have appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Dark Eros, Catch The Fire, Freeform Magazine, Beyond The Frontier, Kente Cloth, Fertile Ground, Family Portraits, Chicken Bones: A Literary Journal, Survival Digest Quarterly, From A Bend In The River,and Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21st Century. She is co-writer/director of the play Brown Blood Black Womb and of the plays Hair Anthem, Spring Chickens, What Happens to Niggers in French Quarter Nightclubs and Hoodoo Gumbo. Olorisha Aboyade is an educator who currently resides in Shreveport, Louisiana.