Which was good! When I performed, it was best that everyone forgot he was standing there at all.įor me, I always wore a white dress. With his dark suit and dark skin, he looked like a shadow, the whites of eyes and the top of his cane the only thing that kept him from disappearing into the wall. Raphael always wore a suit, a dark black one with long coattails and a top hat. I was no newcomer, and the men that night seemed to be familiar with the game of it all. Regardless, I had been at the game for at least a decade. An actual child when I began but not when it happened. I was sixteen then, but I suppose I looked twelve or thirteen. Raphael, he was my manager, told me about them when I first started, oh, years ago. So many things are slipping away from me these days. They had an animal name, but I can’t quite recall it.
There were those sisters back in the last century, when mediums were popular, who used to fool their friends and family and a host of others. It is nothing new, what I do, what I did. The words of a negro con artist are not in great demand, but I will write them anyway.įor my work I performed several roles, but I tended towards automatic writing. It would do no good to skip even if no one but me will read this. I committed to writing this down as it happened, all of it. Or at least I hope that I am remembering and it is not still anchored there, in me.īut I am getting ahead of myself. I can still remember how it felt, wrapped around my mind like a turban, feel the squeeze of it when my mind has chance to wander towards that dark memory. I know I have never done so before, but I did manage to summon something that evening. What I took from her tales was the manner in which I should look when I am summoning and communicating with the dead. That has never been my concern in her stories, whether or not she had been able to was irrelevant. I cannot channel ghosts and spirits, although my mother said my grandmother had been able to. I was, am still, all things being considered, a “medium.” But for what I did, my appearance served me quite well. These things may have disadvantaged me if I was making a traditional living. I look, to most, girlish, if they do not know me.
Seance means full#
Full grown, my height has only reached just over five feet. I will describe myself to you, imaginary reader. I was always only a means to an end, but still, I will have my own say in some small way here. Though it is unnecessary, no one will read this missive, but like everything else I must do this. In any case, I know these two things to be true: that I have not performed since that night, and that what I witnessed then was as real as the nose on my face. I miss that small part of myself, and I have so little left to hold on to now. It is my hope that perhaps penning a recollection of that evening will cure me. I cannot tell, nor do I have the means to explore the matter. I have not performed since that evening, and even now I do not know if it is merely psychological or if there is some greater, unseen force at play.