Deliver Me From Evil Series

 LIVING IN SECRETS

Mommy shared some fantastic stories with us, as we were growing up in our home.  She told us of an evening that she was playing cards with friends until nightfall.  By the time she was finished playing her hand it was near the dawn of morning.  Her friends offered to walk her home, but she declined when she saw a man smoking a cigarette under a street light.  She told her friends she would be safe once she had reached the man because she would be close enough to run home.  As she approached the light she saw less and less of this man, and as she came under the light there was no man.  Needless to say, she ran home, as quickly as she could.

When she was younger, Grumma told Mommy not to walk through the path behind her house, it was a wooded path, and it was a great short cut, everyone used, including Mommy. She did not heed to Grumma’s warnings and one night will cutting through the path, alone, Mommy spotted a man, he told her to get off the path, and in her stubbornness she continued in her journey.  The man transformed into a horse right before her eyes, then into a ravenous dog.  Yet, again, she ran all the way home.

As a woman she and her girlfriend were driving through a fog, when night, when they saw what appeared to be an image of a person, standing in the middle of the road.  She said as they drove pass, the image was attempting to get into the car; she put her foot on the gas, and raced home as quickly as she could.

Now this tale was the story the bore more witness to its authenticity to any of the others.  My father, a man engaged to another woman, began to date my mother.  My father’s fiancé went to Grumma’s home and threw some sort of ill mixture across her concrete steps.  The residue sits on that same step even until today.  But it was after this that my mother received an urgent message about my father.  He was squatting, in the middle of a street, unclothed, and ranting on and on about picking peanuts from a dirt road, clearly he had lost his mind.  My mother sent for my father’s brother to help her with his condition.

My mother and told me that she and Grumma took Daddy to a root woman.  The woman took Daddy’s hands into her own and scratched the cuticles on my father’s thumbs with her own nails.  His thumb nails turned black.  She then knew how to help him. With more hocus pocus she helped my father back to his senses.  All my life I would recall my father’s black thumb nails.

At first I wasn’t sure if I would believe those stories but Grumma signed off on all of them.  She even told me that my uncle, one of my mother’s brothers could see spirits “As clear as day”.  Apparently, it seems that if you are born with a veil over your face, you can see things no one else could see.  So they taught us not to eat from everyone’s hand, not to accept gifts from everyone, and never leaving your personal effects unattended.

Mommy was very funny about her personal things, and like any inquisitive child I would sojourn through her stash of bobbles and jewelry and perfume as often as I could.  One day while I was on one of my scavenger hunts, I discovered that Mommy kept a black leather bound bible in the top, left hand corner of her bedroom dresser drawer.  I couldn’t understand why a bible would need to be hidden away.

It was buried deep, beneath her night gowns, so I opened it.  I remember reading instructions written along the margins of the text.  It appeared to be written in my mother’s very distinct left handed handwriting.  It was directions, pertaining to the burning of significantly colored candles while reciting specific scriptures.  I asked my mother about the bible and she forbade me from “messing” with it ever again.  Like any curious child I returned to the drawer and searched for the bible at my first opportunity.   I never found it again.

Tune in next month for the continuation of “Deliver Me From Evil.” Series.

Judy Washington, Spiritual Counseling Director and Co-founder of the Christian Counseling and Wellness Center for Women, has over 20 years of experience in mental health counseling, counselor training and consulting. Her teaching and interests include life structuring, career and education counseling, spirituality and mental health, integrated with prolific teachings based in theology and spirituality.