Magic Alley

The Magic Alley, for all the fun it provided me, took people’s appearances, souls, or both, leaving nothing but ghosts of men and women. But in this story, in this world, my grandfather exists and burns brightly, always being reborn from the ashes.

 
I cartwheeled and played hide-and-seek in the same place that the people who doubled over from wicked medicine walked in zombie-footed strides. In the same place faces peered from the edges of weathered windowpanes. Here, I built a clubhouse out of pieces of abandoned homes—these homes were empty of love but never of people—pieces patched together to create a castle for children who could never sit still or tame their free will. The place where I created my castle became my playground: a drab, drug-infested, gravel-paved alley in the heart of Detroit, along the main artery of the city—Woodward Avenue, between the streets of Pasadena and Grand. Out of artless life, in this narrow strip, my imagination created fierce and ferocious creatures, and it was there I learned the difference between a child’s world and a young man’s.

Wrapped in the landscape of crumbling structures and unkempt lawns, I disappeared in and out of garages and fields of orange-hued dandelions. I jumped from rooftops deep into dungeons and fought back the touch, the kiss, the sickle of death. I played my childhood games, participated in countless hours of roughhoused basketball, and found magic in what most would define as urban blight. Unbeknownst to me, I was heavily protected by my grandfather, Charlie Ramsey, and his shining light that sliced through darkness using nothing but compassion and generosity. In a garden attached to the alley, I witnessed my grandfather bend his tired body and pluck a red tomato from its vine. He walked to the garden’s edge toward a man I had never seen before. The man, shabbily dressed, stood on the sidewalk. My grandfather handed the tomato to the man. They gave each other a head nod. The man proceeded along the sidewalk and my grandfather returned to a rusted metal milk crate that he had been sitting on before the man stopped to watch us garden.

I was barely ten years old in the mid-’80s, when I first started exploring Detroit’s alleys. During this time, my childlike lens allowed me to see people and places for more than what they offered at face value. Every neighbor possessed their own variation of power; every animal was a pet, protector, or savage, and every building, a kingdom. The years I spent playing in the alley provided me with memories that only a child’s imagination could create, but I also learned that the fun had in this alley could be equally deadly. Kick over an old Maxwell House coffee can, and you might find a four-finger set of brass knuckles, a small manila envelope full of powder, or Chuck’s hidden gun. I’m not sure if there were always hidden weapons throughout the alley or if I just had a knack for finding stuff I wasn’t supposed to find. However, I often found guns, drugs, knives, and I sometimes found a person.

Once, on a cloudy summer day in ’87 or ’88, on an expedition to cross the street, Ginard, Ronnie J, Chauncey, Harvey, and I found the body of a darkened man. He lay in the doorway of an empty, war-torn building that the land was reclaiming for itself; a tree sprouted into its crumbled walls. The man was twisted in death, his limbs pointed in un- orthodox directions. We gathered around him and spoke in chant-like phrases: Who is he? How did he get here? We should leave. Check his pockets. We’re going to get in trouble. We all spoke in broken unison until our words breathed life back into his being. He growled and cracked his body in line, then ripped a belt from around his forearm. It took me some time to learn why sleeping people always wore their belts around their forearms instead of their waists. The dead man erected himself from the doorway, dark and impossible, and as he arose, we ran from him in defeat. We were no match for his magic. We were experts at finding treasures, but we had no powers against resurrection.

We ran from him without looking back. Possibly, we were too afraid to face our fears, or maybe we’d come too close to a threat we had not yet experienced. Years later, I understood the importance of looking back and what can be learned when we pause. For a time after that failed expedition, we didn’t attempt to travel outside our alley. We stuck to our narrow strip and searched for treasures that people lost in their travels, or for artifacts that were supposed to be hidden or cast off. We weren’t ready to fend for ourselves past the war-torn building at the end of the alley, where danger lurked; in our alley, we found protection in our familiar landscape.

When my friends and I found certain things in the alley, such as Chuck’s gun, we knew to leave his stuff alone because everyone knew: “Chuck will kill you.” Though for some reason, I was never worried about Chuck killing me. I wasn’t worried about receiving harm from anyone. I had magic on my side, and bullets had no effect against magic. The other young men I ran with, however, might have been a little worried about Chuck killing us—not from a bullet, but from being fed to his dungeon of Pit Bulls.

A few houses down from one of many small gardens my grandfather and I planted, the Pit Bulls lived. They were behind an old wooden fence with red paint that peeled, sharpened, and formed into skin-piercing little daggers. We’d tread lightly as we trekked past the Pit Bulls’ fence. There were three of them that we knew of, and the slightest noise would drive them to violent scatters of madness. Our every motion around them would be in fright, except for the times when we wanted to witness the power they possessed. From the alley, we could climb on top of a garage across from the Pit Bulls’ yard, and with accurate tossing ability we would launch rocks over the fence from the garage’s roof. We couldn’t see the dogs, but we could hear them slowly rumble about, sniffing for the source of their disturbance. I had witnessed them feed on each other and knew that if they ever caught me, my flesh was no match for them. We were smart to stay on the roof; they were evil and hungry, diabolical and insatiable. We tempted only enough to make them erratic, never more, for if they ever broke loose, that surely would have meant the end of our reign. There would have been no place to disappear—from them, or from Chuck’s wrath.

A single instance occurred that made me, at least, stop harassing the bulls: the one with the large, gnarled head and red nose was halfway over the fence while we practiced how to defend our castle, if and when it was attacked. We could see the fence from our clubhouse and had no awareness of the danger we were in or of the disdain the Pit Bulls had toward us. But as I stood in front of our castle to defend it, the Pit Bull’s front legs, head, and half of his body came over the fence. Foam flopped from his mouth, and his claws scraped across the top of the fence. It was evident that in seconds he would scale the fence and swarm us. I might have had magic on my side, but I was not a warrior, at least not yet. I did what I was great at: removing myself from the danger and replacing myself in my grandparents’ home, a place that I considered to be the most protected place in existence.

I took one step from in front of the clubhouse, then appeared in my grandparents’ bedroom. The room was empty when I arrived, but the hand-quilted comforter, the wooden chair I’d always sit in next to their bed, and a few hunting rifles stacked in the corner wrapped me in a force field of love and protection. I have no recollection of my transfer from the Pit Bulls to the bedroom, from one spot to the other: not how I made it through ankle-deep grass exploding with tobacco-spitting grasshoppers; not how I could have made it through pockets of bumblebees always protecting their queen; not how I climbed two mountainous flights of stairs. I do not know. All I remember is appearing next to a window, surveying yards overgrown with shrubbery, to see if the Pit Bulls had followed me. They had not, and I do not know if they ever made it over the fence, but I imagine that they did.

Although the Pit Bulls were deadly, they were not the deadliest animal in the alley. For an entire summer we heard laughing children, cicadas, and the shake of a serpent that was never found. The shake came from a rattlesnake, believed to be owned by Moo-Moo, who was one of the long-standing residents of the neighborhood. The snake, we learned through rumor, escaped from his house and was loose somewhere in the green grasses and gardens. We could hear its rattle shake wildly through the heat vapor lines that made the surface of the land move with the energy of the beating sun. The sound of its rattle was distant and immediate. Two houses down from Moo-Moo’s lived people I called the Unknown; I never saw them arrive or leave, but they always came and went. This house of the Unknown had a 12-foot fence around its backyard, where an authentic wolf and a Bouvier des Flandres, which we pronounced boobie-a, lived uncaged. Upon hearing that they possessed a wolf, I had to see for myself. Harvey lived next door and had a Juliet balcony on the back upper level of his home. I went there to see clearly into the backyard, to get a glimpse of the wolf. It was tall, long, and slender; gray and grayer, unlike any dog I had ever seen before. We played most of our basketball games in Harvey’s backyard and sacrificed many a ball to the animals on the other side of that fence, balls that were never retrieved because they were attacked before they hit the ground.

Nothing that went over that fence ever came back, ever.

On a sweltering summer day, when one of the Unknown’s pets broke loose, we learned that they sheltered more than human-sized dogs. As was to be expected, the Unknown was somewhere in between coming and going and were nowhere to be found. Everyone in the neighborhood always supposed that the wolf or the Bouvier des Flandres would someday escape and leave a wake of maimed body parts as they terrorized old folks and children. We didn’t know what else lived inside the home of the Unknown, what also wanted to escape.

I used to think it escaped its captors from the window of a tower. It zipped across the rooftops and swung through the branches of trees, and we all listened as it attempted to get far away. Branches of hundred-year-old oaks and maple trees flexed and cracked from the animal’s movements until it was no longer able to escape further; it found shelter in the largest tree in the alley, but instead of safety, the tree offered nothing but a dead end. In its moment of repose, we could finally see what had escaped. From a distance, someone might have thought it was a small, hairy man, but it was not. It was a spider monkey, sitting high in the trees, looking over a foreign land, a neighborhood that it knew nothing about.

Looking back on the incident, I realize the loose running spider monkey probably suffered from the shock, trauma, and confusion of new freedom. Most of the neighbors stood on their front lawns or huddled in the middle of Grand, pointing at the trees and looking for binoculars to get the novel view of a spider monkey in the trees. The Michigan Humane Society tracked the animal to its position high in the trees and shot it with a tranquilizer gun. No one moved from their spots during the pursuit and capture of the rogue spider monkey, its body limp and unlivid as it was hoisted down. The screeches of the rampant monkey still hung in the winds many weeks after it was captured, and they are forever recorded in my auditory system. Pit Bulls, a Bouvier des Flandres, a rattlesnake, a wolf, and a spider monkey—how could this alley not be magical?

In the middle of it all grew my grandfather’s vegetable garden, colorful and full of life.

Several houses around the alley contained different, powerful elements. Some sold little white pebbles that gave people super strength and speed; one sold a powdery substance that gave people the power to stop time; one was a watering hole where people held bottles tightly to their bodies. In the middle of it all grew my grandfather’s vegetable garden, colorful and full of life.

The people who used the powdery substance alchemically transformed it to a liquid, then used a needle to escape to another dimension. They even had a ritual where they twitched and scratched while they stood in a long line resemblant of the ones at soup kitchens during the Great Depression. I saw them as the Lollipop Guild from The Wizard of Oz. They clucked their tongues, kicked their feet, and shucked their arms from side to side before injecting themselves with the liquid that provided them with the power to stop time.

Have you ever seen a soup kitchen line of Lollipop kids? I have, and they wore belts around their forearms and held conversations that they paused in the middle of. After their injections, they stopped moving: there would be tens of them standing like statues in a gothic garden, their movements no more noticeable than the rotation of the Earth. I watched these creatures’ souls leave their bodies to find answers, then return minutes later with the answers they had gone searching for. Later, as a preteen in the late ’80s, when I learned more about the substance that had made them seem magical to me, I would feel more sympathy for them than wonderment.

In the alley, several houses down from our clubhouse, was a three-car garage filled with stripped automobiles and rusted random pieces of cars long forgotten, dust covered, or tarnished by time. On the second level of the garage lived a powder person, and in his lair there was a kerosene lamp, a sleeping cot, and a milk crate that served as a nightstand. The garage was dilapidated at best but still able to stand strongly on its foundation. Surrounding the outside of the garage were light green, prickly weeds that grew to the height of my waist and dark green vines with waxy leaves that appeared to support the structure—nature took over where humans neglected. However disheveled this place looked, the second floor was meticulously well-kept. The space reminded me of my own family members’ quarters: always clean and in order. On the milk crate sat the lamp; a burnt, soot-blackened spoon; and a needle. At 11 years old, whenever I laid eyes on a hypodermic needle I assumed the person using it was a diabetic or a doctor, because they were the only people I ever witnessed with one.

I stumbled upon this person’s lair while I was exploring buildings I had not ventured into before, but when I found it, I was furious. I had allowed someone to move into our lands unscathed, to live and sleep and explore without us knowing about them. We had been infiltrated. Directly under our noses or in the dead of night, we had allowed what I took as a spy into our world, who had made themselves comfortable, and even possessed a genuine kerosene lamp. This lair had a lamp, and our clubhouse did not. This lair was clean, and ours was a box of mangy carpets and filth. This was an attic, and ours was a four-foot-high structure of particle board, old doors, and broken two-by-fours. I was infuriated that this person had items in their lair that we did not.

Chauncey, Harvey, and I assembled and advanced toward the powder person’s lair. Once there, we stood in the space, not saying anything, just standing there. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do, only that something needed to be done. I remember wanting to set the place on fire and claim the building as our own, but the mood hanging over us all grew somber. We were sedated by a force that I cannot describe or define. Finally, Harvey spoke up and said, “C’mon. Let’s go. I think this is my uncle’s stuff.” His words felt like a confession. A damning statement, that his uncle, who we all knew as Bebop, was a powder person. We left that garage feeling a little older, a little more knowledgeable. I went there to take that lamp, but we all walked away with the ugly truth that our imaginations could produce only so much magic before reality choked out our creations.

We walked out of the garage into the alley, empty and empty-handed. We allowed Bebop to exist in our world, and even patrolled his lair for him when we weren’t protecting our castle. But we could not allow our focus to rest on him when there were plenty of other things for us to worry about. Like the watering hole. The folks there were a ragtag, colorful group that came and went and rarely took refuge in any one place. They’d meet up in a field at the other end of the alley, opposite from the war-torn building, and sometimes they sat on an old wooden telephone pole that had been left to rot. They converted it to a nice resting bench; it was porous and had moss growing on it in spots that rarely received contact. The people appeared one by one, but always gathered into a cluster. When their water evaporated, they’d wander off into oblivion. As I encountered them, I imagined they were from a land called Wino.

I enjoyed the Winos more than any other magical creature that walked the alley. Some days I would talk to them and listen to their far-fetched stories, which usually made no sense. They regularly spoke through incoherent speech. On other days I would attack them by hurling rocks their way, or, when I got close enough, I’d kick dirt at them. A few times, one or two would come close to capturing me, and I would scatter off to safety before danger could catch me. I thought they would seek revenge when they encountered me again, but my magic was too strong for someone from the land of Wino—I possessed natural protective magic as well as supernatural. My most powerful magic was being able to erase grudges with a smile. It also helped that most of the Winos never entered the alley more than a few times. The Winos were fun to defeat.

When I kicked dirt at them, they’d try to chase me but always stumbled to their faces, while at the same time holding their bottles in their hand as if they were paying homage to some king on high. Most times when I approached them, though, they paid me no attention; they would already be occupied while talking to another Wino, the genie in the bottle, or an imaginary friend. I could never tell the difference. It’s an uncanny thing to see a group of people talk to another group of people who can only be seen through the distorted view of a Wild Irish Rose bottle. I think the magic for them was trying to get the genie out of the bottle, and that’s why they always hit each other in the head with the bottles.

When I was about ten, I witnessed a Wino drink a big bottle of Night Train with one continuous series of swallows. I went home and tried the same with a jug of Sunny Delight, only to learn that things done within the realm of a magical alley cannot be performed in a mundane kitchen.

There were many types of individuals that frequented the alley, but none of them were more memorable than the woman aptly named Crackhead K, who appeared pregnant for her entire existence. Folks in the neighborhood waited for her to deliver the baby, but, amazingly, one never came.

It saddens me to believe that the baby died inside her, and that K was too trapped in the effects of dark magic to commit herself to anything other than an escape from reality. In the early ’90s, Crackhead K died from a heroin overdose, and when they rolled her away on the gurney, folks chatted about her then-pregnancy. All I could think about was how she had always been pregnant, and how I could not remember a time when her stomach wasn’t rounded to its third trimester.

Sometimes Crackhead K could be seen dancing in a field—pregnant, barefooted, and inebriated—synchronizing her soul with the other creatures of the alley. She enchanted people with magic that was as dark as it was bright. I remember sitting with her on the mossy log by the Winos’ watering hole. She was pregnant and wore dingy jeans, a T-shirt, and a shawl. I looked down at her feet as she spoke words that I could not comprehend except for “You’re such a handsome boy,” and “Don’t get caught up in this world.” She wore pink flip-flops; her feet were dirty, like when you step in mud and don’t wipe them off, and I remember thinking: Why won’t you just wear shoes? Now I wonder if she ever thought that the little boy she sat with on a log and called handsome would memorialize her in his words. She and I didn’t talk often, but when we did, I think I learned what powers she possessed. I believe K had the ability to see the people who had died in the alley and directed what was left of them into realms that no one could see but her. Their souls, without her, would continuously trek in a loop over worn-down pieces of gravel, razor-sharp broken bottles, war-released empty shell casings, and hypodermic needles whose contents were used as a cure-all but were deadly as time.

To me, Crackhead K was part demon, part enchantress, part junkie, but, most importantly, a completely pleasant person. However, I was instructed to stay away from her and her kind because she, like many of the people in the Magic Alley, were drug addicts who, to my family, disturbingly only cared about the liquid they injected from a needle.

Have you ever seen a valley of hypodermic needles? I have. They look like deadly little dandelions with venomous, hidden stingers, waiting to poison their next prey. I think the souls of the people who died in the alley are trapped there forever, their souls forever asleep in those needles.

No matter how bleak or deadly these places appeared, I walked in their murky hallways as easy as I could walk through air.

By the time I entered my high school years, I’d witnessed my share of what the alley had to offer: some things horrific, others morbidly beautiful, and some things fantastically unbelievable. Though instead of thinking of the alley as magical, I began to look at it through the lens of a growing young man. It was just an alley, an alley that held the troubles of most inner cities. Just another area flooded with drugs, violence, and buildings that could no longer bear the weight of the people who entered them. Those buildings no longer symbolized mystical, powerful places but rather crumbling structures that were smeared with the human stain. What once served as my playground became a few abandoned houses, garages, and apartment buildings that grew a reputation of housing mental and physical torture. Astoundingly, I never felt out of place in those structures; they felt as much home as my grandparents’ front porch. No matter how bleak or deadly these places appeared, I walked in their murky hallways as easy as I could walk through air.

Next door to Harvey’s home, where we played basketball, was a very large house that existed without a family for many years. The family moved away when I was 11 or 12, and like every other abandoned structure I walked past, I held intrigue in the story of why it died. I was an explorer, and even though I didn’t have my crew with me, I still wanted to know what caused these kingdoms to fall, their stories. In a sense, even as a teenager, I was still searching for magic in the alley. I entered the large house with no other reason than to climb to its attic and look out over the once-lively lands that had slowly died off. If my imagination still possessed the ability to paint phantasm over urban blight, I would have said that “the once powerful glowing kingdoms slowly died from the effects of a white plague.” But, at the time, my imagination did not allow me to create that storyline. Though I was unaware of it, my imagination had experienced a deadening process, and the kingdoms were losing their color, paling compared to their previous moments of golden grandeur.

The colors were no longer vibrant but rather a faint hue of themselves. The life had been drained from the environment and my mind. I no longer felt like a protector or an explorer, just a teenager in a world surrounded by drugs. I did not partake, and I did not judge the people who used them; I merely watched those people’s turmoil, their daily toil to find a way to procure their customary fix. Then, as heroin was replaced in the onslaught of the crack epidemic, the character of people worsened, and the alley became smothered by more tragedy and lush piles of green growth.

Backyards consumed by plants became hiding spots for shadows; at night, through the darkness, the flame of a lighter shone momentarily bright. The alley had become overgrown, but at least one area remained cared for, and when passersby walked along this small plot of land, merely the width of two city houses, they could not ignore the colors it emitted, the old man sitting on a rusted metal milk crate, or myself. On this small plot of reclaimed inner-city land, using our own two hands, my grandfather and I tilled the dirt and planted vegetables. And when the small green shoots of produce cracked the earth and grew green and edible, we shared the food with the neighborhood. Ms. Robinson, a heavyset, late-middle-aged woman who walked with a cane and a waddle, accepted our vegetables, and in return paid us in thank-yous. She never failed to give me a Snickers candy bar after I handed her a head of cabbage.

When I wasn’t in the garden with my grandfather, I was either playing basketball at Harvey’s or relaxing on my grandparents’ porch. Though my imagination was much less active, and I found very little to explore, I still found the people and surrounding area of the Magic Alley satisfying. The one place I did need to explore was the large house. With the lack of a family, it had quickly fallen to waste. Even when a family lived there, the house had already succumbed to nature’s reclaiming. The backyard was overgrown with prickly weeds and small leafy shrubs, and resembled a wildlife reserve more than a yard. I remembered imagining, as a child, that there were bear traps or land mines back there. I’m pretty sure, as I made my way from one border to the other, that I looked like a plain fool tippy-toeing through the backyard, like a cartoon jewelry thief. Soon after the house became abandoned without a family, the plants grew onto and into the house and reclaimed the structure for themselves.

Most of the time that the house sat abandoned, community children played in it as I had played in other houses a few years back, and drug dealers hid guns and drugs in its backyard forest. Addicts squatted, finding a place to rest. No one seemed to care that it was overrun by verdant plant life. Then, in the early ’90s, a tragedy occurred in the large, abandoned house, and most of the people who knew about it decided not to enter the house anymore; no one played, squatted, or practiced any form of magic behind the house’s walls.

I was either never completely told what happened or I don’t want to recall what happened in the large house; I only know of the solemn, angry temperament people spoke through when the story was brought up. The story was so inhuman that no one wanted to repeat it, so cold-hearted that it could make the cruelest cringe. I can’t remember the story, only the community’s feeling. If I had to venture a memory, the unspeakable event that occurred in that house involved a young girl, and afterward the story had the power to deny entrance into the house. I respected my community’s wishes for as long as I could, but what happened there no longer existed there, and I wanted to explore, if for no other reason than to be alone.

When I finally decided to enter the large house, my ascension to the attic was arduous. The front walkway was broken into torso-size blocks; the roots from the trees fought their way through the concrete, compromising its structural stability along with the rest of the house and the community. The front porch twisted into an entanglement of early century colonial architecture and lush wildlife with a symbolic warning: If you enter, you may not exit. The porch moaned as I stepped on it. The wood felt moist under my feet, and every plank crumbled as the vegetation that grew from it tried to capture me for my invasion. I did not attempt to use the backyard—my muscle memory and imagination told me there were still bear traps and land mines there, but really it would not have been possible to fight through the plants without a machete.

I was standing in the doorway after I’d made it through the plants of the porch. The front door had been removed, along with every window, some of the walls, and the living room floor. Someone else had recently entered the house and had stripped it for its copper pipes, sinks, woodwork, and stained glass. I like to think they stripped it to leave it naked for the world to see, exposed to the elements without any protection, making the house suffer the same pains it had inflicted on others.

As I walked up the crumbling stairs, I could see directly into the basement. A small pond had formed, and dark green moss, or maybe thickened mold, had lined the walls. The house was so uncared for that only the growing plants gave it any attention. If it weren’t for the brick structure, nature could have taken advantage of the house’s frailty and leveled it with a gust of wind, flattening it to a pile of bad memories. The plants had waited many years for people to stay away so they could consume the evils of the house and cleanse it in the manner that only nature knew how. Along the inside of the house, vines and moss lined the walls, and squirrels, raccoons, or possums could be heard scurrying away when they recognized a human in their midst. For a moment I considered leaving, certain the rattlesnake that had never been found slithered around in there somewhere, waiting to strike invaders, or that a family of rabid Pit Bulls lived in the attic and that I would become a fat feast for them. The house was an uncharted forest in our neighborhood. That may have been the only moment I felt unsafe in such houses, the only time I felt danger near me.

I ascended to the attic, weathered and disintegrated, the roof opened to the sky. A structural collapse allowed golden sunlight to paint itself on the puckered walls. Spaces of the room were carpeted with splotches of dark green moss. Sparrows—dark and light brown, fat and agile—darted in and out of the windows. I was afraid I’d be pecked to death, that they understood I did not belong in their aviary. Then, for a moment, the house went dead silent. There were no animals scurrying about, and the sparrows flew out of earshot. In the silence, the room was magical, more magical than my imagination or words could create.

I took delicate steps toward a broken window and looked out over the Magic Alley, viewing it from this perspective for the first time. It served as an equator, a visible but unseen line that separated rows of houses. A calm, lazy river: sullen, violent, and providing. While there, looking out the window, I became one of the faces that peered from the edges of weathered windowpanes, seeming to play a game of hide-and-seek or peek-a-boo, and as I looked out the window my view of the world was changing. I no longer thought of the animals or people of the alley as magical or as beings with unrivaled powers. I only saw animals and people. The Pit Bulls were nothing more than a backyard full of dogs. Crackhead K no longer held my fascination; she was transformed to a dead junkie. I still looked at the Winos the same: people standing in circles, talking to another group of people through the distorted view of a Wild Irish Rose bottle. But as I looked out the window, I could see the ever-prevailing fortitude of goodness and calmer of calamity, a true force of protective magic. From the window I could see my grandfather, Charlie Ramsey, tend to one of our gardens. In that moment I reflected that all my protections came from his magical power instead of my own.

Since before I remember having a memory, my grandfather and I had grown and given produce to people. Next to a crack house, my grandfather and I planted and cultivated an urban garden that fed the neighborhood. We gave lima beans, green peas, tomatoes, and turnip greens to church ladies whose sons were dope dealers and whose aunts and uncles were drug addicts. In his own way my grandfather worked his magic on those people. They guarded me from the wicked magic that should have consumed me. “Mr. Ramsey’s boy” is what they called me, as if I didn’t have my own name. I feel because of my grandfather’s magic, I was immune to the fate that befell occupants of the alley, but I was still witness to its effects, the shells of people left drained from wicked magic.

Have you ever seen a ghost bleed? I have. He walked past me while I played basketball; despite his sun-blackened skin, he was pale-faced and hollow, moaning a dreadful sound while blood trickled from his head. I didn’t reach out to help or ask the injured man if he was okay; I recognized him as one of the people who had suffered in war, someone the Magic Alley had saved its worst parts for, to be released in dark vengeance. Once the golden youthful magic from the alley was drained, there were no imaginative moments of me being a savior, or some kind of imperial guard, but rather moments of being a gladiator, another body in a fight with time and misfortune.

The Magic Alley, for all the fun it provided me, took people’s appearances, souls, or both, leaving nothing but ghosts of men and women. But in this story, in this world, my grandfather exists and burns brightly, always being reborn from the ashes. He survived and overcame everything between the Great Depression and the crack era, from rural Mississippi to inner-city Michigan, and it awes me to believe that a regular human could endure half of that: he was magical. And when the world and people around him were withering away or growing into some monstrosity, he used vegetable gardens to replenish the people as well as the land. He possessed the power to see the contents of people instead of the costumes they wore. I want to believe that all of mankind could be the same as him, but they are not, so how could he not be magical? And that alley, with all its lurking dangers, were no match for him or his metal rake, garden hoe, and seeds. His magic protected me at the times I thought I was fantastic; it was not me but the blanket of comfort and compassion that an old, weary king has on his lands and, especially, his kin.