Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,19
and we’ll submit it to Oxford Systematic. You can do that in two weeks, you could do it in two days if you were functioning.”
I wish so badly that I were functioning.
“Why would you want to interfere with reproduction?” Carlo asked.
I couldn’t tell you that I would do it, because who knows if I’ll really do it, and I didn’t want to depress you with the likelihood that I wouldn’t do it, and Barry was idly running his finger down a groove in your corduroys, and Carlo wasn’t a trapeze artist, so I very strangely and slowly backed away.
“Nell?” you called. I could smell the banana peel in the trash. “The fifteenth?”
I just kept going, walking backwards like an idiot crab estranged from its own nature, and then down the stairs and then back to the library, where nobody had dropped anything of value.
SASSY BARK
The name of this bark is sassy bark. It’s categorized as “an ordeal.” Joan! You are everywhere. You are the human of every plant. In West Africa all three kinds of Erythrophleum, the suaveolens and the guineense and the chlorostachys, produce the poisonous alkaloid erythrophleine, a toxic agent. In Liberia the relevant tradition is a trial by ordeal, in which a suspect drinks a whole lot of bark poison.
The person who is designated as guilty of the crime of witchcraft is arrested by the soldier king, and condemned to the ordeal of sassy-wood. The bark of the sassy-wood is powerfully narcotic, and a strong decoction of this the person condemned is forced to drink; and after he has drank it, he walks to and fro, exclaiming “Am I a witch,” “am I a witch?” while one of his executioners walks behind him replying “You are a witch, you are a witch;” and this continues until he either throws off from his stomach the poison, when he is pronounced innocent, or it operates as a cathartic, when he is declared guilty, and compelled to take more of the decoction, and is subjected to other cruelties, which cause his speedy death.
James M. Connelly, “Report of the Kroo People,” Appendix G, in Report of the Secretary of State, Communicating the Report of the Rev. R[alph] R[andolph] Gurley, Who Was Recently Sent Out by the Government to Obtain Information in Respect to Liberia, United States Senate, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 75, Washington, D.C., September 14, 1850, page 59
Now you just skipped over the citation but I wrote it out deliberately and I have to ask you to go back and look at it. I want you to understand that the reporter was Recently Sent Out by the Government to Obtain Information in Respect to Liberia. I want you to discover, the way I did, that R. R. stood for Ralph Randolph, and that Ralph couldn’t hide that from posterity. We found out his secrets and put them in brackets. A civilized place to put them. Cane Sterling Professor Joan Kallas, Ecology Building Fourth Floor, [wedded a sleaze and can’t find her way back to safety].
In terms of sassy’s antidotes, I’ve found a classified ad for “various dry whole medicinal plants” in which an Italian retailer is looking for South American botanicals including maconha brava (Zornia latifolia) leaf. Maconha is the medicinal form of sassy. As far as I can tell, nobody has sold the Italian any maconha, but a Portuguese pharmaceutical company responded requesting information about the Psychotria viridis leaf the Italian is also hunting down. I would ideally like to crust the sassy bark in dried, crushed, and ground maconha powder, so the body receives both the benefit and the injury of the wood in one go.
This whole thing, if I could detoxify it by say 60 percent, would make a nice product. White chocolate peppermint bark for masochists. You’ll tell me to finish a prototype by Christmas so we can sell it into the gift markets but all I want to do by Christmas is buy a lamp. And the more I stray from it, the more I want to go back to aconite. I think that’s the entry point because it’s straightforward and extensively tested and I can grow an herb box full of monkshood from seed starting next week. They’ll bloom by summer. That’s something I can do, something I even want to do.
For now I’m just down on my rugless floor admiring how totally democratic it was that the suspected witches were male, in nineteenth-century Africa. Those Liberian man-witches were not repressed.