Cocking her head, she finally addressed Darlene. And you, you ain’t nearly got a inkling of what’s coming on you. You hear?
Hazel reached into her pocket. She squatted over Nat and, as he rose up to his knees, brought a cupped hand to her lips and forcefully blew some kind of acrid dust into each of their faces, enough of it that they had to close their eyes against the stinging grit. Hazel stood up and shouted a French phrase that Darlene did not understand, then raised her hands, flicked them at Nat, and brushed them free of dust above Nat and Darlene. The substance turned out to be a puzzlingly dirty, possibly volcanic soot that stuck to their cheeks and lips; Darlene thought in horror that it might be somebody’s cremated corpse. In another moment, Hazel clunked across the main road and disappeared, leaving them to clean up and regain their wits.
Ridiculous gris-gris, Nat grumbled to Darlene, though he couldn’t see how gory he looked—a squiggle of red liquid at the corner of his mouth, and his teeth soaked with blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It doesn’t work. She carries it with her all the time. You’ve never seen it? Stupid.
Yet when they returned to school, it did seem as if some bizarre spell had taken effect. Not on the two of them, but on everybody they knew. News of the scandal had spread rapidly, no doubt hastily pollinated by Hazel’s own sharp tongue. By the end of the weekend an unspoken banishment had begun. Suddenly their identities were hollowed out; they were nobodies. Even Nat’s status had fallen somewhat, if not as far as Darlene’s. As she clacked across the dorm lobby, lugging her suitcase, people who used to smile, even the ones who didn’t know her, studied the floor as she passed. None of them offered help as she bumped up the stairs. When Darlene got to her room and pulled back her bedclothes she found a dissected frog in the center of the mattress, bleeding formaldehyde.
One of Nat’s roommates, a man whose girlfriend spent a lot of time with Hazel, jumped him, knocking the wind out of him. Three weeks later, a different guy Nat didn’t know asked him for directions to the student union, slugged him in the stomach, and ran. The guy hadn’t seemed like a Grambling student—Nat and Darlene wondered if Hazel had relatives or dangerous connections outside the university and had started calling in favors. Their paranoia soon reached a high pitch when Darlene became the victim of many ugly pranks.
In the next month and a half, the majority of Darlene’s notebooks got stolen or destroyed. As she turned the pages of her textbooks during classes she found the words WHORE, SLUT, and CUNT scrawled across them in red Magic Marker. The faces of her family in photos she’d left on her dresser grew mustaches and beards. Their eyes were blacked out and crude drawings of genitals sprang from the children’s heads and mouths. Her sorority sisters, including her roommate, Kenyatta, denied responsibility for the vandalism. Darlene received phone calls from strangers at very early hours, the weirdest at three a.m. on a Wednesday, a computer voice that sounded like a children’s toy threatening to cut her throat.
Someone put sports cream in her bra, and the burning came on during an econ exam, numbing and searing her chest until she gasped and nearly passed out, even after carefully twisting free of the straps without removing her shirt and hiding the icy-hot garment between her legs. She flunked the test. Nobody admitted doing any of it, and she had too many suspects to point at anyone in particular. It staggered Darlene to discover how terribly people, even so-called sisters, could treat you as soon as they had an excuse. Hazel hadn’t needed any powder. It turned out black magic didn’t work because of spells or potions but because of the fear of persecution and conspiracy that roiled under people’s lives like contaminated groundwater.
Darlene struggled against the abuse, thinking it would eventually subside, but it didn’t. The authorities, meanwhile, saw the pranks as isolated incidents, not a system of torture, and didn’t offer Darlene help. Her sisters hid behind their reputation. Sigma Tau Tau girls volunteered at soup kitchens, as the school’s administrators frequently reminded her, they led can drives and supported upward mobility in the black community with their bake sales. They performed, in their trademark periwinkle and tangerine, at senior citizens’ centers. They organized step shows and church bazaars and raised funds for people with cerebral palsy. Nobody believed that they had ganged up on Darlene, and finally she felt she had no choice but to leave Grambling.