Men, Djinn and Angels

My grandmother’s mom lived in rural Mississippi just outside of Greenwood where some of her ancestors of Choctaw and African descent spent their lives in forced servitude.   Roxanne, my grandmother’s mom was never a slave; she was the family’s first born emancipated.   As such, she was afforded the opportunity to have input on her future education and after taking a liking to a mid-wife, learning the trade, Roxanne delivered her first baby at sixteen year old.   Not only did she win trust and respect from everyone in her community for her skills as a mid-wife, she was soon respected as a healer.   She learned what herbs and roots are needed to make medicines to stop pain, break fevers and treat burns.   By the time she was twenty one, she was regularly called upon to tend the young and elderly until one day she was labeled as a witch by a doctor who came to treat a young boy and saw, to his surprise, the boy healed and active. In those days and in those places, a medical doct

I had an uncle who was a member of the Free Masonry.  We were related by marriage, but I admired him greatly and wished that I had spent more time with him during my formative years.  When I was old enough to visit relatives by means of a bus ride to the far side of the city, I visited him and my aunt.  They had three children – two were older than me and the third was significantly younger.  The older girls, and I were as close as brother and sisters – they had no brother for a while and I had no sister, so it worked out very well.  My grandmother was the baby sitter for us all, including two other children in the neighborhood and an additional cousin.  You can say that there was a house filled with children.  For a child related to a Free Mason, there is not much to know other than that he was my uncle, he had a nice car, he bought new cars for my aunt.  He had an upright posture and was thought to be an intellectual.  There were a few self-made intellectuals in the family, t

     I was just barely twenty-years old when I caught the paranormal fever. It started with a movie; I don’t remember the title, but it dealt with an Angel that came to earth for some mission and fell in love with a woman. Sense then, I’ve been drawn to similar books and movies until perhaps five years ago when they started to boar and annoy me. It may have been the Twilight series that did it for me as the story line seemed to get out of hand. I did like the beginning of the series, as it was intriguing and different: Vampires trying to co-exist with people. True Blood, the HBO series, was equally intriguing for a while. But then, the stories all seemed to have the same basic story lines that I broke down into two categories.      The Love story: These stories, mostly written by female authors, seem to lose an interesting story line in an abrupt or slowly materializing romance. The innocent, beautiful girl causes the powerful vampire or angel to throw everythi