The Unexpected Gift of Mr. Money Bags

When Nana Jenkins gave Janice her little black book, Janice would have never guessed it with yield a spell that inadvertently granted her $20,000 from a shady, city official. Growing up in Bayview-Hunters Point gave Janice Jenkins a genuinely honest perspective on white people, particularly those from the liberal haven known as San Francisco – a city where people openly embraced diversity, while neglecting the Black community.

Janice could recount many racist indiscretions: the red tour bus getting lost in the Bayview and when her auntie tried to give them directions, they locked the doors; those tech-bros giving a lecture at her high school, who had personal security with them, and all wanna to snap some shots with the Bayview kids, but wouldn’t give anyone their business cards; the gentrifiers would lightly sprint through “the ghetto part” of their neighborhood towards their overpriced hipster coffee; the white warlocks who drew energy from the neighborhood via marginalization spells; and the city officials that maintained both a powerplant and shipyard in Bayview, diminishing the health of most of locals.

The world of magicks and spells came to Janice when her Nana’s little black notebook became hers. Where Janice had begun documenting the injustices of the city, Nana wrote incantation, sketched images of monsters and creatures, and tracked the activities of suspicious white folks over the years—and many were landlords, business owners, and city official who capitalized of the Black people of Bayview-Hunters Point.

One late night in the Fall of ‘98, Janice decided to investigate a gathering Nana had never witnessed, but knew occurred every few years. After recruiting her bestfriend Tommy, the two snuck out to Heron’s Head Park, and waited by the edge of Indian Basin. As the moon beamed upon the quiet waters, a van pulled up and two white men in long, wizard robes and some city-suit stepped out, dragging three young Black men behind them. The young men were in rough shape, likely homeless based upon their tattered, dirty clothes. The whites formed a triangle around them, reached their hands out towards the dazed men. As they commenced with chanting, a dark green energy radiated from the three Black men. None of this was in Nana’s notebook, which meant Janice and Tommy needed to improvise.

Janice had prepped with two spells: one was a failed substitution for getting high after auntie found her weed stash and declared their apartment “a drug free zone”—it was a mental disruption spell. When Janice had practiced it on herself, it left her like a living zombie, too drowsy to operate for almost a day. Tonight, as Janice chanted the lokan awọsanma incantation, a simmering, gray wispy energy slipped her lips, dancing through the air, until the spell slid into the ears of the three whites. In unison, the three men groaned, grabbing their forehead, cause the energy building from the three black men to diminished.

The second spell was ready to go in ziplock baggy. The incantation called for certain herbs and spices, most of which Janice had from Nana’s collection, but one ingredient called for the rarer San Francisco Bay Spineflower. Tommy’s family worked did restoration efforts of endangered, native plants from across the Bay, and after Janice had saved Tommy from a treacherous curse several summers back, he was often down for thwarting the gentrifying caucacity of overprivileged whites casting mystical nonsense.

Tommy poured the mixture in his hand, and while the two wizards and the city official continued to hold their heads in a deep, intensive bewilderment, Tommy dashed towards them, sliding into an imaginary home base and blowing the mixture onto the three homeless men. They inhaled the dusty concoction, and the spell induced a sharp, spike of adrenaline, meant originally for Tommy and Janice’s escape. Instantly, the young men’s eyes snapped open, pupils dilated, overwhelmed with awareness, and sharply Tommy commanded, “Run to safety!” The words fused into their mind, the sharpness of the Spineflower fused commands that eradicated hesitation, magickally fueling their bodies before they sprinted away.

The three whites’ dazed attention shifting from the fleeing men, lifelessly look at young indigenous man and the young black girl who had disrupted their ceremony. The city official squinted at them, his glazed-over stare sharpened to a glare until his brow furrowed. He took a step towards them and stopped, pausing, glancing down at some were sack that was behind him. He picked it up, looking at its contents, then back at the wizards and then out at the Bay.

“I have…an offering.” The befuddled city official was trying to piece together what was unfolding; only fragments were coming to him. “I’m supposed to offer this to… to—you?” Tommy jumped back, as the official swung the back towards them.

There was then a sharp and sudden tremor, throwing all of them off balance and in the Bay beside them, large bubbles started simmering by the edge of where they stood. The city official dropped the sack, turning in awe and terror, trying to recall or comprehend what was happening. That was when Janice noticed several sealed, perfectly stacked dollar bills fall out of the sack. But the others attention was elsewhere, because even through a heavy mental confusion spell, the appearance of a giant, snake-like monster rising from the polluted waters of Indian Basin.

There was no need for a spell, with the unpleasant mixture of fear and excitement surging through Janice. She dashed forward to grab the sack in one hand, slipping Nana’s notebook in it, and Tommy’s arm in the other, fleeing from the water’s edge back towards the neighborhood. Neither Tommy nor Janice turned back, but there was a loud roar from emerging the creature. “WHERE ARE MY SACRIFICES?!” snarled the monstrous creature. Janice snapped a final glance back at the dazed white invaders, exchanged concerned yet confuddled looks. The last thing Janice and Tommy heard was the creature shout, “YOU’LL DO” before a feral roar escaped it and a terrified scream yelped from the men and an abrupt, imminent silence from the white wizards and the city official persisted.

*

Janice led Tommy into her auntie’s apartment where she lived. Inside, she dumped the bills from the city official’s forgotten sack. After flipping through the small stacks of hundreds, Janice counted 20 bills in one stack, and while Tommy organized the other 9 stacks. Without the aid of a T-9 calculator and after their first miscalculation of $2,000, Janice and Tommy swiftly recounted and assessed that the small sack of bills was in fact $20,000. With birthday card gifts never exceeding $100 excluded, neither twenty year-olds had never seen so many $100s.

“So, we freed some residents, clouded the minds of some colonizing whiteys, and we scored 20K?” summarized Tommy. At this point, they were laying on the floor, with stacks of $100 bills spread out around them, as they star-gazed at the opportunities a sack of cash could score them.

“Well, it’s like in Final Fantasy, when you defeat the Boss, and then there’s some coins left behind,” said Janice, “except the whiteys were technically defeated by whatever came out of the Bay—which, by the by: is there a demon living in the waters of Indian Basin around Heron’s Head Park?”

“Seemed more monstery than demony BUT LIKE, not an expert on monsters,” remarked Tommy, joyously skimming through a stack and then suddenly stopped. “Wait, was the money the offering?!”

“No, why would a monster want money?” Janice paused, flipping off her back onto her stomach, turning back to the pages in Nana’s notebook that brought them to Heron’s Head. She turned back further and found a detailed sketch of an enormous snake-like creature at the water’s edge, with little lines rising from the water as if they were stench marks. Janice’s mouth narrowed, re-examining the pages that had the map that led them to Heron’s Head, where a small snake was sketched, and arrows pointed to what had become the site of the power plant. “Seems like we have more work to do.”

“I know right—like what we’re gonna do with our split of the 20K?”

Janice closed the notebook, smirking. “Maybe a down-payment on something? Oh—or putting it towards something college related?”

“Well, that’s the opposite of a down-payment—I think that would be the cost of ONE of us to payment go to a year at a university… maybe half a year.”

“Oh, and like, juuuust an idea, and nothing at all related to you being native or anything, but—”

“Well, first of all, you know I prefer being called indigenous, and second of all, we are not going to attempt to up the amount of money by gambling at a casino—that’s problematic.”

“What the hell—get outta the way man!” Tommy and Janice froze when they heard the commotion outside. Though knew to stay away from the windows when they heard nonsense outside, dread weighed down Janice, fearing any of those whites had escaped. They peeked through the curtains and saw one of the homeless men they have saved dash by. They waited, and a few minutes later, another of the young men jetted by at an intense speed, sweat dripping of his body, gasping for breath.

The magickal command crept back into Janice’s mind: Run to safety. Those were the words Janice had given Tommy, and her mind skipped an significant fact: where was safe for three homeless black men on the streets of San Francisco?

*

Nana,

Admittedly, your little black notebook game is stronger than mine. Yours has way more character to it—homemade paper, a patterned exterior, little water marks and coffee stains here and there. You have a notebook worth cherishing, one that almost whispers to be opened. That’s why I did years ago, it caught my eye after you were gone. However, growing up with Auntie and the rest of my nosey family, I need a basic black moleskin that can remain uninteresting so not to be opened and invaded.

And as you have for countless years, you inspired me. I write this down in hopes that this will carry my words into whatever afterlife you ended up in and so I can document what happened tonight. And who knows, maybe this text will be a pathway and guide for future generation. I found your detailed account that the monster living in Indian Basin is not only feeding of the toxins of the Power Plant but the pain and struggle of those in Bayview—and routinely snacking on the homeless. Though we stopped the sorcerers and city official who may have been sacrificial substitutes tonight, that thing is still out there.

But we had an error of our own to clean up. The mad dash powder you detailed worked, and with a jolt like that, you said we had to point it in the right direction. And in the moment, I spaced out on the reality of others and told Tommy to get three homeless Black men to safety, forgetting what a neglectful city we exist in. We jettisoned them to an unreachable destination. But we broke that spell when we placed a stack from Mr. Money Bags (the city official) in their paths. As soon as they saw the stack, the spell shattered. We had no words or guidance or instructions, it was simple: here is $2,000! Whatever they would do with it, it wasn’t our business, we just knew how to help.

And with a city official on the inside of this job, that meant other high-level individuals that would want to keep that monster fed and keep our community endangered. Which is why we took the other stacks, keeping one for ourselves, distributing the individual bills throughout our neighborhoods, with the word ireti etched inside of a protection spell. I know hope will be what sparks the fight for justice in our neighborhood.