Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 20

Toward the end, when he was seventy-eight, when he was sick in his body and sick in his mind, when he knew the government was tracking him and he was hearing voices, when he and his pistol started having philosophical dialogues about choices, he still believed in parts of his mother’s religion and its power to open doors between life and death, though most of his art was more directly influenced by Catholicism. He had built a shrine of mirrored glass, Christmas lights, dolls, and framed pictures of his youthful familia. In the center was a black, plastic saint, which may have once been his mother’s.

In Santeria, a mix of African and Caribbean belief, of Yoruba traditions and Catholic ritual, there is a porous border between human and spirit worlds, and sometimes no border at all. The ancestors are always here. The same year Alfonso died, a mother in New York, a santera, with the help of her twenty-year-old daughter, suffocated her other daughter, a teenager, with a plastic bag. The girl had exhibited signs of what in secular American culture would be called serious mental illness, then diagnosed and pathologized. The mother knew better, though. She was releasing the bad spirits, letting them go back home and hoping, with luck, that she might be able to keep her physical daughter here. What one person—and the state, for that matter—calls murder, another calls a failed attempt to save a life.