White Witchery

Some girl at school once had a mood ring. We were quiet about it the way we were quiet about the rolled waistbands of our uniform skirts, which we concealed with the loose overhangs of tucked-in polos. Both were kinds of witchcraft the nuns forbade: spells done with sacred tools, the conjuring power of our hips.

But I too bought a mood ring at the mall. On my finger, it turned from black to green and sometimes to orange when my hands filled with hot desire. A witch brings change to the seen world using unseen forces; a witch gestures through the veil between worlds. Wearing the ring, I saw my thoughts on my hand. This is how I learned I wanted witchcraft: by paying for something cheap.

Now thirty-three, I have crystals scavenged from places unknown and unimaginable after the rocks are tumbled, polished, and turned into tiny vessels to hold wishes and dread. The stones, I know, belonged to somebody’s homeland. I worried about my crystals long before I read Emily Atkins’s piece for The New Republic, which asks the reader, “Do You Know Where Your Healing Crystals Come From?” In the article, business owner Julie Abouzelof says that crystal sourcing is unclear in part because of “the deep, psychological construct of the mining industry, where everything is a little bit hidden.”

I know about hidden things: gathering locations, fishing spots. What happens in some ceremonies. Once, I went with my aunties to pick huckleberries on the mountain where aunties have picked since the beginning of time, but we got nearly nothing, because we were late in the season and the white people were early.

If you let whiteness in, it takes you for everything you’ve got. 

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Not long ago, the witches got upset on the Internet. Sephora was going to sell a “starter witch kit”—tarot cards, sage, rose quartz, perfume—and the witches thought it was wrong