10/24/2025
Rainmaker
When I was a child, I lived with my African grandmother in the woods house that seemed older than time. The walls were the color of ashes, and the air always smelled of something burning — kerosene, garlic, or whatever she was cooking for the spirits that day. She was an African woman of strict faith, a Protestant who prayed with the fury of a storm and believed in a God who was always watching. But beneath that Bible on her lap lived something older — something that came from the other side of the ocean.
She called me Ndoki.
She said I was born with the eyes.
She said I could look at a person and change their fate.
At first, I thought she was joking, but she never laughed.
She would study me the way a hunter studies an animal — quietly, with suspicion and fear. Sometimes she’d make me sit in the living room while she read her Bible out loud, pausing every few verses to look at me and whisper prayers I couldn’t understand. When she thought the house was empty, she would walk barefoot into the yard and pray under the old tree behind the house — her voice rising and falling, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, until she began to shake and speak in tongues. I would hide behind the curtain and watch her, half-terrified, half-hypnotized.
One day she went too far.
That afternoon, the sun was heavy and the air thick with silence. I watched her from the back window as she knelt under the prayer tree. This time there was something different about her. Before her lay a black snake — long, still, and dead. I saw her raise a machete and cut it into seven pieces, her lips moving fast as she muttered strange words. Around each piece she placed garlic and something red, maybe pepper, maybe blood. Then she looked straight at me — like she’d known I was watching all along.
“I have broken your power,” she said. Her eyes were wide and bright.
Then she pointed to the sky. A rainbow stretched above the tree like a scar across the heavens. “See? God has sealed it.”
I didn’t answer her. I turned and went back inside, my heart pounding.
That night I couldn’t eat. I kept hearing her voice in my head, the sound of the machete cutting through flesh, and the way she said broken your power. Something inside me refused to believe it.
When she left the house again to pray, I decided to do the same — my own prayer. I went to the sliding glass door that looked out over the yard, and I locked it. I checked the front and back doors — all locked tight. Then I knelt in front of the glass, staring up at the sky.
It was bright and cloudless, the kind of sky that doesn’t care about your prayers.
I closed my eyes and whispered:
“Rain fall, rain fall, make her pay today.”
I said it again.
And again.
And again.
At first, nothing happened. But then the air began to shift — heavy, electric. I felt it move through my body like a low hum. My chest grew tight, and every time I repeated the words, the sound seemed to echo deeper inside me.
“Rain fall, rain fall, make her pay today.”
A wind picked up. The trees outside began to bend.
The first drop hit the glass with a sound like a drumbeat.
Then another. Then hundreds.
It was as if the sky had torn open.
I stood up and watched the storm come alive. The yard was flooded in seconds. The thunder cracked so loud it shook the floorboards. Then I saw her — my grandmother — running toward the house, her white dress plastered to her body, her Bible held over her head.
She reached the sliding glass door and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t move. She pounded on the glass, screaming for me to let her in. Her eyes were wild, the Holy Spirit gone, replaced by something else.
But I didn’t move.
I just stared at her through the glass as the rain poured down between us.
When my father came home later that evening, the rain was still falling. My grandmother had told him everything — that I’d locked her out, that I’d called down the storm, that the devil himself had entered her house. I got the beating of my life that night.
But even through the pain, I could hear the sound of rain pounding the roof — steady, relentless, like it was obeying me.
That night I learned who I was.
Not cursed.
Not possessed.
Just different.
The spirits had marked me before I was even born. My grandmother saw it in my eyes, and her fear made her cruel. But she was right about one thing — there was power in me. Power that could move the sky, call the rain, and make the earth remember my name.
From that day on, they called me evil.
But the storm called me something else.
Rainmaker.