What the Crossroads Teaches You

Stay awhile. People ask me about the trickster the way they ask about weather in a country they never plan to visit, and I have stopped answering that question, because it is the wrong shape. A god is not a topic. You do not learn anything true about a being by filing him under a category next to other people’s gods, the way a collector pins butterflies. What changes a man is not information about the relationship. It is the relationship. So I will not lecture you on Eshu tonight. I will tell you what living as his child has done to my sight, because that is the part that might be worth something to you, and it is the part that is mine to give.

There is an old story, and if you have sat anywhere near this work you have heard some version of it. Two farmers, friends since boyhood, worked fields on opposite sides of a path, and Eshu walked between their farms one morning wearing a hat that was black on one side and red on the other. That evening the first farmer said the stranger’s hat was black, and the second swore it was red, and each man knew what he had seen with his own eyes, and the friendship nearly ended on a roadside over a hat. Then Eshu showed himself, and turned the hat in his hands, and let them look at both sides of the thing they had been ready to bleed over. Sit with that story a year and it stops being about a hat. Everybody you will ever meet is standing on one side of something, telling you its color with complete sincerity, and most of the misery I have been paid to untangle in twenty years comes down to two honest people, each holding half a thing, each calling his half the whole. The first understanding the relationship gives you is that partial sight is not the same as a lie. You stop asking who is lying and start asking where each person was standing. It will change how you hear your wife, your enemy, your gods, and yourself, because you are standing somewhere too, and your side is not the whole hat either, and he has never once let me forget it.

The second understanding is about doors. The keeper of the crossroads opens roads, and everyone loves that part, and everyone wants to skip the rest of the sentence, which is that he closes them too. Living with him teaches you that a closed road is an answer, not an insult and not an attack. I have watched people batter themselves bloody on doors that were closed for their protection, calling it faith, calling it persistence, calling anything except what it was, which was a refusal they did not want to hear. He taught me to hear it the first time. A road that will not open is information. Treat it the way you would treat a bridge that is out. You do not curse the river. You find the road that is yours, and you walk it like you mean it, because choice is the sacred part. At a crossroads, every direction is real, and every direction has a price, and the price is not a punishment. The price is how you know the road was real.

The third understanding is the one people find hardest, because it has no varnish on it. What is fed, lives. What is starved, closes. That is the law under every relationship I have ever seen hold, with gods, with wives, with friends, with your own two hands. People come to me wanting a blessing treated like weather, something that falls on them because they are good. Then they show me a decade of neglect and ask where the road went. The road went where everything unfed goes. And do not mistake me here, because I can be soft, and there is a tenderness in being known the way he knows me, seen from every side including the ones I hide from myself, and still claimed. The relationship has gentleness in it. But it will not lie to me, and it never promised that love would exempt me from cost. Nothing real exempts you from cost. That is how you tell it is real.

Now I will say the hard part plainly, because it needs saying and because my comfort is not the measure of a fact, and neither is yours. In his own house, Eshu is the messenger, the first one greeted, the one who carries the sacrifice and without whom no prayer arrives anywhere. When the missionaries came, they needed a devil for their book, and the translation of the Yoruba Bible rendered Eshu as Satan, and a gatekeeper who had never been evil woke up wearing horns in somebody else’s cosmology. I have no issue saying it in plain words: the Abrahamic faiths are the kings of bastardization, and this is the proof of it that I carry in my own family. They took a non evil spirit and forced an evil persona onto him because their story required one, and then generations of his own children were taught to fear the road their fathers prayed on. I will not soften that to safeguard anybody’s feelings. Feelings are not the gatekeepers of the record. A group’s comfort has never once outranked a fact at my fire, and it is not going to start tonight.

So what does the child of such a being actually carry through the world. I will tell you the shape of it and then I will stop, because some of it belongs to the house and a door is not a secret, it is a door. He walks with me, so I mind my mouth, the way you would if every word you spoke was actually carried somewhere and delivered, because it is. He has seen both sides of every hat I own, so I got honest young and stayed that way, because lying to the messenger is a special kind of stupid and he has a long memory for it. And I stopped needing beings, or people, sorted into good and evil before I could deal with them, because comfort is a child’s filing system and the world does not run on it. See both sides before you speak. Feed what you claim to love. Respect a closed door. And never, ever let a room full of comfortable people edit a true thing down to a size they can swallow. If you take nothing else from my fire tonight, take that. It is not information about him. It is what a lifetime at his crossroads does to a man’s eyes, and it is yours now to do with as you will.