Apocryphal Family Tree: The Rough Draft

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I am of two kinds about my mother. Angry because she lied to me for all but 3 years on my life and the lies were BIG lies, not that white lie shit. But also I get it. If you see this power as a death sentence, and all of literary theory says that it is: see a ghost in the first act, be a ghost by the third, it makes sense that you'd do whatever you could to protect your baby. Including make some terrible decisions that ultimately would only delay the inevitable. All of the other apprentices started before college. I look at my student loans and I wish maybe I'd had that option. Did you know that death isn't a way to discharge your student loans? I mean, my family is actually quite loaded because Winnie makes sound investment choices and has setup a trust to make sure that the Washingtons will always have a home.
Bay didn't have to report back to school until tomorrow at noon, so they let us stay in one of the two bedroom tiny homes they have. It was good to have them there while we all processed this. My siblings were just as thrown as me even though as I learned that long evening they'd had some idea that the shit between mom and her family was me related and not exactly bad blood but they didn't know enough to know what else it could have been.
I suddenly was feeling some type of way about returning home. Winnie offered me a purpose that would allow me to use my double concentration degree that didn't await me in the bedroom I grew up in. Winnie also shed full light on stuff that I'd been wondering about for years. Finally, I had my answers and with any luck I could get answers for Winnie.
After I dropped Bay off at college, Sep and I went back to the homestead. I wasn't ready to leave and we didn't really need to hit the road until the following day in order for Sep to be back for his next shift in time. I soaked up as much as I could throughout the afternoon. In the evening Winnie came back with a proposal: come live with her (she doesn't live on or even near the homestead) and be her apprentice. In exchange, she'll help me travel wherever I want. She has a lot of great connections in Italy.
Ostensibly the reason to find our deitical roots so she could better invoke her powers. She figured that the not drowning likely meant some kind of water fae or deity or spirit. She called her other power an allergy to staying dead, but the terms I found for it are dying-and-reviving or resurrection. I do like her term for it. She also has a theory as to how her powers got activated as well: she believes that both are somewhere in our lineage and that the mermaid power that kept her from drowning triggered the allergy to staying dead. Based on how many times Winnie has died, I think of it more as an allergy to staying alive, but alas here we are.
I did an initial Wikipedia pull for African water and death supernaturals as well as European water and death supernaturals as cut down my list to the following:
Kianda, Angolan water deity and mermaid
Mami Wata, composite water deity and mermaid
Santa Muerte, Death saint
Death, European concept
Grim Reaper, a specific psychopomp
Pyschopomp
Kore/Persephone, resurrecting deity (Greek)
Inanna/Ishtar, resurrecting deity (Mesopotamian/Sumerian)
Quetzalcoatl
Thanatos
Phoenix, bird that dies in a burst of flame and is reborn in that flame.
When I presented the initial options to Winnie she told me the search needed to be expanded. When I asked why she said it was because I was missing European mermaids for one. I told her that I figured she would have mentioned if the mermaid that saved her and her bae had pale white skin. Winnie said she really only remembered the being having a greenish tiny to their skin. It was dark out and although she was pretty sure the being was a dark skinned mermaid, she knew the accuracy of flashbulb memories and wasn't about to start cutting beings off the list when we don't have enough information to be cutting in the first place. Plus, Winnie mentioned, it is very shortsighted of me to not think that Europeans didn't have dark skin. The slavery that is woven into our ancestry extends back over a thousand years and at does wasn't super successful in Europe because they kept capturing ladrinos in Africa, who blended in well enough that once they got to Europe, they could escape and get free. There were African merchants and artists and nobility. Laws were in fact made to stop that from happening. Modern day slavery has its roots in the Crusades. You now those ever moral Christians? They thought that since the Africans were already not Christian, it was okay to enslave them under the guise that they'd be converted. It makes me a little sick that it worked. With that I added about eighteen different European mermaids, water spirits, and fae.
Melusine, undine, sirens all added to the list. I also added Hades, the Valkyries, and Anubis. I went back to Wikipedia and dumped the lists I got from there wholesale into a spreadsheet to start breaking down the information. I scrapped duplicates as started creating the foundation for a baby database in a very linked Excel spreadsheet. Each pantheon (usually a country or ethnic group) gets its own sheet (or table) and then the two big tables, Death and Water, pull from those tables. Primary key in each pantheon's table is the deity's name because fortunately none of those overlap.
After that was figuring out the columns: what relations do they have (parents, siblings, spouse, affair, etc.), what are they deities of, are there niches in their domains, what forms are they known to take, where are they from, where do they reside, how does one worship them, what are their followers like, what does it take to invoke them, how do they treat their horses.
I went with the MVP, minimum viable product, approach where I found as much information as I could and filled in my little SQLite database and then presented it to Winnie. Who does not know SQL and was therefore rather unimpressed. But she said she likes my enthusiasm. Pretty sure I'm manic and I'll crash again like I always do but right now I'm enjoying this high brought on by things actually going well and not the escape of drugs and alcohol.
So now I'm learning how to turn my SQLite database into a SQL based database that takes natural language queries or if I have to figure out how to data warehouse all of this information then build an easy to navigate search that will interact with natural language.
I've also been keeping an eye on the tidiness and cleanliness of my data and figuring out how to pull information from webscrapers and build an ETL pipeline to continue to feed my monster once I get it up and running in a more significant way.
It seems like every year there's more information about ATRs surfacing online then the year previous. I remember looking for a podcast about this stuff a few years ago and the only one I found was put out semi-regularly and generally lasted two hours and the topics were not beginner friendly. As I learn more, I can find more, but also as more Black people reclaim their witchy conjure roots, the more information bubbles up online. Building an infrastructure that will hopefully require the barest of minimums in terms of maintenance so when I'm gone, the project can not only continue but grow.
I still haven't talked to my parents. It's been three weeks. I had been talking to my dad every day and both of my parents every week. And now I
This is all happening, things I've wanted or at least rhought about, my death sense is a blessing not a burden, and I still don't know how to address the elephant in the room. I want to talk to my parents so much. I also want to yell at them. It's this weird sensation and mixture of emotions where I miss them like they're dead but they aren't. And even if they were I have this sneaking suspicion that neither Mom nor Dad would move into whatever comes next without making it right with me. I know that my siblings have had their own discussions with them. I encouraged them to because I'm not going to be the root cause of our family falling apart, despite my parents making nearly the same mistake Oedipus's parents made. Except there was no prophecy saying I was going to become Winnie's apprentice and die within the year.
Winnie told me that she gets it, what my parents did. She apparently did something similar to her sister Eleanor after she'd recovered enough to get back to the family home. She'd nearly drowned a few months prior and now this, she was worried that death was somehow attracted to her and she didn't want it to accidentally miss and get Ellie so she'd kept Ellie at arm's length. And she also kept her love at arm's length, although that was easier since they were teenagers and passions that run strong can still switch directions. Hormones, you know.
I've been thinking about going back because I've been rotating the same fifteen pieces of clothes for nearly five weeks. Since seven of the pieces are underwear and one is a bra, I've been wearing variations of the same three or four outfits for five weeks. The bookshop bar that I frequent has noticed that I'm wearing the same few pieces of clothes and has said the next time they have a clothing swap I'm invited and not to worry I don't have to bring anything.