THE EVIL EYE

FOLK WISDOM FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD

My mother always said she was part gypsy, and I believed her. Roma Gypsy. Through her maternal grandmother from Hungary. She certainly behaved as though she were. She hung blue glass talismans around the house to ward off “the evil eye,” a sort of curse that is thought to be transmitted when a covetous person gazes at one’s belongings, or even at one’s children. I learned later on while researching the superstition that the talismans are called nazars. She hung one nazar by the front door, one by the back door, and others here and there around the house. I think she also kept one in her purse. At whom these trinkets’ protective rays were aimed she never told me. The neighbors? This made no sense. Our Minnesota river village was an orderly, placid, harmless place, with a siren downtown that went off exactly at noon to remind people who worked outdoors — farmers, laborers — that it was time for lunch. The only local villain of any note was the troubled teenage son of the town librarian who sometimes, high on marijuana, spray-painted curse words on the general store. Was it demons my mother feared? I never saw any. Maybe her glass had scared them off. Or maybe, as the descendant of a people who’d been reviled and persecuted for centuries, it was the powers that be that made her nervous.

The people in charge. The enforcers of the rules.

In 2011, the year my mother died, I hung a nazar from her collection at the top of the stairs in the building in Montana where I maintain an office and a loft. I looked at it now and then, remembering her, but soon I forgot that the old-world charm was there and I didn’t notice it anymore. I suppose I assumed that it was working. I’d grown rather fond of my Roma roots by then, which I gathered were real from a mail-away genetics test that informed me I had “Anatolian” blood. Anatolia is a region near modern Turkey that struck me as gypsy country. This made me proud. The Roma, whose defining characteristic is their refusal to bow down to authority, preferring to live by their wits and on the move, held great appeal for me as a freelance writer with a skeptical, iconoclastic temperament. My painted gypsy wagon was my pen, my notebook, my computer. They allowed to me travel light and skip around, working and living on the fly and eluding the evil should I attract it.

The talisman caught my attention again last winter, when the shutdowns started and mobility, even mobility of spirit, grew instantly and intensely difficult. The gaze of the ever-watchful establishment, and also of my upright neighbors, oppressed and spooked my inner gypsy. The mandatory masks were merely annoying — like oral harnesses, like bridles — but what I found positively chilling were the squinting looks from passersby as they assessed my potential infectiousness and visibly deplored my slips of hygiene, as when I picked up a grapefruit in the store one day and then put it back and chose a larger one. It’s said that eskimos, natives of the arctic, have many different words for snow and ice, and for a like reason, because of how they live, Roma people have many words for cops, including one that gives us the word “dick” for a private detective. Suddenly, from the sidewalks to the produce aisle, dicks were everywhere. A world of dicks. And unfortunately there was no way to evade them, even at home when I turned on my phone.

The Internet, and especially social media, was the evil eye multiplied by infinity and backed by technology beyond my ken, against which my my mother’s nazar was impotent. I’d turn on Twitter and count the morning’s fugitives, insulted, harangued, and molested by the dicks, whose ranks had exploded with millions of volunteers. People bold or irascible enough to question the wisdom of quarantines and curfews, school closures, business closures, and other dictates were set upon by mobs of busybodies wielding the truncheons of “scientific” hygiene and stern political certitude. Some Roma may be tricksters, but few are bullies — they lack the institutional backing necessary to adopt that role — and the spectacle of virtual posses stalking and cornering supposed miscreants chilled me to my chromosomal core. Then, one by one at first, then by the dozen, and lately in numbers difficult to track, the oddballs and misfits and back-talkers and rebels began to disappear. Some slunk away, preferring peace to controversy, while others were chased away by the landlord class, like vagrants from a wealthy neighborhood. Some may have deserved this, the truly nasty ones, but the charges in many cases seemed trumped up, modern versions of the misdemeanors — unruliness, indecency, corrupting public morals — that have been used throughout the ages to make alleged undesirables pack up and hit the road.

Before the thunderous crackdown of this week aimed at the King of the Gypsies, so to speak, and those who consider themselves his band or clan, the main charge used to sweep clean the public square has been fraudulent practices, deception — the spreading of misinformation, as it’s called now. Good Americans have been conned, the story goes, by a tribe of charlatans, one in particular. They are out to fleece us. It’s implied that we’re helpless against their trickery. Some assert that they hail, at least in spirit, from the savage eastern steppes — from untrustworthy Russia or some such frightful land — and that they hold cultish, magical beliefs at odds with our sober and scientific norms. Anti-social in their customs and lax in their sense of duty to the state, they are also vectors of contagion, biological, cultural, and political. And quite suspiciously, some of these rogues speak a secret dialect (QAnon) that helps them plot their low-down schemes.

But what’s most offensive about these lying carnies is that, as practitioners of magic themselves, they regard the beliefs of the mainstream as grand illusions. They allege we’ve been conned at levels beyond our fathoming, and not at the street level, but from on high. Right or wrong, it’s a humiliating criticism. We may be racists, sexists, and multi-phobics — increasingly, we seem willing to say we are — but the thought that we’re dupes of ruthless overlords posing as news anchors, billionaires, and leaders, well, that’s an insult beyond our bearing in this immensely narcissistic age. And it’s why those who level it get the evil eye as they stand surrounded in the panopticon, subject to the glares of the collective. The threat they pose is insurrection, it’s said, but in some ways it feels more dangerous than that. It threatens to deflate our bulging pride in our own superior judgment, as individuals and as a group.

As a child, my image of gypsies, of Roma folk, was stereotypical and poorly formed and based on a single old movie, The Wizard of Oz. Dreamy Dorothy feels suffocated, pinched, and one day with her dog Toto she flees the homestead, seeking freedom and adventure. Out on the prairie, she meets a traveling fortune-teller in a romantically decorated wagon. Professor Marvel, who wears a turban and dazzles young Dorothy with his crystal ball, is a Hollywood gypsy down to his curled mustache. He reappears in the last act as the quaking, diminutive illusionist lurking behind the grand projected visage of the non-existent wizard. Once he’s exposed — by Toto, the only character still in possession of his animal instincts and able to see through the scowling mask of power — he teaches Dorothy and friends about the tricks perfected by the magicians who don’t have to scurry away from the police, the ones with diplomas and medals and credentials, the ones we rely on, who really run the game. He grants them Roma wisdom of a kind, simplified for the American screen, and after he has he floats off in his balloon. Out of reach, out of sight, to the safety of four winds, where the truth tellers go to escape the evil eye.