The Medicine Man - Snap Classic

Chris Lundy has always wanted to figure out why his family took him to see a Vodou priest and how this treatment made him better. And a group paratroopers go on a trip with their Sergeant that’s out of this world. STORIES Magic Potion Vodou Chris Lundy has always wanted to figure out why his family took him to see a Vodou priest and how this treatment made him better. There is one explicit word in this story. Sensitive listeners, please be advised. Big thanks to Chris Lundy for sharing your story! Chris is a storyteller who’s performed at First Person Arts, RISK!, USA Today’s Storytellers Project, and more. Major thanks to WHYY’s The Pulse https://whyy.org/programs/the-pulse/, who originally aired this story. Their podcast features stories about people and places at the heart of health and science. Check it out!! This story was produced and reported by Chris Lundy and Justin Kramon. It was edited by Maiken Scott and Lindsay Lazarski. Sound design by Maiken Scott. Engineering by Charlie Kaier. Special thanks to Dieu Nalio Chery for his help on the story. Acid Jump When morale was low among the paratroopers in his company, Sergeant Ray Christian takes them on a trip. Thanks Ray for telling us your story! Check out Ray’s podcast, What’s Ray Saying https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-ray-saying/id1097310592, and follow him on Twitter. https://twitter.com/WhatsRaySaying Original score by Leon Morimoto, produced by Adizah Eghan. Artwork by Teo Ducot Season 16 - Episode 7 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Hey, Greg May here. As a pro quarterback, I know I can't do it alone. I have to trust my team, and that goes for my money, too, which is why I use Betterment, the trusted investing and savings platform. Their automated investing tools always have my back, just like my O-line, always blocking and protecting me so I can focus on getting us to the end zone. With Betterment, I don't need to worry about picking stocks or managing everything myself. Their expert-built portfolios handle all that for me automatically. They even help me avoid surprise tax bills, something I don't ever want to worry about. Plus, getting started is easy, like having a clear game plan from day one. Over a million people already trust Betterment to build their wealth, so I know I'm in good company. On the field or off it, you've got to trust your team. Mine includes Betterment, and yours can, too. Get started at betterment.com or download the app.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed. Betterment does not provide tax advice. TLH may not be suitable for all investors. Learn more at betterment.com/TLH-TERMS. Paid client ad. Views may not be representative. See App Store and Google Play reviews. Learn more at betterment.com/ambassadors.

• 1:59Glynn Washington?

  OK, so whenever anyone in my generation of the family gets pregnant, or you know, gets someone pregnant, when the happy news is announced, after the cheers, the shouts, the congratulations, the baby name suggestions, one of my aunties or uncles will always say, "Watch out now, because twins running our family."

• 2:23Glynn Washington?

  I've always heard that. Always knew that. In fact, when the doctor did the ultrasound for my own children, I told her, "Be sure to take a good look around, you know, because twins run in our family." Recently, my cousin announces she's having a baby. When the folks started with the twins thing, I think, you know, what twins? My dad's not a twin. My uncles are not twins. My aunties, my grandparents. Where are all these twins? My family is like, I don't know. You just can't ask for simple answers to simple questions.

• 3:07Glynn Washington?

  Everything's gotta be difficult. And I've found the best way to uncover something is to act like you already know it. So at a recent gathering, after I see her drink her second glass of Moscato, I slide over next to my auntie. Auntie, I can't decide which one of us the twins would most resemble. Oh, I'd say they really favor your Uncle Eddie. Then she scowls, angry, fuming, because I actually tricked some real information out. Won't say another word to me. But I get from my uncle, "Oh, them twins, yeah.

• 3:52Glynn Washington?

  Your grandmother, she never drove again, you know that? You know, after the accident." I nod. Accident. And it's like, with just a few words, my entire childhood shifts. I certainly knew we lived under a cloud, under a shadow. I could see it in my grandmother's eyes, even when she laughed, when she hugged me, when she kissed me. The darkness was always there, right next to her power, right next to her strength.

• 4:38Glynn Washington?

  I just never knew what to call it.

• 4:42Glynn Washington?

  And having something to call it, recalling how she sometimes fought back tears in order to be present with me, for me.

• 4:55Glynn Washington?

  It makes me love her memory all the more.

• 5:23Glynn Washington?

  Today on Snap Judgment, we're searching for answers of an entirely different sort. Snap proudly presents The Medicine Man. Now, my name is Lynn Washington, and I learned something incredible. Every single time I poured my auntie that extra glass of Moscato, but she gets very mad, very, very mad, when I spill the beans on Snap Judgment.

• 6:09Glynn Washington?

  You see, family secrets are powerful secrets. Today on Snap, we're sharing a mystery from our friends at WHYY's The Pulse. Chris Lundey became very ill when he was just 10 years old, but the doctors, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. So Chris's family turned to other experts to get the job done. Afterward, no one would talk about it.

• 6:35Glynn Washington?

  Now, Chris is in his 40s, and Chris wants to know what happened and why what happened was hidden from him.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Snap judgment.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  I was 10 years old. I was almost 11. I was living in Maryland with my mom and my older sister. The year was 1989.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  As Chris Lundey tells it, he was a healthy kid, liked to play outside, read comic books.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  It was a normal day, and all of a sudden, I felt this cough coming on, and it was intense. I remember feeling like I wasn't qualified for this level of pain. I mean, it came from the center of my chest. I remember covering my mouth, but removing my hand and looking down and seeing blood all over my hands.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Afterward, he was sweating, curled up on the floor.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  The very next day, the cough came, the same pain.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  It started happening day after day. This was summer, and he was home a lot by himself. Chris liked video games, and most days, he would stay inside playing them while he anticipated the cough. After several more days, his mom took him to the doctor. The doctor checked him out, ran some tests, but couldn't say what was going on.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  My mother seemed calm, which made me, I guess, a little more worried than I would have been if I would have seen her here.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  The cough kept coming, just as painful, just as scary. It continued for a couple weeks, until Chris's mom came up with another plan.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  My mother sent me up to New York.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  That's where most of Chris's family's from. His mother and her sisters were all born in Haiti, and everyone but Chris's mom had established their lives in Brooklyn. Chris didn't know why he was going there now, but it seemed like there was something they weren't telling him.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Everybody was really, really nice to me, overwhelmingly and suspiciously nice. You know, when my aunts hugged me, the hugs were longer than usual. When they talked to me, they talked more gently than usual. So the next day, my mother shows up. I remember being really happy to see her, you know?

• 8:48Speaker 05

  They headed out together, the whole family.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  The thing that floored me was... All the aunts were there. This was so unusual, outside of Christmas or Thanksgiving.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  They arrived at a house Chris didn't recognize.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  We were greeted by this man and he brought us downstairs to the basement. And it was interesting because, one, it was dark. It was all candles. There was a tub with flower petals. There was a statue of the Mother Mary.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  Chris's mom and aunt sat in chairs lined up along the wall. Chris and the man sat in chairs across from each other in the center of the room. The man told Chris he had special healing abilities that could help Chris.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  He said, "What question do you have for me?" And I asked him, "How'd you get your powers?" You know, and again, I was, I was big into comic books and things like that. So my little 10-year-old mind, it framed it, you know? It was like, "What's your hero origin story?"

• 9:51Speaker 05

  The man told Chris about a dream he had where an angel visited him. Then he pulled out an amber glass bottle with a dropper in it.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  He explained that whenever I feel the cough coming on, to put one drop of the liquid inside on my tongue.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  When I left, I was skeptical. This was just another thing that we were gonna do with no answers.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  So that night, Chris heads back to Maryland with his mom, amber bottle in hand. Next day, she goes back to work. He goes back to video games, until he feels the cough coming on.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  I found the vial and I put a drop on my tongue.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And the coughing sensation goes away.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  I gotta stop for a second because I know how this sounds, man. Justin, I'm telling you, it went away, man. It went away.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  And when you think that, like, are you like, it's some psychological thing? Or you're like, no, physically it went.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  It went away.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Like physically?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Physically.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  The liquid in the vial worked the next day and the next. The cough-free days started to stack up and Chris started to believe there was something powerful to what the man had given him.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  So one night, the coughing sensation came again, as usual. Put a drop on my tongue and the coughing sensation kept coming. Okay, let me do another drop and then the cough hit. This pain was completely off the charts. It was the most pain I've ever been in, even till this day. I was crying, I was balled up, but I think on top of the physical toll that it took, I remember being enraged because I felt betrayed by the guy. I felt stupid for even believing that to begin with.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  So this is where the struggle really started for Chris, between believing and doubting the remedy the man had given him.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  The next day came and I spent the entire day anticipating the cough. Is it gonna be as bad as last night? Is it gonna be even worse? And as it got later and later, the cough didn't come. I remember going to sleep that night. It was just a free day. So the day after, I woke up worried, but again, it didn't come. And so those days of no cough became a week of no cough, became a month. I started to relax a little bit and I realized that it was over.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  As Chris got older, he wondered what was in that amber vial and if the man had actually cured him.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  So over the years, it became clear to me who that guy was, who they sent me to, that he was a voodoo doctor. You know, he was a voodoo priest. I'm Haitian, my family's Haitian. Part of Haitian culture is voodoo and voodoo practices.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Chris found it odd his family never talked about it, like, his trip to New York never happened. He also wondered what had been wrong with him. His condition was really serious. So what made it go away? Chris actually works in the medical field, selling medications that coincidentally treat lung diseases.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  But here I am with this experience from childhood that stands in the face of all that. There's this conflict of intellect and life experience. A lot of the questions that I have could have been answered in 10 minutes if my mother was around. But she passed away when I was 17. Flash forward a few decades later, I had a ton of curiosity around what happened and what my mother's life was like and what my mother's relationship with her family was like.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  And his sister wasn't around much and can't fill in the holes. Of the aunts that were there, two have died. The other two, Aunt Mila and Aunt Renette, he hadn't spoken to in decades. There'd been a bitter fracture in the family a while back, and Chris and Mila had ended up on different sides of it. Beyond that, there's always been an intense discomfort discussing voodoo with the older generation in his family. Chris thinks it's a taboo topic.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  It would be more than hard to ask them. It would be, you know, virtually impossible.

• 14:36Speaker 05

  There aren't any medical records, so Chris had to turn to other resources to answer his questions.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  My search began with Auntie Leslie. She was my mom's best friend. I know she misses my mother every single day, and I know that talking to me sparks memories of my mom. But I also know that she loves hearing from me. Even though she wasn't there, I expected her to be able to tell me my mother's state of mind, because they used to talk every day.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  She came to see me, and I remember her saying that you were sick, that you were really, really sick.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Do you remember them taking me to that guy?

• 15:16Speaker 06

  What guy?

• 15:19Speaker 05

  She doesn't know where Chris was taken. She said his Aunt Mila would be the best resource, the one Chris hasn't spoken to in years. But Leslie also said Chris could try his Aunt Mildred, who, in general, knows a lot of the family business.

• 15:33Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 15:36Speaker 07

  Hi, Tootoo Bobby.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  He catches up with her, and he gets to his reason for calling. Says he's been thinking about that time he was really sick as a kid and got sent to New York.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Do you remember any of that?

• 15:49Speaker 07

  No.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Oof. She has no memory of the whole episode. Still, Chris tells her.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  We ended up going to see a voodoo doctor.

• 16:00Speaker 07

  You too?

• 16:01Speaker 05

  She explains it wasn't uncommon in the family to visit a voodoo practitioner when they didn't know why someone was sick. She'd been taken too.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  What it told me is that voodoo is a part of not only Haitian culture, but my family's culture. The older aunts that were pretty much adults when they moved from Haiti to America, they were living in this Haitian bubble inside of Brooklyn. So they're going to be more connected to voodoo practices.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  Mildred echoed that only Mila would know the answers to Chris's questions, but he still wasn't ready to go there. Instead, he decided to seek, let's call it, a more traditional medical explanation of what might have been going wrong with him. He called up Chris Becker, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at Mount Sinai in New York. Dr. Becker jumped into asking about Chris's symptoms surrounding the cough.

• 16:55Speaker 08

  Would this be a daily occurrence? Yes, it was daily. Were you able to identify any triggers? It was random. And what was the color of it?

• 17:05Speaker 05

  They go on for a couple minutes until Dr. Becker feels he's gotten enough to offer some ideas, which, we should emphasize, were not to be taken as a diagnosis or medical advice.

• 17:15Speaker 08

  Hemoptysis or coughing up blood is very distressing. We usually take this situation very seriously.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  Based on Chris's description, Dr. Becker says he was coughing up a moderate amount of blood, and it was pretty clearly coming from his lungs.

• 17:30Speaker 08

  What you're describing is that you have this warning, which is probably when the bleeding starts, and then there's a few seconds before that causes you to cough as the lungs realize that there's blood all of a sudden.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Chris's explanation knocks a number of chronic illnesses off the list of possibilities, like bronchitis, or fungal infections, or tuberculosis. This leaves mostly anatomical issues, blood vessels in the wrong place. These arterial-venous malformations mean that an artery connects to a vein without the normal pathway, increasing the possibility of spontaneous bleeding in the lungs. Dr. Becker says that if Chris had been his patient, he would have done imaging to look for these abnormalities, see exactly where the bleeding was coming from. That triggered a question I had. And a spontaneous resolution would be possible with some of those conditions?

• 18:22Speaker 08

  Well, that's actually, in general, that's a bit puzzling, is that this just spontaneously stopped and never recurred. I can't really fully reconcile this because it wouldn't be the most common scenario.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  This is the part that puzzles Chris, too. How do you get better? Dr. Becker supports patients seeking out different approaches to their medical conditions, including through religion.

• 18:45Speaker 08

  But for a scenario of significant hemoptysis, in our scientific view, they will not be enough.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  Is it possible Chris is forgetting some details? Does he just remember it as worse than it was? Either way...

• 19:01Speaker 08

  You know, you were lucky that those episodes always spontaneously stopped for you, right? But what if one of them hadn't?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Listening to Dr. Becker helps me understand that my mother was scared, she was afraid.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Small side street here.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  So what did his mom think a voodoo priest could do for her son? That's it, right there? Okay. We can't find the man who treated Chris all those years ago. But in January of 2023, we head to Queens to see an ordained voodoo priestess named Mambo Florence Jean-Joseph. Go here knocking.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Mambo Flo is there and on the walls, there was a lot of Haitian art.

• 19:56Speaker 05

  They sat down at her dining table, started talking. Mambo Flo explained that many different people from the Haitian-American community come to her: teachers, various professionals, even doctors. Her services have recognized importance to Haitian families.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  What she provides, in addition to religious ceremonies, is like a counseling service. And she gives her advice according to what she sees as basic vodou principles.

• 20:23Speaker 09

  Vodou is like philosophy. Love yourself, accept yourself the way you are, be in harmony with nature, be in harmony with humans, and respect life.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  She explains her advice is not in contradiction to medical advice, but more like a supplement. In fact, she encourages people to get checked out by a doctor before they come. After their talk, Mambo Flo takes Chris down to the basement, where she conducts vodou rituals.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  And one thing that really took me was how familiar it felt. It was very similar to the room that I was in back when I was 10 years old.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  He recognized the candles, the altar, even the way the chairs were arranged. Mambo Flo is welcoming and open about her practice, though she acknowledges a stigma vodou sometimes carries, even within Haitian communities.

• 21:17Speaker 09

  It's like vodou is for the uneducated and all that. Even if we have scholars who are vodou initiates, but when they write, they never refer to it like I practice it.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  It gave Chris an idea why his aunt doesn't talk about it, and even why he feels reluctant to discuss the whole episode. Driving back from Mambo Flo's, Chris returns to the questions that have brought him here.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  What did I have? How did I get better? And what happened when I was there? When I was at that house, when I was in that basement, what went down?

• 21:53Speaker 05

  And one thing becomes clear to him.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  I have to get my questions answered, and my aunt's the only one who truly can.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  His Aunt Mila, he means, the one he's been avoiding.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  So even though I think it'll be a challenge, I gotta make it happen.

• 22:22Glynn Washington?

  Snap returns. Chris decides there's only one way to get the answers he's been searching for. Stay tuned.

• 22:35Speaker 10

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

• 22:42Speaker 11

  But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or

• 22:47Speaker 10

  Politics.

• 22:48Speaker 11

  Country music.

• 22:49Speaker 10

  Hockey.

• 22:49Speaker 11

  Sex. Of bugs.

• 22:52Speaker 10

  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

• 22:58Speaker 11

  And hopefully make you see the world anew.

• 23:00Speaker 10

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

• 23:04Speaker 11

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:12Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Medicine Man episode. When last we left, Chris realized that there's just one person who knows what ailed him as a child and knows how he got better. But talking to her, that's another thing entirely. Snap Judgment.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  To get ready, Chris called up a person he thought could counsel him on what he might say to his aunt. Someone who knows a lot about how voodoo fits into Haitian culture, and who actually counsels kids about reconnecting to that culture through her organization, the Empowerment Network.

• 23:51Speaker 12

  I am Dr. Charlene Dezier. I'm a professor at Nova Southeastern University. I'm an initiated voodoo priestess.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  Dr. Dezier said she could discuss Chris's childhood experience with him.

• 24:03Speaker 12

  But you have to understand a little context about voodoo. So voodoo was created by kidnapped Africans.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  During the middle passage, enslaved people from all over Africa were taken to the island of Hispaniola, which present-day Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

• 24:20Speaker 12

  The Pan-Africans that were brought to Haiti from various tribes, various classes, various education levels, created a system.

• 24:31Speaker 12

  That made sense to them for survival. And that system was called vodou. Vodou is more than a religion. It's a system, a way of life and understanding. Academically, we call it an epistemology, a way of knowing. And one of the fundamental aspects of that was health.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  So people from all over Africa brought these traditions and this knowledge about how to heal the body using the natural resources they had.

• 24:57Speaker 12

  And this is our inheritance as Haitian people.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Chris asked why all the aunts had to accompany him to the Ongon, the vodou priest.

• 25:05Speaker 12

  Having the sisters be there in alliance, it shows the love that surrounded you. I don't know, Chris, but I'm sure your family sought out medical care. They sought off medical care first. That's where you're gonna go first. If it doesn't work, then we have to go to the other doctors.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  I know what the majority of people think and believe about vodou. And it's like, how do I explain that I had this incredible illness? And that I went to a Ongon? And then I no longer had that incredible illness?

• 25:40Speaker 12

  Well, brother, you telling the whole world right now. So you ready? You've arrived. I mean, it's very simple. I went to a root doctor. I went to an herbalist. We've been denied our humanity for so many years. This is how we survived, slavery.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  Chris asks why vodou has this stigma associated with it.

• 26:04Speaker 12

  We've been miseducated, miseducated as a community. My thing is that we have a problem of respecting things we don't understand.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  Dr. Desire says that Haitians have been made to feel insecure about vodou because of hiding it for so long for their own protection. But given all that secrecy, what should Chris say to his Aunt Mila to get her to open up about his family experience?

• 26:29Speaker 12

  What is it you want to know? You know that you were healed. You know that at some juncture, despite what's happening now, that there was a relationship that you had with the women in your bloodline. And you are a Haitian-American man, point blank, simple. You are an African-American man. You are a Pan-African-American man. But your indigenous roots are vodou. You're Haitian spiritually and culturally.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  I think you just gave me everything I needed.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  They hung up, and something had shifted in Chris.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Something the doctor just here gave me that I walked away with was this pride, like being proud of the Haitian culture and where voodoo fits and where it came from.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  He felt ready to talk to his aunt.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  It's February 1st, 11:30 a.m. I'm sitting in my car.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  He's outside his Aunt Mila's house. His cousin Gabby came with him for support.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  There's a lot of anxiety, a lot of reluctance. I'm looking forward to it and I'm not looking forward to it, all at the same time. Yeah, I don't know what to expect.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  All right. Haven't been here in, I don't know, maybe 15 years.

• 28:01Speaker 13

  Why you... Oh!

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Cold as day in here?

• 28:04Speaker 13

  Ooh, man!

• 28:05Speaker 04

  Oh, no, yeah, this is...

• 28:06Speaker 13

  Hi, Chris. How you doing?

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  They sit down together in the house Chris remembers from his childhood. The stairs where he played with his cousins, the table where he ate cereal before going to bed, and the talk's going well. They're sharing good memories, laughing, and then Chris gets to why he contacted Mila now.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  You know, there was a, there was a time, and I was gonna ask you, that I got sick. I was coughing and coughing up blood and stuff.

• 28:35Speaker 13

  Yes, blood, yes.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Okay, because my mother sent me to New York. Do you remember that?

• 28:39Speaker 13

  Yes, I remember that. I went to the doctor. They said that you have something on your chest, your pulmonary thing.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 28:45Speaker 13

  They did a test and everything. And after I went to get the second opinion, what the first doctor had said, it was wrong. And I said to my...

• 28:55Speaker 05

  She knows exactly what he's talking about. She confirms how sick he was, how scared they were, he was going to die. That's when Chris brings up the other part.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  I remember we went to the voodoo doctor.

• 29:07Speaker 13

  You did? We went with you? I don't remember.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  You don't remember that?

• 29:11Speaker 13

  Mm-mm.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  She says she doesn't recall it.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  You were there, my mother, Auntie Maya, Auntie Esther, Auntie Anne, all in the room.

• 29:19Speaker 13

  I don't remember.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  Again, she says she doesn't remember.

• 29:22Speaker 13

  I never heard anything after that. You got better. Maybe the voodoo doctor worked.

• 29:27Speaker 07

  We just gotta peel back that layer. Yeah, wait, auntie, auntie.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  She remembered the illness clearly. She remembers me coughing up blood. She remembers me coming to New York. She just held to being completely unfamiliar with any voodoo element at all.

• 29:49Speaker 13

  That's it. You go home. That's it. You go home. That's it. There's something happened.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  That's that. They moved on, talked about other things.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  I felt cheated. I had talked to everyone else.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  Chris never got the background he wanted. He figured it was for the reasons Dr. Desire said, the cultural discomfort. Even if he'd gotten past it, it seemed his aunt never would.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  So where I was at this point was, you know, there were some things that were confirmed. For example, you know, I was sick. You know, it was really, really bad. But there was still a mystery in terms of how I got better. I initially set out to get answers to some factual questions. I didn't get answers to all of that. But what I did get was answers to things that are far more important. I learned about my mother. I think that the longer my mother was in America, I think that she was becoming more and more Americanized. Bringing me to the voodoo doctor, in that moment, my mother was Haitian, you know? Full-on Haitian.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  I think that my mother would have went down almost any road to try to get me better. You know, my mother passed away. She was 39 years old and I was 17 years old. So when she passed, I still saw her as ma. But through this journey, I think I have a clearer picture of who she was as a woman and who she was as a parent, as a protector. And I love her for it, and I know that she loved me.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  And as far as how Chris got better?

• 31:42Speaker 04

  I am more comfortable sitting with the mystery of it. I'm never going to know why I got better. A voodoo priest would say I got better because of the potion that I took. A Western medicine doctor would say I'm missing some facts or lucky break. I think what matters is what always mattered, and that is I got better.

• 32:23Glynn Washington?

  Big thanks to W H Y Y's The Pulse, who originally aired this story. Their podcast features stories about people and places at the heart of health and science. Chris Lundey is a storyteller who's performed at First Person Arts, RISK, USA Today's Storytellers Project, and lots more. This story is produced and reported by Chris Lundey and Justin Kramon. It was edited by Mike and Scott and Lindsay Lazarsky. The sound design by Mike and Scott. Engineering by Charlie Kaier. Special thanks to Doo Nalio Chiri for his help on the story.

• 33:19Glynn Washington?

  After the break, you're in the Army now, and the Army doesn't want to hear your excuses. Stay tuned.

• 33:46Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Medicine Man episode. My name is Glynn Washington. Today, real stories from real people wondering if the doctor is in. Now, you've asked, we have answered. Our next storyteller, Snap, is a longtime friend of the show, Ray Christian. And aside from being a storytelling legend, Ray's an army man. Snap Judgment.

• 34:28Speaker 14

  In 1984, I was a 22-year-old young sergeant assigned to an airborne infantry battalion. We were paratroopers.

• 34:39Speaker 14

  I was stationed at Fort Bragg. We'd conduct night combat equipment jumps that would involve thousands of paratroopers at once. The training was dangerous, and it wasn't unusual for us to have guys severely injured or even killed during these training operations. We had young soldiers in the company that were Grenada vets, and our senior NCOs, a lot of them were Vietnam vets. Our young soldiers, we were just chomping at the bit to get a chance at combat. Guys start doing drugs, guys start drinking, guys have problems with their wives, their girlfriends. Morale in the company was starting to drop. And this added up to so much stress, we had a few guys go AWOL.

• 35:28Speaker 14

  Me and Sergeant Ronnie were assigned to inventory this soldier's locker and equipment who had went AWOL. It was uniforms, civilian clothing, radio clock. And in the corner, there's this little folded bindle of aluminum foil. Unfolded and I saw inside were two small stamps with stars on them.

• 35:51Speaker 15

  Whoa, acid?

• 35:53Speaker 14

  Nah. So I took one of the stamps out and I said, "Hey Ronnie, put one of these in your mouth." He looked at me and he said, "What is this, acid?" I, I figured it was acid, but I wasn't gonna really take one. I was just fooling around with them, you know, "Put it in your mouth, just kidding with them."

• 36:11Speaker 14

  He looked at it for a second and said, "Why not?" And put it in his mouth and I laughed.

• 36:23Speaker 14

  Now Sergeant Ronnie was the kinda guy that was very hyper military. He was kinda strict, he had a high pitched voice, pretty by the book kinda guy. He looked at me and said, "So what are you gonna do?" He must know something I don't know, he wouldn't, he wouldn't take acid. I just knew, when he put it in his mouth, it had to be fake. Then he looked at me and said, "What are you gonna do?" I said, "Hey, okay." "Same as you, I put one in my mouth."

• 36:55Speaker 14

  We take the inventory sheet, we turn it into supply, we start heading out. And as we were walking across the parking lot, the battalion sergeant major yelled out, "Hey, you two guys, what are you doing, where you going?" I said, "Oh my god, Sergeant Major." We said, "We're heading out Sergeant Major, heading home." He said, "Oh no, you're not, get your gear, you're going on the jump."

• 37:21Speaker 14

  Because we had the additional duty of inventorying this guy's equipment, we believed that we weren't gonna be involved in the jump. But Sergeant Major, I think he, uh-uh, he cut me off. "We need to get these chutes filled. Let's go. Let's move out."

• 37:37Speaker 14

  So I'm starting to think about all the things that go wrong. What if I get decapitated by a suspension line? What if I get towed behind the aircraft? What if I hit some equipment on the ground? I was starting to immediately feel fear and apprehension.

• 37:57Speaker 14

  If we would've said something like, even slightly hesitant about being on a jump, it would've seemed suspicious. We call people who are not on jump status "legs", and that's a dirty word. I would rather have died than turn down being on a jump. I wasn't gonna be a leg. I was gonna jump.

• 38:16Speaker 14

  I looked at Ron and I said, "Man, how you feel?" He said, "Man, I don't feel nothing, but this is bad anyway."

• 38:29Speaker 14

  When we were on the trucks headed to the pack shed, this is at the Air Force Base, I started having this feeling right then and there that everybody on the truck was staring at me, and I knew, oh, it's starting to kick in now.

• 38:46Speaker 14

  We all pour inside the rigor shed, all 500 of us, and one at a time, we're issued parachutes as we enter inside. Once you've got your parachute on and you got all your equipment hooked up, you stand in line for the jump master's inspection. Open your ripcord, protect it, flap, hold, squat, hold, recover, turn, bend, arch your back, tick, tap, tap, tap, tick, tap, tap, turn, turn, squat, hold. I actually started saying that out loud, you know, "Squat, hold, squat", I was just saying it because I thought I should. And then I started thinking, "Wait a minute, if I do that, people will think I'm high. But if I act like I'm not high, they'll think I'm high."

• 39:39Speaker 14

  Slowly, all the guys in line started getting their parachutes inspected, and we take a seat. I wanted to sit down, but I kept standing up, I kept walking around, and that was unusual. I started to think about how many thousands of paratroopers have been in this building preparing for a jump, and I was inspired to just yell out for everyone to hear, "How many paratroopers have been in this place?" I started thinking about, there were ghosts, maybe, still impregnated in the memories of the building and in the walls. And I yelled that question out, too. "Are there any ghosts in the walls?" When I was startled by two, well, what looked to be two World War II-era paratroopers coming out of the walls.

• 40:24Speaker 14

  I couldn't help but walk closer to it, but on closer inspection, it was just a pattern of old paint scuffs on the wall.

• 40:34Speaker 14

  That's when I started to notice that other people were starting to stare at me, staring at them, and a few even laughed at me. And that's where I saw Ronnie. He was already rigged, sitting on the floor, crying, tears coming down his cheeks. To me, it was like a river of water.

• 40:58Speaker 14

  I asked Ronnie how he was doing. Ronnie looked at me, and he just started to cry, and people noticed. I went to him and I said in a soft, loud voice, "Man, get yourself together. You are an American paratrooper. Do you know what our brothers have done before you? Act like a damn man, get it together."

• 41:20Speaker 14

  And I started singing, and I'm not a singer, and I'm singing these corny airborne songs that they force on us.

• 41:28Speaker 14

  "Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die. Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die. Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die, and you ain't gonna jump no more." And I remember somebody yelling out, "Oh, that's pretty damn appropriate, Sergeant Christian, it's really appropriate." Ronnie stared. I reached out and I wiped his eye. A little tear was coming from it, and I helped him up. And then he assisted me in rigging my chute.

• 41:59Speaker 14

  Once everybody's inspected, we stand up and we all march out toward the back of the airplane.

• 42:16Speaker 14

  The only thing you could see inside a C-130 at night like that is this, the red jump light above the jump door and down the floor, and there's this hum of the plane.

• 42:31Speaker 14

  Usually the guy's asleep, but I didn't. I was just focused on the light. I mean, it was beautiful. And the Air Force pilot turns on the green light, "Go."

• 42:43Speaker 14

  Door opened up and the wind rushed in. Normally, you really feel the impact of the prop blast hitting you and you twist into the night sky, but, I don't know, I had this sensation that I just jumped into a big old marshmallow cloud and I just floated out.

• 43:06Speaker 14

  The stars were starting to twinkle. The moon smiled at me. There's parachutes billowing across the drop zone. They looked like ghosts. They were just floating and dancing and, uh...

• 43:23Speaker 14

  I could hear everything, every sound.

• 43:27Speaker 14

  Threw my arms out, looked up. Like Jesus.

• 43:33Speaker 14

  Started contemplating the nature of the universe.

• 43:38Speaker 14

  God, it was just beautiful. It's probably the best jump I ever had. I loved it. Loved it. Seemed like it took me forever to reach the ground.

• 43:52Speaker 14

  I landed in a sandy pile amongst the pine trees and thickets. The guy landed close to me and he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and he gave out an "Oh!" And I just yelled out across the whole drop zone, "This is beautiful!"

• 44:11Speaker 14

  And it just echoed. I know everybody heard that, but I couldn't help myself. It was beautiful like those other parachutes that were billowing across the drop zone. They looked like a woman in a dress.

• 44:30Speaker 14

  Through the darkness, I heard this sound and I recognized it as the sound of vomiting. And instead of going to the assembly area, I followed that sound and that led me to Sergeant Ronnie. And there he was, sitting on the ground, vomiting. And he was crying softly. And I was thinking to myself, "He must be having a bad trip." And that's when I decided I wanted to sing to him. We're all Americans and proud to be guardians of honor and liberty. Some flying gliders to the enemy, some come down as paratroopers.

• 45:15Speaker 14

  The next morning, when I woke up, the company commander, who I always try to avoid because of his manner, when he saw me, he said to me, "You know, you need to go see the battalion commander. He wants to talk to you about your behavior, pre-jump and on the drop zone." The battalion commander doesn't speak to me. People in my rank don't usually get a chance to talk to him. And I go into the battalion commander's office.

• 45:44Speaker 14

  All the senior officers in the battalion were present. That kind of a group usually means something bad. You're getting some kind of a ugly reprimand. And I was scared as hell.

• 45:59Speaker 14

  And he said, "Never have I seen such an unselfish act as a man motivating his fellow paratroopers, sticking with a scared, nervous man during every phase of the operation, even on the drop zone. Sergeant Christian, you are the personification of an American paratrooper. Keep up the good work. Airborne." I said, "Thank you, sir. Airborne."

• 46:31Speaker 14

  I can remember shaking my head as I was walking away from his office going, "Damn." I was completely dumbfounded. I, what just happened? It was like the blade didn't cut my head, but it fell.

• 46:51Speaker 14

  In the mornings, when all the units are doing physical training and they run up and down Ardennes Street, they're the loud speakers where they play nothing but non-stop military martial music. And these old airborne songs are the ones that you hear. And when they would come across the speakers, we would all start singing them really loud to Sergeant Ronnie, you know, much to his chagrin.

• 47:19Speaker 14

  Sergeant Ronnie, you was scared on the drop zone, man. Sergeant Ronnie, what's up? You lost your nerve? You was having problems, Sergeant Ronnie? And he'd be running with his butt cheeks really tight. He was too stiff and too anal to respond. Up to that point, everything, all of our encounters were always serious. We really didn't have anything to joke about. There was nothing funny. I had my boys back again. They were back in their spirit.

• 48:14Glynn Washington?

  Big thanks to Ray Christian, who is a storyteller living in Boone, North Carolina. Now do yourself a favor, subscribe to his podcast, What's Ray Say? It'll be available on our website or wherever you get your podcasts, snapjudgment.org. Do that. The original score and sound design was by Leon Morimoto. That story was produced by Adisa Egan.

• 49:09Glynn Washington?

  Now, when you're looking for a gift to give that special someone, do you know what's better than socks? Better than a tie? Better than a bottle of cheap perfume? I'll tell you what they really want. The story. And you can give the gift of story by sending your friends and your enemies a little taste of the Snap Judgment Podcast. They will be forever grateful, I promise. But did I mention that Snap's Evil Twin Podcast spoof is available everywhere? That's two for one, players. Snap Judgment is brought to you by the team that will always drink the entire contents of any vial you offer them. Except for the Uber user, Mr. Mark Ristich. He'll take two.

• 49:54Glynn Washington?

  That's Nancy Lopez, Pat Lucini Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorio, John Facio, Shayna Sheely, Taylor Decot, Flo Riley, Marissa Dodge, Bo Walsh, David Exame, Regina Berriaco. And of course, you may have heard this is not the news? No way is this the news. In fact, after pouring her an extra glass of wine, you could coax your auntie into revealing that, yes, yes, it is true. That she did cut you out of her last will and testament. And that's exactly what you get for asking all those crazy questions, Mr. Snap Judgment Radio Man. You happy now? Huh? Huh? Do that.

• 50:36Glynn Washington?

  And you would still, still, not be as far away from the news as this is, but this is PRX.