[better] - Tarot Mercedes Dantes
My throat tightens. I don’t answer.
In a dimly lit studio tucked between a Botánica and a used tire shop in East Oakland, the air smells of Palo Santo, fried plantains, and regret. Behind a beaded curtain, a woman known only as shuffles a deck of cards so worn they feel like chamois leather. Her nails—long, coffin-shaped, painted the color of a bruised plum—tap twice on the table. “Sit down, papi ,” she says, not looking up. “Your ex isn’t coming back. But your money? That’s a different story.” tarot mercedes dantes
“Prison is the best divination school on earth,” she tells me, finally lifting her gaze. Her eyes are the color of whiskey left too long in the decanter. “You learn to read men in three seconds. You learn which ones will stab you, which ones will save you, and which ones will cry when the guards come. Tarot is just that skill with pictures.” Mercedes’s signature deck is a modified Rider-Waite she calls The Concrete Arcana . She has scrawled over the traditional imagery with Sharpie and glitter glue: The Hanged Man now dangles from a fire escape. The Tower is a public housing project collapsing in slow motion. The Devil wears a police badge. My throat tightens
Third card: Not literal death, she clarifies. “End of a version of you. The one who people-pleased. The one who over-explained. That bitch is gone. Don’t go looking for her body.” Behind a beaded curtain, a woman known only
Her philosophy, which she calls , blends Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions with what she learned in prison psychology classes. “In San Quentin, I had a cellmate named Miss Bea. She was 64, doing life for killing a man who deserved it. She taught me that divination isn’t about seeing what’s coming. It’s about deciding what you’re willing to do when it arrives.” The Name Why “Mercedes Dantes”? I ask.
“First card: your past.” She flips. “You’ve been fighting a war nobody else signed up for. Family stuff. You were the referee when you should have been a child. Sound right?”
She grins, and for a moment, she looks like a teenager. “Mercedes because I wanted a car I couldn’t afford. And Dantes… like Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo . A man wrongly imprisoned who becomes a ghost of vengeance and mercy.” She taps her temple. “I was wrongly imprisoned? No. I was guilty as sin. But I chose to become a different kind of ghost. One who reads cards instead of holding grudges.” As I leave, she calls after me: “Hey. That Ten of Cups? Don’t go looking for it. It’s not a destination. It’s a decision you make every morning when you wake up and decide not to be an asshole.”