This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Catherine Burns, and this time we're going to hear about occasional magic,

those moments of wonder and clarity that we sometimes stumble upon in life.

We're just going along in the day-to-day, minding our own business, and then bam, suddenly something happens,

and we discover a piece of truth in our lives.

These moments often sneak up on me, and I can miss them entirely if I'm not paying attention.

Magic is definitely at play in our first story told by Chinurai Kuminika.

He told the story at the Moth event we produced in Las Vegas,

where he partnered with Nevada Public Radio and the Black Mountain Institute.

Here's Chinurai Kuminika live at the Moth. So I was at this family

barbecue earlier this summer. You know, I don't know if y'all go to Black family barbecues.

Frankie Beverly Mays is playing. I was eating a second plate of mac and cheese. I promised

myself I wouldn't eat. You know, and I was doing some card tricks for my seven-year-old nephew, Jonathan. And after a couple tricks, you know, Jonathan looks up with me and he goes, you know, how did you do it? How did it work? And I was like, ah, you know, it's magic. You know, he got excited. He's like, oh, magic. You know, he kept asking me. I'm doing more tricks. He kept asking me, right? And then, you know, for some reason, I started to think, well, maybe he's asking me something bigger than the card trick. I was projecting, right? I mean, you know. And so, like, for some reason, I went way too dark on this, right? I started, I was like, this kid's got to know. This is the time for this seven-year-old kid to understand. Like, this is a trick. So I was like, I called him all, you know, I showed him how the trick worked, right? And then I was like, look, man, you know, this is a trick,

man, but you, you know, you got to deal with reality. You know, you just saw, like,

his seven-year-old face just dropped, and I knew that I had failed as an adult human. You know,

I had told him that there was no magic. And it's funny that I would

be the one to deliver that, because my own relationship to this question is much more complicated.

You see, when I was about 13, my aunt went to go live in Senegal, and she invited me to

come stay with her for a month or so over the summer.

Now, like a lot of African Americans, I don't really know exactly where my ancestry is from,

but I'd never been out of the country, so it was so exciting to go to Africa, right? And when I landed in Dakar, it was like everything was new.

I mean, I'm talking about like just to go get some bread from the store was like an adventure, right?

...