by Dennis Dalman
news@thenewsleaders.com
When she heard the news her mother had died, Eve Woodson of Sartell was overcome by joy.
“Yes!” she screamed out loud. “This is the best news I’ve gotten in a long time.”
That is the opening of Woodson’s just-published book, entitled 777: The Lost Blood, a book Woodson describes as an autobiography.
Readers will likely be shocked by those opening lines, as they will be throughout most of the book. It is, by turns, shocking, horrifying, brutal, spooky, weird, appalling, perplexing, distasteful and sometimes even humorous. Warning: Children should not be allowed to read this book.
However, as Woodson said in an interview with the Newsleader, her book is supposed to be shocking because, as she explained, the truth of her life was shocking.
Woodson believes her mother was a witch. When Eve’s first children were born – a set of twins – her mother put a spell on one of the babies, and the baby boy died. For the rest of her life, the mother worked all kinds of spells and sinister influences to weaken and to kill Eve.
Much of 777 reads like a vivid horror movie. It is filled with witchcraft, ghosts, angels, emissaries of Satan, strange goings-on, disembodied voices, sudden deathly illnesses, meant-to-be car accidents and shape-changers (the mother morphing into semblances of other people). In fact, the book at times reads like a cross between those chilling horror flicks The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.
This is how Woodson describes her mother:
“Our mother is a well-known witch in Africa. She was the child of the devil himself, like I said earlier. She was nothing like an ordinary woman. She was a bully who knew she had special supernatural powers and was not afraid of using them on whoever stood in her way.”
As disturbing as Woodson’s anecdotes are, there is what Woodson describes as the “bright side” to the horrors of 777. She said her point in writing it was to bring people to God. The book, which is a kind of journey from darkness to light, is dedicated to the “Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, without whom my story would have been impossible to live and write about.”
The moral of her story, she says, “is no matter what you are going through in life, put God first and he will surely deliver you from the hands of darkness.”
Woodson’s life story will all sound far-fetched – even utterly unbelievable – to most readers, who do not believe in such things as witches and spells. However, Woodson was born in Liberia, a country in West Africa, where witchcraft in some areas is still practiced and believed by many people. To this day, after many centuries, witchcraft is part of the cultural and psychological makeup of some Africans, the way voodoo is still a force in places like Haiti.
Woodson was born into a rather privileged family, with a father connected to the government who was well known and respected. When she was 10, her mother sent her from Africa to live with a sister in Maple Grove, Minn. A few years later, she was summoned back to West Africa. By that time, her mother and relatives had moved to a country next to Liberia, the Ivory Coast. They had fallen on hard times. The mother forced Eve to become a prostitute to make money for the family, a job Eve detested. At that time, a tug-of-war between mother and daughter intensified, and evil witchcraft spells began, resulting – Woodson believes – in the death of Elijah, one of Eve’s twins.
Later, Eve and her mother both moved to Minnesota. Working mainly menial jobs, Woodson began a series of relationships with boyfriends, some of them abusive. She eventually became a heavy drinker and marijuana smoker. All the while, through a rocky life she admits was not healthy or positive on her part, she was battling the forces of witchcraft and hearing voices some of which were good, some bad. Many times, God told her he wanted her to suffer, to make wrong choices so she would eventually come into the full light of salvation and redemption – God’s love. But, too often, Woodson listened to the voices from sinister, satanic, witchcraft forces. She was sexually promiscuous, often just to get even with her boyfriends for cheating on her; she had multiple abortions; she continued to drink and to smoke marijuana; she had violent fits of temper at times.
Even though she believed in God’s promises to her, she could not quite connect all the dots and would slip backward into darkness. Finally, she met a prophetess named Annie Wolo Johnson who guided her toward a fuller understanding of what had been happening in her troubled, dangerous life. It was difficult to struggle out of the darkness, she said, because of so many interconnected problems: her mother’s evil hexes, a car accident, soured relationships, untrustworthy people and those who used her for their selfish ends, not to mention a series of health problems that include lupus, auto-immune deficiency and other ailments. At one point, when their problems overwhelmed them, she and her husband lost their jobs, their car, their home and had to live in a homeless shelter.
“It’s been really tough,” she said.
Her newfound enlightenment, Woodson notes in the book, was the strength – through God – that she needed to defeat the dark forces around her, including a sister who was working in cahoots with the mother to weaken and kill her.
In her concluding chapter, Woodson calls God “The Great Boss” who has an open line to his employees so they can call on him at any time.
“The (employee) pay is remarkably high,” Woodson wrote. He (The Great Boss) will bless you in many ways. You can get a hold of him at any time, day or night . . . But beware, you cannot cheat him; he is always watching.”
Woodson’s major ambition, she said, is to spread the word of God to all the four corners of the Earth. The “777” part of the title of her book, she explained, refers to the numerical symbols for Father, Son, Holy Ghost. “The Lost Blood” part of the title is the blood lost by Christ on the cross that had been found again by God.
Woodson and her husband, Sumo, live in Sartell. A stay-at-home mom, she is the mother of three children, two of them at home.
777: The Lost Blood is available online at www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore or at Barnes and Noble or amazon.com.
photo by Dennis Dalman
Eve Woodson of Sartell holds her just-published autobiography, entitled 777: The Lost Blood. The book is a harrowing story of a string of problems and tragedies that led eventually to redemption and salvation through faith in God.
