Mercedes Dantes—born Marcus Dupré to a Haitian father and a NOLA Creole mother—is not your typical tarot reader. For one, she doesn’t own a crystal ball. For another, she learned to read cards not in a coven, but in a cell at San Quentin, where she served nine years for a robbery she now calls “a spectacularly stupid act of youthful hunger.”
Her clients range from C-suite executives who park their Teslas around the corner (“they don’t want their secretaries to see the license plate”) to teenage single mothers who pay in EBT cards and homemade candles. She charges on a sliding scale: $20 for a three-card pull, $50 for the full Celtic Cross, or one genuine secret she doesn’t already know.
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
My throat tightens. I don’t answer.
She leans back. “That’ll be twenty dollars. Or the name of the first person who broke your heart.” Mercedes Dantes—born Marcus Dupré to a Haitian father
She flips the second card. “Present. You’re healing wrong. You think healing is forgetting. It’s not. It’s learning to carry the wound without bleeding on everyone.”
I step out into the Oakland sun. The Botánica next door is playing a corrido. A child is crying over a spilled slushie. Somewhere, a car alarm wails. She charges on a sliding scale: $20 for
“People come to me and say, ‘Will he come back?’ ‘Will I get the job?’ ‘Am I cursed?’” She snorts. “You’re not cursed. You’re just predictable. You keep dating the same man with a different name. You keep applying to jobs that will destroy your soul. The cards don’t predict the future. They show you the pattern. And patterns are just habits you haven’t hated enough to break.”