Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  The juju woman's mouth and eyes weren't smiling as she looked at them, but still her whole face gave an impression of laughter. “I figger you po-licemens want to ask me where I was the night that white Creole man got hisself killed.”

  “Then you probably got your answer all figured out too,” Fio said. He had come no farther than just inside the door, and he'd set his jelly glass down on the window sill without touching it.

  “I was right here. Had me some supper, went to bed.”

  “Uh-huh.” Fio rocked back and forth on his feet and shifted the matchstick he was chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. “People say you were putting voodoo spells on Mr. St. Claire.”

  “People ax me to do things for 'em sometimes. Me, I'ma obligin' soul.”

  “Yeah, a regular Sister of Charity you are,” Fio said. “And those things people ask you to do—what might those be?”

  “The things people wants, Mr. Po-liceman. I only give people what they wants.”

  She made that wet noise with her tongue again and rubbed the thumb of one hand over the knuckles of the other. She wore a ring fashioned of copper—two snakes entwined, mating with each other, killing each other. Rourke remembered it from that day, as a boy, when she'd given him the tattoo. Then, for some strange reason, it had made him think of the rings the nuns wore to symbolize their marriage to Christ and their faith.

  Rourke could feel Fio's gaze on him, but he said nothing. He would let his partner ask the questions that he knew Mamma Rae would never answer. She would tell him things, though. People always told you something, even with what they didn't say.

  As if she had read his thoughts, she turned to look at him, her eyes like two burning coals now in her face, and he felt her power that he knew came from that dark place inside himself.

  “You don' like my wine?” she said, and Rourke smiled because he had never met a dare he didn't take.

  He expected the wine to be sweet, but it wasn't. It tasted of the black earth of a grave, of blood spilled in rage. Of the hot, wet spot between a woman's legs. One swallow and already he felt it burning in his own blood, melting him from the inside out.

  Her voice was low and taunting, and strangely echoing in the small and crowded room. “What you afraid I put in that wine? Some woman's cassolette, uh-huh. You afraid I goin' make you crazy to death with love?”

  Rourke smiled again and drank some more. His skin was on fire now. His heartbeat was like a wild riff inside him. “At least I'd die happy,” he said.

  She laughed and nodded. “Mmmmm-huh. Make you crazy in love.” She twisted her head around and called out to Fio, who was still standing by the door and watching Rourke now with troubled eyes. “How 'bout you, Mr. Policeman? I could give you some horsemint. Make that thing you so worried 'bout stand up stiff as a beanpole.”

  Rourke thought he would go take a look at her hoodoo altar, but rather than walking he seemed to float there instead. Bowls of holy water, plaster statues of saints, a sacred sand pail. A cottonmouth coiled around a piece of brain coral. He thought it was dead and stuffed, and then its belly undulated and its mouth stretched open. The forked tongue flickered and the fangs glittered in the candlelight, and for one wild moment he almost reached out to touch it, to capture it and feel its poisonous bite. The old ones claimed the voodooienne got her powers by mating with a snake.

  She had come to stand close beside him. There was a strong musky smell to her, like what you find in cheap bawdy houses where they don't change the sheets on the beds for days on end.

  He felt himself turning, almost against his will, to look at her. She picked up a tin can from off the shelf by his head and spit the snuff into it. He noticed that next to where the tin can had been was a small shallow bowl filled with the same kind of red peas that had gone into the making of Heloise Lelourie's rosary beads. He picked up the bowl for a closer look.

  “You want those love beans, you can have 'em. Make a bracelet for yo' lady.”

  “I haven't got a lady anymore.”

  Mamma Rae leaned closer to him. The smell of her was overpowering. “You take these love beans away with you anyway, only best to know what you might be lettin' yo'self in for. They can be pretty, used fo' a bracelet or necklace or rosary beads. But they poison, too, love beans are, if they all crushed up and put in somethin' real sweet to make 'em go down easy.”

  She reached up and ran her finger down the length of his cheek. Her nail was long and sharp and painted black, and she pressed just hard enough to score the skin lightly. “Feed love beans to a man and he'll die screamin'.”

  He took her hand by the wrist and pulled it away from his face, then wrapped her fingers around his empty jelly glass. Slowly, she pulled her hand out from beneath his, allowing him to feel her flesh. It fanned the fire in him like air from a bellows.

  He stared at her hand, wanting her to touch him again, wanting her to rake his back with those nails. Yet the silky feel of her skin had also released a gentle memory. The black hands of the smiling, gap-toothed woman who had raised him. His mama in all but blood and name.

  He had to work to get the words out, and when they came he was surprised at how sane they sounded. “I'd heard it said you make the best blackberry cordial in all New Orleans. It wasn't a lie. You have yourself a good evenin', Mamma Rae.”

  Fio seemed to figure they'd done what they'd had to do, because he was already out the door. Rourke stopped at the top of the stairs and turned back to her. “You had any news from that LeRoy Washington lately?”

  “LeRoy up in Angola. 'Sides, you think I'ma ever tellin' you who I was spellin', and what for?”

  Slowly, he smiled. “You just did tell me.”

  She came out onto the steps with him. Within the shadows cast by the deep eaves of her shack it had grown too dark to see her face, but he could feel a tension emanating from her now that was like heat waves off a tar road. It wasn't part of her juju game. In anyone else he would have thought it was fear.

  “Then might be I'll go on an' tell you more than you want t' know.” Her voice was soft and low now, even though Fio was too far ahead to hear. “Might be I'll tell you 'bout a white woman alla time sendin' her two lil' girls to me for spells against their daddy. She had them girls hating their daddy like nothin' I ever did see, that white woman did. Then come a day one of them lil' girls, she come to me and she say, my daddy's dead now, Mamma Rae, but I found me a wild yeller-haired boy, an' I want t' make him love me fo'ever. Fo'ever is fo'ever, honey, I says back to her. What if you want rid of him later? But she only laugh.”

  She leaned close to him and laughed herself, and he could smell the snuff on her breath. “Now why don' you tell me somethin', if you smart as you think you is? You still love that lil' gal? You still crazy in love with that Remy Lelourie?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  IN NEW ORLEANS THE PAST IS NO DECAYING MEMORY. It lives in the beat of your heart, a constant echo in syncopation with your soul of all the yesterdays and lives that came before you. The sins of fathers, mothers, and their mothers and fathers before. La famille. For it is the sins committed that are most remembered, better than any blessings bestowed. So you take your sinful past and you bury it alive in crypts like the ones in the St. Louis Cemeteries. Elaborate, aboveground, but tombs nonetheless. You keep the sins secret, you keep them buried, but you keep them still, within heart and soul, for the sake of yourself, and la famille.

  The secrets came down through the years in whispers, and rarely were their names spoken aloud. The whispers only spoke of “he” or “she,” yet names were not needed for passing down the lessons learned. Heloise Lelourie had listened to the whispers even before she was old and wise enough to understand the truth and the lies that shaped the words. It was the nameless, whispered ghosts of the past that Heloise remembered most of her growing-up years. The sins confessed, but not forgiven or forgotten.

  She suffered from the Lelourie affliction. So delicate down below, she was, the poor thing. />
  She said he was a gentleman when it came to things like that. He hardly ever bothered her after the boy was born.

  He had the Lelourie grit, that one. Pulled up sweet potatoes out of the ground like some darkie, but he said there was no shame so awful that couldn't be borne if God wills it, and no damnYankee was going to see him beaten.

  Every bit of it went into the bourré pot. Lost in a single night. She had to sell her mama's jewelry and it like to have broke her heart.

  She married an American and moved uptown and her mama never spoke to her again. Then, at the funeral, her eyes shed blood…. No, it was blood, sure enough. My own mama saw it. They say she still has the handkerchief with the stains on it, tucked away in her first communion missal.

  He had the Lelourie coloring, but that nose, oooh, Lord. That nose could have been cut right off his daddy's face.

  She held her head up proud and lived with it in silence. What else was she to do?

  The stories Heloise most loved to listen to, though, were about Sans Souci and how it had come to be lost. When she grew old enough she pestered her mama and aunts for the details they didn't like to give. She read the old letters, the legal documents, and the yellowed newspaper clippings. She studied the photographs and daguerreotypes, and slowly the whispered ghosts began to take on faces, names. One face, one name, in particular came to haunt her—Henri Lelourie, who was granddaddy to her second cousin Reynard, which made him, then, her own great-uncle. Henri Lelourie, the man who had lost Sans Souci and had died so young and so tragically.

  One day, Heloise began to make pilgrimages to the places where it all had happened, for she wanted to imagine how it had been. Not how it had really been, but how it had been told, passed down from generation to generation as secrets whispered over blackberry cordials and cups of café au lait.

  Carnality and betrayal and murder.

  It was Sans Souci she always went to first, that lovely house with the deep galleries and graceful white colonnettes. The first Lelourie to come to this land of swamps and yellow fever and hot nights had built her, and so she would have been special for that reason alone. It was Sans Souci's beauty that charmed and enthralled, and seduced.

  Heloise would stand on the bayou road and look up at the house and imagine she could see a line of ladies, mamas and their daughters, generation upon generation, walking along the gallery, their fans fluttering before their faces, their wide-hooped skirts swaying like bells. The truth was that only one generation of Lelouries had made Sans Souci its home. Within twenty years the family had moved onto a bigger plantation upriver, into a house with wide Grecian columns, marble floors, a spiral staircase. They were rich, for a time, those Lelouries, with ten thousand arpents planted in sugarcane.

  But they had kept Sans Souci; they thought they would always keep her, for she was in their blood. It was a matter of practicality, too—she gave the Lelourie fathers and sons a place to stay when they came to New Orleans to eat a bowl of Alvarez's famous Louisiana gumbo and drink a glass or two or three of le petit guoave. To sell their crops of cane and molasses, and buy slaves off the block at the City Exchange. To dance their cares away at the quadroon balls in the Salle d'Orleans.

  The Salle d'Orleans was the Convent of the Holy Family now, an order of Negro nuns. A place of worship, with its faded green jalousies and stone portico, overlooking the garden of the St. Louis Cathedral. On her pilgrimages to the past, Heloise would go and sit on the stone bench in the garden and look up at the convent's balcony and imagine those years long ago, when dark beauties had stood there instead of nuns. Dark beauties enjoying the night breezes and hiding their smiles behind fluttering, coquettish fans.

  Then from these quadroon balls of her imaginings, Heloise's pilgrimage would inevitably lead her to the house on Conti Street, and to what had happened there three generations ago, in the winter of 1855.

  In the old days they had called it plaçage: the carnal union of a white man and a colored girl. He would meet her at the quadroon ball, beneath a crystal chandelier, and he would dance with her to the scrape of a fiddle, across a floor bright as glass. She would be seductive in her colorful silks and satins, resplendent in her plumes and jewelry, and he would make the proper arrangements with her mama, buy her more silk dresses and a cottage in the Vieux Carré, and there he would visit her until he married, and sometimes afterward, too.

  A man has his urges—they can't be helped. But she says he was a gentleman when it came to things like that. He hardly ever bothered her after the boy was born.

  She would have been raised a lady, that planter's colored mistress, as much refined as the white Creole girl he would someday marry, and her dreams would have been the same: to attract a man rich enough to protect and provide for her, and who would have a care for her heart. Only unlike the white Creole girl, the man of her dreams could never take her for his wife, and if there was a love between them it would only have been acknowledged in the heat of the night.

  Henri Lelourie, though, he had fallen in love, that winter of '55. Henri Lelourie, in love with a colored girl.

  No, a love-madness it must have been, and not with a girl who danced a cotillion with her brown shoulders bare, her red satin ballgown rustling, her dark eyes inviting. Henri Lelourie had fallen in love with a slave who worked barefoot in his brother-in-law's sugarcane fields. Henri Lelourie had been a married man, with a babe on the way, and still he had to have that little Nigra field hand, or so that is what the whispers said.

  It was as though she'd bewitched him, heart and soul. He lost his honor, he lost his mind, he lost Sans Souci. But he had to have her.

  His plantation struggling, desperate for capital, he had sold Sans Souci to his brother-in-law, whose name was Pierre St. Claire, for money and that one slave. “A mulatto female, approximately sixteen years of age, skin medium to dark brown, with all of her teeth, her limbs and back strong and of good conformation.”

  A mulatto slave, and yet Henri Lelourie had dressed her in silk and set her up in a cottage on Conti Street. There he stayed with her, night after night, as if he had no plantation to manage, as if he had no pregnant wife. Even after his heir was born, a sickly boy, still he stayed in New Orleans with his slave girl, neglecting his home, his wife, his son.

  The house on Conti Street sat empty and shut up all the while Heloise was growing up, but she would still try to imagine how it must have been with them—with Henri Lelourie and his colored mistress, his slave, whose name, never recorded, had long since been forgotten. Her name had been forgotten, but not her sin. Behind the gauzy mosquito netting, on that bed of twisted silken sheets, what had she given him that his wife had not? Savage and unbridled pleasure? Or had she been pliant and yielding as she bore his weight and took his body into hers, her master, her Michie Henri? They say, those who are not of la famille, that the house was lost, the duel was fought, over a game of faro, but that is a lie.

  Sans Souci was lost for love of a slave girl.

  Oh, she was a bewitching girl, that Nigra. And well, you know how they can be—like cats in heat. So it was no wonder that Pierre St. Claire decided he had to have her too, even though she wasn't his for the taking anymore. That's why that duel was fought under the oaks. Not for cheatin'over cards, but for cheatin'at love.

  The dueling oaks were still there for Heloise to look at and imagine how it had been. Gauzy like a shroud, the dawn light filtering through the gnarled and twisted branches. Shawls of gray moss floating in the mist. Coats lying on the grass, and two men walking away from each other, their boots sinking deep into the wet earth, pistols hanging heavy in their hands. A shout sending startled birds into flight, the men turning, firing. A white shirt blossoming with scarlet flowers.

  Henri—unable in the end to kill his friend, the man who was brother to his wife and uncle to his son—had raised his arm at the last instant and his shot had gone high. Pierre, drunk or afraid, or driven mad by lust for the slave girl, had aimed to kill. They say Henri's dying wor
ds were Promise me you'll take care of her. Whether he was speaking of his faithful wife or his unfaithful mistress, that was one secret that went to the grave untold.

  Or so went one story, but there was another: That Pierre St. Claire had waited for Henri early one morning, hidden behind the dueling oaks, and then shot him in the back when he came riding by. Murdered him in cold blood with one of a pair of matching gold-plated French revolvers.

  But whether it was murder by stealth or a duel, whenever Heloise would imagine what came after, it was always the slave girl waiting in the cottage on Conti Street. She would imagine the girl hearing a step on the front stoop, a knock on the door. A voice saying one word, a name, and the girl beginning to weep. Had they been tears of grief, though? Or of joy?

  The crypt Heloise would save for last on her pilgrimage. The Lelourie family crypt in the old St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. That whitewashed monument of stone, where you came to bury your secrets and your sins. The bones of five generations were housed in the Lelourie crypt, including those of Henri, the granddaddy her Lelourie cousins had never known. Murdered by a St. Claire in the winter of 1855.

  Heloise's own grandfather—Henri's younger brother—had been in Paris on his Grand Tour when the tragedy happened. He had returned home months later to find Sans Souci lost and the upriver plantation in debt on the next crop to the hilt. His brother buried, and his brother's wife caught up in a wild grief that was near to madness. His brother's baby son already cutting his first tooth.

  That year an early frost destroyed the cane, and a few years later the war and the Yankees came along and destroyed what was left.

  There had been ten slave shacks out in back of Sans Souci in those bygone years, but only one was left standing by the time Heloise came along. It disturbed her to look at it, so that she always had to be reminding herself how the shack had nothing to do with her. It was too frightening to imagine that destiny was merely an accident of birth. That the distance between being born in that shack and in a bedroom up in the big house was no wider than the yard one had to cross to get from the one to the other.