The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  She realized she’d been trying to dream herself whole. “History repeats,” the journal said. Across centuries, across time. Unless she could get it right. Reshape the future.

  Laveau had been a child, only ten, when visions visited her; Marie was a woman grown. A doctor. With friends: El, Reneaux, DuLac. And she had Laveau, herself, to guide her. DeLavier’s journal to chart a path.

  But she hadn’t finished the story. What was it DuLac had said? “Consult an ancient book for an ancient evil.”

  She read on. Dusk gave way to night. The church tolled nine, ten, eleven.

  Laveau’s husband was named Jacques. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Zombie. Zombie.

  Marie Laveau makes zombies.

  Walking dead. The undead.

  Marie Laveau makes zombies.

  Except that was a lie. There was “li Grand Zombi.” Damballah. The snake god. Just as DuLac said. It was the name of Laveau’s python. Zombie was an aberration. An inheritance from Haiti. From those who aligned voodoo with evil.

  It was John who’d called: “See here. Witness a miracle. Marie Laveau makes zombies.” While the crowd roared approval.

  Marie stopped reading. She couldn’t catch her breath. Kind Dog howled.

  Marie felt as if some spirit was pushing her, trying to delve inside her. She fell back upon the bed. Rainbow colors floated on the ceiling. Kind Dog was snuffling her, whimpering, pushing against her hand and arm.

  She could feel herself leaving, disappearing from the concrete world. The outlines of the room dissolving, the bed becoming ephemeral. Even Kind Dog was fading, his smell and sounds dissolving.

  She was back in time. Almost as if she was inside DuLac’s painting, except the ceremony was on a lakeshore. There were thousands, not hundreds—black, white, free and enslaved followers dressed in white. Others dressed in outrageous purple, red, and black, wearing grotesque Mardi Gras masks.

  She saw Laveau, young and heart-stricken, screaming to wake the dead. Jacques stood dull-eyed, center stage, in a filthy sailor’s uniform. His clothes hung loosely, as if, soulless, his body had shrunk in size. His skin lacked color and his hair was matted and tangled. His arms dangled. To the crowd, Jacques was the bogeyman come to life. He was the ghost who’d haunted their childhood dreams. There was nothing in the world more horrible than Jacques.

  Laveau turned, appealing to Marie. Seeing her ancestor, remnants of her family history, an echo of her features, there was no way to ignore the call.

  Dead, undead.

  A hundred and fifty years later. She was chosen to finish the battle.

  * * *

  Marie gulped air—like a negative developing, her surroundings became concrete, color filled in the shapes. She was here. In this reality.

  She could feel her flesh tingling, hear her heart’s murmur. Smell Kind Dog’s fur. See him watching her, his nose moist, his brows arched, curious. She patted his head. “You are one pretty dog.” Black hair, brown-eyed. Compassionate.

  * * *

  Marie went to her balcony. It was dawn again. The city had always been two cities: the past and the present. The culture had been infused with slaves, immigrants, soldiers, opportunists. Great good had happened. Great evil, too. She blinked. Like a veil lifting, she could see the human drama Laveau had been a part of—slave auctions, street vendors, elegant French ladies shopping with black footmen carrying their parasols and hatboxes, priests decrying licentiousness, and drunken sailors being seduced and rolled by prostitutes. Sidewalks were made of wood, streets littered with horse manure; carriage tracks etched in mud like a mad maze. She blinked again: Hawkers were heralding escort services, X-rated shows, corner stands sold juleps, taffy, and brittle candy, tourists shopped for T-shirts, an evangelist propped on a box warned of the apocalypse and seamen heckled transvestites and slovenly drunks.

  This was her city—her home.

  Here, she’d find herself. Here, she’d find who killed her mother. Here, she’d find who was murdering young girls. She had a purpose now. Not a bad way to live or die. Like the ER, she was beating back the odds, beating back the Devil.

  The phone rang. Kind Dog barked at the receiver.

  She picked up the phone, knowing it was Reneaux, knowing what he was going to say before he said it.

  “Another girl dead.”

  He hung up; she listened to the static on the wire.

  * * *

  Pride.

  She’d been focusing on marshaling her strength and another daughter, a child had been dying. Marie collapsed into a chair, her face in her hands. What good were visions if they were after the fact?

  Who did she think she was?

  An orphan. Foster child. Not even a licensed doctor. A woman—like the victims.

  She shuddered. Kind Dog rubbed his back against her legs. She bent, cradling him, her head resting atop his spine.

  “Je suis Marie.” She lifted her head. “Je suis Marie.” It was Laveau’s voice. I am Marie. A simple declaration. But more than that. Laveau spoke the words to affirm she was strong. She said it when John tried to manipulate her. She said it when she’d lost track of her soul, her self. When she felt vulnerable beyond measure. Je suis. I am.

  Marie Levant, not perfect. She was who she was. I am.

  Marie heard a trumpet blare. Loud enough to bring down Jericho’s walls. To call Gabriel to Kingdom Come. Three long, wailing blasts. Defiant. Outraged. The sound became a keening wail. Then the notes swirled into the melody: “Go Down, Body. Lay My Body Down.”

  Marie went to the balcony, gripping the railing. Over rooftops she could see St. Louis Cathedral. See mourners coming out of the church and a black and antique gold carriage with stallions (feathers sticking skyward from their manes) pulling a coffin on a flatbed hearse. Kind Dog barked wildly. She looked down. The snakes on the rail were moving, slithering end to end. Iron was as malleable as clay.

  She saw the nineteenth-century world blending with the twenty-first, the spirit with the real. Parallel worlds merging. There was substance in the air. An intangible feeling that grief was necessary for instruction.

  She dashed into her apartment. Some instinct made her remove the rosary from the pouch.

  “Stay, Dog.” He howled.

  But she needed to move fast, race down the stairs, faster than the elevator, dash across streets, through cobblestone alleys to Cathedral Square. Mist covered the Gulf; oil pools made rainbows on the road.

  Two other trumpets joined the fiercely melancholic one. A clarinet added a whine and a snare drum rolled a steady, funeral beat. Five brilliant-black musicians. A concert master waved his hands like batons and the rhythm shifted from a drone to a celebration. “Oh, when the saints . . . oh, when the saints go marchin’ in . . .”

  I am just a lonesome traveler,

  Through this big wide world of sin;

  Want to join that grand procession,

  When the saints go marchin’ in.

  Oh, when the saint go marchin’ in,

  Lord, I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marchin’ in.

  Marie saw the Guédé clapping, their white gloves fluttering like doves’ wings. In unison, they tipped their hats. She nodded. And they clapped again, this time for her. Two danced a spontaneous minuet, bowing and weaving, stepping primly forward and back.

  Women with parasols were twirling, skipping behind the hearse as it stately turned out of the square toward Riverwalk and St. Louis Cemetery.

  There was a man dressed like a Guédé—in top hat and tuxedo tails, his gloved hands offering engraved cards.

  “Mademoiselle.”

  She flipped over the card: “To everything there is a season.” Ecclesiastes 3:1–8.

  Marie studied the sharp-faced man. “Who died?”

  “One of the Pietre twins. Ninety, if she’s a day. Other one gonna go soon. Old maids. Never married. C’est vrai. That’s why all the folks come. Really two funerals, not one. Good time,
good day to die. Guédé happy; mourners happy.”

  “You see the Guédé?”

  “Oui. They over there.” He pointed at a lamppost. Marie realized he didn’t see any spirits at all. The Guédé were frolicking, crawling all over the hearse.

  Marie handed him back his card. The Guédé man sniffed and walked away.

  Unlike for her mother, Marie appreciated that the Pietre mourners were many. Dozens of family and friends, even strangers who’d been partying all night, and early morning Mass celebrants who respected an unknown woman’s passing. A perfect time for a funeral, just past dawn before the streets were crowded and the sun too high.

  The surviving sister, tiny, no more than five feet, draped in black satin and veil, was escorted by two middle-aged women. Marie felt the old woman staring at her. Her head tilted like a bird’s.

  In a reedy voice, the Pietre twin squealed, “I know you. I know you,” and moved toward Marie with a surprising spryness and grace.

  “Auntie. You don’t know this woman.”

  A priest was watching from the steps.

  “I do.” The woman lifted her veil; to Marie, it was clear it didn’t matter. The woman’s eyes were blue marbles, cataract-blind.

  “I apologize,” said the elder escort.

  “No need,” said Marie.

  The Pietre twin clutched Marie’s fingertips. “My sister and I know Madame Laveau. Every goodbye ain’t gone. Every goodbye ain’t gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She visits us every Mardi Gras. I always leave out a bit of wild rice. Lemonade, too.”

  “Excuse her. Our aunt is old-school. Believing in superstitious, voodoo stuff.”

  “You, nothing but silly new school. No more sense than a cricket.” The small, elflike twin batted her niece’s hands away. She crooked her finger at Marie. Marie bent, her ear turned toward the old woman’s mouth.

  “She told us you were coming. Said I’d live to see it. I’m Bettina. My sister was Luanne. Sister be so happy when I tell her tonight. Everybody thinks she’s gone but she ain’t. Just like Madame Laveau. She—we—been waiting a long time for you.”

  Bettina had the sweetest smile. Marie hugged and kissed the small woman. Her skin felt like soft crepe.

  The two nieces, annoyed, steered Bettina away.

  “Say prayers,” the old woman shouted, gleeful.

  “I will.”

  Bettina stepped lightly, shaking her shoulders to the marching beat. Not at all sad to be attending her sister’s funeral.

  Marie couldn’t help smiling. She felt she was herself yet not herself—a collection of ancestors. Bettina was right. The dead weren’t gone.

  The black-robed priest, as white as the moon, watched her. Then he turned and went inside the church. Marie felt compelled to follow him. She stopped on the steps, watching the departing funeral, appreciating the uplifting wail of the band.

  The Guédé were fluttering about Bettina, solicitous. One Guédé pulled the hat off a niece’s head. The woman gasped. Bettina cackled and clapped her hands.

  The human Guédé was right. Bettina was going to die soon.

  * * *

  The priest had disappeared. In the vestibule, red votive candles flickered and two ornate angel statues cupped their hands to hold the holy water.

  She hadn’t been in church for nearly two decades, not since her mother died. She dipped her fingers in the holy water, genuflected, and walked down the center aisle. The church was tomblike cool.

  On the wall, the Stations of the Cross showed Christ’s passion. The Twelfth Station, etched in oil, showed Jesus nailed to the cross between two criminals; mourning beneath him were John, his beloved disciple, Mary, the Virgin Mother, and Mary Magdalene, the redeemed whore.

  Marie plucked the rosary from her pocket, feeling the beads.

  How to reconcile two faiths? Two worlds?

  She stared at the portrait. Christ in agony. Two women at his feet. Twins.

  Faces turned, both Marys looked at her with a beatific smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  Startled, Marie leaped back, stuffing the rosary in her jeans pocket. “I don’t think so.”

  She was barely literate as both a Catholic and a voodooienne. She wanted to confess—but how dare she? Whatever would she say? For all she knew, this priest would condemn her to the Devil.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait. Your spirit needs healing.”

  Up close, his skin was luminescent.

  “New Orleans is a city of contrasts. Ugliness. Great beauty, too. Sin and charity.”

  She watched him. Feeling some measure of strength in him. Commitment.

  “In the summer, heat and yellow fever would consume the city. It was like opening a floodgate to the Angel of Death and the worst in human nature, too. Lime was tossed on thousands of bodies; everyone wore black armbands—for everyone knew someone who’d died; criminals and recent orphans robbed graves.

  “Mosquitoes brought the fever; some said it was a strain from Africa brought with the slaves. Many believe the infection served as punishment for slavery. Marie Laveau worked beside priests. Nuns, too. Unafraid. Never once infected. Never once feverish. She could lift folks’ fevers right into her hand.

  “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m like the mariner, I fit the story to the soul. Part of my gift. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’m doing it.”

  Marie lowered her eyes, staring at the cracks, the centuries-old floor. With her peripheral vision, she could see high-top button shoes from another age; leather half-boots with bits of mud and dung; and some bare feet. The priest beneath his flowing robes wore tennis shoes. Two worlds. Two realities.

  “Did all the priests welcome Laveau?”

  “Some didn’t. If I’d lived then, I surely would have.”

  “And Christ?”

  “Christ, too. If he has love enough for two Marys, he has love enough for two faiths.”

  “It isn’t at all the same.”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t it love to embrace seeming contradictions?”

  “Seeming?”

  “The older I get, the more I see symmetry. Reconciling of contrasts. Opposites. Everything has its season.”

  His palm rested on her shoulder. His expression was solemn, but he had deep smile lines etched about his eyes.

  Why did she feel she was being blessed?

  She reached into her pocket. “Hold this for me, Father. Keep it safe.”

  “A lovely rosary. Unique. I’ve heard early voodoo worshipers made these rosaries with Christ and the snake god.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Forbidden on pain of death to practice their faith, they merged the religions. Seeing parallels. Symmetry. They could pray, hold the cross in their hand—both Christ and Damballah—and no one would ever know their secret. Wherever did you get this?”

  “It belonged to my mother.”

  “Why give it to me? This is rare, precious.”

  She sighed and felt a calm wash over her. Why give it to him?

  “To make sure you come back,” whispered Laveau.

  She turned, walking slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  “Comment t’appelles-tu?” the priest called.

  She smiled. “Je suis Marie.”

  “Bon. The Marys’ namesake.”

  “Oui. I am the namesake.”

  Outside, she paused on the steps. No trace—neither sight nor sound—of the funeral. Inhale, exhale. The river stank. Fishermen were gutting fish, laying ice on their catch. The city was rousing for a new day. Vans delivered onions and okra for gumbo. Sanitation men sprayed the streets, clearing away last night’s debris and vomit. Joggers were enjoying their morning constitutional before the air became too thick with heat and humidity. Mosquitoes carried West Nile.

  Summer. Sin season. Fever season. Anything could happen. Even the undead.


  She ran, feeling her heart expanding, growing big. She needed to hail a cab. Get to the hospital. It wasn’t the sin of pride. She needed to believe in herself. And there was only one path to follow if she was going to save women’s lives.

  Madonna; Magdalene. Virgins and whores. Nothing new.

  Baby makes three. A trinity. Both Marys, all of the Maries capable of motherhood, a mother’s love. Capable of sisterhood. The key was to love with charity.

  The priest’s last words rang in her ears, “Your namesake Marie Laveau cared especially for the whores.” His words had stopped her. He had a huge, incongruous smile.

  “From the root word ka—two contrasting derivatives. Ka, in Germanic tradition became prostitute; in Latin, kros became cherish, charity. The highest form of Christian love.

  “See,” the priest, palms open, spread wide his arms. “Faith is embracing seeming opposites.”

  Whether I wanted it or not, asked for it or not, people needed to believe in me.

  Just as I needed to believe in myself.

  —Marie Laveau, on accepting her fate as a Voodoo Queen

  here is she? Morgue?”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “Intensive care?”

  El leaned close. “Upstairs on the surgical floor,” she whispered.

  Marie quickly hugged her, then slammed open the stairwell door, racing up the stairs. It was faster; more important, no one would see where she went. No clues to where the dead girl lay.

  One step, two steps, two steps at a time, she raced, feeling overwhelming love for an unknown girl. Her footsteps echoed on concrete.

  Chest heaving, loose tendrils from her ponytail, she stopped at the fifth floor. Quickly and quietly, she slipped past the door. Nurses moved efficiently. Gurneys rolled in and out of OR; some to be cut, others to recover from surgical wounding. The floor smelled of latex and antiseptic. Respirators, cardiac monitors, intercoms whirred, clicked, and buzzed.

  She looked down the long hallway. To the left, third from the last door. The girl was there.

  Marie wished she’d worn her medical coat. In jeans and a T-shirt, she looked like a relative. Except visiting wasn’t allowed on this floor. She walked slowly, confident. They won’t see me. Won’t care. She walked past the care station: Nurses were reading, writing in charts, technicians labeled test tubes, a doctor was on the phone, reserving a table for two at eight.