The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  “And in honor of the L’Overtures.”

  There was silence—stillness, as if air had been sucked from their bodies. Residents stood dumbstruck.

  A bird caw-cawed and something slithered through the underbrush.

  “This, too,” said Marie, “is hallowed ground.” She searched faces. Most were uncomfortable, wary. A few betrayed grief. Tommy appeared, furious.

  “Tonight,” she went on, “we honor Nana and the L’Overtures.”

  “Eh, yé, Maman Marie, eh, yé, yé.” The roar was loud and magnetic. She blinked. Hard to believe that a ragtag band in poor health could sound so vibrant and alive.

  She raised her hands again.

  Silence.

  “Damballah, creator of the universe, loa of infinite knowledge, guide me. Make me special.” She opened her eyes. “Spirits, enlighten me. Especially the ancestral spirits honored by Nana. The old ones. Wata. The elders.”

  “Amen,” rose from the crowd.

  “Especially those spirits who came from across the ocean. Spirits I have not met. Spirits I have yet to meet.”

  Followers were rapt.

  El stood with the L’Overtures, ephemeral forms hovering outside the ritual square, on the edge of the marsh.

  Animals were attracted to the bonfire. Deer, mosquitoes, grackles, snakes were all hiding, lurking in the woods. But Marie sensed them—she could see them, in her mind’s eye, slithering, inching forward.

  Gabriel pounded the drums.

  Energy, like electricity, trailed down her spine. “Make me special,” Marie murmured. “Spirits come. Fill me with grace.”

  She took nothing for granted. Damballah, the snake god, was her special loa. But here, in this bayou world, Nana had worshipped other spirits. Loas who were less familiar to her, yet more familiar to slaves two centuries ago. Wata. And the shapeshifter, the dual-gendered creature.

  Boudom. The drums’ rhythm increased, the timbre grew louder.

  To the left was the well. After dipping a cup into the shiny pail, Brenda was drinking water.

  She wanted to shout, Stop. But she suspected it was already too late. If the town’s water supply was toxic, the damage had long been done.

  El stood beside her, reminding her that the world was hard on women. Hard on Brenda. Hard on Nana. Hard on her.

  Gabriel pounded again and the other drummers echoed his insistent rhythm. Soon, Papa Legba, like the Catholic St. Peter, would appear to open the spirit gates.

  She swayed, her body and mind both felt lighter than air, both responding to the drums’ call.

  With her roots and herbs had Nana kept sickness in abeyance? She remembered Nana saying that she, Marie, “could heal.”

  Yes, she’d healed as a doctor and as a voodooienne. In both roles, the price, anxiety and exhaustion, had always been worth paying. She’d never regretted a single healing, but, somehow, she was beginning to suspect Nana had. Decades of healing, being selfless, would exert a toll.

  The drums were calling her. Gabriel, she imagined, was warning her. Or was he?

  Why did she need to be warned? Yet the world, both tangible and intangible, seemed upside down. Hurricane season—would a hurricane ravish New Orleans? Would it even come? This season or the next? And Nana had died in pain, distraught as a voodooienne. Would that happen to her? Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, would she be embittered like Nana?

  She held her head. What was wrong with her? What in this world—in this time and place—was making her weak? Tentative?

  Inhale, exhale. She was Marie, intent on healing both medically and spiritually. She was Marie-Claire’s mother. And being a mother, like a water goddess birthing the universe, was the most powerful position in the world.

  Parks and Louise were caring for, loving Marie-Claire.

  She needed to love and care for the world, the time and people she’d been given. As a Voodoo Queen, she served where she was needed.

  “Damballah, Wata, give me faith. Give me strength,” she whispered to herself.

  Time to begin. Swaying before the fire, Marie prayed for sight, for possession.

  Luella brushed against her and swooned.

  Quickly, as if a floodgate had opened, followers were pressing against her, gripping, pulling at her arms, clothes, screaming, “Heal me. Heal . . . heal me.”

  She fought to steady herself, screaming, “Get away. Get away.”

  Followers fell back. The air was still too close. It was hard to breathe.

  Strangely, she felt as if the followers intended her ill. Felt as though they wanted something that she couldn’t give. Felt as if they wanted to suck her dry, like the wazimamoto she’d slain, and they wanted more than was acceptable to give.

  She looked over at Gabriel, talking to her with his drum.

  She didn’t understand.

  Nothing about the ceremony was as it should be. Luella wasn’t healed. Papa Legba hadn’t opened the spirit gates. She wasn’t possessed with divine grace.

  At the back of the crowd, closer to the trees, Nate watched her, his eyes lit like black jewels.

  The air around him, trembled, seeming fluid, like water.

  Marie knew it was a spirit—one not beholden to Legba, not beholden to the faith as she knew and understood it.

  Nate’s appearance was changing, shifting forms: from male to female, then back again.

  No one else seemed to see what she saw.

  She saw age—beyond ancient, wrinkled, and scarred flesh. Then Nate’s skin became smooth, handsome. His face transformed again. It became the Haitian’s face, the man she’d seen in the hospital. Then, like a mirror image, it became her.

  She cried out, disbelieving.

  Drums vibrated, followers chanted: “Maman Marie, Maman Marie. Heal me.”

  No one heard her scream.

  K-Paul, entranced by the ceremony, was looking everywhere and nowhere.

  Gabriel intensified Legba’s call: a staccato rhythm with the left heel of the palm sliding. The other drummers were entering the conversation, adding new beats to the call, creating an urgent, insistent cacophony.

  A man, screeching, “Open, open,” was possessed by crippled Legba. Another follower handed him Legba’s cane. Someone else gave him Legba’s pipe. The man limped, jutting his neck forward, screeching, “Open, open.”

  Two women, their steps lively, danced and flirted with Legba.

  Luella rose from the dirt, clapping, shouting, “Miracle.” She exposed her breast. Amazingly, the lump had disappeared.

  Where had the healing come from—from the spirit inside Nate?

  What was it Nana had said? “A Voodoo Queen with full power can heal anything. But every healing has a cost.”

  Marie only knew that Luella’s miracle, Luella’s healing, wasn’t hers.

  Someone brushed against Marie; another touched her hand; more bowed. Followers shuffled, barefoot, making patterns in the earth.

  The crowd become one, chanting, whispering, “Maman Marie. Heal me. Maman Marie.”

  The spirit walked among the crowd. He was there, yet not there. Aged, then youthful. Male, female.

  She saw El stroking Brenda’s hair, but Brenda didn’t feel it. Mimi L’Overture was weeping, holding her beloved baby to her breast.

  Marie heard rolling waves.

  She felt lost in a new territory—nothing about this ritual was typical, normal. She almost laughed, hysterically. “Normalcy.” Ever since coming to New Orleans, nothing had been normal. Ever since El and DuLac had died, nothing had been normal. She couldn’t even love a man like Parks, normally. Or care for her child, normally. She needed others to care for Marie-Claire when she couldn’t be there.

  Everything about her life was outside the bounds of normal.

  She was a failure. No, she wasn’t.

  She reached inside her pocket, pulling out the figurine of Mami Wata. She held it up to the fire, its tail and breasts shimmering, and followers began weeping, wailing anew.

  She was
different, special. And if she sacrificed herself, she’d be good for no one. Not Marie-Claire, not Parks. Not the hospital. Or herself.

  Drums pounded. Bonfire sparks rose like fireflies.

  Marie pressed the statue to her lips. It was one thing to be a mother and suppress yourself, another to be a mother and fulfill yourself. What would Marie-Claire want? What would be the better role model for her daughter? The better life for herself? The better life as a woman, as Marie, as a mother? Life, both tangible and spiritually intangible, wasn’t easy.

  Suddenly, she saw Wata filling Nana with nourishing power. She felt Nana as she’d once been, vital, filled with sacred power.

  She saw Nana, younger, ministering, healing, building her community, possessed with exultant glory. She saw Nana mixing roots, herbs, blending potions . . . Nana applying compresses, bandaging wounds, delivering babies.

  She heard a kaleidoscope of sounds—urgent voices, whispers from another time. Voices calling her, demanding that she heed them.

  Nana had been the intermediary between the ancient African faith and the faith transformed by the intermingling of African slaves with Americans, between old and new worlds.

  Nana’s shape-changing spirit was helping her to rise. Like lightning, “disease eater,” flashed through her mind.

  “Show me,” Marie murmured. “Show me.”

  The spirit clasped her hands.

  She stepped, as Nana had done, through an ancient door.

  She saw water rising, creating a vortex. Saw Nana, in its center with a spirit circling her, twisting like a whirlwind, changing faces and form. Male then female. Faces spiraling about Nana—Nate, the Haitian, her face, and a multitude of faces, she didn’t recognize. Water cascaded as a tangible mist, shaped and reshaped itself, mimicking human form. She saw two great forces, both prehistoric, linked by mutability.

  “Charyn,” she heard El whisper.

  Charyn. Was that the shape-shifting spirit’s name—a name so old or so powerful that only the dead knew it?

  Charyn, the statue stolen from Nana’s altar.

  “Wata.”

  Nana had worshipped Charyn and Mami Wata. But honoring Wata had come first. When did she start to honor Charyn? How were the two connected?

  El chanted, “Hard on women, hard on women.”

  Nana, now seemingly trapped by the vortex, the ever-swirling spirit, spinning tighter and tighter, shouted, “Every healing has a cost.”

  Wata murmured, “Give”; Charyn murmured, “Take.”

  Marie felt power, constructive, destructive power. The vision turned black.

  She saw Nana, her hair turning white, her eyes dulling, becoming blind.

  Nana fell on her knees, her arms clasping her abdomen. Her belly grew big.

  At the water’s edge, she saw Charyn, half male, half female . . . saw Nana touching Brenda’s pregnant abdomen, and though there was no bleeding, no sucking of flesh, she nonetheless knew that Nana was swallowing diseased cells, swimming through fluids, muscle, and blood.

  A police car pulled onto the dirt. The vision ended.

  A dust cloud rose; women shrieked. The drumming stopped. The man who’d been possessed by Legba straightened his spine, disoriented.

  Marie felt bereft, furious. A few moments more and she would have understood better.

  The car’s front window was stained with dead insects; splattered mud caked the black-and-white’s wheels and sides.

  The engine died. Aaron staggered out of the car. Barely able to stand, he fell back against the car door.

  Deet, skip-hopping from the passenger side, caught him in an embrace.

  Aaron shoved Deet, breaking away.

  Protectively, K-Paul came to stand beside Marie.

  Chest heaving, Aaron’s shirt was undone, his pants stained with whiskey. He moved, sliding from side to side, like an unbalanced skater.

  Followers stood, wary, moving away from the fire and nearer the forest’s shadows.

  Spewing spit, Aaron yelled, “Nana’s gone and you’re still here, Maman Marie. It isn’t right. Not right. Damn fucking wrong.”

  “I’ll get the rifle,” murmured K-Paul.

  “No,” she said, touching K-Paul’s arm. “He won’t hurt me.”

  Aaron was radiating pain. He tried to advance menacingly, but his stride was off balance. “All you’ve done is cause trouble, Doc Laveau. Nana stayed alive till you came along. Everything’s your fault.”

  “I didn’t cause her death.”

  “You did. You did something to her. Hexed her. Made her feel shameful. Ashamed.”

  “What’re you talking about? Why was Nana ashamed?”

  “Come on, Aaron,” said Deet, tugging his brother. “Let me take you home.”

  Aaron twisted his arm free. “You’re a traitor.” Deet was stricken. Aaron pointed at his brother, walked backward, then spun around. “You and Doc Laveau, both traitors.”

  K-Paul stepped forward, steadfastly blocking the path between Aaron and Marie. “You should sleep it off, Sheriff.”

  “I’m not the sheriff. She,” his head tilted toward Marie, “took that from me. Took Nana, too.”

  “Aaron, you’ve got it wrong. I’d never hurt Nana.”

  “Everything was all right, under control. Till you came.”

  “What control, Aaron? Whose?”

  Followers drew farther away, keeping their distance from Aaron.

  “I was taking care of her,” he said, belligerent.

  “You were helping her die.”

  “We both were.” Aaron stumbled, falling nearly flat on his face.

  Deet caught his brother beneath the arms, righting him.

  “I didn’t cause Nana’s death,” said Marie flatly.

  “Liar.” Aaron lunged.

  K-Paul pulled Marie back.

  “We, you, caused her to die horribly.” Aaron slid down, out of Deet’s arms. Dignity gone, Aaron sat blubbering, cross-legged in the dirt. “Such pain. She died in such horrible pain.”

  Marie knelt before him, caressing his face. “I’m sorry she refused the medicine.”

  The statue in her pocket was ice cold.

  “Aaron,” she murmured. “Nana couldn’t be saved. Her cancer was too far gone.”

  “Why didn’t you heal her? You could’ve healed her.”

  “No. I couldn’t have.”

  “All she ever talked about was the great Maman Marie. Marie Laveau.” Aaron’s arms were flailing. “ ‘Time for a new voodoo life,’ she said. ‘Time for the great healer.’ ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You denied her care,” said Aaron.

  “Shut up, Aaron,” said Deet. “Nana had the best care.”

  Deet’s eyes were luminescent with tears; Aaron’s were bloodshot.

  With sudden clarity, Marie understood that it had been Nana who’d guided her to DeLaire. Nana who’d called upon the power of her gods to summon her.

  “Why didn’t you heal her?” whimpered Aaron. “She’d done it enough. You could’ve helped. You could’ve healed.”

  “You’re wrong,” wailed Deet. “Nana was relieved when Maman Marie came. She felt content to go. She wanted to go.”

  Aaron, the elder, looked crazy, young. His hands flailed no, and Deet tried to contain them, wrestling his brother to stillness. The two were wrung out, exhausted from playing war. Both were breathing heavily. Deet caressed his older brother’s face.

  “I love you, Aaron,” he said. “But you’ve got it wrong. Nana wanted to die.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t want to believe me. Nana wore herself out. Taking care of everybody. Even you. Me. You knew that.”

  “I didn’t know,” Aaron said, stubbornly.

  “You did. That’s why the grief’s so bad. You knew and yet you still tried everything to keep her alive.”

  Guilty, his chest concave, Aaron shrank, collapsed in upon himself.

  Marie shuddered. She’d seen plenty o
f terminal patients go through hell, pursuing hope on their children’s behalf. For her grandsons’ sake, Nana must have held on as long as she could.

  “Nana wanted to go,” said Deet. “She was worn out. We wore her out.” Deet stood. “All of you,” he said, stepping menacingly toward his neighbors. “Every last one of you here wore Nana out. You all took until she couldn’t give anymore. Couldn’t cure anymore. She just held on until Maman Marie came.”

  Aaron was crying, his back curved, his knees pulled in like a fetus.

  Luella, massaging her right breast, murmured, “Maman Marie is our new mambo.” She smiled, gaily. “She’s healed me.”

  “I haven’t,” protested Marie.

  “She’s going to deliver my baby,” Brenda piped, drawing near. “Nana told me so.”

  “We’re all guilty,” Aaron said, sitting up, uncapping his flask. “Everybody in DeLaire is guilty.”

  Tommy took away the rum flask.

  “Hey,” said Aaron.

  Nate pulled Aaron upright. “Time to go home.”

  “Let it go,” said Tommy, soothingly. “All of it, Aaron. Let it go.”

  Deet rushed forward, pushing Nate’s and Tommy’s hands away. “Don’t touch him. Leave my brother alone.”

  Fiercely, Deet clung to his brother. “None of you cared when Aaron was paying the price. None of you helped when help was needed.”

  Followers glanced at each other furtively.

  Tommy said darkly, “Let it go, Deet. Take your brother home.”

  “Damn all of you,” Deet cursed, then murmured, “Come on, Aaron. Let’s go.”

  Deet and Aaron took a few steps, arm in arm, toward the car, then Aaron broke free and clasped Marie’s shoulders.

  “Let her go,” said K-Paul.

  Marie held up her hand. “No, let him speak.”

  “Did you think I liked being dirty?” Aaron’s voice slurred. “Liked burning the bodies?”

  The alcohol smell made her nauseous. She stroked Aaron’s face, sorry to see him so vulnerable and weak.

  “What else could I do, Maman Marie? They were already dead. Couldn’t help John no more. I’d told him to keep quiet. But he kept saying he was going to the authorities.”

  “Shut up, Aaron,” said Tommy.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I didn’t want to, Maman Marie—they all made me.” Aaron, trying to steady himself, pointed his finger at the followers—the men and women who, in the firelight, dressed in white, infused with emotion, didn’t seem so frail.