Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  “The yellow girl’s man didn’t flinch. “Then he raised his pistol and shot. The boy crumpled over, twitching. The referee put a blanket over his face—tucked that poor child into bed.

  “Everyone knew what it was—the secret medicine Makandal used on his soldiers. When you drink it, no bullet can touch you, a cannonball can’t slow you down. And everyone knew where the yellow girl’s man got it.

  “From then on her man was her slave. After his wedding night he crawled back to her house at dawn. He told his wife he was working and the poor thing believed him—she’d never been out in the world, never learned a husband could lie.

  “The girl finally got her way. She got prouder than before. She got pregnant to show everyone: my man does it all for me. He lights the fire in my kitchen, fixes the pump like a common handyman. Chi rainy days he fetches my hairdresser in his own carriage.

  “I used to see her sashaying by, proud as a sailboat on a windy day, sticking out her belly, acting like she knew something I didn’t. But I knew. It wasn’t love holding them together. It was the memory of that poor dead boy binding them like an iron chain—”

  “Shut up!” hissed Delphine. “You don’t know anything. You’ve taken my money to tell me what I already knew.”

  “I do know something you don’t,” Marie Saloppe said calmly. “Something special and secret. I’m just getting to that part.

  “The girl I was telling you about had her baby about a month ago, all alone. She wouldn’t let the midwife near her—that’s how proud she was. She had time to regret it—nine hours and nine minutes, it seemed like nine months as she cried and swore on Mary and Jesus.

  “But when she saw the baby’s face her tears dried up. ’Cause its face was covered by the caul, the pearly veil from the womb. The girl knew the caul was supposed to be good luck—she thought the slimy gray film was disgusting. Before she’d even looked to see if the child was a boy or a girl, she’d scraped the caul into a basin near the bed.”

  “How did you know?” whispered Delphine. “Nobody knew.”

  “I read it in her palm.”

  “Tell me what it means.”

  “The caul,” said Marie Saloppe, “is the beautiful veil. It’s the face of our other soul, the spirit which wanders at night when we’re dreaming. A baby born with the caul can see through the eyes of her other soul. She can see into the world behind the veil, beyond the surface of the mirror. She can talk to the spirits in the trees and hear what the wind has to say.

  “It means she’ll be the kind of woman who can’t let go—just like she couldn’t let go the blanket in her mama’s womb. It means she’ll never get any peace—not living, not dead, not ever.”

  Delphine bit her lip. “I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what to do. Go home and find the basin where you threw that caul. It’ll be there at the bottom, dried out like a thin sheet of gray paper. Take that paper and give your baby a secret name—understand? A name only you know. Don’t tell anybody. Write the name on the dried caul and fold it twice. Then sew a little bag—velvet, dark blue like the sky at night. Put the caul in the bag and hide it in a secret place. Don’t tell anyone where it is.”

  “That’ll help,” said Pinhead Helen. “But it won’t change things—this baby still won’t get any peace.”

  Fighting back tears, Delphine stood up and rushed away.

  “Hey, Miss Delphine!” Marie Saloppe called after her. “There’s something I forgot to ask. What did you name that baby? I do hope you didn’t name her Marie. I don’t want to be answering by mistake when the spirits call her. I don’t want to be the one who’s never left in peace.”

  Delphine began to run. Huddling to shield her baby from the chill, she ran until she reached St. Ann Street, where she was stopped in a head-on collision which knocked the wind out of her. Gasping for air, she looked up to see whom she’d run into. Then she gasped again.

  It was a black man, seven feet tall, wearing an evening coat, smoked spectacles, gold earrings and a high top hat. His face was covered with welts and eleborate tattoos.

  Delphine apologized. The man didn’t answer. Scowling, he spit on the ground three times, right near her feet in the place where her shadow should have been.

  Tipping his top hat, the giant walked on.

  Every night Delphine had washed Marie’s eyes with a handkerchief dipped in holy water. Six months after her birth, the rash disappeared.

  “I knew they’d get better,” she told Victor. “I knew no daughter of mine would grow up with eyes like a screech owl.”

  “Not an owl,” said Victor. “A bunny rabbit.”

  “You’re sorry she’s better,” said Delphine. She was right. Already he missed the pleasure of watching Delphine in her white nightgown sitting on the edge of the bed with the baby in the crook of her arm. He’d liked the quick motions of her hands tipping the silver vial into the Belgian lace handkerchief he’d bought her himself. He’d liked the scent of roses and the candlelight which cast a luminous aura around the mother and child—so that Victor, raised in the church, couldn’t help thinking of the Holy Family.

  “The Holy Family,” he’d said. “Me and my yellow girl and our little bastard.”

  Delphine knew that the sight of her loose black hair always made him picture his wife Virginie, who coiled her own mousy hair behind her neck like some spoiled sausage; he imagined her thin back hunched over her tattered copy of The Imitation of Christ, trembling with envy as she studied on the martyred saints.

  It had taken him a while to see that his second family—holy or not—was the only one he had. At first Delphine had bored him. Later, during the scandal with that boy, she’d embarrassed him. And then, from the morning of the duel to the night Marie was born, he’d learned that there were worse torments than boredom or embarrassment.

  That was the time when everything in Delphine’s house had gone wrong. The kitchen fire had refused to burn. The courtyard pump ran dry. Water wouldn’t boil. At night melancholy breezes gusted through their bedroom. Delphine awoke with her hair in knots.

  These minor household problems had had a strange effect on Victor. They’d begun to seem like omens, signs that nothing would ever be right again. Nothing in his gentleman’s education had prepared him for handyman’s work. But he had done his best, desperately lighting and relighting the fire, jiggling the pump, fetching the hairdresser—always hoping that one small repair might somehow keep his life from going wrong forever.

  The baby had fixed things. Since her birth, the fire had practically lit itself. Water splashed the tiles. Delphine’s brush glided through her hair. Gradually Victor’s despair subsided until, one night, he confessed that he felt happier than he’d been since his boyhood in Santo Domingo.

  “If this is my share of family contentment,” he said, “thank God for yellow girls and their little bastards.”

  For the rest of his life Victor would associate these spontaneous prayers of gratitude with those candlelit evenings when he’d watched Delphine wash Marie’s eyes. That was why he was so disappointed when the rash disappeared.

  Delphine couldn’t understand his regret. Delighted that she hadn’t given birth to a freak, she settled back to receive the blessings she believed God owed her.

  Yet there were moments when she suspected Jesus of having second thoughts about His generosity—nights when Marie screamed and thrashed in her cradle, mornings she awoke with her eyes as red as blood.

  Old Marinette, the hairdresser, knew why the baby was crying. “She’s got witches sucking on her little teats,” explained the skinny old woman. “That’s what makes her scream. Back in Santo Domingo they call those babies ‘witch children’ and drown them the day they’re born. They’re the evil born back into the world. They’re dangerous. They’re the ones who fix their mamas’ deaths.”

  Delphine watched Old Marinette in the mirror. Women called her ‘The Bat’ because of her bony hunched back, her leathery brown skin, h
er shrill voice. Suddenly Delphine felt as if a bat were really caught in her hair. She jerked her head away, leaving a thick black swatch in Old Marinette’s comb. “Go to hell!” she shouted. “I can comb my own hair!”

  The hairdresser blinked. “You asked me what was wrong,” she said. “I told you. You don’t like it ’cause you know it’s true.”

  “I know I’ll strangle you if you don’t get out!”

  “I’ve been listening to her for fifteen years,” muttered Old Marinette, hobbling toward the door. “And the first time I open my mouth, she throws me out.”

  Fortunately Delphine had no intention of doing her own hair. Old Marinette was soon rehired. But though the hairdresser had a girl of her own—a healthy little granddaughter whom she often brought along on appointments—Delphine stopped asking for advice about Marie. But on that bright December morning seven years later, when the trail of blood led her to the courtyard, Delphine looked at the child she’d borne on All Saints’ Day, her daughter with the caul and the red eyes of the double-sighted—and decided to ask her.

  “Marie,” she said softly, “do you know why your eyes get red like that?”

  Marie sucked thoughtfully on her injured thumb. “It’s those damn bedbugs,” she said at last, her red-rimmed eyes shining with sincerity.

  CHAPTER III

  FROM EARLIEST CHILDHOOD Marie remembered her dreams and knew they were her secrets.

  She learned from experience. One morning at breakfast she was relating a dream about broken crockery when her mother’s coffee cup crashed to the floor.

  “It’s bad luck to tell your dreams before noon,” said Delphine, crossing herself. “Unless you want them to come true.”

  Marie never mentioned her dreams again. Still somehow she knew it was important to remember them—important enough to spend whole mornings in the sunlit courtyard recalling every detail. There were funny dreams, nightmares, mysterious visions. And three dreams which returned again and again, faithful as orbiting moons.

  She dreamed a werewolf appeared at her window. Lying in the dark, she saw the grinning wolf’s head, the human body covered with mangy gray fur. Its yellow teeth were caked with dried blood. Black wings ending in razor-sharp claws extended from its shoulders. Its red eyes peered into the window inches from her bed.

  She screamed. The sound dried in her throat. But the werewolf heard, pricked its pointed ears and flew off, leaving a luminous red trail in the dark sky.

  She followed the trail through her dream into her parents’ room. Supine on their narrow bed, Victor and Delphine slept so peacefully that Marie had the momentary fear they were dead.

  The werewolf stuck its blood-spattered head in through their open window. “I’m here for Marie,” it said in a deep male voice.

  Delphine snored softly. Victor didn’t stir.

  “Give me your girl,” said the werewolf.

  Marie waited, knowing what came next. “She’s yours,” Victor mumbled in his sleep. “She’s yours,” said Delphine, tossing beneath her satin quilt.

  “I’m not!” cried Marie. But she was already awake, crying her eyes as red as the werewolf’s bright trail.

  In the second dream, a stranger lay beside her in bed. She knew it was a man by the smell—not her father’s cologne and hair oil, but sweat, sawdust, and whiskey, the smell of the carpenters Delphine hired to fix her shutters and refinish her floors.

  She lay rigid, terrified the man might touch her. “Who are you?” she tried to ask. But she couldn’t speak. Then the man put his arms around her and her question no longer mattered. She felt calm, joyful, safe in the warm center of creation.

  The man reached for her hand and pressed something into her palm. She opened her fist and saw a tiny fish molded in strange luminescent gold, lighted from within, glowing in the darkness. Its light grew brighter until it filled the room and was the sun at dawn.

  The man and the golden fish vanished. She awoke red-eyed, in tears, with a sharp pain inscribing a fish in the center of her palm like a deep and invisible bruise.

  The third dream began with distant breaking waves, the scent of gardenias, an endless solitary uphill climb through lush jungle. Somehow she knew it was Santo Domingo. Somehow her feet found their way through the dark, though her body—heavy and strangely unbalanced—hindered her. Looking down at herself, she saw a swollen pregnant belly bobbing like a buoy. She touched her hair—cropped to her skull like a man’s.

  Somehow she knew she was her grandmother, Madame Henriette.

  After a while, silent white-clad figures slipped out of the jungle onto the overgrown trail. Single file, they climbed to a mountaintop clearing surrounded by bonfires and vulture carcasses impaled on tall stakes, crowded with black people in white cotton with gold coins and ribbons fixed to their clothes.

  At their center was an altar—a stone cross mounted on piles of brick. Lashed to the cross, an enormous black bull with silver horns sweated and shivered. A tall black priest with snakelike coils of frizzy hair and an orange parrot on his shoulder stood beside the altar.

  His red-rimmed eyes searched the crowd. Somehow Marie knew he was seeking her. Blood pounded in her ears, then changed to a drumbeat. The bull began to bellow.

  Suddenly an old woman spun out of the crowd. Marie recognized the hairdresser, Old Marinette—dressed like the others in white cotton, clasping a gleaming machete above her head. Whirling in circles, she orbited the altar nine times, stopped near the priest and swung the machete, grazing his face. The priest didn’t flinch. At last Old Marinette screeched, thrust the handle toward him, kissed his cheek, kissed the bull’s horns and danced away.

  The priest raised the machete and faced the crowd. All around Marie, people swayed like charmed snakes. She lowered her head.

  Startled by the whistling blade, she looked up to see the bull’s head roll from its twitching carcass. The air reeked of blood and fear. Throwing down the machete, the priest bathed his forearms in the gushing blood. He filled a large bowl with the sticky fluid and offered his parrot the first drink.

  Marie joined the procession filing by the altar. One by one people bent to drink from the bowl. The priest kissed their foreheads.

  Finally it was Marie’s turn. The priest gazed at her like a lover. Then his bright bloodshot eyes turned blank and empty as a doll’s. “Who are you?” he asked coldly.

  “Don’t you know?” she said.

  “Not anymore.” Turning away, he motioned for her to drink.

  As she bent toward the bowl, a harsh steam rose into her face, blinding her. The priest’s lips touched her forehead. But she was already awake. Tears streamed from her eyes, burning them red as the bull’s blood.

  These three dreams returned most often. Yet there were others—nightmares which she couldn’t remember though she spent whole mornings trying, somehow knowing that these were the most important of all.

  But she didn’t know why till Marie Saloppe showed her how to turn her dreams into money.

  By the time Marie was six, she’d begun running away from home for long afternoons, which she spent in the Place D’Armes playing Indians with tough little boys from the Irish Channel.

  Often Marie Saloppe and Pinhead Helen scolded these grimy Indians for kicking sand in their fritter oven. But Marie never answered. Delphine had warned her.

  “See that fat lady over there?” Delphine had said one Sunday on their way home from mass.

  Marie nodded.

  “Well, that lady’s got warts all over her body.”

  “Warts?”

  “It’s like leprosy, only worse. And if that lady touches you, you’ll catch them sure as the sun shines.”

  Marie had enough trouble with the rash around her eyes. She didn’t need warts. She avoided Marie Saloppe.

  And so on that day she saw Marie Saloppe approaching her across the square, she prayed to Jesus that the conjure woman wouldn’t touch her. Her prayer was answered. Panting and wheezing, Marie Saloppe stopped a few feet away
and put her hand over her heart. “How’re you doin’, baby?” she asked.

  “Fine,” muttered Marie, returning to the circle she’d been drawing in the dust.

  “That’s not polite,” said Marie Saloppe. “I’m trying to start a conversation and you’re acting nasty as a jaybird. That’s not nice when all I’m trying to do is help.”

  Marie drew a large cross through the circle. “I don’t need your help. I’m not sick.”

  “I’m not talking ’bout root doctoring. I’m talking ’bout money.”

  “Money?” Marie squinted up into the sun.

  “Money. Now listen. I know you got a sweet tooth, baby. How would you like all the three-cent chocolates you could eat? How would you like all the pretty clothes and pretty dolls your little heart desires?”

  The prospect was tempting. But when Marie Saloppe took another step toward her, Marie remembered the warts and forgot the chocolate. “My papa brings me everything I need,” she said quickly.

  “I’m not talking ’bout that. I’m talking ’bout your own money. How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  “High time you made your own living.”

  Keeping her distance, Marie got to her feet. She was certain that a conjure doctor’s helper would have to skin black cats and slimy frogs, go out in the swamp and dig roots at midnight. “What do I have to do?” she asked coldly.

  “Tell me your dreams.”

  “My dreams? How can I make money off my dreams?”

  Marie Saloppe smiled. “They’re combinations.”

  “Combinations?”

  “Don’t act so innocent.” Marie Saloppe spat in the dust. “It’s time you grew up. Combinations are numbers—numbers you can play on the Wheel of Fortune. If your dreams are the real thing and you can read their language, they’ll tell you the numbers.