Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  As she rattled on, Marie looked in the mirror and was surprised to see Emma’s husband, Richard, absent-mindedly stumbling around the room as if searching for a lost pair of spectacles. Yet she hadn’t heard his footsteps. Turning around, Marie saw he wasn’t there.

  She tried to concentrate on her work, but Emma’s hair kept slipping between her fingers. Marie cursed softly, then remembered that it didn’t matter. Whenever and however she finished, Emma would smile sweetly into the mirror and tell her that it was all just perfect.

  2 P.M. Lucinda Brown. 3 Van Buren Place.

  Lucinda Brown knew she was Emma Sands’s equal. She was as good as any woman in the American colony. The only difference was that the Browns’ money hadn’t come from a bank or a mill or some snooty family lawyer. Their fancy home hadn’t come in grandma’s will. It had all come directly from the profits of Brown’s Pharmacy, the biggest drugstore in town.

  This small difference made all the difference in the world. Pharmacy wasn’t a gentleman’s profession. A merchant’s hands were dirty enough—but a pharmacist’s were almost as dirty as a barber’s. So the Browns were never asked to their neighbors’ homes. Lucinda’s invitations weren’t returned. Her daughters were admitted to the Protestant School but not to the debutante balls.

  Finally accepting her social failure, Lucinda had retreated to the edge of society—from where she watched it closely—not as a participant, but as its pharmacist’s wife. None of her neighbors would recognize her on the street, but she knew their intimate bodily secrets. She’d taught her husband to recognize slaves and servants so he could tell her whose houseboy had come to the shop for a dose of purgative or a package of asthma cigarettes.

  That was what the Browns discussed at dinner. That was the bond which held the family together. And that was what Lucinda Brown chatted about while Marie worked to preserve the dignity in the stern Spanish-looking face which none of the right people would ever see.

  “Poor Mrs. Cartwright,” she said as Marie tinted her hair to shine like Chinese lacquer. “She must’ve had an awful toothache Sunday night. It took a whole ounce of clove oil to kill the pain. And isn’t it too bad about that Morris girl, taken with fits on the night of her engagement?”

  Looking in the mirror Marie saw a huge black crow perched on the iron gates of St. Louis Cemetery. The crow was leaning down and pecking at the heads of passing mourners ...

  “Tell me.” Lucinda called Marie to attention. “Isn’t Emma Sands your customer? Is everything all right at the Sands’ home?”

  “As far as I know,” said Marie. “Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” said Lucinda. “That Richard Sands has been buying the most prodigious quantities of opium.”

  In the mirror the black crow swooped down and plucked a man’s spectacles off his nose, then flew back to its perch cawing with delight.

  3 P.M. Angelique Collins. 12 Franklin Lane.

  Angelique Collins had been married five years. City Councilman Lewis Collins had proposed at a garden party in honor of her fifteenth birthday. Angelique’s Creole mother had opposed the marriage on the grounds that her daughter was still a child. But her American father insisted that marriage would make a woman of her.

  He was wrong. Since the wedding Angelique had grown younger each day, finally affecting the style of a ten-year-old girl. One day she told her husband she wanted a dollhouse more than anything in the world. It had to be a replica of their own home.

  The city councilman had bought her a huge dollhouse which occupied half her bedroom. The moment Marie saw the perfect little town house—hung with tiny ivy and wrought-iron balconies, furnished with miniature blankets, spinets and bidets—she understood: The city councilman wanted a doll, a pet, a jewel to decorate his home and his parties, graceful and silent as a figurine. If Lewis Collins had wanted a wife, he’d have married one.

  So Marie worked like a dollmaker—accentuating the milky whiteness of Angelique’s porcelain skin, the gold of her silk-thread curls, the blue of her bright glassy eyes. She painted her mouth in a pink bow and thickened her lashes till they brushed her cheeks like horsehair fringes.

  Despite her stilted coyness, despite her refusal to say one intelligent word, Angelique was one of Marie’s favorite customers. Because no matter how long she watched her in the mirror, she could never figure her out. Sometimes she thought she was stupid, slow and backwards like Elspeth Nedermeyer. And sometimes, remembering Pinhead Helen, she wondered if Angelique knew something she’d decided not to tell.

  3:50 P.M. Marie walked out into the gray afternoon, through the American colony toward Canal Street. Tired and cold, she retied her kerchief and crossed back into the Quarter.

  4 P.M. Alice Morton. 53 Esplanade Avenue.

  In New Orleans political circles it was agreed that Judge Henry Morton had made a foolish match, a doting old man’s marriage. He was lucky he’d gotten his permanent judgeship, said the politicians and their wives. Otherwise he couldn’t have brought back a hussy from that sinful New York City where nobody knew her people. Some said Alice wasn’t really widowed like the judge but was actually a divorcee; some said he’d found her dancing in a sleazy Bowery cafe. No one bothered saying the obvious: Alice’s tight honey-colored ringlets were a sure sign of mixed blood.

  Alice had done her best. After two weeks in New Orleans, she’d hired Marie to straighten her hair. Years of irons and hot lye had given her a smooth helmet of faded gold. But respectable society had never forgotten how she used to look.

  So Alice had taken to supplementing Marie’s treatments with some remedies of her own. At ten in the morning, when Marie was transforming Madame Adele into a tum-of-the-century beauty, Alice was adding a nip of brandy to her coffee. At noon, when Marie was rouging poor Elspeth Nedermeyer, Alice had a third cup. At one, when Marie was listening to Emma Sands’s gossip, she had two mint aperitifs and a bottle of white wine with lunch. At two she drank a double shot of rum to help her nap; at three a glass of gin to wake her. When Marie arrived at four, Alice had just had her first whiskey of the day and could hardly sit up in her chair.

  “The judge was at me again last night,” she said, lurching forward, splattering Marie’s forearm with hot lye. “Don’t know why the hell I married him. He’s just not the same kind, sweet man I used to know. Last night he was scolding me about drinking when he knows I won’t touch anything but a little sherry before dinner. He locked me in my room all night. He’s been acting like the devil lately, but I don’t think it’s me causing it. There’s something on his mind—something to do with work. I think somebody’s got something on him, know what I mean? I think somebody knows something...”

  “What do you think it is?” whispered Marie, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder. Looking in the mirror she saw a card from Doctor John’s deck: Justice. A crowned robed figure seated on a throne between two pillars, holding a sword in his right hand, the scales of justice in his left, Justice’s face as level and composed as the perfectly balanced scales.

  5 P.M. Clarisse Recamier. 60 Royal Street.

  Clarisse was the wife of Armand Recamier, whose mistress Lucie was Marie’s first customer of the day.

  Clarisse and Marie had been classmates at the Ursuline School. Marie remembered her as a religious little girl, Mother Therese’s favorite, so holy that the others hated her almost as much as Marie. In the annual Nativity pageant Marie and the two white kings had entered the manger to see Clarisse as the Virgin Mary, her pale face shining with supernatural light.

  Armand’s family had assured him that girls like Clarisse made good wives. For a while, when she’d gone after Lucie Raphael with a Crusader’s zeal, it had seemed that Clarisse was transferring her devotion from Jesus to her husband. But after Armand’s mother had told her the hard facts of life, she’d given her heart back to Jesus.

  It was a wise decision. Jesus was so faithful that Armand’s infidelities didn’t matter. When Marie washed Clarisse’s hair, she knew she was fixing
it for the family chapel where she spent her nights in prayer.

  Looking in the mirror, Marie saw Lucie Raphael yawning at seven that morning. The sun had circled New Orleans. She’d circled the city and circled the web to see the spinning from the other side. “Is something wrong?” Marie murmured as she arranged Clarisse’s hair to look like the picture of the Virgin on her dressing table.

  “It’s Armand.” Clarisse smiled ruefully. “He’s been so troubled since he killed poor Pascal in that duel. It was so unnecessary. I’m saying fifty Hail Marys a day—it was all my fault.”

  “Your fault, madame?”

  “Yes, can you imagine? It started at our dinner party Monday when Pascal started kissing my hand, crying that Armand was neglecting me like a bottle of fine sherry left to rot. Imagine: me, at my age, inspiring such passion in a grown man. And imagine the passion left in Armand to make him challenge Pascal and kill him. How could Jesus let such a terrible tragedy happen?”

  Marie’s hands shook with exhaustion. She leaned against Clarisse’s chair. Looking in the mirror, she saw Father Antoine in his dim cottage, listening to confessions hour after hour after hour....

  “Jesus has His own reasons,” said Marie. “Don’t ask me.”

  6 P.M. Leaving the Quarter, Marie carried her combs and scissors and secrets down the black dusty alleys which led to Doctor John’s house on Lepers’ Row.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER,” said Doctor John. “That’s lesson number one.

  “I’ll show you what I mean. Say you get a client, little Miss X. She walks into your house and you say: ‘Sit down, Miss X, you’ve come to the right doctor. You know who I am and you know I can help.’ That’s how you got to say it—you got to give them that mumbo-jumbo or the cure won’t work.

  “Now suppose you just happen to know a lady—let’s say she’s Miss X’s cousin’s hairdresser—and this lady’s been telling you all the family dirt. So you say: ‘I know who you are, Miss X, and I know why you’re here. I know what’s on your mind. I see a boy in your life. I see his initials are ... R.S. I see you hoping for this boy to propose, but your hope’s running low. That’s why you’ve come to the doctor, right? You want my help ...’

  “If you waited for Miss X to tell you that herself, you’d be waiting all day. She might never’ve spit it out. But when you say it ... Miss X is staring at you with her mouth open like you were Jesus Christ come again.

  “ ‘How’d you know?’ she says. ‘How’d you find out?’

  “ ‘I got my ways, Miss X,’ you say. She believes you. When you offer to sell her a dose of your special Venus Draw, she’s ready to buy a dozen. She knows you’ve read her mind. She knows your magic powers will bring that boy around.”

  “Do they?” asked Marie. “How does that work?”

  “That’s lesson number two,” said Doctor John.

  Marie had a regular appointment with Doctor John. Every Monday, as the cathedral bells tolled nine times across the bayous, she tiptoed past the filthy huts on Lepers’ Row. She stayed at Doctor John’s till midnight, repeating a week’s worth of hairdressing gossip. In return he paid her nine dollars and taught her the secrets of hoodoo.

  Originally she’d arrived earlier and stayed until dawn. But lately Doctor John had been too busy. He’d become the chief hoodoo man in New Orleans with a business five times as big as Marie Saloppe’s at its height, including many white society people who’d never set foot on the conjurewoman’s worn-down doorstep. It was more than a business—it was a following. He was selling himself as some kind of holy man and people were buying it. Old men willed him their entire pensions; respectable women reached for their smelling salts when they passed him on Royal Street.

  Marie was convinced that he owed his success to her. She told him the secrets he used to put rich clients under his spell. Rumors about his mysterious mind-reading powers had brought him half his business. If it weren’t for her, he’d still be peddling drinking cures to unemployed mulattoes.

  Doctor John denied it. “I’ve got the power,” he said. “I’m Bayou John, Johnny Buzzard, Mr. Needle, High John the Conqueror. You’re not so special, Miss Marie. You’re just one among the many in my service. I got myself a regular army in this town. Every maid and cook tells me twice as much as you.”

  “Then, if you don’t need me, I might just quit. I’m making seventy a week hairdressing, and the work suits me fine. I could get a little sleep Monday nights ...”

  “Don’t be so hasty,” Doctor John laughed nervously. “That’s what I mean about your needing some patience. Anyhow I wasn’t talking straight to you before. I won’t mumbo-jumbo you. You are special—even if you are a half-breed—you were born with the gift. I pay everybody in my service the same nine dollars. But you’re the only one I teach the secrets. You were born to learn and the teaching’s my sacred duty. Someday you’ll thank me—someday when you have the knowledge and you see what the power can do.”

  Actually Marie didn’t need to be persuaded—because every Monday night as she sat in Doctor John’s house drinking Texas whiskey and hot mint tea, she saw what the power could do:

  It fed the Doctor’s six wives and five children. It bought Sweet Medicine a magnificent silk empress’s kimono. It bought Doctor John an emerald tie-tack, a new top hat, a forty-carat ruby for the eye of his cobraheaded cane and a line of diamonds down its curved back. It replaced his ever-present Jockey Club Cologne with the delicate scent of French Sandalwood Essence.

  It cured Doctor John’s raw prejudice. “Yellow money’s as good as any other kind,” he said. “They got hearts and bodies to fix like anybody else. Besides, I’d rather get power over those treacherous sons of bitches than let them get it over me.”

  Most important, the power gave him his freedom. No other black man in New Orleans could carry on like Doctor John. He whispered filthy words to the fainting ladies on Royal Street, and they searched his curses for divine revelation. The police never touched him—he claimed to have fixed'the whole force.

  Doctor John was getting everything he wanted and offering Marie the secrets of his success. It was much more inviting than the paths Mother Therese or the girls at the ballroom had advised her to take, more tempting than any life she’d ever imagined—except, perhaps, for a life of quiet contentment with Jacques Paris.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Doctor John. “In ten years you’d have been wanting to murder that boy for putting hot sauce in his gumbo before he even tasted it. You’d have left him flat as a cold cup of coffee. You should be grateful for the way it turned out. You should be thanking the loas for giving you the gift so you could lead the good life ...”

  For the first time, Marie began to see cause for gratitude. She’d get the knowledge and the power would set her free from living the life of a yellow hairdresser in New Orleans. So she learned what she had to learn. Marie Saloppe had taught her the basics—medicines, roots, gris-gris, and fixes. Now Doctor John taught her the theory and style.

  He taught her about the loas: Papa Legba—lord of the gate, the crossroads, the mirror, keeper of the keys to the other world. Baron Cemetery—glutton, lecher, cigar smoker, bringer of death and plagues, the skullheaded dancer at the ballroom. Freda-Erzili—goddess of love, of purple lips and pink lace dresses with blue hearts and daggers, the husband-stealer who can never steal enough .love. Damballah the bearded serpent—god of creation and sky, mating with the rainbow and sucking down the world like a raw egg, shell and all. The Twins, human and divine, male and female, the doubles, two halves of the same soul.

  He taught her to recognize the loas in butterfly, crocodile and human form, to call them, to make them do her work. He taught her about possession—about feeling the spirit take you, the dizziness, the numbness, hearing someone else’s voice come out of your mouth.

  “Sounds strange,” said Marie.

  “It’s not so strange,” said Doctor John. “You ever been in love? Who was that speaking out of your mouth?” S
he knew what he meant. She remembered that first night with Jacques Paris.

  He taught her about the weather: ill winds, the storms of the Creation and the Last Judgment, talking breezes; the raindrops, tears of the loas taking pity on men so their crops would keep growing. He taught her about the stars: souls in limbo, mirrors for the spirits beneath the waters, God’s diamond tie-tacks; taught her how to read the signs of the zodiac in men’s faces, how to pick the numbers by studying the positions of the planets.

  “Look,” he said, taking her outside and pointing up at the sky. “Sagittarius twenty-two. The fifth node of the moon. There’s your Scorpio on the twenty-seventh degree. Add that together and what do you get?”

  The next morning Marie broke an appointment to play number fifty-four on the St. Julian roulette wheel and laughed when Clement Moevius grudgingly gave her a brand-new hundred dollar chip.

  Doctor John taught her about the demons: lutins, the ghosts of unbaptized children; evil bayou mermaids reaching up to pull sailors down beneath the surface of t)ie water. Diablesses—shrill cries from the highest branches of the trees, women doomed to shriek like owls for the sin of having died a virgin. And the loup garou, the werewolves, cursed souls with vulture’s wings and human hands, pack wolves condemned to solitude, to look back and see nothing but their own red trails.

  Marie shuddered. “I know about them,” she said. “I used to see them in my dreams.”

  “Good,” said Doctor John. “Then you’ll know if you see ’em again.”

  He taught her about the Bible: Jethro, the first hoodoo man, Moses the sorcerer, Solomon the wizard, Jesus the biggest hoodoo of them all. And about Virtue: Patience—the alchemist who found gold on the ten-thousandth try. Pride—the mark of Cain. Faith—the prophet who moved the mountain to his own front yard. Hope—fishing for trout with a strand of the thinnest silk.