Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  More disruptive was her gift for throwing temper tantrums—unprovoked fits of purple-faced screaming, wailing, harsh asthmatic gasps. Christophe called them “moody spells.” Marie regarded them as a form of possession—the spirits using her daughter to make trouble for her. Almost always, Ti-Marie’s rages happened in the middle of her consultations.

  Soon after Ti-Marie’s baptism, Marie began taking her to work. No one objected to a pretty little girl playing quietly in the corner. “She’s learning the business,” explained Marie. “Starting early.” Her clients assumed she was joking. Surely she didn’t expect such a tiny child to understand.

  Ti-Marie was five when Marie realized how much she’d learned.

  “Those tantrums aren’t unpredictable,” she told Christophe one night. “I can predict a fit the minute a client walks in the door.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s always the most hopeless cases, the ones nobody can fix. She seems to know.”

  “Wishful thinking,” said Christophe. “You want a little voodoo prodigy.”

  “I don’t wish it on her,” said Marie. “It’s a hard gift. But she’s got it—got it from somewhere.”

  The saints’ and the good loas’ gifts were easier. Beauty: bright black eyes untouched by her mother’s rash, clear skin, and a mass of black ringlets. And grace: Marie had watched lots of children dance—flailing arms, wild laughter, eyes hungry for adult approval—but she’d never seen one with her daughter’s poise, the dignity of a young queen.

  Marie and Christophe could predict when the angel in Ti-Marie would shine through. She loved to chew Cloud of Joy Root; she loved to snuggle in her parents’ bed on chilly nights, safe and warm as a cub.

  Most of all she loved church. St. Louis Cathedral was her paradise. Her chest heaved as she gulped the incense like a tiny fish. She stared worshipfully at the altar boys and the girls in their First Communion dresses, collected penny holy-pictures of saints which she cut up into dolls. By the age of three she was saying her Hail Marys with such fervor that her parents stopped their own prayers to listen in amazement.

  “I was never that devout,” thought Marie. “Maybe Sister Delilah’s right. Maybe she will become a nun.”

  She was comforted by the fact that Ti-Marie liked getting her hair done almost as much as she liked church. Sunday dawns found her dressed and ready for the weekly ritual. The house was quiet; morning light shone on Ti-Marie’s gleaming curls. Marie had never seen such beautiful hair. Brushing and braiding the feathery-soft black strands, she recaptured the deep well-being of certain good dreams: Everything is understood.

  One Sunday morning when Ti-Marie was six, Marie asked her about her dreams.

  “Dreams?” Ti-Marie seemed as startled as if she’d just been awakened from one. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you dream about?” Marie patiently untangled a snarl in her daughter’s wet hair.

  “You. And me. And Papa.”

  “Where?”

  “In church.”

  “What happens?”

  “Nothing. The incense smells nice.”

  Marie’s comb caught in the snarl. “Quick,” she said. “Look in the mirror. Tell me what you see.”

  “Me,” Ti-Marie said warily. “You combing my hair. What do you see?”

  Marie saw herself in an old kerchief, her shapeless hairdressing frock recalled from its retirement. And Ti-Marie like her miniature, staring at their image with clear wide eyes. There were no strange visions in that mirror—just a woman undoing the knots in her daughter’s long hair.

  “Maybe she’s a changeling,” thought Marie, ignoring the mirror’s evidence. “Maybe she doesn’t have the gift. Or maybe she does. Maybe she’s keeping her secrets already.”

  Weighing the angel and the devil, she puzzled the mystery of her daughter’s being, the secret sources of her blood.

  Of course there were clues. Omens and signs.

  Standing in the kitchen, Marie pressed her face into the clean sun-dried laundry and listened to Ti-Marie playing in the nursery, three rooms away. Marie began to sort the wash. Folding a bed sheet, she heard Ti-Marie cry out: “White!” She finished the sheet and picked up the hand towel which reminded her of the sunrise on her Chinese shawl. She heard Ti-Marie’s voice: “Orange!” Puzzled, Marie stopped, then chose an indigo tablecloth. Her daughter’s cry came again: “Blue!” She held up a napkin, a test. Ti-Marie identified its color: “Green!”

  She tiptoed out of the kitchen, half-expecting to find the girl hiding behind the doorway, teasing her. But Ti-Marie was still in the nursery, playing so intently she didn’t notice Marie. She’d lined up her paper saints and was giving them a scholarly lecture on the colors of their robes.

  “So that’s it,” thought Marie, smiling as she returned to work. But no sooner had she picked up a scarlet face cloth than she heard her daughter announce in the confident maternal tone she adopted with her toy dolls: “Blood red!”

  Ti-Marie found a dead bird in the courtyard—a baby swallow killed in a fall from its mother’s nest.

  “Throw that away,” ordered Marie. “It’s crawling with lice.”

  “It’s not dead,” insisted Ti-Marie. “Just broken.” Before Marie could seize the feathery corpse, she’d spirited it off to her room.

  Three weeks later, Ti-Marie brought a live baby swallow into the kitchen. “Look,” she said. “I fixed it.”

  “Did you find another bird?” asked Marie.

  “No. It’s the same one. I fixed it.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I prayed to Jesus,” said Ti-Marie. Then she opened her cupped hands and the swallow flew away, straight to its nest in the eaves above the courtyard.

  One morning at breakfast, Ti-Marie began to sing a little song of her own composition. “Fifty-two,” she chanted, banging her grapefruit spoon against the coffee mug for accompaniment. “Fifty-two. Fifty-two.”

  “Fifty-two what?” asked Marie.

  “Fifty-two nothing. Just fifty-two.”

  “Get your money ready,” said Christophe, who liked to tease Marie about her gambling career.

  “It’s ready,” said Marie.

  That day Marie placed two hundred dollars on number fifty-two at the St. Julian Wheel. Clement Moevius gave the wheel a feeble spin, squinted at the results, and—with a gallant lack of recognition—handed Marie her winnings.

  Fixing Ti-Marie’s hair, Marie realized something was wrong. Her daughter’s eyes were anxiously searching the mirror. “Am I pulling too hard?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I had bad dreams last night,” Ti-Marie admitted at last. “I dreamed a man with a wolf’s head and bird's wings was looking in our windows.”

  “They call those ‘loup garou.’ ” Marie steadied herself against the chair.

  “Are they real?”

  “Sometimes. What happened then?”

  “A big wind came up and blew him away. The loup garou left a red Jrail behind him. The wind turned into a storm. Rain poured in my window. Then the storm lifted our house into the sky. I was tumbling into the walls—I could look down and see us flying over the bayous out to sea. My saint dolls were blowing all around me. Then I woke up ...”

  Marie felt a chill wind at the back of her neck. “I’ve been having that same dream,” she said. “But I don’t know what it means.”

  Marie dreamed that Father Antoine was baptizing Ti -Marie. Thanking God for having resurrected him, Marie leaned happily against the font. Then she pulled back the baby’s blanket and her dream became a nightmare. Ti-Marie was a monster with a baby’s body and a grown woman’s face: Marie’s face.

  “It’s a sin,” said Father Antoine. “Creating this child in your own image—that’s God’s business, not yours.”

  “That wasn’t my plan,” said Marie.

  “I know your plan.
You don’t want to let go—not ever. But under the water you won’t even care.”

  “I will,” said Marie, and awoke with her eyes so red she covered them with powder so Ti-Marie wouldn’t ask what was wrong.

  After twenty years of making gumbo, Marie noticed the colors of her ingredients changing. The tomatoes were a rich brick-red, darker than the scarlet fruits she’d stewed for Jacques Paris. The okra were a deeper green than the ones she’d served those first prisoners. The com kernels were larger, more orange, the peas fatter, the onions smooth and round as apples. The pepper tasted hotter, the marjoram more pungent. Even the file gumbo seemed to be working its magic faster.

  The richer colors and spices of this new gumbo were a perfect match for those of their Sunday lunch. The half-closed shutters cast stripes of sunlight on the cool white walls, the tile floors, the bowls of vegetables, the pearly iridescence of the copper pans Marie rarely had time to polish. Christophe wore his-immacu-late cream-colored church suit, a few shades lighter than his skin. Not until after lunch would Marie change her sedate dove-colored prison dress for the outrageous satins she’d wear to the afternoon dance.

  Tall for her nine years, Ti-Marie sat between them, straight and dignified in the pale brown dress in which she always reminded Marie of a fawn. Even as a tiny child, she’d shown definite tastes which had puzzled her mother. Unlike the garish reds and yellows Marie had secretly preferred as a girl, Ti-Marie favored light grays, greens, and browns. “Like her father,” was Marie’s first response. “Like a nun,” the sobering afterthought. It cheered her to discover that Ti-Marie was actually quite vain about her modest style. She was neat, even fastidious. And the pale colors set off her beauty in such a way that no one but Marie suspected she was conscious of her own grace.

  Marie’s eyes traced her daughter’s long sleeve to her honey-colored hand, dipping a spoon in the red-brown gumbo. Then her spoon came to rest in the bowl. “I want to start school,” she said.

  No one spoke for several minutes. “What kind of school?” Christophe asked at last.

  “The Ursuline School.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Marie, her own spoon slipping beneath the forgotten gumbo. “Not my daughter! You couldn’t be mine!” She was stopped by Christophe’s disapproving glance—she knew he would have sent Ti-Marie to school long ago if not for her.

  “I know you hated it,” said Ti-Marie. “But that doesn’t mean I will. It’s different now.”

  “It’s no different. It’s still a white girl’s school.”

  “It’s Jesus’ school,” replied Ti-Marie.

  “And those white girls are His star pupils,” said Marie, insisting on the last word even in defeat.

  The next morning Christophe registered Ti-Marie at school. The nuns were gracious to the wealthy-looking mulatto and his pretty child until Mother Benedicte—who resembled her predecessor Mother Therese like a natural daughter—asked the girl’s mother’s name.

  “Marie Laveau ...” repeated the nun. “Isn’t that the lady who leads those slave dances?”

  “It is,” replied Christophe.

  “They’re voodoo dances, are they not?” Mother Benedicte addressed her question to Ti-Marie. Ti-Marie turned to her father with a blank look. “Yes,” said Christophe, surprised by his daughter’s reticence.

  “Then ... you believe in voodoo?” Again the nun directed her attention to Ti-Marie. Again Ti-Marie deferred to Christophe.

  “My daughter’s a Christian,” said Christophe. “Like you.”

  Mother Benedicte had left France with unlimited compassion for American savages. But she’d been in Louisiana long enough to know a high-handed colored man when she saw one. She was about to send Christophe away when she was suddenly overwhelmed by a singular daydream. Shutting her eyes, she imagined herself in heaven, telling a proud Jesus how she’d saved an innocent yellow girl from her mother’s black magic.

  “Have you any learning at all?” asked Mother Benedicte, her face still flushed with Jesus’ approval.

  “The Bible.” Ti-Marie spoke for the first time. “I know about Adam and Eve.”

  “Tell us.”

  “And on the sixth day...” began Ti-Marie, reciting the Scriptures with such perfect recall and deep conviction that there were tears on Mother Benedicte’s face long before the serpent had made its first appearance.

  The convent uniforms were the same pale gray Ti-Marie had always loved. That afternoon she wore hers home to find her mother slightly reconciled.

  “I hear you been learning already,” said Marie.

  “What’s that?”

  “I hear you been learning to keep your mouth shut. I hear you been learning to keep your own secrets.”

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  TI-MARIE KEPT LOTS OF SECRETS.

  “My mama’s a herb doctor. And a dancer on the side,” she told her classmates. That was her final word on the subject—even after hours of ingeniously cruel interrogation. Stony and superior as St. Catherine on the wheel, Ti-Marie spoiled her tormentors’ pleasure.

  “It’s herb doctoring,” she said when Mother Benedicte took her aside to ask the truth about voodoo. “Camomile tea for the stomach. You know.”

  “But the religion ...” prodded the nun. “Those dolls ...”

  “My mama’s a churchgoing Catholic. She’s got statues of the saints. Maybe that’s what you mean.”

  “And that snake she has?”

  “Some people keep hounds,” said Ti-Marie. “Some have bunny rabbits. My mama keeps a snake.”

  When Mother Benedicte asked about John the Baptist, Ti-Marie quoted Scripture. She didn’t mention the evenings she spent watching her mother work love fixes, nor her own love for the Sunday dances in Congo Square. When her presence at the dances was reported, she told Mother Benedicte she had to be there—she had to help her mama with the business. Even the nun couldn’t condemn a colored girl for helping her mama get by.

  Packs of boys stopped her on the street to demand a taste of her mama’s gris-gris; Ti-Marie didn’t say a word. Nor did she tell her father when she tired of his nightly bedtime-readings, his endless vistas of Edens and Utopias. She concealed her own ideas of paradise: a place she could lead a normal life—a good man, a child, mass every morning—a quiet place where she’d never have to keep another secret.

  Her most troublesome secrets were the ones she prayed and dreaded her mother would find out.

  “What you been dreaming about?” asked Marie one Sunday, pinning Ti-Marie’s hair into the tight knot the nuns required.

  “Last night I dreamed Jesus was sitting in the brown chair.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Like Jesus.” Looking in the mirror, she saw her mother tense. She knew Marie disapproved of her respect for the nuns, her dreams of Jesus. Still she went out of her way to mention them, praying that Marie would tell her what she longed to hear: Everything will be all right. Everything was possible. She could have everything—the business and the normal life, Jesus and the loas, voodoo and heavenly salvation, the good man and the work. But Marie wasn’t making any such promises. Instead she warned her about the darkness, the evil spirits.

  “How ’bout that other dream?” Marie slid a hairpin into the smooth knot. “The loup garou?”

  “I still have it sometimes ... but now that I know what it means it doesn’t scare me. The werewolf is the Antichrist, the beast. The storm is the Last Judgment.”

  Marie stared at. the mirror in disbelief. Then she saw a bright red shape like a bloodstain move across the glass. She saw that Ti-Marie’s blood had been flowing for three months, saw her washing the napkins, hiding every trace.

  “You’ve got your periods,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why? I know what it means. Now I can have babies.”

  “Marie Saloppe used to call it the dancing lesson,” she said. “That turned out to be the Lord’s own truth.”

  “I don’t need dancing lessons,” said Ti-Marie. “I�
��ve been dancing in Congo Square for ten years.”

  “You’ll be dancing this dance the rest of your life.”

  “I guess so. But somebody else will always be calling the tune. It’ll always be somebody else’s dance.”

  The resignation in her voice startled Marie. “Do you really believe that?” she asked.

  “I can see it in the mirror,” said Ti-Marie.

  As Ti-Marie grew up, she kept more and more secrets. One Sunday when she was sixteen, her mother found a big purple love-bite on her neck. “What’s his name?” asked Marie.

  “Whose?”

  “The reason you’ve been spending all day at eight o’clock mass.” Six months before, Ti-Marie had graduated from school and devoted herself to managing the household. She spent evenings learning her mother’s business, measuring out packets and doses while Marie saw her clients. She had dinner with her father and went to bed early. But lately she’d been staying out till two, the hour she used to return from school. Marie was relieved by the love-bite; she’d been afraid Ti-Marie was spending all that time in church.

  “I’m not at mass,” said Ti-Marie. “I do the marketing ...”

  “Not all day you don’t. Don’t lie to me. I can find out his name.”

  “John Eustis Poe,” said Ti-Marie.

  “That gangster! He’s old enough to be your father!”

  “That’s not true. He’s only twenty-one.”

  John Eustis Poe was a good-looking quadroon who came from somewhere outside New Orleans. He dressed well and had lots of money which came, like John Eustis himself, from some mysterious source. Marie had seen him making eyes at her daughter in Congo Square. But she’d never taken it seriously. “Why him?” she asked.