by Rod Davis
“I said you a little far from your mama, ain’t you?”
At first, Paulus didn’t even turn, not taking the hoarse words to be directed at him, but then the question came louder, tagged with a “Yes, I talkin’ to you, sweet boy.” A half-turn of his head gave Paulus a view of a short, dark-complected man moving out from the edges of a Mardi Gras crowd that had spilled out of the Quarter where Esplanade met Rampart.
Instinctively, Paulus kept walking. Probably a drunk or maybe one of those queers who’d moved into the Quarter trying to pick up a black boy. He was Mexican, Paulus thought, from the accent, or maybe a Cajun. Not black. Paulus moved faster—he was already too far behind Orwell and Kareem, who were taking him to a Wild Tchoupitoulas party somewhere on Frenchmen Street.
A half block later he heard the voice again. “Say, little boy. You know where is your mama?” He said it like a Cuban that time and Paulus turned his head to look again. The man was waving at him. He wasn’t a big man, but he looked all smooth in the face and mean. He had on a short-sleeved brown shirt and green trousers and paint or something on his face.
Paulus picked up his step, but didn’t break. It wasn’t good to run until you had to. He thought he had seen one or two other Cuban-looking men in the crowd as well, although with everyone in costume or painted up it was hard to tell in the dark. Later, Paulus realized he had known at once that this was not an accident, that the men intended him harm, and that it was not going to be his fate to escape. But he had clung to the idea of freedom. They shouldn’t be acting like this around here. Some of the brothers will take care of them. Too many people around for anyone to try anything.
But they kept following him.
At Dauphine Street he got in front of three white couples drinking and waving Champagne glasses and darted off Esplanade. He figured that would lose them and he could hurry ahead a few blocks, then double back and still get down to Frenchmen and run into his friends. He only wished more people were there on the side street like there were out on Esplanade, which was so full of tourists the cars couldn’t even get down the boulevard.
He felt a pop on the back of his head.
It burned and he was on his knees, blinking, and had forgotten where he was going or why. It was as if he had been transported to another world in an instant and although he knew he hurt somewhere he was mostly surprised and confused.
“What the matter, church boy? You lose your way?”
He heard the voices but he couldn’t see, exactly. Now his head was starting to hurt more. He blinked, rose to his feet, sagged back against the wall of an apartment building. It was three of them, all right. The little guy in the brown shirt and two others. They were saying things to each other in Spanish. “Mierda”—he knew that word, it meant shit.
“Why you do that?” Paulus asked. He could smell the alcohol from them, saw them laughing and one handing another a bottle. He watched the bottle closely. He hoped it wouldn’t be used on him. For the first time he was scared.
“Who said niggers could come into Mardi Gras?” one of the men said, his words slurred. He wore a red tank-top. Paulus didn’t say anything. He was looking to see if anyone was around. A loud group of young men in women’s hula skirts passed on the other side of the street but they didn’t stop.
“Come back—” Paulus began, stopped when a small board appeared out of the darkness behind the red tank-top and fell full across his face. Paulus sunk against the wall.
“Fuck him up,” said the hoarse voice. In what might have been a few seconds or time beyond noting, Paulus felt a foot hit his throat, then something else on the top of his head, and the board again against his cheek, and feet in his ribs and one in his groin, though it just missed his balls.
“Leave him,” said a voice.
“We ain’t finished,” said the hoarse one.
“Orale, people comin’, let’s go.”
Then there was another kick. And then they were gone.
Paulus opened his eyes and as he did a bottle wheeled out of the dark and broke on the wall just above his head, which was good, but as he crumpled lower onto the sidewalk, he couldn’t keep from resting his broken and bloody face on the amber shards and breathing in the fermented fumes.
Probably one of those had cut open his right nostril. When the two young white men had put him on the stretcher and loaded him into the back of the ambulance, they had thought he’d been drinking and gotten into a fight and hadn’t been all that compassionate, considering. He remembered hearing one of them say, “He’ll be lucky to eat again,” and another saying, “I wonder if his mama will recognize him.”
She did, of course, at Tulane Medical, and cried for him but mostly a calm quiet. After he got out, and even though the doctors had sewn him up so that you could barely see any scars, except for the three African spirit marks on his cheeks from his initiation, she didn’t like to talk about it. When she did, she got that smooth-face expression that seemed so cold it almost made him think she was mad at him, not at whoever had done it. Jean-Pierre told him it was best not to bring it up, and that was mostly the reason for trying not to think about it. But he had to think about it. And he knew his mother did, too. He knew she thought about it a lot.
He knew she had killed a goat and spent most of the night under the moon in some kind of trance and that no one would go near her all the next day and that whenever she saw Cubans in the neighborhood she went silent and cold in that same way and that something was on her mind and in her soul and that there would be revenge. Revenge no one even wanted to talk about. And that Aunt Eddie’s Smith & Wesson from the palo pot, which had never before been loaded, now had six shiny cartridges in the cylinder.
“I know some of you think you know Jesus, think you know the Bible, think you good Christians.” Corina paused. Her mouth curled in a sneer. Her face fell into the surrounding blackness of her full-length cotton robes, offset only by a white lace caplet and shawl. As she stared out at her congregation, swollen with a half-dozen visitors, including Gus Houston and Bonita Rae Doucet, the membership in turn stared back.
They were like donkeys about to get beaten. Not because they deserved it, but because it was their fate and because in some way perhaps they did deserve it. The African Spiritual Church of Mercy, newly affiliated with the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Redemption, which everyone in town called the Holy Redeemers, was not given to deep theological analysis, and so few were those who dwelt long on the question of why the reverend could turn on them so fast in the name of the Lord.
It wouldn’t have done much good. The Reverend Youngblood would have found them in their philosophical redoubts and dragged them out by the scruff of the neck and cudgeled them all the more for ducking the issue. The issue was faith. The sermon was that you could never have too much of it. That you could never be sure of what you did have. And so you had to be on guard against your own sloth at all times.
Put simply, you were never good enough for God, as the Reverend Youngblood saw it. Her job was to make you aware of that deficiency every conscious moment of your life, and in that awareness of the foolishness of your supplication to the Almighty to possibly—if you were lucky and so devout it hurt—possibly secure Grace.
For a while, Corina was silent, staring out over the tops of the heads of the worshipers. When she looked up from her trance of Holy Bible, not an eye met hers, and none hoped to. But not all could be lucky.
“You think you know Jesus, Sister?” Corina was looking at Estella Bourgeois. A stout, fiftyish night supervisor at Tulane Medical, she was to devotion as granite is to solid. Nor was she timid. She had raised six children, none gone bad, except one killed at a stoplight when a cokehead trying to become a carjacker shot him in the face. She had gotten the supervisor spot moving past three white women. She lived by the Bible and didn’t skimp in the collection plate. She said, “Yes, Reverend, I do know Him.”
C
orina nodded. She looked off to one side of the sanctuary, where Jean-Pierre sat as quietly as possible at the keyboard. She looked to the other side, where Paulus fidgeted near the open door and she saw the dark, steamy street outside sucking incense out of the building. Then her gaze shifted across toward a porcelain statue of Blackhawk, the Indian spirit, and to a wooden likeness of St. Jude carved by one of the deacons who had a year ago tried to gain Corina’s affections. He had carved St. Jude as an African.
Corina wasn’t sure about that at first, but since she also hung portraits of the Black Madonna and a black Jesus (also a white one) in the church, it seemed to fit. All the members liked it and one time a weekly black newspaper had come to her church to write a feature story about it, which had brought in a half dozen new members, and so Corina liked the statue even more.
Her vision snapped back to Estella Bourgeois.
“That good, that very good.” Corina addressed the rest of the congregation. “Here a woman who know the Lord Jesus Christ.” She smiled. “She know him well.” She laughed. “Why, she know him so well I don’t even know what I be doing up here—ain’t that right?
“Reverend, I never said that—”
“What you say? You say you know Jesus? You know the Lord?” Corina paused a moment. “You know what I say? I say, ‘Ha!’”
Estella looked at the preacher. She said nothing. She knew she’d already said too much.
“Well, that’s just fine,” Corina said, moving up to the front so that Estella was only one pew away. “I guess a fine lady like you that got such a good family and such a wonderful job and such a nice, fine house and a nice, fine car naturally think she know Jesus.” Corina laughed viciously. “Why, Miz Bourgeois, I expect you be having Jesus over for supper this very night!”
No one in the small, smoky room moved. Bonita shot Gus a glance, almost certainly of disfavor, but Gus didn’t hold the look long enough to respond.
“Reverend, you got no call to be saying this to me.”
Corina leaned across the pew, through two semi-frozen schoolgirls of twelve, until she was inches from Estella’s rocklike, coal-black face. Then the preacher lurched back as if she’d been grabbed by the nape of the neck. Stumbling, spinning with her arms stretched out like some kind of prehistoric bird of prey, she retreated to the front wall, just under a gold-plated metal crucifix.
“You know who you know, Miz Bourgeois? It ain’t Jesus. Who you know ain’t even the devil.” She laughed, her eyes flashing. “All you know is yourself and your puny little pride, and all you know for knowing that is you ain’t even in this church.”
Estella cocked her head.
“You heard me. I said get out. Get out of this church right now.”
The woman’s face turned gray, her arms began to quiver slightly. Looking to her daughter on her right, and then back to Corina, she seemed paralyzed.
“What you waiting on? I said get out of this church, proud woman that know Jesus all to herself, probably on the phone to God and Mary all night, too.”
“Mama—” said the daughter on the right.
Estella had started to cry.
“I never said it the way you say.”
“Oh, I see. I must have got that wrong. When I said, ‘Do you know Jesus?’ and you say, ‘Yes,’ what you mean? ‘No’?”
“I didn’t never mean the way you say is all. I just say I know I love Him in my heart. I don’t mean nothing else than that.”
“You love Him in your heart? Now what you doing with Him? Having Him over to stay with you?”
“Stop,” the woman whispered.
“What that?” Corina said, still against the wall at the crucifix, her ferocity all but flesh and blood of its own.
“She said, ‘stop,’” said the daughter on the right, Willie, holding her mother around the shoulders.
Corina laughed. “Maybe I ask Jesus to stop. Maybe I say, ‘Lord, please stop making this woman think she so high and mighty she know You, cause if she know You that well she don’t need to be in church and she don’t need to pray and she don’t even need to try to have much more to do with You on account of she so familiar with You and all. Just give her a bus pass to heaven right now, Lord, and let us poor sinners get on with our singing.’ That what you want me to say?”
“You a mean woman, Reverend.”
“Or maybe I should get the Holy Ghost to come down and just take Miz Estella out of here right now like I said before. Didn’t I say that clear enough? Didn’t I say get out of my church you proud woman? So be going.”
Corina straightened up and marched to the door. She pointed outside. “Get.”
Estella Bourgeois rolled her head side to side, then picked up her purse and, shaking off Willie’s arm, moved out of the pew into the center aisle. She was almost to the door when her knees stopped working. For a moment she seemed suspended in the air, like some big building a millisecond after the demolition dynamite has gone off. And then she was down, first on her side, then on her back. Faster than a cat, Corina was next to her, kneeling low. No one in the church moved.
“Tell me, Sister.”
“You killing me, Reverend.”
“Tell me, Sister.”
“I—” she began to sob uncontrollably.
Willie tried to get out of the pew, but one look from Corina held her in check. Then Corina bent her head directly over Estella. “Who are you in the eyes of the Lord?”
“I ain’t nothing, Reverend. I never meant to say I was anything.”
“Then say that to Jesus. Tell Him.”
She sobbed more. The silence around her was too much. Jean-Pierre began a soft chord progression.
Five minutes may have passed. Corina was crouched over her charge like a battlefield nurse. Waiting. The difference was that she would not mend the wound.
The crying continued as the organ music became more fluid, less mournful. Corina waited. She would not intervene.
“Tell Him,” she said when there were no more sobs.
Estella looked up into the preacher’s face. She saw something. No one ever knew what but it stopped the contorted expression. Very softly, she said, looking upward, “I don’t know You, Lord.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I want to.”
“But you don’t.”
“No.”
“Then why you say you do?”
“I thought I knew You.”
“But you don’t, do you?”
“No.”
“And how you think you going to?”
Estella’s eyes were like huge brown oceans into which anything could have been poured.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Then what you do?”
“I don’t know, Reverend. I don’t know.”
Many would have taken pity on those eyes. But pity was not the way of a true preacher, or of a daughter of Ogun.
“Then I guess you better find out.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t?”
“No, Reverend, I—Reverend, I don’t know what you want me to say?”
“It ain’t me want you to say anything.”
“What the Lord want me to say, then?”
Corina touched the woman’s cheek. Then she placed her other hand on the other cheek. Then, close enough to feel her breath, she squeezed Estella’s face so hard the cheekbones began to hurt her palms. Then she stood up and looked down.
“What I say is you pray and you tell Jesus you nothing on this earth unless He make you something. That what I say. What He say is what He saying to you right now. “
Corina stepped back and folded her arms tight across her chest, then she whirled around, extended one arm toward Jean-Pierre, and turned to face the congregation, arms crossed again. The music came up. She nodded o
nce and Willie came to help her mother off the floor and back to the pew.
“Bring Me not your pride nor your riches nor your deeds,” said Corina, in a voice difficult to recognize. “Bring Me nothing for ye are nothing and to nothing ye shall return and none shall pass save through Me and through faith in Me.”
Then the iron-like expression in her own face seemed to slip off. She let out a short, audible sigh.
“Sing with me, children.” Jean-Pierre brought up both the organ and the synthesized drumbeat. But Corina did not sing with them. She retreated to her hard-backed chair and sat with her head bent down, her shawl pulled tightly and knotted up in one hand, her red Bible in the other.
Gus felt Bonita’s hand in his, her nails dug into his flesh. She was singing from the hymnal but something in her voice made him uncomfortable. Even an hour later, after the service, after the prophecies, after Corina called Estella Bourgeois forward and covered her face with Florida water and then bathed her feet with it, Bonita seemed stiff and wired. When Gus tried to talk about the service she changed the conversation. For the time being he let it drop. His intuition wasn’t always correct, but Gus didn’t think Bonita was repelled by what she had witnessed.
12
The idea didn’t come to Gus all at once, but once in there it rooted like cypress in a swamp and it had to be accommodated. Or some other metaphor. The point is that one fairly normal morning it came to Gus Houston that the state of things being what they were, he should create and enter a girls’ choir from Miss Angelique’s in the Gospel Tent at Jazzfest. In that moment of clarity, he considered the idea an inspired, so to speak, synthesis of a number of paired entities: black and white New Orleans; the St. Jude Lamb of Light Botanica and the chaplaincy; elite and street; and, not least, his future and pretty much everything going on in his life at that moment in time, as the special counsel to the White House had so often phrased it.
