Ruined

by Paula Morris

  Her voice was so plaintive, and her smashed-in face so grotesque, that a chill shuddered down Rebecca's spine; for a moment she was tempted to let go of Lisette's hand, just to make the awful faces of the ghosts disappear. She didn't know what she was expecting of the spirit world, or even if she'd truly believed she'd see anything out of the ordinary -- but here, on the streets of New Orleans, there were too many sad and ugly sights. History was a mess, thought Rebecca.

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  "No, Miss Ella, I haven't seen your baby," Lisette called back, pulling Rebecca's arm to hurry her up and leaning close to whisper. "She's been asking me that for seventy years."

  In the Warehouse District, Rebecca didn't know where to look: Nineteenth-century dockworkers with rope burns around their necks mingled with a businessman who'd been killed by gunmen robbing his office ten years ago, and a gaggle of brassy prostitutes -- from a variety of different eras, judging by the various lengths of their skirts -- who all waved and hooted at Lisette. A man dressed in the style of an eighteenth-century fop, complete with white-powdered wig and silk breeches, paced up and down the cobbles of Julia Street, gazing into the windows of art galleries.

  "He was visiting from Havana, when this was all still someone's plantation," Lisette told her. "They said he caught yellow fever, but actually he was poisoned by his cousin, because they were fighting over some land. He told me the story when I was first a ghost -- he'd already been here for a hundred years then. He's been much happier since all the art galleries moved in. Now he has something new to look at."

  Crossing busy Canal Street was hard, because Rebecca couldn't tell who was a ghost and who wasn't. Nobody could see her, but she could see everybody. And, unlike Lisette, she had to dodge the real world: They couldn't just walk right through Rebecca any more than she could walk through walls -- or locked cemetery gates.

  She wildly ducked past anyone walking her way, sometimes noticing only at the last minute -- to her horror -- that the Asian guy in green hospital scrubs had a small wound in

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  his chest -- stabbed during a carjacking, Lisette told her -- and that the nun pacing the neutral ground wasn't waiting for a bus or a streetcar: It was a man dressed as a nun, and he'd been strangled late at night one Halloween sometime in the 1980s.

  In the Quarter, with its Saturday crowds, Rebecca couldn't help it: Her invisible self was bumping into startled people all over the place.

  "That mimosa I had at breakfast must have been strong," she heard one very-much-alive woman tell her husband, after Rebecca careened into her. "I'm banging into things I don't even see. I think I must be drunk."

  Lisette dragged Rebecca into the road, because cars were easier to avoid than people. Some ghosts were very easy to spot, like the woman with dark ringlets wearing a flowing blue ball gown, picking her way back and forth across Royal Street, gazing up at a flower-bedecked balcony. She didn't have any shoes on, Rebecca noticed, so she nudged Lisette.

  "She died before the streets were paved," Lisette explained. "Before there were even banquettes."

  "What?" Rebecca didn't know what bang-kets were.

  "You call them sidewalks."

  "So people walked around without shoes on?"

  "Ladies did, when it had been raining and they were going to a dance." Lisette tugged Rebecca around a group of tourists ogling a silver-painted human statue. "They had their servants or slaves carry their shoes for them, because the roads were so muddy. See all the mud around the hem of her dress?"

  Rebecca looked back, peering so hard at the dark tidal

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  line around the bottom of the beautiful gown that she walked straight into a bicycle chained to a lamppost.

  "Ow!" she moaned, Lisette's hand almost slipping free from her grasp.

  "Watch out," Lisette warned her. "We should turn here. If we keep walking this way, we'll run into all the Sicilian guys from the market, and they're still really angry. Down by the river it's bad, as well. Lots of people died in fights there. And there's a mean drug addict down on Ursulines -- he's been there since the 1950s and I try to keep out of his way. He says terrible things about black people."

  "Ghosts can be racist?"

  "Ghosts are the people they always were. Death doesn't change you. It just ... well, it freezes you, I suppose, in a moment in time. People who were crazy or mean before are still crazy or mean after they're dead."

  There weren't so many of the living up on Rampart Street, at the edge of the French Quarter, but there were plenty of ghosts -- Spanish-speaking soldiers playing some sort of marbles game with brass buttons ripped from their coats; slaves of both genders and all ages; a sallow-faced man in a frock coat clutching a dueling pistol; and a sullen teenager sitting on the curb, a nasty, dark wound blooming across the side of his head like some exotic flower. He was wearing low-slung jeans and a baggy white T-shirt; his sneakers were Nikes.

  "He wasn't here last year," Lisette whispered as they crossed the street. "He must be a recent arrival. It takes a while to get used to being a ghost. Sometimes people are

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  unhappy about it for a long, long time. That's why everyone's leaving him alone, see?"

  Rebecca had seen Armstrong Park before, because Aunt Claudia always parked near Rampart Street when she came down to the Quarter, and they drove past it on the way home. But Rebecca hadn't realized before today that this used to be a neighborhood as well -- another black neighborhood, torn down years and years ago.

  "That was Storyville," Lisette said, gesturing with her free hand. "You know, where all the bad places were. The clubs, they call them, where they play music. And the brothels."

  "Where they played jazz, right?" Rebecca remembered hearing something about this, or maybe reading something in one of the local history books. "Didn't Louis Armstrong grow up around here? And Jelly Roll Morton?"

  "Are they ghosts?"

  "Well -- not exactly. I mean, they're dead, but I don't think they died here. And I don't think either of them was murdered or anything."

  "I recognize that first name -- I think one of the ghosts up here used to say he'd played with him back in the day. He pronounced it 'Lewis,' in the Anglo way. I don't know where that ghost is now. Someone must have avenged his death. I haven't seen him for years and years."

  That was another thing Rebecca hadn't realized until today: Lisette really only knew about history before her death. Unless some other ghost had explained something to her, the world after 1853 was a mysterious and complicated puzzle. She only knew little pieces of things. For example,

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  she knew all about Storyville -- which grew up after her death -- because she'd spent years walking through it, and she knew about a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln because she'd heard a lot of ghosts talking about him during the Civil War. But when Rebecca asked her about other historical events -- like, say, the sinking of the Titanic, or the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- Lisette didn't have a clue. No other ghost had ever mentioned them.

  "Mainly they like to talk about themselves," she explained.

  Once they'd crossed Rampart and cut down a street alongside the park, Lisette started pausing more often to chat with a ghost or two, and though Rebecca said hello to them, nobody ever spoke to her.

  "Who dat, baby?" one woman asked Lisette, nodding in Rebecca's direction. "She not one of us, now."

  "It's a long story," Lisette told her.

  "Save it for next year," said the woman, sashaying up the stairs of a small green house and disappearing -- literally -- by walking through the wall.

  "They can see and hear you, but they can't speak to you," Lisette explained. "We can see the living, but we can only talk to other ghosts."

  "And the people you haunt," Rebecca reminded her.

  "The people we haunt." Lisette smiled. "Even if we don't know why."

  "How far is it now to Tremé?" Rebecca asked. It felt as though they'd been walking for hours. She was exhausted, overwh
elmed with everything -- and everyone -- she'd seen. The ghostly version of New Orleans was crowded with more strange costumes and ghoulish, bloody sights than Greenwich

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  Village during the Halloween Parade. One thing was sure: Rebecca would never doubt Lisette again. She was a ghost, all right.

  "This is it!" Lisette squeezed her hand. "But we have to walk a ways further."

  This part of Tremé looked just like the French Quarter, Rebecca thought, its streets jammed with small, shuttered houses -- Creole cottages, she thought they were called -- painted in pretty colors. As they walked farther, the style of houses didn't change all that much, but she started to see the difference between the wealthy Quarter and this neighborhood. Homes were a little shabbier, a little creakier, some leaning and peeling, some in a state of obvious disrepair. The "real" people -- that is, nonghosts -- of the neighborhood were out and about, some sitting on their stoops or riding bikes, others working on their houses. Everyone Rebecca saw was black.

  "I read how this is the oldest African-American suburb in the country," she told Lisette, but her friend didn't reply. She seemed focused now, quickening her pace as they walked up St. Philip Street.

  "They complaining about a foot of water!" one ghost in a bloodied sailor's uniform shouted to them. He gestured with his head at some people carrying a fat roll of moldy carpet down their front steps. Rebecca couldn't believe that they were just cleaning the house out now, three years after the storm. "I want to tell them, walk a ways up there, up toward Broad Street and see what the water did. They got nothing to be muttering about."

  Rebecca smiled at him, but the sailor seemed to look right

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  through her. Lisette didn't say a word. In fact, she didn't speak at all until she came to an abrupt stop outside a house that looked as though it was about to fall down.

  It was a small house that once, long ago, must have been a clean sky blue, but now its paint had rubbed away; it looked scoured by years of wind and rain. Weed-spouting cracks splintered its foundation. One shutter hung broken from its hinges; the others were missing. The roof had caved in, and the remnants of a ragged blue tarp were loosely fixed over its gaping hole.

  "This is my house," Lisette whispered. They stood staring up at it.

  "And this is what the storm did to it?" The house was a depressing sight. It looked as though it was about to collapse.

  "Not just the storm. My mama, she took care of it. It was her house. But for years it's been getting this way. People buy it, but they don't live there -- they rent it out and do nothing to keep it together. Every year it looks worse and worse. And since Katrina, nobody lives here at all. Nobody bothers to fix it. One of the ghosts down on St. Claude told me there was talk of pulling it down. 'Houses are coming down all over,' he said. 'Easier to wipe them away than put them right.'"

  "That's terrible!" Rebecca thought how sad it had to be for Lisette, coming here year after year and seeing the home she grew up in and loved crumbling into a ruin. "But aren't historic homes protected here? This house must be nearly two hundred years old."

  Lisette shrugged.

  "All those houses in Storyville were old," she said. "And up there -- see?"

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  She pointed up the street, and Rebecca looked. Ahead of them stretched another branch of the interstate, humming with unseen traffic, its overpass running above what Rebecca thought was Claiborne Avenue.

  "That used to be a beautiful street," Lisette said. "Big oak trees, just like St. Charles Avenue. It was the heart of Tremé -- the green heart, some people said. But they pulled down all the old houses and the old trees so that the big road up there could go in. Lots of ghosts there are real unhappy still. All they got to haunt is a pile of concrete."

  "It's strange to think of how the past gets swept away," Rebecca mused. She wondered how long it would be before Lisette's house was demolished, cleared away with no trace, like all those houses and streets in old Storyville.

  "The past doesn't go away." Lisette gazed up at her house. "You just can't see it anymore."

  "I don't know about jour past," Rebecca told her. "Not really."

  Lisette glanced over: Her dark eyes were glittering, her cheeks flushed. Her skin was the color of burnished gold, Rebecca thought. Where her sleeve was ripped away from her shoulder, Rebecca could see a small, purplish hint of a bruise.

  "Perhaps now's the time," Lisette said. "On our walk home. If you have the stomach for it."

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  ***

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ***

  I didn't die from yellow fever," lisette told Rebecca. "That was what they said to my mother, and to the notary, but it wasn't true."

  Rebecca could barely breathe. At last, Lisette was going to tell the story of how she became a ghost.

  That summer, Lisette explained, not long before her seventeenth birthday, another yellow fever epidemic descended on the steamy city, its first outbreaks recorded at the docks, and soon taking hold of the neighborhood people were starting to call the Irish Channel. Before long, people in the wealthier, leafier Garden District were falling sick as well.

  Business wasn't good during the times of the fever and her school was closed, Lisette said, but she and her mother were getting by. One day, when they were both working in the small front parlor of their house, starting work on the trousseau of the daughter of a Creole family up on Esplanade Ridge, a note was delivered.

  "I never read the note, but I could tell from my mother's face it was something bad," Lisette said. She paused so they

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  could cross Rampart without Rebecca getting run over. "And that evening she asked me if I would consider going to nurse someone who was sick. Someone who'd been very good to our family, who'd just fallen ill."

  "Why would she send you?" Rebecca was aghast. "Wasn't she worried about you catching yellow fever as well?"

  "You don't catch it from other people," Lisette told her. "We knew that much, even then."

  "Of course -- duh." Rebecca was ashamed of the lapse in her scientific knowledge.

  "And I'd already caught it -- when I was five," Lisette told her. "It wasn't so bad -- lots of children had the fever and lived to see the next week, especially children of color like me. Something in our genes, I think, from Africa. So after that I was immune."

  Although she'd never worked as a maid or nurse of any kind before, Lisette agreed to go -- even though the house she'd be staying in was a long way away, on the American side of the city.

  "Everyone we knew spoke French, or something like it," she said. "A mixture of French and English, most times. Upriver was a different world to me, like a foreign country. That was my one and only time on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, that day."

  "There was a streetcar then? What -- was it pulled by horses?"

  "Not then. It was the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, pulled by a steam engine. It was loud and smelly, and it moved quite fast. There were too many people pressed together inside. I didn't like it at all. But my mother held on

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  to me, and I knew nothing terrible would happen if she was there. I was right about that, I guess."

  Lisette gave an enigmatic, sad little smile. "But my mother left me at the gate. She didn't come into the house."

  "Why?" Rebecca asked, but Lisette just shook her head. She didn't say anything at all for a while, so Rebecca tried a different sort of question. "Who did you have to look after?"

  "Two people. A wealthy man -- he was a sugar factor.... "

  "A what?"

  "A go-between, maybe? Or you would say a broker? He bought sugarcane from the planters upriver and sold it on. And he arranged loans for them, investments. He was from New York, but he'd lived in Mississippi, coming back and forth to New Orleans for almost twenty years. He'd made a lot of money. Just that year, he'd built this big house in the Garden District for him and his wife, and his son and his daughter. It wasn't even really
finished, but they were already living there. The son was away for the summer, and they told him to stay away. The man was sick, and so was his daughter. She was not much older than I was. That winter she was going to make her big social debut."

  Lisette was used to much smaller houses and a very different kind of neighborhood. Everyone who worked in the house was a slave, and, unlike the black people she'd grown up around, none of them spoke French. They regarded her, she said, with some suspicion.

  "My skin was light, and when I told them my grandparents had come from Haiti, and that my mother had her own little business, and that we lived in Faubourg Tremé -- well, they

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  acted as though they didn't know what I was doing there. And I didn't know myself, really. I knew a few Americans, but I'd never met this man in my life. But he knew me." "Really?"