Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  When we grew older, more for Albane’s benefit than my own—as the child showed a scholarly bent—he brought a pedantic young man from town to teach us Latin and mathematics and music.

  It was only the music that I mastered. To this day I can play any stringed instrument, including the violin, and I can also play the piano and sing tolerably well. But Papa never praised my singing, while he praised Albane’s sums and her tedious Latin compositions, usually moral tales of a falsely pious nature.

  Papa was always a great reader of books. He respected knowledge more than he respected money, an attitude that is tenable only if you already have enough money to support yourself in a fine style.

  Two rooms off the front gallery of Belle Azure on the second floor were set aside for his library. In one of the rooms alone stood four thousand volumes, neatly arranged on shelves along the walls. I counted them one day when I had nothing else to do. In this room also were a long table of dark wood and a map of Louisiana and a globe that showed all the countries and continents of the world.

  For hours Papa would sit in there, the lattices drawn against the heat, reading and annotating several volumes at once open before him on the table. He loved Molière, Racine, the poet André-Marie de Chénier, who was guillotined during the Revolution, the philosophic works of Pascal and Rousseau, and of course, the contemporary writer Chateaubriand, whom he had met once in Paris, though he often complained that the latter’s René and La Nouvele Atala were full of poetic distortions and lies about the red Indians in general and the Louisiana tribes in particular.

  When he became overexcited about something he was reading, he would fling open the shutters, step out onto the gallery, and declaim passages in a loud voice to whoever was passing below. The slaves thought him mad. He would make them stop and listen to him, sometimes for hours in the heat. He always wore a pair of yellow slippers and a yellow waistcoat when he read and a sort of round Turkish hat with a tassel hanging from it, which he called his reading hat.

  I can see him standing there on the gallery, even now, book in one hand, gesticulating wildly with the other hand and shouting some speech from Racine at the top of his voice. Sometimes, when he came to a favorite passage, he would close the book and recite from memory. It was thought among the slaves that he made it all up, that he wrote the books himself and imagined the words on the spot out of his own head.

  Soon the pious pinch-faced little brat Albane grew into a smug and pious pinch-faced adolescent. But she was always an abnormal girl. There was something strange about her from the beginning, something that made you think she was still looking at you when her back was turned. A few of the house slaves who had been brought from St.-Domingue during the terrible uprising there knew the ways of the Vou-Dou religion, and thought that Albane had the gris-gris on her—that is to say, the evil eye. This is the power possessed by witches to affect the very nature of the things around them: to curdle milk in the pail fresh from the cow, to turn the baby in the womb upside down and dead with the cord wrapped around its neck.

  Indeed, a supernatural power existed in Papa’s family, passed down through the women of his line. There was an old book from France in the library written in Latin that told the story of several women of our family in the days of the great witch La Voisin, and the scandal at the court at Versailles when they tried to poison Louis the Fourteenth himself. One of them, a certain Marianne de Vaubran, was tortured and executed in the Bastille, two days after La Voisin went to the scaffold.

  Our slaves were after a while much afraid of Albane. They would turn to the wall and cross themselves when she passed. Papa heard about this and whipped them for it many times. He was not a whipping master and until then had been known for his kindnesses, but this behavior offended his pride and his foolish love for the girl. I would like to say that because of the whippings, Albane was hated by the Negroes at Belle Azure, but hate is not exactly characteristic of the reaction she produced among them.

  You do not worship something that you hate.

  Slaves have to be watched always; this is one of the conditions imposed by our peculiar institution. To keep a man down, you must know what he is thinking, what he will do next. As a Prasères I was born with this knowledge; it was imparted to me in the womb. The consequences of being lax with the Negroes or not watching them closely enough are fatal, a fact impressed upon us by what went on at other plantations upriver and down. There were stories of poisonings, insurrections, slaves with knives between their teeth crawling beneath the baire at night.

  One of our cooks, a sullen light-skinned girl with tribal markings on her face, let a basket of deadly snakes loose in the house not long after Albane came from the city. The act had nothing to do with us but was part of a complicated vendetta between the house slaves. She had spent months catching the snakes out in the bayou and fed them on milk from her own breast, for she had recently given birth to a child that died. When it came out that the cook had done this thing, she was not whipped. Whip marks on her back would have lowered her value. Instead she was locked up, fattened on sweetbreads and corn mash, and taken to the market in New Orleans.

  The snakes were small bright bracelets of color, and their bite was fatal. We found them in the oddest places over the next several months. Curled up inside shoes, swimming happily in freshly drawn bathwater, in bonnets left upside down, in plates of food at the dinner table, in the bedding. Every night we had to beat the sheets out for ten minutes before going to sleep. At last Papa called in a snake catcher from the bayou. He was an old half-blind Negro who had bought his freedom from the master of Fleury Plantation several years before. The man had tribal scars on his face just like the cook’s. He put out bits of raw meat dipped in molasses in the corners of every room and small saucers of sweet cream in the hallways. He intoned certain spells in his own unknown language, and tiptoed around like a shadow. One morning I saw seven snakes sipping at the cream in one of his saucers as the snake catcher came up behind, quiet as a cat.

  When he had the snakes in his canvas bag, I asked him what he was going to do with them. He smiled, and I saw yellow teeth filed to points. “After you strain the poison out of their heads, they make a very powerful magic gumbo, mademoiselle,” he said. “Good for the ague and the gout.”

  In the end sixty-six snakes were taken from the house and the galleries. The man was paid in gold for his skills, which were quite amazing. Then he left, and it was assumed that all the snakes left with him, but later Zetie caught Albane playing with three of them. The strange child had kept them as pets. She fed them on dead flies and housed them in a basket full of grass. One afternoon Zetie found the snakes curled up asleep in the child’s hair. When the snakes were taken away, Albane cried for a night and a day.

  Out of this incident the slaves began to worship my cousin as a Vou-Dou goddess.

  I am referring now to a particular night in August 1829, when Papa was away at Mobile attending to business, and I was fourteen.

  I don’t need to tell you that fourteen is not so young in our part of the world. At that same age all the Bringier girls were married and the mistresses of great estates of their own upriver, and it is certainly not uncommon for Creole women of any age to take a hand in the day-to-day business of running a plantation. I had already sometimes directed the labor of the slaves in the fields and made sure they were not either worked to exhaustion or unduly spared by the overseers, who are a conniving and untrustworthy breed of white men. I also saw the cane and indigo loaded onto the ships, and made sure that proper receipts changed hands, for thousands of dollars can be lost at this point through forged or incorrect bills of lading.

  As you know, August is a month of great restlessness for the Negroes, the time of many midnight and secret rites in honor of their various Vou-Dou deities. Accordingly I slept beneath the mosquito baire with the shutters open on the gallery to catch any odd noises from the yard. For on other plantations, where the slaves are not watched so closely, there have been in
this dreadful season reports of human sacrifices: slave children cut open to appease the savage Vou-Dou goddess and then reported missing, or dead the next morning of some convenient accident. Remember, the loss of a single slave is the loss of a valuable piece of property.

  That night a wavering moon shone above the yard. The live oaks around the house rustled and whispered in a hot wind from the swamp. I was woken from an uneasy sleep by the heat and a sound of chanting from the jungle of underbrush behind the slave quarters. I listened for a while, put on the suit of boy’s clothes I used in the fields, took two loaded pistols from the gun cabinet in Father’s room, and went out into the darkness. You may scoff at my accounting of this incident, but let me tell you that no Prasères, man, woman, or child, has ever been afraid of their slaves.

  I now directed my footsteps to a wide clearing in the jungle. Sometimes on Sundays the slaves are allowed to dance there, free of leg irons and shackles, as they dance at Congo Square in New Orleans. Tonight I found them assembled, about a hundred fifty Negroes, writhing and baying beneath the moon, their attentions fixed upon my cousin Albane. This wicked girl now stood in her nightgown on a wooden table at one end of the clearing, her arms outstretched like some goddess of antiquity, a dozen snakes coiling at her feet. The overseers were loitering about in the background, leaning back in their boots, very drunk, and enjoying the spectacle. I went up and asked them to halt this obscene ceremony and bring my cousin inside the house. “No, mademoiselle,” they said, their tongues swollen from the liquor. “Too dangerous now.” And they professed themselves afraid to interrupt the slaves at their devotions.

  I turned from them in a high rage and took the pistols out of my belt and went myself to remove Albane from the table. One of the slaves, a big field hand, made to stop me, and I shot him through the lungs, a wound from which he did not recover. Albane screamed and whimpered at this, and the snakes around her feet slithered off into the darkness. Then I dragged her through the underbrush and up to her room.

  Once there, the girl’s spirits revived and she became bold. “I am the goddess Nokomu. Touch me, and I will turn you into a snake,” she said, or some such nonsense.

  “Interfering in slave ways is wicked,” I said, “and you are ordered to desist.” Then her face got twisted up and ugly, and she told me that she would behave as she pleased because now she had as much a right as I to be called mistress of the house.

  “The last time I went with your papa to the opera in New Orleans,” she said, “he took me over to Royal Street, to the offices of M. Levallier, the lawyer. I watched as M. Levallier wrote up a paper signed by your papa and two witnesses that said when he died, this whole place will be divided up equal between you and me.” And she laughed, and the sound of it was weird in the room.

  But when I heard this scandalous lie issue from her lips, I was seized by a madness I cannot name, and I took up a horsewhip from somewhere and whipped her as I would whip a slave who had thieved from me or spoken with insolence. I whipped her up and down the gallery till her nightgown was in shreds and her back and her arms were covered with great red welts. Neither her screaming nor her tears nor her piteous importunings could stop me. Not her power to curdle milk or charm snakes or steal my father’s heart.

  When my arms were tired and I could whip her no more, I called the house slaves, who had been cowering at the bottom of the stairs, and I said, “Here is your goddess now. Take her and put some grease on her wounds.” Then I went to my room and closed myself in and slept or did not sleep until Papa came back from Mobile, several days later.

  Allow me to pause a moment in my narrative to describe the setting of the dramatic events that I have been relating to you. I mean, the place I love most in the world—Belle Azure Plantation on the Mississippi.

  It is situated at a wide bend along the river, at the center of seven thousand square acres of good black-soiled bottomland granted by Louis the Fifteenth of France to my ancestor Antoine Raoul de L’lsle de Prasères for an unknown bit of gallant service to the French crown. His secret action has passed into obscurity, not recorded at the time for high reasons of state, though one may surmise it had to do with the preservation of the dignity of the king himself.

  The house itself was built tall with slave-made bricks and cypress wood cut out of the swamp. The brick walls of the ground floor are so wide that as a child I could barely span them with my arms outstretched. They enclose a dark, cool cave of arched doorways and barrels of wine and coiled rope and other odds and ends, where I used to play on the hot summer days. The two upper stories are constructed of cypress timbers with sand and moss and horsehair mixed with plaster in between the posts, and in all the bedrooms you can see the stout timbers of the beams, which bear the mark of the carpenter’s adze. A set of horseshoe-shaped stairs lead from the ground up to the first gallery, which wraps in French style around the house, while the second gallery above is reached by a freestanding staircase of curving cypress just inside the front hall.

  We are famous upriver and down for these features and for the second gallery, which is unique in all of Louisiana. My mother placed many plants along the length of this gallery. It was once her favorite place to cradle me when I was an infant and suffering from the colic. The plants remain there today, ferns and banana trees and flowering bushes in pots. They give our top gallery the aspect of the famous Hanging Gardens, which a Babylonian king once built for his mistress, and which was one of the wonders of the world.

  You have no doubt seen the plantation home of Jean Noël Destrehan, who was a friend of Bonaparte’s and who they say once received the gift of an imperial bathtub, slightly used, with imperial grime from the emperor’s fat body still visible around the rim. In any case, Destrehan Manor is generally regarded throughout the region as a dwelling of striking beauty and elegance. I understand that since my hasty departure a Scotsman has wed Lelia, the daughter of the family, and improvements have been completed, with the addition of Greek-style columns to the facade. This is a pity. Destrehan was a house built after the French fashion, without the pompous Grecianisms favored by the American planters.

  Belle Azure resembles Destrehan before the recent grotesque additions but is much more beautiful and a good deal larger. The Prasères family was once known for its generative power. My great-grandfather, Etienne Charles Marie de Prasères, sired twenty-two children off two wives. Twelve of the children survived infancy and lived comfortably at Belle Azure until marriage. The great house was meant for broods of this size. We are lucky today to see a family that exceeds eight children. Perhaps our forebears were better, stronger people than we are today, as many insist, but I do not believe it. The real reason is simple: You must first have a happy marriage to bring such a lot of children into the world. And happy marriages, for one reason or another, are rare in these complicated times.

  Listen, this is a whore’s piece of wisdom: Nothing makes a better aphrodisiac than happiness.

  Even now in the sordid exile I have come to, I can close my eyes and picture Belle Azure, down to the last detail.

  From the top gallery in the spring, you can smell the countryside blooming just before dawn, then the sun rising hot over the fields spread like a brown furrowed cloak down to the river. In the diminishing light of a winter dusk, the blue walls of the house glow the remorseful blue of the sky after a storm. In summer, seen from the windows of the second gallery, the horizon toward the Gulf is all lilac heat shimmer and the air is dense and still. Then there are the vessels—sail and steam—coming and going upriver and down day and night, whistles blowing as we light the great first-floor gallery for a party and the music spills out over the yard. And the gray of dawn in the fall, hunting friends of Papa’s waiting impatiently below, their horses pawing the gravel of the drive, breath rising as white clouds into the air. And always, the green margins of the bayou and the halo of birds rising out of the swamp.

  Belle Azure is my beautiful blue star above the river. Everyone must belong somewhe
re. I belong there. I love its very wood and brick and plaster. Perhaps in the end true happiness in life consists of knowing where you belong and staying put. Circumstance and ill fortune and the necessity of my revenge have taken me away from my home for too many years. But I have made secret plans. And one way or another design and tenacity will take me back again.

  At noon on the fifth day after I horsewhipped Albane on the gallery, I heard Papa’s tilbury turn up the drive. An hour passed. Then he came up the stairs and entered the brat’s room, where he stayed just long enough to examine her welts, which were even then receding into harmless pink bruises. Then he went away a second time. He did not come in to see me; he did not even say a word through my door. I stepped out on the gallery in the dusk and watched him drive off toward New Orleans. This is when I first began to be afraid that something terrible would happen to me. Two weeks later Papa came back, and this time he ascended to my room without even bothering to remove his traveling clothes.

  As I feared, he would not let me speak. When I tried to explain my actions, he struck me across the mouth with the back of his hand. Then he told me that I had developed a malicious and spiteful temperament that had caused the death of a field slave worth five hundred dollars, that I had beaten an innocent orphan girl who had received such a shock from it that her life still hung in the balance. He appeared to be in anguish, and I trembled because I had made him unhappy and because I did not want to be punished.

  Then his demeanor changed, and he sank down on a stool and put his head in his hands and began to shed tears. These frightened me more than anything I had yet seen.

  “I have been unmindful of you for a long while,” he said at last. “I thought that it was your cousin who needed looking after, not you, Madeleine, You have always been my strong one. Even when you were an infant and death took your mother, you were strong and you did not cry. I should have remarried or sent you to the convent school with the Ursuline nuns, like other girls of the province. Perhaps the sisters would have given you some moral training, cooled your hot temperament. Now it is too late for such measures.”