Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “He really die of the cholera?” A tall, thin figure emerged from between the tombs, disreputable hat in hand and the filth of three days’ travel crusted on his boots.

  “I have no way of knowing.” January had heard the truth from Isaak, and via letter from Dominique, who’d had it from Thérèse’s second cousin Roul’s lady friend, who was sister to Madame Cordelia Jumon’s hairdresser, Hélène.

  “Mighty auspicious timing, given what that Dr. Yellowjack’s had to say of the man.” Shaw spit, the tobacco disappearing into in the soupy brown muck of graveyard earth. “May not all be true, of course. And that gal Zoë, she swore up and down that Mathurin was good and kind to just about everyone he met, even if, as she said, there was an illness in his heart about ‘certain things.’ She didn’t say which things.”

  “You found her, then.”

  The policeman nodded. “Clear up to Ouachita Parish, she was. Sold to a man name of Dedman. Nice enough feller, and seemed to treat her decent. Let me talk to her out in the kitchen. She didn’t have a whole lot to add to what Isaak’s told you. The cab feller had already left by the time she figured Isaak was gone, and Antoine was laid out colder’n a mackerel—bet he didn’t mention he had a bottle of opium in his pocket that he was swiggin’ right through his brother’s mortal struggle. That Zoë’s a big strappin’ gal, and even in full health Isaak wasn’t much heavier’n a flour-barrel. Like you guessed, there was a sort of cart or wheelbarrow in the shop, from bringin’ in the floor mats. She used it twice, once to haul Isaak out’n there and again for Antoine. In the rain and the dark, and scared as she was about M’am Cordelia comin’ down, she was kind of hurried over Isaak. She wept when she told me about it, said she’d never have done it, ‘cept for bein’ scared of what M’am Jumon would do.”

  January said dryly, “She had reason to be.”

  “Well now, by all I hear M’am Cordelia’s mellowed some with age.” Shaw spit again, at a roach the length of his finger, ambling down the side of a nearby tomb. “I understand when she was runnin’ Trianon by herself, she kept discipline by bakin’ the troublemakers in the brick ovens behind the house, or buryin’ ’em up to their necks in the dirt for six, seven days. That kind of reputation buys you good service for a long time.”

  January remembered Mathurin Jumon’s anxious, coaxing voice, Now, Mother, don’t be like that.…

  “That it does,” he said softly. “That it does.”

  “But comin’ back through Natchez,” went on Shaw, scratching absently under the breast of his coat, “who should I see at the American Flag Hotel but them dear long-lost friends of mine, Lucinda and Abigail Coughlin. Turned out pretty as a pair of angels and actin’ like little Abby hadn’t never screamed and faked dead in her life.”

  January’s glance cut sidelong, and met the chilly enigmatic gray eyes.

  “They was waitin’ for word from Yellowjack, seemingly.” Shaw watched as the priest made the sign of the cross above the body, the men slid the shrouded form up into the rented holding-tomb—Laurence having a few months left to run before his year and a day’s undisturbed occupancy of the family vault was up. “I understand now there was some certain amount of foolery with a pig’s bladder full of blood, and the most heartrendin’ death throes this side of a Bulwer-Lytton novel, and then somebody comin’ around askin’ somebody else for a whole lot of money not to say nuthin’ about what had happened. I didn’t speak to ’em—bein’ shy of the ladies, you understand, and not knowin’ at the time they was wanted for anything specific down here—but I sort of hinted to the Sheriff there to keep an eye on those two. I guess it’s about time I headed back on up there again.”

  “Would it accomplish anything?” January thought with distaste of Blodgett and his notebook, of the elegant dark-haired gentleman amid his rustic ware and his books.

  Shaw shrugged. “Might save the next man some grief.”

  The mourners were scattering, holding handkerchiefs before their noses as they hastened along the muddy paths. Lingering by the narrow hole in the cemetery wall to watch the sexton’s men cement a marble square over the opening, the priest made the sign of the cross.

  “ ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions,’ ” quoted Abishag Shaw quietly, and folded his long arms. “And it may so be God has an understandin’ that we don’t, of how much a man can do with the hand he’s dealt.” He made his ambling way down the path between the tombs, hastening a little to catch up with Isaak and Célie.

  Turning, January went quietly back into the church.

  In my father’s house there are many mansions. January lit a candle and set it before the feet of the Virgin, among the holocaust of waxlights always to be found there in the fever season. A handful of nuns from the Ursuline Convent grouped before the sixth Station of the Cross; their voices a soft murmuring in the gloom.

  “Lead us not into temptation.… Deliver us from evil.…”

  And what else, January wondered, was there to ask of God?

  Quietly he walked to the rear, where the old statue of St. Peter stood, battered and shabby and soon to be replaced. An old man in a robe, with a beard and a bunch of keys. As January knelt at the rear bench, self-conscious and a little embarrassed, he noticed two or three pralines, a slice of pound cake, and a couple of cigars had been left on the base of the statue; another slice of pound cake and a dozen or more silver half-reale bits were tucked into the corners behind the railing.

  To let those still in fear know prayers do get heard.

  In my father’s house there are many mansions. And in those many rooms, armoires containing, perhaps, many different suits of clothes. Maybe even a top hat and a pair of spectacles, for the benefit of those who didn’t believe white men in long robes.

  He saw in his mind Olympe in the darkness, swaying with silent ecstasy, the bride of the god of her understanding. Saw the hot yellow sun on the dust of Congo Square, and the stir and blend of life along its verges: the smell of gumbo and pralines, the laughter of flirtation, the murmur of talk as men sought healing or advice or just the money to make it through another day. Why wouldn’t God like the smell of rum and cigars as well as that of incense?

  Waiting for the nuns to finish and depart, he counted out the beads of his own rosary, and thought, Blessed Virgin Mary, forgive me for my sins against my sister. You know—and Jesus Christ your son knows—more than I do about what lies in the human heart. Pray for me to be healed of my pride.

  When the sisters were finished and he was alone in the chapel, January got quietly to his feet. Reaching into the pocket of his black coat, he brought out a slice of pound cake, wrapped in a scrap of the Louisiana Gazette. This he opened up, and laid the whole at the feet of the old man with the beard and the keys.

  “Thank you,” he said, to the silence of the church.

  Coming out of the chapel he glimpsed Marie Laveau in her seven-pointed tignon in the cemetery, kneeling beside a tomb. She might have been praying, but he suspected she was simply digging graveyard dust.

  A second cortege arrived at the chapel as January left the cemetery gates, the undertaker’s men going ahead bearing a black velvet pall and eight wax candles like ship’s masts, flames pale in the hot still afternoon. Several dozen men followed, all those American businessmen who had not already fled the city, red-tipped wax tapers in their hands. Against the black of their coats the long white scarves of the pallbearers reminded January of bandages—where had he seen bandages, he wondered, wrapping skeletons who danced? He shook the thought away.

  Carriage after carriage drew up, black plumes nodding on the heads of the horses. A black-lacquered coffin was taken down and borne past him, draped and padded in velvet and crêpe and trailed by Père Eugenius and a bevy of chanting choirboys. Only when the widow followed, supported by Elaine Destrehan and Manon Desdunes, did January realize who the dead man was.

  It was Colonel Pritchard.

  “It wasn’t food poisoning, was it?” he asked the Sexton, who came o
ut the cemetery gate beside him to watch the mourners file into the chapel.

  “Heavens, no!” The official looked startled. “Whatever gave you that idea? The Colonel tripped on the front steps of the Union Bank, and struck his head on the granite carriage block. A dozen people saw it happen. A most sad and terrible accident.”

  January watched the floating darkness of the widow’s veils disappear into the candle-starred gloom of the chapel vestibule: “It is terrible,” he agreed quietly. The Colonel’s slaves followed behind the widow, a long double file of them, trying very hard to look sad.

  When the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana reconvened following the fever season, it found in favor of Isaak Jumon against his mother’s renewed claim that he was her slave. It likewise awarded Jumon the property from his father’s will, and the three thousand dollars left him by his uncle, against the contest of his grandmother, Cordelia Jumon. That same month, Joseph Lafevre, also known as Dr. Yellowjack or Yellowjack Joe, was hanged for attempted murder and extortion.

  After the ruling, Cordelia Jumon sold what remained of her sons’ properties, and early the following year returned to Paris to live. She never returned to New Orleans.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  VOODOO

  As usual when writing against a historical background, it required an effort of will on my part not to wander off and write a book about voodoo. Like most religions, including Christianity, voodoo has been used and misused, criminalized and politicized, trivialized, glamorized, and sensationalized, used to manipulate people’s emotions and pick people’s pockets. None of this alters the fact that it was a lifeline of comfort for generations of people in pain. I have tried to write about it as it must have appeared to the people at the time of my story: blacks, whites, and the free colored who were a class and a culture separate from either.

  Historically, voodoo evolved from the tribal religions of West Africa, a complex interlocking of ancestor worship, reverence for the spirits of nature, and an overarching belief in a single deity who works through the various spirits—the loa or lwa—to aid humankind. The thousands of men and women who were kidnapped and enslaved by their tribal enemies, and sold to the whites, carried with them only what they had in their minds and in their hearts: skill at their trades, love of family, a rich heritage of music, and stories of animals and spirits. Among them were priests and herb doctors, priestesses and midwives, who carried the gods of their homeland, and the ways in which these gods might be petitioned for help—an invaluable treasure to people who needed help as desperately as any in the history of humankind.

  As with most matters under slavery, how individual Africans or groups of Africans fared vis-à-vis religion depended largely on the personality and outlook of the individual white master. Many owners did not bother to convert their slaves to Christianity or were content with token baptism; others insisted on the show of belief. Given the brevity of the average slave’s survival on a New World cane plantation, it may not have seemed worth the trouble. Anything that smacked of religious or any other organization among the slaves was, of course, severely punished, so the worship of the loa—always more or less a come-as-you-are, make-it-up-as-you-go-along proposition anyway—went underground, taking different forms, depending on where most of the slaves in any particular locale had come from and how strict a watch the local whites kept. It became a common practice to identify Christian saints with loa, either as a way to fool the whites while keeping integrity with one’s own beliefs or out of instinctive syncretism, the belief that they really were the same entity by different names: like lenses of the same color, filtering the same Light.

  In writing about voodoo in New Orleans in the middle 1830s, I have tried to extrapolate backward from the modern forms of voodoo found in Haiti and New Orleans. Even before the black revolution of 1804—in which it played a significant part—voodoo in Haiti was enormously strong, and remains close to its original African elements. Spellings and names of the loa vary in different accounts: Spirits and gods from several different African cultures were incorporated and, at different places and different times, Native American spirits (or what second-generation Africans perceived to be Native American spirits) as well. In most cases I have simplified and have used the modern Haitian spellings, names, and identification of the loa.

  Reading nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century accounts of New Orleans voodoo—for the most part white finger-pointing at “barbaric superstition”—elements in common are clear: the priest and priestess (Hougan and Mambo, King and Queen), the worship of the serpent, animal sacrifice, dancing, possession by the loa in the course of the dance. Most agree that the loa like alcohol and tobacco—in fact, the loa like most of the things that people like: food, candy, bright colors, lights, pretty things, money, something to smoke. Voodoo altars are fantastic (and weirdly beautiful) accretions of whatever speaks to the worshiper of God or the gods, items dedicated to whichever loa is honored by that particular altar: Ezili likes certain types of perfume, the Guédé—the dark loa—like symbols of power and death. (I’ve seen a black plastic statue of Darth Vader on one such altar, and it’s hard to see how that symbol of intergalactic power and evil could be considered out of place.)

  Voodoo, both old and modern, is very much a religion of this world, of God or the gods acting in this world to help people attain success, health, help, or protection from a capricious and arbitrary universe.

  Most accounts of New Orleans voodoo add that sexual excesses followed hard upon the dancing. This may be projection by whites who feared a more sexually liberated culture. But anyone who has gone to nightclubs and parties will be aware that the presence of loa is not required to connect the one with the other, particularly if this is the only time most of these people (a) get to see each other and (b) are able to enjoy a few hours in which they can forget they’re someone else’s property and aren’t on call for some kind of work.

  Voodoo has such an alien appearance to Westerners that, inevitably, it acquired an astonishing veneer of bizarre connotations. Nineteenth-century Christians regarded it as Devil worship (read nineteenth-century authors on the subject of the Buddhism of Chinese coolies working on the railroads and the Hinduism of most of the population of British India). Many French Creoles, brought up side by side with voodoo, went regularly to its practitioners for charms and gris-gris, something that would have deeply saddened their confessors but not surprised them. In the latter part of the century, half-understood practices coupled with the racism inherent in yellow journalism made voodoo a fertile source of sensationalistic plot elements in dime novels: zombies and voodoo dolls (and let’s not forget those sexually degenerate dances) became staples of cheap thrillers, both printed and cinematic. Hoodoo—African-style sorcery and herbalism—was seen as part of the voodoo religion, although the closeness of the connection varied from place to place and from time to time.

  In fact, the practice of voodoo varies even today. Some practitioners do it one way, some do it another, not to mention the plethora of tourist voodoo and of fakes and cheats to rip off the unwary and credulous. Even in Haiti, where voodoo is more or less an organized faith, it is a patchwork of personal interpretations of gods, rites, and emphasis.

  All of the above—and the fact that nobody attempted anything remotely resembling an organized and unprejudiced study of voodoo until almost a hundred years after my story takes place—make it extremely difficult to present a picture of what voodoo was, or must have been like, in the summer of 1834.

  I’ve done the best I can. I’ve tried to remain true to what sincere practitioners of voodoo have told me about ceremony and possession, but I am sure there are others who do it very differently. Excellent books exist about the history, and the current practices, both of voodoo as a religion and about African sorcery. There are voodoo shops—or shops catering to Santeria and other West African—based New World religions—in most big cities of the Western Hemisphere, and large segments of the population follow the prac
tices of these faiths.

  Likewise, it is difficult to get any kind of straight story about Marie Laveau—and the fact that her daughter was also named Marie Laveau, and also became “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans (leading to tales of eternal youthfulness) does not make investigation any easier.

  My goal, as always, has been simply to entertain without doing violence to the truth of former times. One can buy voodoo candles in nearly any supermarket or drugstore in New Orleans, and the priests of the Church of Our Lady of Guadeloupe—formerly the mortuary Chapel of St. Antoine—still regularly find slices of pound cake or bits of money at the feet of a certain statue in the back of the church.

  “CREOLES”

  One of the problems about writing a historical novel (or any other kind, for that matter) is that once you’ve said a thing, there it is in print for better or worse.

  It’s been pointed out to me by a research specialist in the Jacksonian period that my source for the way the word “Creole” was used in that time and place was incorrect (although the source seemed pretty authoritative at the time). In both A Free Man of Color and Fever Season I’ve said that in the 1830s “Creole” meant “white descendant of French or Spanish colonists” only; in fact, the word was used in contemporary documents to describe the free colored as well.

  All I can do is apologize for my goof and promise to correct it in future Benjamin January novels, and future editions of the existing novels, should I be so fortunate as to have them. Thank you for your forgiveness and forbearance.

  B.H.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master’s degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer. She has just completed the fourth Benjamin January novel, Sold Down the River.