by Brian Hodge
His French Quarter savior, Magenta, had brought him here last Monday morning. Mama Charity had greeted Magenta as she might an eccentric daughter, and sold her a little sack of candles before she was through. Shrewd, oh, she was, but there was no doubt that a compassionate heart beat inside that heavy bosom. After her second look at Napoleon’s battered face, the pulpy skin around his eyes, Mama had gone to work making a poultice of scandalously smelly ingredients, with no thought to reimbursement. She had doctored him with delicate hand, and Magenta hadn’t even yet asked if she could use an extra hand around the shop for a while.
Mama Charity was mountainous in her wraparound sarongs, an enormous woman, as tall as Napoleon and twice the girth, made taller still by the bright tignons she would wrap about her hair. He’d seen no more of her legs than from upper calf to ankle, but these looked as stout as oak limbs. She was brown as a pecan, with a deep, throaty voice, and he couldn’t guess her age. She might have been a weary forty, or an energetic seventy.
“Mama?” he said.
“Mm hmm.” Eyes still shut in regal repose.
“Before she brought me here, when first she was telling me about you? Magenta was saying there’ve been others before me, others you took in and gave a home to.”
Mama Charity nodded slowly. “That Magenta, she’s an honest one, she don’t lie to no one but herself sometimes.”
“Why do you do it?”
Her eyes popped open. “Somehow all you indigents figure out I’m a sucker what can’t say no.”
And then she winked.
“Do you have no family?”
“Married three times. Wore ’em all out.” She arched her eyebrows, then chuckled to herself. “Now two of ’em, they weren’t worth a lick, I did my choosing of them with a part of me best left to things other than thinking. But that middle husband, now he was a fine, fine man. Hardly a day goes by I don’t miss him.”
Mama Charity drew back in the chair, looking him up and down as he leaned against the counter in a lazy-day stance. “Well now, listen to this, you getting a lot more about me than I know about you, and if you think you can fool me by sticking to that Jamaican label you hang on yourself, you can think again. That’s a fine accent, but I got a better ear. So why don’t you try me one more time.”
All week Napoleon had debated the wisdom of total honesty, and whether the truth even mattered at all. Would she cast him back to the streets if she knew there were those who were looking for him? No, he could never see her doing that, and perhaps he had withheld the truth simply to spare her needless worry.
Nevertheless, she had challenged, had asked. He would tell.
And when he’d concluded his brief but unhappy tale of chauffeuring, murder in the night, and panicked flight into uneasy anonymity, Mama Charity rocked with a little more speed, a little more determination. Her rounded jaw was firmly set with defiance of popular opinion.
“Andrew Jackson Mullavey.” Her voice was charged, haughty. “I never did much like him. Always something a little too smooth about that man, like he was running for office and he’d done forgot to tell anyone. Can’t say I trust that brother of his, neither, only he don’t ask me to, so of the two, you know, I think I have just a hair more respect for Nathan Forrest.” She rolled her eyes. “Just how’d you come to work for a man like that?”
Napoleon felt the broomstick in his hand, solid and real and now, so much a part of him this week that the fit of the steering wheel already seemed foreign. “We came to him from Haiti when I was a boy. I was … twelve? Thirteen? My life before then, I don’t remember much. My life since … it always seemed that I would be working for him when I was old enough. I never thought it would be another way.”
Her eyes had narrowed. “You said ‘we.’ How many of you came from Haiti?”
“Sixty, maybe? Sixty-five?”
“All at once?”
“Yah, I think so. I remember us on a boat. My father telling me we were going to a new life, a better life than we could be living at home. And it was, I had me a real bed.”
“Where’s your daddy now?”
“He died after we came here. Three years, I think it was, he had a bad heart.”
“Mm hmm. And if you don’t mind me being so nosy, what’d they do with your daddy after he died?”
“Some of the other men, they buried him in a grave in the trees between the house and the river.” He could vividly recall the bone-thin adolescent he had been, bowing his head over an earthen mound and anointing it with his tears. Knobby knees and elbows, the center of a ring of solemn heads as black as the earth that had swallowed his father, and in their grief he could almost sense a quiet envy.
It had seemed normal then, as had so many other things that he was only now beginning to question, and put into a new perspective. His knowledge of his adopted country was limited, but he knew enough to comprehend its sprawling size, its diversity of people and customs and values. That something appeared uncommon here did not mean it was unacceptable, only that it was, simply, uncommon. Or so it had seemed, while growing up.
But that look in the eyes of others while he spoke of the past — he could clearly see their disbelief, even abhorrence, and sense that perhaps not everything he’d taken for granted at Twin Oaks was acceptable in this country.
He could only have known what people had told him. Nurtured on lies, wouldn’t he eventually see the fragile wall they built as standing solid as truth?
“Maybe they did give you a bed and a roof over your head what didn’t leak,” said Mama Charity, her eyes terribly knowing. “But child, I daresay they stole something from you a damn sight more important than creature comfort. They stole away where you came from, and its rightful place in your heart.”
And wasn’t it true, sometimes? If his unclaimable boyhood in another land was characterized by more poverty than he had seen since, at least he could recall Haiti as having a deeper spirit than he was able to find here.
“Now you answer me one thing: Can you tell me what a poteau-mitan is?”
The word rang vaguely familiar, connotations of a past forgotten and buried in the mud of this new land. Then it clicked:
“The post,” he whispered. “The ladder that goes up to heaven, so the gods can be coming down.”
Mama Charity’s round face beamed like that of a mother watching her child take his first steps. “See here now? Just might be a little Haitian left in you after all. Then after tonight, well, maybe a whole lot more.”
Saturday night services were like nothing he had seen for nearly half his life. Mama Charity left her shop in the hands of a clerk named Jo-Jo, and off they went, north, through the city and to the far wild shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Here amid rustling grasses and cattails, the droning of frogs and the distant airy bellow of alligators, she owned a renovated farmhouse on eight acres, the last great gifts of a beloved second husband.
Here they gathered, mostly black, a few white, adepts all of a religion born of the Old World and the New. To Napoleon, vodoun had been a font aboil with mixed emotions ever since his arrival at Twin Oaks. We can be sweet as honey, or bitter as bile, said a Haitian proverb, to explain the dualities of vodoun, its ambivalence, its potential for good or for harm. That souls were made vulnerable, or stolen altogether, beneath Mullavey’s roof had come to be common knowledge among the house staff, though they rarely spoke of it. Bereft of ceremony, they saw only the terrors inherent in their religion, receiving none of the sweet uplift. At Twin Oaks, only bile flowed.
In the early days, house staff and canefield workers alike sometimes mingled late at night around the dancing blaze of a bonfire, to the summons of homemade rada drums, long after Andrew Jackson Mullavey’s was lost to sleep. And the freewheeling rituals of abandon and sacrifice went on much as they had before. But that a rift would someday develop was inevitable. Day by day, with continued exposure to everyday life in a country that had once been nearly as distant as their mythical Guinée, the house staff could no
t help but reflect its influence — much to the suspicious dismay of the others. Haitians who profited too ostentatiously often became suspect to those less successful, and all who’d been chosen for softer lives at Twin Oaks had no doubt made bargains with the gods while leaving their brothers and sisters behind. They eventually became unwelcome at the riverside ceremonies.
Orvela LaBonté, eldest among the house staff, was best schooled in the old ways of Haitian mountain folk. She protected those she could, or desired to, in the case of strangers who spent the night, though her feeble magic was no match for the power of a true bokor.
But house staff or canefield worker, it did not matter, one and all were made profoundly uneasy by Mr. Andrew and his brother. To challenge them was unthinkable. No one had ever explained it to Napoleon’s satisfaction, merely shushing him when he, as an adolescent, had asked. Look at them, look at them, Orvela would say, as if that settled it. By the time he had grown another few inches and shown a talent for driving, he’d given up asking. Put it down to old superstitions about white men that were looking more and more ridiculous the more he was out in their world and driving their streets.
“Don’t have a thing to do with white or black,” Mama Charity told him in the car, somewhere over Lake Pontchartrain. “Or red or yellow or brown, for that matter. You never heard of the Cult of Marassa?”
Napoleon shook his head, said he had not.
Mama Charity’s eyes widened. “Ho ho ho ho. The Cult of Marassa? That’s twins. Powerful magic in twins, some say. Every man, every woman, they’re half-human, half-divine, all rolled up in one flesh. But twins come along, now that’s a sign. They say twins is two halves of the same soul, and that’s why you don’t go messing about with twins. Maybe you never saw it happen in Haiti, but used to, at least, a twin could kill his brother or sister and nobody’d say or do a thing. They’d all pretend like nothing ever happened. They say you don’t want a twin on your bad side.”
Napoleon rolled that around a moment. It certainly explained a lot. “Do you believe it?”
She eyed him with bemused caution. “Let’s just say I never put it to the test.”
They chose us well, didn’t they? Had the Mullaveys known what they were doing from the outset, or had they merely made the most of opportunity once it had arisen? Not that it mattered.
“You’ll feel better after tonight,” Mama Charity told him. “Maybe you’ll know a little clearer who you really are. And not what some fat, lying white man — twin or not — wanted you to be.”
He clung to this after they arrived at her land on the northern shore of the lake, cars and vans waiting, motorcycles and bicycles already there. Disciples of the mambo, the priestess. She moved ahead of him, and through them all, touching hands and faces with the tender care of a healer, these supplicants from numerous walks of life by day, and by night all the same in the soul. That they loved her was obvious. That they respected her was understood. And that they feared her, just a bit, was wise.
The loa were fickle, and their servants only human.
Napoleon followed, blending in with the throng of celebrants who laughed and drank from bottles of rum or cola, and that he was a stranger to them didn’t seem to matter. No solemn processional of dour liturgy, this, but a heartfelt striving to reach beyond the seen and touch the infinite, and swallow a piece of it for one’s very own.
They gathered beside the lake in an open building of wood and corrugated metal, surrounded by craggy oaks whose limbs trailed streamers of Spanish moss. The floor was hard-packed earth; naked light bulbs glared harshly from the ceiling. Around the poteau-mitan was ample room for dance. Beyond that sat a few crooked rows of benches for those who preferred less strenuous worship.
No cathedral of stained glass and stone could have felt more sanctified.
The altar stood heaped with candles and flowers, bottles of libation and likenesses of the saints, and clay jars to hold the souls of ancestors, or living worshipers who had entrusted them to Mama Charity’s care. The accessories of the loa were placed within reach should a god come down into the body of someone here and demand them: the crutch of Papa Legba, the sword of Ogu, the gown and perfume of Erzuli, the black topcoat and bowler hat of Baron Samedi. Others. The loa were many, and the pantheon grew daily, as dead ancestors ascended celestial ranks.
Napoleon sat near a wizened man who mopped his forehead with a bright red handkerchief, then replaced his straw hat. His rheumy eyes shone with transcendence, and he smiled at Napoleon, as if to say how wonderful it was to see the young respecting the traditions of old.
“You look like a city boy,” said the man.
“I am.” But was he, truly? In truth he didn’t know what he was. In transition, he supposed.
The old man grinned, then suckled with bulging cheeks at an upended Coke bottle. “Zaka was good to me this year. Zaka … you never see him in the city, no.” He laughed with the glee of an ancient child.
Harvest celebration, Napoleon realized. The sidelines were filled with the fruits of the season, offerings to Zaka, patron of crops and farming.
With a rigid thrill of excitation, the air suddenly split with rolling thunder. Three drummers at their rada drums, one man in dreadlocks, another in shades, pounding without mercy to their hands, fingers and flat palms shuddering in blurs of fresh sweat.
Mama Charity broke from the ranks of disciples to take a jug of water, to salute north and south, east and west, then Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Dancing to the entrance of the humfo, then, to spray libations on the ground, and when she danced back she might have been another woman, as nimble as a sprite. She plunged her hand into a sack of cornmeal, let it drizzle to the ground in a thin stream to form the intricate patterns of the gods’ vèvès, curves and crosses and scattered hieroglyphs. A cry arose when she finished, and Napoleon watched as plates and baskets of food were brought forth and placed upon the vèvès in consecration to the gods, then sprinkled with rum to appease godly thirst.
With a renewed burst of drumming, Mama Charity was joined by the hunsis, mostly young women in the white cotton dresses of new initiates, and the master of ceremony, carrying his machete. The chaos of drums, dance, and song was sweet and immortal, and loud, so jarringly loud Napoleon could not think, did not want to, with room left only for feeling, but the feeling was total.
The feeding of the loa continued, knives and machete opening the throats of animal offerings … first the fowl, then a young goat. He knew the divine was upon them; no terror in these beasts, even at the scent of spilled blood and death throes. They welcomed the blade with placidity even as the drums rolled with deepened frenzy, animal eyes beholding such mysteries as men and women could never clearly see, and willingly they gave themselves to the throats of gods.
The drums, the drums … like the rumble of an earth before men, before women, before trees and grass and beasts, a virgin earth known only to spirit and serpent twining from the stars…
And he was there, in their midst, Damballah-Wèdo, god of creation come down from the waters of heaven to take up residence in the body of a woman who clutched into ferocious spasms, then fell to the dirt to writhe in serpentine undulation, and eat of the fruit upon his vèvè, and take his due. Zaka was next to arrive, choosing an older man as deliberately as one might pluck a single grape from the bunch, dashing him to the ground in shuddering violence, only to raise him up moments later with new face, new footsteps, new voice and eyes and persona. Zaka demanded and was given his shirt of faded blue denim, his baggy trousers, his straw hat, and beside Napoleon, the old farmer burst into tears of rapture, hurrying forth to appease the god.
The divine horsemen, these were the gods, who rode their followers as riders mount their horses. The chosen were blessed, for great loa could never ride small horses. And it made sense, this ancient school of worship. Filing into a solemn sepulcher and listening to a robed priest speak of God … of what use was this when you could dance and become his holy vessel?
; The moon rose and the stars shone, while the drums and the singing became the river into a night beyond time. They were the thunder heard at the dawn of creation, and summoned anew for re-creation. New hearts, new souls, new minds … available to all. Here was power, Napoleon knew, and here was hope, and Mama Charity had been right: He had been robbed of something precious.
It came with the sudden fury of lightning that would not abate: the divine, come to mount him, and his choice in the matter was even less than that of a child’s before a wise parent. He was chosen, some god would have its way, and his palate was rich with the taste of agonies and raptures.
Standing, then, upon borrowed legs, one tottering step forward, another, and as he pitched into the fray, the worshipers made room. He doubled up on the ground in convulsive fury. Hurricane roar of Caribbean winds, hot smell of sultry fields and the sweat of Africa. Back bowed but unbroken, striped raw by the lash, and above all was the pride and pernicious rage.
Hands upon him — he had no right arm, but it scarcely seemed to matter — he was restrained by a circle of women and men with quicker wits than he. Then he could see nothing but the inside of his own head. They stripped him of his shoes, and as he bucked in the mass embrace, Mama Charity was there, leaning in with the asson, a rattle made of a gourd and filled with colored stones and the vertebrae of a rattlesnake, and she shook it about his head, the sound soothing to the god who called him home…
While the drums drifted, insistent, faraway, like voices calling from another land. Until he could stand on his own, with no need of helping hands. Standing, as it were, by divine mandate.
It had been his all along.
Sunday morning found him in a bed that smelled of disuse. Napoleon focused first on the ceiling, off white and webbed with tiny plaster cracks. Down, then, along old wallpaper, patterned with small yellow flowers, and at last he came to the window. Two floors down, Lake Pontchartrain became the horizon, giving birth to chilly mists, silent ripples.
