The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  “But the ex-slaves have stayed.”

  “And the owners have never given up ownership of the land, expressed guilt or remorse. Far as I’m concerned, they’re beyond hope. Criminals.”

  “But you can help the living, the survivors. You’ll see. The plantation descendants are still suffering. They’re diseased and dying. Maybe John L’Overture discovered some connection—”

  “Aaron said no.”

  Marie and K-Paul were startled.

  Deet had slipped behind them, looking like a haint, his face pulled thin, his shoulders slumped.

  “Aaron said he didn’t want you touching Nana’s things. Told me to tell you to go.”

  “It’s okay, Deet. I understand.”

  Deet reached into his pocket. “When Nana took ill, Aaron changed. Even now he went to town to go drink. Said you disturbed his peace here.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Deet looked about to cry.

  “But Aaron doesn’t have any peace. None of us do.” He pulled his hand from his pocket, and opened his fist. “Brought you this, Maman Marie. Will this help?”

  The water goddess. Deep inside herself, Marie felt recognition. The statue was the same spirit she’d seen in the Mississippi. Teal breasts, snakes entwined in her hair and neck. Except, in the Mississippi, the apparition had been bolder, three-dimensional. Water sparkled like diamonds.

  “You can have the statue. I think Nana would’ve wanted you to have it. It was her favorite spirit.”

  “Thank you, Deet.”

  She couldn’t help wondering why Deet hadn’t brought both statues. Nana had had two gods on her small altar: the mermaid and the androgynous spirit. If the mermaid goddess was Nana’s favorite, why honor the other? Altars usually favored one god, yet Nana had set her two spirits side by side.

  Somber, Deet stared at the goddess in Marie’s hand.

  “Thank you,” she repeated.

  Deet had lost his chance for escape and glory. He’d lost his nana and was losing his brother, too. Still, he was trying to help her, trying to help because he knew Nana would have wanted him to, because it was the right thing to do.

  Impulsively, she hugged him.

  Deet’s hands gripped her hard, as if he was using her body to hold himself upright.

  “You’re a good man,” she said.

  He shook his head, swallowing, his Adam’s apple shifting up and down. “Water was always important to Nana. Said Mami Wata—”

  “Mami Wata? Are you sure that’s the name?” Puzzle it out.

  “Nana said she was one of the old ones.”

  Marie thought hard. Three years ago, they’d been in DuLac’s altar room. He’d taken a frayed book off his shelf. Inside were beautiful images of water goddesses. Some were line drawings, others were vividly painted. The book had discussed religion even before it was called religion.

  DuLac had always insisted that she read with him, study old texts. Now she understood; he’d been preparing her for this moment. When voodoo wasn’t typical, but atypical.

  For the first time since his death, she saw DuLac. Not as a ghost, but as a vision.

  DuLac was drawing three wavy lines, creating the symbol Marie-Claire had finger painted. He pushed the book toward her. Pages fluttered, sifting, shifting, through images of mermaids.

  “I’ve seen this goddess before.”

  “Nana said when Africans were made slaves, this spirit, Wata, followed them across the ocean.”

  Marie turned the sculpture in her hand. Maybe a slave had molded it in the Americas? Or else clung to it during the horrific Middle Passage.

  “Marie?” murmured K-Paul.

  “Wait. Something’s happening. I feel—”

  Both Deet and K-Paul quieted.

  She closed her eyes, squeezing the statue tight.

  Inside her head, DuLac whispered, “Africans worshipped a multitude of water goddesses. First and foremost was Wata. All water spirits are aspects of Wata. Like Lucy is to flesh, so Mami Wata is to spirit.”

  She saw El. Mimi L’Overture. Her ancestor Marie Laveau. A trinity of women, three spirits standing, arms clasped, beside the water.

  Marie Laveau, her voice a rich timbre, spoke: “Women hand sight down through the generations. Mother to daughter.” El and Mimi echoed her.

  Together, the three chanted: “Women hand sight down through the generations.” The sound cascaded like a healing balm.

  She understood. It was her time.

  DuLac’s disembodied voice, crooned, “You don’t need me. You’ve never needed me. Or any man.”

  “You can do this,” El’s voice reverberated. “You can do this.”

  Marie exhaled. “Water goddesses,” she said, opening her eyes.

  Both men were staring at her—K-Paul, concerned; Deet, worshipful.

  Water goddesses appeared in every culture. The divine feminine.

  She stroked the statue’s body, from her breasts to her tail. “European mermaids were more like sirens, sensual distractions, singing, sucking life from men. Most likely they were a myth, a manifestation of sailors’ fears of feminine power.

  “Mami Wata,” she said, “was far more powerful than any mermaid or siren. Sensual, passionate, she was an ancient healer, encouraging prosperity and fertility.”

  “Doesn’t New Orleans have a river goddess? Yemaya,” asked K-Paul, “isn’t she it? That voodoo tour mentioned her.” K-Paul ducked his head sheepishly.

  “The tour spoke true. Maybe it was Yemaya that I saw in the Mississippi. Maybe it was Wata.”

  “Why not both?”

  “Yes, why not,” she answered. “There’s always been syncretism. A melding of variants of African-derived images and faith. More confusing, there have been changing names as slaves learned differing New World languages. Wata has become Yemaya in New Orleans. Both goddesses signify motherhood, pregnancy, and the rejuvenating power of water.

  “But even in New Orleans, Yemaya is sometimes called Yemalla. In the Yoruba tradition, she would’ve been called ‘Yemaja.’ Elsewhere in Africa, she’d be known as ‘Yemoja.’ In Brazil, she’d be ‘Yemanjá; in Haiti, ‘La Sirene.’ The fluidity of names goes on. But the image of water goddesses as healers, supporters of love and the fruits of love, remains sacrosanct. Water goddesses own all the waters: oceans, rivers, streams. Each of these goddesses, but especially Mami Wata, the oldest, is understood as the ‘mother of all living things.’

  “What if Wata has been restored? Not figuratively, but literally. What if Nana’s worship reaffirmed, reenergized her in the New World? It makes sense that slaves transported by water would embrace, hold tight to Mami Wata.”

  “Ever since we were boys,” said Deet, “Nana told us tales of Wata. Said women took after Wata, birthing babies in rich, nourishing water. Said Wata healed by giving, never by taking away.”

  Deet wasn’t making sense. How did one heal by taking away? Folk healers, like doctors, gave—medicinal herbs and soothing, palliative care.

  “Nana said water was all about love, needing to journey, to go where a woman needed to go.”

  “Water needs to go where she wants to go.” That’s what the spirit in the hospital had said. But it still didn’t make sense. How did it connect to folk healing? Medicine?

  If she understood K-Paul and Riley, in drilling waterways, the Corps of Engineers had altered both fresh- and saltwater landscapes. What did that mean? To change the course of water? To force water to go where she didn’t want to go?

  It would be like telling a pregnant woman that her amniotic fluid had to flow upstream; her child couldn’t be nourished and born.

  “Deet, where’s Nana’s grave?”

  “You don’t want to go there. Too sad.”

  “I want to make obeisance,” she said. “Thank Nana for her blessings.” She gripped the statue. “Understand why she prayed to Wata. Help me. Please.”

  “You’ll have to take the boat.”

  “I don’t understand.”
/>   “I do,” said K-Paul. “Where, Deet?”

  “Southwest about ten miles. You won’t miss it. Miz Marie, tell Nana I love her.”

  “You tell her. You’ll come tonight to the ceremony.”

  He shook his head.

  “Come. You’ll be needed.” Why did she say that?

  “Hurts,” said Deet simply, explaining his refusal.

  Deet undid the dock slip, and handed Marie into the slim motorboat with K-Paul. The metal boat swayed, and she sat facing K-Paul as he used the rudder to guide the boat from shore.

  “Deet,” she called. “Where’s the second statue? The one Nana kept beside Wata?”

  “Don’t know. Gone. Wasn’t there.” Deet, his hand raised, waved, growing smaller as the boat traveled farther.

  Marie held the figurine, thinking repeatedly, “Mind. Mine. Mind. Mine.” Both could be right. Couldn’t they? She looked at the round eyes of the blunt clay figure.

  Most paintings rendered Wata as supernaturally beautiful, yet this figurine, so old, seemed to contain all its beauty inside the gray clay, behind its’ pin-top eyes.

  The boat bounced over the thin waves, breaking against currents.

  K-Paul was quiet, intently searching for the graveyard. They were pulling farther away from land, motoring into the Gulf’s wide arms. It didn’t make sense. Nana hadn’t been buried at sea.

  Sunburned, K-Paul’s cheeks and nose were red.

  “Land ho,” he shouted.

  “Where?”

  K-Paul pointed. “Oil and water. What did I tell you about land disappearing?”

  She saw a small concrete roof half in and half out of the water. Then another. It was a sinking island of marsh. Maybe an acre, long and wide. Not all the tombs were sunken—several dozen were still upright on the land, but it was only a matter of time.

  “Causeways and erosion separated cemetery land from the mainland. In another few years, maybe sooner if Katrina comes, burying Nana here will be the same as burying her at sea. In sixty-five, Betsey buried New Orleans under seven feet of water. I’ve seen plenty of cemeteries where bodies have floated right out of their tombs.”

  “K-Paul, where does the Mississippi end?”

  His hands sweeping, he said, “This is all of where the Mississippi ends.”

  She saw more specks of land, isolated islands. Lush green, rich earth . . . then trickles, canals, small lakes of water.

  “This here . . . where Riley took us, is all the river’s end. The river’s sediment—silt and sand—builds up, and the river breaks onto the surface, distributing fan-shaped deposits. New land. That’s all the delta is.”

  K-Paul cut the boat’s motor.

  The boat gently smashed into the island, and soil fell away, crumbling, dissolving into the Gulf like brown sugar.

  K-Paul swung his anchor rope like a lasso until it caught on a headstone.

  “No disrespect,” said K-Paul, making the sign of the cross. “Watch your step, Marie.”

  It felt like walking on an unsupported cushion—soft, bouncy, destabilized land. She held the rope, letting it guide her to the headstone’s inscription: DELORES. HOUSE SERVANT. 1858.

  “She must’ve been a beloved slave.” By whom? Fellow slaves? Her master? Or her children?

  “Most bodies were left in mass graves or buried with no signifiers,” answered K-Paul. “Maybe a wooden cross. But that’s it.”

  “So Delores was beloved by her masters?”

  “You bet. Maybe she was a cook, a nanny? Didn’t have a last name. Except DeLaire. She would’ve been Delores DeLaire, after her owners. No idea of her birth date or her age when she died.”

  “I wonder what she died of,” murmured Marie, walking between the graves.

  Class was clear in the cemetery. Some graves were bare or had minimal markers. Others had metal crosses soldered on their headstones. Still others had gates, with metal filigree encircling more modern tombs, raised by cement four feet off the ground.

  “These tombs are like the ones in New Orleans,” she said. “Aboveground.”

  “Makes sense because everything is sinking. The city is below sea level and DeLaire’s slave descendants would’ve seen, storm after storm, land wash away. Like this here. I can’t imagine why the Malveauxs went ahead and buried their grandmother here.”

  “Tradition,” answered Marie. “But maybe something else. Maybe she insisted.” Marie bent down before the freshly painted tomb of Ernestine “Nana” Malveaux. There were blank indented squares with the names Aaron Malveaux and Deet Malveaux and their birth dates, already chiseled in preparation for their deaths. Marie found it chilling.

  “It’ll be decades before the grandsons are buried,” said K-Paul. “I doubt the land, the cemetery, will last that long.”

  “The tomb’s cover isn’t flush.” The slab was slightly off-kilter.

  “I can fix that.”

  “No, let’s take it off. I think there’s something I’m supposed to see.”

  “Grave digger?”

  “Stop it, K-Paul. Just the slab. Okay?”

  The two of them pushed; the gray concrete against concrete screeched like cats. They lowered the slab to the ground.

  “Look.” A cheap pinewood box held Nana. But on the tomb’s cover, hidden on the underside, Mami Wata’s portrait had been etched in stone. A huge snake hung from her neck. Beneath her were three wavy lines, like the lines Marie-Claire had drawn.

  Marie laid her body on the slab. She felt amazing power—creative as well as destructive. She sat back on her knees, grave dust covering her pants and shirt. She didn’t bother to look at K-Paul—he surely thought she was crazy. Instead, eyes closed, she let her fingers study every inch of the slab, left to right, top to bottom. She felt such pain at the bottom-left edge.

  “Something’s here.” She opened her eyes, peering close at uneven cement, a scratched surface. She lay flat on the dirt, her face close to the edge. Everything was compressed into a three-inch space. There were scratches, not random, more like cave etchings. Figures, bent, holding their stomachs. Next, a figure lay prone. In another image, a figure, clearly a woman, laid one hand on the stretched figure; the other hand was raised high, to heaven.

  “It’s telling a story,” said Marie. “A preliterate narrative. See. People are sick. One is near death, I think. And this figure with breasts must represent Nana. Nana is praying—”

  “Or healing.”

  Marie stared, her heart racing. “You’re right. Nana’s trying to heal. One hand toward the gods. No, toward Mami Wata.” Her hand embraced the portrait etched above.

  “What’s this last frame?”

  The Nana figure was on her knees, holding her stomach. Black lines were drawn, depicting vomit, expulsion from her mouth. Figures stood tall around her. A small pool was drawn, colored with charcoal, beneath Nana’s mouth.

  “I don’t understand it. It seems to tell the tale of Nana healing villagers and herself becoming sick.”

  “All true, right?”

  “Yes, the villagers and Nana were both sick. But in this frame, the villagers seem healed. There aren’t any prone figures.” She sat, rubbing her brow, leaving trails of dirt.

  “After Nana was buried, someone came here and drew these images,” she said. “Why? Why underneath the slab? Why is Wata drawn boldly?”

  “And the story small, like some secret?”

  “Exactly.” She stood. “Help me lift this, K-Paul.”

  Arms and backs straining, they lifted the slab, sliding it in place while Marie murmured, “ ’Night, Nana. May Wata bless you and keep you.”

  Circling all sides of her, Marie could see water churning, lapping hungrily at the cemetery island. It was almost as if the waves were pregnant with potential, feeding on earth.

  The horizon was growing bleaker as gray clouds seemed to fly in, striking out blue sky and chasing birds to ground.

  “Some folks are grateful for the levees—especially those surrounding New Orleans, but
I’m not one of them. They choked the river, keeping it from producing.”

  “Her,” said Marie, “kept her, Wata, from producing.” She touched the crumbling earth. “Levees, dams, kept her from creating, from birthing new land.”

  Marie clasped K-Paul’s shoulder. The good-natured Cajun boy had grown sad and bitter. For K-Paul, the environmental struggle was as tragic as the closing of Charity’s hospital services to the poor.

  “In the drawing, the dark pool beneath Nana reminds me of the apparition at the L’Overtures’. Some kind of malevolence, poison.”

  “Used to be called Cancer Alley. Here and about,” murmured K-Paul. “All the time, industrial chemicals, solvents, petroleum by-products “accidentally” spilled where black people lived.”

  “That accounts for why so many DeLaire elders have tumors. Nana was pregnant with multiple tumors.”

  “Funding was supposed to go for clean up and public health clinics.”

  “Didn’t happen around here,” she said, looking about. “No one’s given me a doctor’s name. Not even for Nana. Brenda said a clinic was over fifty miles away. Imagine, in America, having to go over fifty miles for prenatal care.”

  “The fate of the rural poor,” K-Paul said wearily. “I wouldn’t be surprised if much of the settlement money was diverted. Typical for Louisiana. Bribery, back-room politics, public funds becoming private slush funds. Remember Huey Long? Pretend to care for the poor, then rob them, and everyone else, blind. Look how Charity is perennially underfunded.”

  Marie, unsettled by the landscape, sighed.

  “Louisiana, as much as I love it, is a cesspool. Polluting oil, diseased water—both salt and fresh. And New Orleans,” said K-Paul, his voice rising, “ a city beneath sea level, with inadequate landmass, and poorly maintained levees, is a disaster waiting to happen. I love this place. Louisiana. But even I can understand why your boyfriend, Parks, left. I’m more likely to turn out like Riley, unable to leave the dying state’s bedside.”