Now Let's Talk of Graves

by Sarah Shankman

  “But Leander talked like he knew her. Not on the TV, but in person.”

  “Anybody ’round here can reach right out and touch her, they want to go over to her church. I think she calls it a tabernacle. It’s right on the edge of the Quarter, over on North Rampart almost to Esplanade.”

  “She preaches every day?”

  “They broadcast her show live, from right there, every afternoon people got money in their pockets think it’s gonna buy ’em a seat in God’s balcony. Ma Elise and Ida have been. They said it was some show.”

  “I guess it’s a hell of a lot easier than getting a chair upstairs at the Comus ball.”

  “See? You’ve already figured out the appeal of a lady like Nadine in a city snobby as this one. Preaching about an equal opportunity Jesus. That and the pies—well, you’ll see.”

  “Did you say pies?”

  “Listen, I got to get back to work here. Get out there on the street, girl. Earn that fee.”

  “Sit on it, Kitty.”

  “Thank you ever so much, sweetheart.” An imaginary cigar waggled in her voice.

  Kitty’s Groucho routine had always made Sam laugh. “By the way, Kit,” she said, signing off. “It’s impolite to keep an old man waiting. Even if he is a slimebag. You ought to return old Cole Leander’s call. He’s got something real interesting to say.”

  Talking to G.T. on the phone, Sam could hear the blap blap blap of the ambulance’s siren in the background.

  G.T. was dropping somebody off at Charity. She said it ought to be the last run of her shift. Then she’d have Ark drop her at the St. Louis Street police station, on the rear boundary of the Quarter. It was the safest place in the neighborhood, she said, and there was something near there she wanted to show Sam.

  Did Sam think she could find it? She’d meet her out front. Oh, and bring seven dimes, said G.T.

  *

  “Man couldn’t find his own butt with both hands, UPS delivered it to him,” Detective Blackstone was saying to his partner, Shea, standing out on the steps of the St. Louis station at shift change. They were talking about their captain, Perkins, who they both thought was a fool. On a good day.

  “Uh-oh,” said Shea, watching the ambulance pull into the parking lot. Then back up, turn around. “They done come for you, ’Stone. I thought I been smelling something the past three or four days. Reckon you been brain dead at least that long, that Black Jack got ahold of you.”

  “Yeah,” his partner answered. “You gone think something else got ahold of you in a minute here. You see who that is? General Taylor Johnson, what hauled Church Lee to the emergency. Gonna want a full report, wanta know how come we been dragging ass on that thing.”

  “Yeah. Well, just tell her the truth, ’Stone. A, that it ain’t none of her cute little business. And B, we’re stupid, no count, don’t know what a whole lot of nines is.”

  “Don’t have to tell her nothing. That woman, she just closes her eyes, she sees it.”

  “Yeah. Well, let’s give her our whole caseload and see if she can whomp it. Then you and me can tie up the loose ends, haul our fat asses into Earline’s old man’s boat, head on out to Grand Isle do some fishing. Weather’s too nice us to be hanging around this city busting heads.”

  “I hear that.”

  Just about then G.T. popped up to the bottom step with her neat little feet laced into a pair of black Reeboks. She was already out of her whites, back into her workshirt and jeans, her regulation street clothes. In her left hand she was carrying a couple of white carnations. She said, “How y’all doin’?”

  “Fine. Fine,” answered Shea. “You come over here to give us those flowers or bust our chops?”

  “Just using your steps to meet the lady’s gonna do that little thing for me.”

  “Uh-huh.” Blackstone gave Shea the big wink. “And who’s that gonna be? Superwoman?”

  “Marie LaVeau, more likely.” Shea laughed. “Ain’t that the name of that old voodoo queen? One y’all conjure up in your meetings?” He punched Blackstone in the arm. “When y’all stabbing chickens?”

  “That’s your business.” G.T. smiled a pretty smile at them. “Stabbings. Beatings. Killings.”

  “You get the feeling Miz Johnson here ain’t impressed with us?” said Blackstone, giving Shea a wide-eyed look.

  “I think she—” Then something else caught Shea’s attention. “Lordy, would you look at that? Who you think that is, son?”

  “I don’t know, but I have the feeling she’s headed over here. Probably needs our help in the worst way.” Blackstone was tugging on his belt, hoisting his trousers up.

  G.T. was already down the steps. Bye-bye, she waved. Then she turned and flipped the words back over her shoulder. “Pretty woman’s name is Sam Adams. She’s gonna show you boys up something terrible on this Church Lee business. You better get moving, you planning on saving face.”

  Shea looked at Blackstone. Blackstone looked at Shea. They shook their heads and laughed. “No way, lady. No way.”

  Fourteen

  SAM AND G.T. were walking uptown on North Rampart toward Our Lady of St. Guadalupe. Just beyond the church were the Iberville projects, built on the ruins of the legendary Storyville. That once-infamous red-light district had worn a gay, grinning face above a pestilential underbelly. In the present-day grim and deadly projects, what you saw was what you got. This was a neighborhood the guidebooks warned visitors away from.

  Sam knew that. “Wait, where are we going?”

  G.T. answered. “For a consult.”

  Sam put her hand on G.T.’s ann. “Whoa, let’s stop right here.” She didn’t even know this young woman. Sure, there was her reputation as a voodoo queen, but did magic make her impervious to mugging, rape? And would whatever Invisible Protective Shield enveloped her work for Sam too? “A consult with whom? Where? About what?”

  As they stopped on the front steps of Our Lady, Sam took a closer look at G.T. She had seen her only that one time, the night Church was killed, and that was in the rain and the dark.

  General Taylor Johnson was in her early twenties, of medium height, lean, lithe, and light-skinned. Her brown eyes were almost golden. Her long, reddish-brown hair was plaited in little braids laced with bright beads that clicked when she walked. All in all, she looked more like a cute college student with a pert nose and an easy smile than a voodoo queen—though Sam wasn’t really sure what one of those looked like.

  “What do you mean, a consult?” Sam asked.

  “I thought we’d go talk with Mam’zelle.” Then G.T. pointed behind the church to the gates of St. Louis Cemetery No.1. Behind it rose a city of white marble tombs.

  “Mam’zelle’s here? Mam’zelle who?”

  “Mam’zelle Marie LaVeau.”

  The famous voodoo queen. But wasn’t she dead? Of course she was. Otherwise they wouldn’t be calling on her here.

  “Now, why would we want to do that?” Sam asked. “Listen, I was going to call you to talk about Church Lee. We can do that in a coffeeshop.”

  “Yes. But it might help a lot if we visited Mam’zelle first.” G.T. smiled; her strong white teeth looked like little tombstones themselves. “Look, I knew why you wanted to talk with me. Ida told me; besides, why wouldn’t you? I was there when it happened, right beside you. I know all about the insurance business, and I’m happy to help you any way I can. But you have to respect where I’m coming from.” She waved a hand toward the cemetery.

  Sam nodded. Maybe. “Go on.”

  “You probably think I’m nuts, wanting to do this before we start, but that’s ’cause you’re not from New Orleans. Most people ’round here have no problem with folks practicing the ancient arts. It’s part of our religion. Natural as breathing. It helps us get what we need and what we want.”

  Sam smiled skeptically. She’d lived in California. She’d known people who bayed at the moon, called themselves witches, did all manner of the bizarre. But none of them had ever practiced voodoo. Besid
es, this young woman looked so normal. She told G.T. that.

  G.T. laughed. “I am normal. What d’you think—I’m gonna cut your gizzard out? Set you on fire? Listen, I’m a college student—straight as they come.”

  Well, Sam had called that right.

  “And a trained emergency medical technician. In a couple of years I’m going to medical school. Nothing crazy about that, right? All I’m asking you to do here is step inside the cemetery with me and ask Mam’zelle for a blessing to help us with this thing with Church. She’s closer to him than we are, you know, since he’s passed over.”

  Well, she did have a point there, if you believed in the hereafter. “Let’s sit down on the steps here,” Sam said, “and you tell me all about Mam’zelle.”

  They sat, and G.T. started: “She was a powerful woman in the same way women, especially black women, have always been powerful.” Her smile was wry. “Manipulating, hiding, slipping, and sliding.”

  Then she leaned back and spun out the tale. Marie LaVeau was a free mulatto born in New Orleans around 1800. A hairdresser, and a surrogate mother for many quadroon (one-quarter black) women, she arranged for their common-law (for there was no other kind) marriages to white men through le placage, a tradition in which a woman of color was courted by a wealthy white suitor, usually after having met at a quadroon ball. Through a surrogate such as Marie LaVeau, the white paramour would meet the woman’s parents, agree to buy her a house and to settle a certain amount of money on each of their issue.

  Thus Mam’zelle had entree to the rich and powerful white men of the city whom she manipulated with gossip collected from their servants—and from her own psychic abilities. The house she owned on St. Ann was given to her by the father of a young white man whom she saved from the law with a gris-gris—a charm.

  The location of the house—where Ida lived now—right at the foot of Congo Square, now Beauregard Square, part of Louis Armstrong Park, and directly in front of the Municipal Auditorium where the Carnival balls were held—was convenient for a voudou queen.

  V-o-u-d-o-u, said G.T., was the proper spelling of that word. Then she pointed down the street. They could see the auditorium, the square, the places she was talking about.

  To placate whites who were suspicious of voudou, Marie ordered public dances performed in the square every week. Whites thought them magic, but actually they were pleasure dances, Dahomey mating dances, handkerchief dances, conducted to the drumming of a donkey’s shinbone.

  Mam’zelle invited the police to these bogus entertainments. When the curfew cannon was fired at nine o’clock, the slaves returned to their quarters behind their masters’ houses, but the free woman Mam’zelle took her wealthy white clients home to serve them drinks and take their money for powerful charms.

  Her compassion was legendary. She tended victims of the yellow fever that plagued the city in the 1850s. Her house became a refuge for orphans and women in distress. And, through her contacts with the rich and powerful, she frequently intervened between the courts and the black community.

  “Marie the Sainted” they called her for her work with prisoners. She visited those condemned to death, building an altar, praying with them, giving them gumbo laced with painkilling hallucinogens.

  Legend has it that when Mam’zelle grew old and tired, she stepped into a cabin on Bayou St. John and emerged the next morning as a young woman who was known as Marie II, her daughter. After her there may have been a Marie III.

  “What is for sure,” said G.T., “is that her practices have been handed down through generations of women and are still alive and well.”

  “In you?”

  “And in others.”

  Sam considered. Maybe it was mumbo jumbo. Maybe it wasn’t. But what could it hurt to go pay their respects, unless muggers got them in the cemetery— “Okay, but everybody’s told me to stay out of these places.”

  “When you’re alone, that’s for sure.” G.T. pointed a warning finger in her face. “But with me you’re safe.” Then apparently judging that her audience was warmed up, she handed Sam one of the flowers she’d been carrying. “Ready?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Now just watch me and do what I do, and stay close beside me.”

  So Sam followed G.T. the few steps to the cemetery gate, where the young woman kissed her white carnation, gave it a long look, and tucked it inside her bra. She motioned to Sam to do the same. Then G.T. knocked three times on the gate with her left hand, scraped the soles of her sneakers on the sidewalk, and called in a low voice: “St. Peter, St. Peter, please let me in.”

  Sam repeated the words. She was starting to get into this thing. Besides, if she ever wrote a piece on New Orleans, she’d be hell on local color.

  G.T. paused and seemed to sniff the air, then smiled. “I feel a tingling in my spine, a glowing in my belly. That means it’s okay.”

  “Great,” said Sam. “What next?”

  G.T., motioning her to follow, stepped over the threshold. She stopped on the other side and then turned left, walking loose-hipped down the aisle to the first right turning.

  There she stopped. “This is it.” She pointed. “Mam’zelle’s tomb.”

  The mass of dirty white marble looked no different from its neighbors except for the hundreds of X’s inscribed on every surface.

  “Lots of people been here before,” said G.T., then reached inside her shirt, pulled out the carnation, kissed it again, and dropped it on the ground in front of the grave.

  Sam played Follow the Leader.

  “Mam’zelle, it’s General Taylor Johnson,” said G.T. in a loud voice, then gave Sam the nod.

  “And Samantha Adams.” Sam felt only a little foolish, talking to a grave.

  “We’re here because we need your help and your guidance. We want to know what happened to Church Lee. We want to know who ran him down.” Then G.T. stepped back a bit and motioned to Sam to speak.

  She didn’t know what else to add. “What should I tell her?” she whispered.

  G.T. gave her a sharp look. “Why you’re here.”

  To humor you, sweetie, she thought. Then—okay. Why not? You get one wish from the voudou queen. Make it good. Then to her surprise she heard her mouth saying, “I need your help with Zoe Lee.”

  G.T. nodded approvingly. “Follow me.” She began walking around the tomb, stopping every few feet. “It’s called Making the Four Corners.” Then, with her back to the tomb, she raised her arms to the sky, lowered them back to the earth. Her lips were moving. “Say a prayer,” she ordered.

  Sam wasn’t real big on religion, but one petition was familiar to her: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  That said, she followed G.T. back to the front of the tomb, where they pressed their foreheads against it. G.T. reached into her jeans pocket, fished out her seven dimes, and dropped them in the basket hooked to the front of the tomb. Sam did the same with the coins G.T. had asked her to bring. Then G.T. picked up a piece of red brick lying on the ground and used it to add her X to the thousands on the tomb. A big X. Sam’s was even bigger.

  “Thank you,” G.T. said to Mam’zelle.

  “Thank you,” echoed Sam.

  “Now wait. Shhhhh. Listen.”

  Sam didn’t hear a thing.

  “Listen harder.”

  She closed her eyes again. And then the message came. It was the one she’d heard a thousand times before. One word, the hardest one for her.

  Patience.

  When she opened her eyes, G.T. was reaching out to her. They left the cemetery hand in hand, pausing to knock again at the gate with their right hands, scrape their feet once more. “Please let us out, St. Peter,” they chorused. Then they stepped up over the threshold, stepped big, like little girls playing a game.

  Out on the sidewalk G.T. asked, “Do you feel sad?”

  “No.”

  “Scared?”

&nb
sp; “Not anymore.”

  “Good, then we don’t have to back up and do this again. Let’s go have ourselves a drink over at the Napoleon House instead and start figuring this thing out.”

  *

  Pavarotti was belting out an aria from Madame Butterfly over the speakers above the ancient bar at the corner of Chartres and Toulouse. The Napoleon House was the kind of place where they replastered every hundred years whether they needed to or not. It sported bare light bulbs, opera posters, checkerboard tile floors, and had been one of Sam’s favorites when she was drinking. Sober, she still liked it.

  They sat at a dark wooden table beside an open arched door. G.T. sipped a beer in the late afternoon light. For a while the music was enough, and they were quiet.

  Sam gazed out at the tourists draped with cameras out on Toulouse. She’d bet none of them had been taken to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 for a blessing from Mam’zelle by a New Age voudou queen.

  Ah, New Orleans, New Orleans, she sighed to herself. She truly loved this city, one that casual visitors never got to see, though they thought they did. They flew back home with their Mardi Gras beads, T-shirts, Hurricane glasses, a little smug about their hangovers, proud that they’d let it all hang out on Bourbon Street, done a little too much partying in the town that care forgot.

  That time forgot was more like it. That’s what the city was all about. Time. Blistering heat. Water.

  The oil companies could come and build all the bronze glass towers they wanted to on Poydras Street, pretending that progress had come to town in a big way.

  But progress had already failed. The bottom had fallen out of the oil market, and the Poydras towers were mostly empty like many other buildings in the city. Empty except for ghosts.

  No, New Orleans wasn’t what the tourists thought, nor was it about business. New Orleans was a state of mind—slow, Mediterranean, indolent, easy. It was stuck in the fifties. The 1850s Uptown in the Garden District. The 1950s Downtown.