by Ray Celestin
Occasionally he came across a shack, set back from the path, solitary and scrabbled together from discarded wood, sheets of tin and reclaimed advertising signs. The effect made the buildings look like scrap-book collages, with multi-colored advertising logos and slogans cut up and woven haphazardly into the walls. Some of the shacks were still lived in, others abandoned. The swamps were home to a shifting population of disparate, disenfranchised people, mainly small communities of Negroes or Cajuns, who lived in shanty villages and fished the waterways, or trapped animals for their fur. When Luca happened to pass them, they stared at him with suspicious, unwelcoming eyes.
As he journeyed he wondered why a voodou priestess was living among the chaos of the mangroves, and not in some gaudy consulting room on Canal Street. The time of the priestesses had long since passed, their halcyon days having been in the middle of the previous century, when the great and good of New Orleans consulted them on all manner of problems. The priestesses, dressed in colorful tignons and flowing robes, conjured spells for society ladies in Haitian or Congolese, or prepared ointments and potions, or divined the future through the casting of chicken bones, or contacted the spirits of the dead in ghoulish séances. The whites paid them handsomely and held them in such high esteem that the most famous priestesses were regular attendees at society functions, at a time when other colored people were treated no better than cattle.
But the customers didn’t realize the industry was a sham, built on a network of messengers and connections. The colored servants of the rich would collect information about the goings-on in their employers’ households and sell it to whichever priestess their masters were consulting. When the clients arrived for a consultation the priestesses knew, as if by magic, all their intimacies. The pantomime the priestesses performed – a mix of the occult, Catholicism and African magic – held its charm for well over a century, but eventually the priestesses fell from grace. Their presence ebbed, from the gilded ballrooms of New Orleans to the cheap apartments of Canal Street, and now, it seemed, even all the way to swamps outside of town.
Presently Luca came to a group of shacks and cabins on the edge of a small lake hemmed in by trees and bushes. He checked the directions again and guessed he was at his destination. The lake emitted a stagnant humidity and strange animal calls rose up from the mangroves on its far side. Luca put the paper back in his pocket and was trudging along the dirt track that connected the shacks when he heard a girl’s scream tear through the sky. He dashed along the path until he came to the source of the scream, a cabin on the near side of the lake, and swung open the door.
In the corner of the single room, an overweight colored woman in a blue smock sat in a chair, crying into a handkerchief. On a table in the middle of the space sat a teenage colored girl, her legs spread apart, and kneeling in front of her was a Creole woman tending to the girl’s crotch – sewing up some kind of wound while the girl yelped and writhed in pain. Blood sullied the girl’s skirt and dripped down the edges of the table, pooling on the warped floorboards below.
When Luca opened the door the three women turned to look at him, and instantly turned back to the matter in hand. The Creole woman spoke to the girl, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, in smooth, French-accented tones, and the girl wailed and clenched her hands to the side of the table. The Creole woman brought a thread up from the girl’s crotch and broke it off, carefully knotting it a few times.
‘All done now. Just need to clean you up,’ she said, in a warm, coaxing voice, then she stood and stared at Luca.
‘Wait outside,’ she said dismissively, taking a bucket and cloth from the kitchen counter and returning to the girl.
Luca sat on the steps outside the cabin for a half-hour or so, smoking cigarettes while he waited. Around the building was a yard of sorts, delineated by a half-collapsed wire fence, inside of which a handful of underfed chickens strutted around, pecking food from the grasses and weeds. There were a couple of barrels of rainwater in one corner of the yard and a smoke pit in the other. Luca noticed two basil plants placed either side of the front door, one male, one female – an old slave superstition to ward off bad spirits.
Beyond the yard was the desolate lake on whose opposite bank, amid the mangroves, stood a few other, lonely shacks, and beyond them, the bayou. When the wind whistled through the mangroves a perturbing whine rose into the air, soared into a crescendo, then died down again to nothingness. Luca became aware of a lyrical quality to the noise, and he wondered if what he was hearing was the wind, or the call of some unknown creature, or if the noise was the sound of the mangrove itself, lamenting its own mournful existence.
His thoughts were interrupted by the door opening. The girl limped out, resting one hand on the older woman’s shoulder, and gripping a roughly-hewn crutch with the other. They gave Luca strange, embarrassed looks as they hobbled past him and down the steps. They made their way along the dirt track, their progress slow, and Luca wondered if he should offer to help. But he was unsure if he could help, or even if they wanted his assistance, so he did nothing but tip his hat at them and hope they didn’t have far to travel.
He realized the Creole woman was standing behind him, also watching the pair depart. Seeing her up close, Luca noticed she was only a little younger than him, and she was unusually beautiful. Burnt almond skin and high cheekbones and a fragile depth to her eyes. Her hair was pulled back from her face and was onyx-black except for a few gray strands at her temples. Luca peered at her a moment, and she met his gaze with an open, forthright look.
‘What happened to her?’ Luca asked, gesturing towards the retreating figures. The Creole woman frowned at him, as if she didn’t believe his interest was genuine, then she nodded towards the dirt track.
‘She got pregnant. Her mama took her to a back-room quack to get rid of it. Same old story,’ she said, her accent a lilting mix of French and diphthong-rich New Orleans. ‘The quack took her money and got rid of the baby, but he pretty much destroyed her womb. She would’ve bled to death if she hadn’t come to me.’
Luca frowned, then returned his gaze to the track to look at the forlorn mother and daughter once more, but they had already disappeared from view.
‘Is she gonna be OK?’ he asked.
The Creole woman shrugged.
‘She’ll live. That’s the main thing,’ she said. ‘But she don’t ever have to worry about getting pregnant again.’
She stepped forward and sat on the porch next to Luca, and Luca noticed the fragrance of rosewater on her skin, the scent of coconut oil in her hair. He realized he hadn’t been this close to a woman since before Angola, and something about her closeness, her scent, made his freedom seem more real.
He smiled and offered her a cigarette, and she accepted. As Luca leaned over to light it for her, he noticed the bloodstains on her arms and dress.
‘My name’s Simone,’ she said after thanking him and taking a deep draw of smoke.
‘Luca,’ he responded, shaking the flame from the lucifer in his fingers.
‘Italian?’ she asked with a frown, and Luca nodded.
She looked at him for a moment and Luca got the feeling she was weighing him up. Then she turned from him and grabbed a bucket of water that was sitting on the porch. With the cigarette clenched between her teeth, she rolled up her sleeves and washed the blood from her arms.
‘What can I do for you?’ she asked, her tone suddenly cold and distant.
‘I heard you’re a voodouienne,’ said Luca, feeling a little foolish.
‘And who’ve you been talking to to hear that?’ she asked.
Luca shrugged. ‘A friend of mine in the city,’ he said.
She stared at him again, the same far-off, guarded look. Then she smiled to herself and Luca got the feeling she was mocking him in some elaborate, personal way.
‘I’m not a priestess,’ she said, ‘but if you tell me what your problem is, I’ll tell you if I can help.’
Luca tried to
judge the best way to approach her. He’d composed a line of inquiry on the journey there, a convoluted story that the average person might buy, but now he wasn’t sure it would work on her.
‘If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t help you.’ She took her hands out of the bucket and dried them on the apron around her waist.
‘What’s the matter?’ She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘Need a love potion? Want me to smite someone? If you want that there’s a hundred fake “spiritualists” in town. Just take a walk down Canal Street and stop wasting my time.’
She had her head cocked to one side as she spoke and Luca caught the full glare of her eyes, a deep, distracting hazelnut brown tinted with flecks of green.
‘Is that what people come to you for?’ he asked.
‘The stupid ones. Most just come here when they can’t afford a doctor. Like the girl and her mother,’ she said, nodding towards the dirt track.
Luca paused and wondered why Bechet had sent him here. The woman was some kind of country medic, a midwife and nurse; she probably had as little in common with the priestesses on Canal Street as the average surgeon did.
‘I’m investigating the Axeman murders,’ he said. ‘I’m not a policeman, I’m a private detective, and—’
‘Why are you asking me?’ she interrupted.
Luca shrugged. ‘The killer’s been leaving tarot cards at the crime scenes. French cards. The type I know are used in voodou rituals.’
She stared at him with a half-suspicious, unsettling look that made Luca feel guilty for some reason.
‘You can buy those tarot cards in any dime store in town. I wouldn’t think them important. Voodou’s not demons and blood and witches and crazy people running around with axes. It’s just medicine for poor folks. Slave masters got scared of it and made up a bunch o’ horror stories. How’d you know it’s not a white man, making it look like it was a Creole? Leave a few tarot cards behind to prove the point. Police are quick to blame a colored man for anything.’
Luca nodded. The cards could be a red herring, left by the killer to throw the police off the scent. But they felt like something more to Luca, they felt like a message.
‘These aren’t normal cards,’ he said. ‘They’re expensive. Hand-painted with gold ink, they’re about so big.’ He held up his hands to indicate the size, and Simone stared at him with a frown. ‘You know where someone would get ahold of cards like that?’
‘Sure,’ said Simone. ‘The voodou priestess department store, just off Canal.’
Luca frowned, then turned to look at her and saw a girlish grin had crossed her face. He smiled at her, surprised she had made the joke. She had struck him as a serious type, taciturn and aloof, but the joke had made her seem softer, down-to-earth, easier to warm to. But as quickly as the grin had appeared it was replaced by a mournful look, as if she regretted the intimacy the joke had brought about.
‘I’ve seen cards like that before,’ she said, her tone serious once more. ‘Years ago. I don’t think you can buy ’em in New Orleans. Ones I saw, a Frenchman brought over from Marseilles. I guess you’d could call ’em collectors’ items. Maybe you should be looking for rich Europeans.’
She turned to peer at him and he smiled back at her. Rich Europeans weren’t exactly what he’d had in mind. He nodded and Simone shrugged, and the two of them stared into the distance.
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ Luca said, ‘how’d you get into this?’
Simone smiled, remembering a long-distant memory. ‘My mother,’ she said, her voice heavy with nostalgia.
Luca smiled back at her. ‘My mother used to read the tarocchi back in Italy,’ he said.
She nodded and they lapsed into silence once more. When they’d finished their cigarettes she surprised Luca by asking him if he would like some tea. Luca, who had been expecting her to send him on his way, accepted with a smile, and she made the tea and they sat on the porch drinking it, talking of this and that, both of them happy to watch the day go past. It had been years since Luca had spent time with a woman, but he seemed to regain his charm with her, settling into the easy manner he was known for before his fall. In their conversation he caught a glimpse of what his life might be like when he left New Orleans behind – a life of sitting in the open and talking of nothing, whiling away the time, free from worrying about unatoned-for sins.
As they talked the wind murmured through the trees and whistled through the cracks in the wood-paneled cabin, making it moan and strain.
‘It’s been blowing a gale two days now,’ she said. ‘There’s a storm coming.’
Luca glanced around him – dusk had firmly settled on the handful of buildings scattered around the dirt track, and the sky was gathering dark. Simone stood and made her way into the yard. She grabbed a bail of juniper branches speckled with berries and threw it into the smoke pit. They lit the bail so the smoke from the berries would keep the mosquitoes away and they watched the fire a little, before Simone nodded to the swamps behind the yard.
‘Spook-lights,’ she said, and Luca followed her gaze. In distant patches all across the swamps flickering blue flames glowed and danced about on the ground, methane bubbling up through the earth and catching the light.
‘Jack o’ lanterns, we call them,’ said Luca, ‘or will o’ the wisps.’ They watched the ghostly phosphorescence for a few moments, sweeping across the black ground like some stunted, earthbound northern lights, then they returned to their place on the porch. A few of the bayou-dwellers had lit juniper fires too, and their houses glowed orange in the gloom. One of the neighbors on the far side of the lake picked out a song on a mandolin, minor chords that floated across the water and twisted about the mangroves with the whining of the wind.
Luca felt there was a heaviness to the backwaters, a mournful quality, as if they were on the edge of something more than just the bayou; the place felt deathly and hellish.
‘You’re not gonna get back to New Orleans before night,’ Simone said, turning to peer at him with a smile, the orange of the juniper fires flickering in her eyes.
REPORT OF HOMICIDE
Department of Police
First Precinct, New Orleans
Sat. April 12th 1919
Name of Person Killed:
Unknown
Residence:
Unknown
Business:
Unknown
Name of accused:
Unknown
Residence:
Unknown
Business:
Unknown
Location of homicide:
Unknown
Day, date, hour committed:
bet. Thu. April 10th & Fri. April 11th
(Coroner’s Clerk initial estimate,
see below)
By whom reported:
Harry Majest (colored),
1827 Chippewa Street
To whom reported:
Corporal Bernard Yeager
Time reported:
11 o’clock A.M. Sat. April 12th
If arrested, by whom:
Still At Large
Where arrested:
N/A
If escaped, in what manner:
N/A
Witnesses:
Harry Majest (colored),
# 1827 Chippewa Street
Jonas Mouney (colored),
# 1232 Perdido Street
Detailed Report
Capt. Paul Coman reports that at 11 o’clock this A.M. Wed. 9th April, Harry Majest (Negro), residing at # 1827 Chippewa Street and a man-of-all-work in the employ of the Audubon Zoo came to this station and informed Corporal Bernard Yeagar that a body had been discovered in Audubon Park. Corporal Yeager and Patrolman James A. Burns immediately proceeded to the above place in the Precinct Wagon and on arrival there discovered the body, partially buried in the center of a clump of oaks in a secluded section to the south of the park.
With the help of Mr Majest and another worker at the Zoo (see attached witne
ss reports, Majest H. #1-2698-1919, Mouney J. #1-2699-1919), Corporal Yeager and Patrolman Burns successfully unearthed the body. They thereupon noticed two bullet wounds in the victim’s forehead, roughly an inch apart, an inch and a half above the right eyebrow. Also extensive lacerations and bruising around the face and rear cranium. The victim’s hands were tied together behind him with twine.
As of writing of this report the body is yet to be identified. Cursory Bertillon statistics reported at scene by Corporal Yeagar: male, Caucasian, mid 20s, crop-cut red hair, blue eyes, no distinguishing marks. For a full description, see attached, Initial Coroner’s Report, Hunter J. # c-8733-1919.
Corporal Yeagar notified by telephone Your Office at 12.55 P.M., Patrolman Peter Styles, and also the Coroner’s office, Clerk John Gazave. Whereupon Mr John Hunter, Clerk to the Coroner’s Office, arrived up on the scene circa 1.35 P.M.
By order of Mr Hunter the body was removed to the Morgue at the Charity Hospital in the First Precinct Patrol Wagon, in charge, Driver William Godfrey and Patrolman Peter Styles.
Mr Hunter’s initial report (see attached, ibid.) was that judging from the levels of decomposition, the man had been killed no more than two days previously, and had been buried immediately upon death.
Victim’s clothes (one brown tweed sports jacket, white cotton shirt, black cotton trousers, and undergarments) were removed to the Coroner’s Office. Also possessions: one silk handkerchief (found breast pocket of jacket), one return train ticket to Baton Rouge, 2nd class, purchase date 1st April (found left jacket pocket).
