Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  “Now, I can read their language better than my own. And I know you were born dreaming in your mama’s womb. Your dreams are bound to be the goods. You’re nine now. The time’s just right.

  “So here’s how we’ll work it. You tell me your dreams. I read the numbers. Helen places the bets for us ’cause I don’t like nosy folks knowing how I spend my money. We’ll make a million. We can’t lose.”

  “It won’t work,” said Marie.

  “Sure it’ll work. Listen. I took yesterday’s fifth place number and read it backwards. It told me about a girl sitting on the beach in the late afternoon with the sun and moon both up in the sky. Then the sun and moon exploded and fell into her lap in billions of gold and silver flakes. Tell me: Didn’t you have a dream like that—night before last?”

  Marie thought hard. “No,” she said. “Three nights ago.”

  “I know that,” said Marie Saloppe. “I was just giving you an idea. No, I know those little dreams don’t count. If we’re lucky, they’ll give us the fifth-place number or the right number on the wrong day. No, baby, we need those big ones—the ones that come back and wake you up with your eyes so red I’ve seen you out here rubbing dirt in your face so your friends wouldn’t get curious. Those are the ones to play for the Grand Jackpot.”

  It sounded intriguing. Marie was impressed.

  “Partners,” she said. “Fifty-fifty.”

  The Wheel of Fortune turned five times a day. The fifth-place number came up at noon, the fourth at three, the third at six, the runner-up at nine. When the winning number came up at midnight, Clement “Lucky” Moevius, owner of the Wheel of Fortune Room, went home to bed.

  Though he could easily have hired someone to do it, Clement Moevius spun the wheel himself. He liked to feel it whir beneath his fingers, to see which number came up. Most of all, he liked to watch the players concentrating on the wheel, then howling with joy when they won.

  He knew how they felt. Winning at gambling seemed like a special blessing from God. That was why he’d made the Wheel of Fortune Room look like heaven. The walls and ceiling were an airy pastel blue. The wheel was mounted on a high stage. Behind it a painted backdrop showed a peacock-blue sky dotted with feathery clouds, angels playing trumpets, and coy cherubim holding extraordinary poker hands.

  Five times a day Clement Moevius spun the wheel to observe the gamblers’ pleasure. It was the only pleasure he had left.

  Back in Holland he’d been a gambling prodigy. Professionals advised him that a boy with his talent could make a fortune in America. So he’d gambled his way from New York to New Orleans, where he’d promptly lost his first seven games. He’d quit at eleven and used the last of his savings to renovate an abandoned stable on Tchouploulas Street into the Wheel of Fortune Room.

  At thirty he was rich, secure, almost respectable. He’d paid off the police. The odds were in his favor. There was no more risk—and, he discovered, no more excitement. He began to recall his gambling days with nostalgia. Watching the professionals stake everything on their wits, he felt like an old married man watching young lovers neck on a spring night.

  That was why he’d announced the Grand Jackpot—ten thousand dollars to the lucky winner of five numbers in a row. It was the one game he’d decided to play against himself. Once when Pinhead Helen ha

  Helen had missed the fifth number. But all that week Clement Moevius had again felt that special joy, the blessing of risking everything and winning.

  Like Lucky Moevius, Marie Saloppe loved the thrill and risk of the game. But she had the odds against her.

  The partnership started off well. Marie dreamed about the werewolf and ran to tell Marie Saloppe. “Let’s see,” she murmured. “The wolf’s a five, two for the wings, the man’s a three, the window’s a four, two for your mama and daddy, one for you ...”

  At noon the next day Clement’s bookkeeper handed Helen ten gold pieces and warned her not to spend it all in one place.

  In April Marie dreamed about the bull sacrifice. Marie Saloppe gave her a searching look.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Marie.

  “Nothing,” said Marie Saloppe. “That dream should be good for four numbers at least.”

  That was the time they almost won. Helen came back with forty dollars in her apron. And that was when Marie learned about the joy of winning, the first time she felt she must be living right because fortune was rewarding her with luck. She used her share to buy a new doll and a garish red satin skirt which she couldn’t wear without arousing Delphine’s suspicion. She spent five dollars on three-cent chocolates and ate each one slowly, letting it dissolve in her mouth like a communion wafer.

  Unfortunately she’d spent her last penny by the time she learned about the stupidity of gambling with someone like Marie Saloppe.

  Marie Saloppe saw the game as a test of her magic, of her ability to see the future, to control the wheel by pure strength of mind. When Marie failed to come up with lucky dreams, she gambled anyway, playing her own dreams, Helen’s dreams, numbers based on changes in the weather, the croakings of her pet frog, the drunken, sleepy gibberish of Grandpa Joel.

  Naturally she lost. She lost all the profits from her fritter stand, her root doctoring—lost so much that she had to go on working twenty-four hour days. Sometimes her losses made her bitter, and she took it out on Marie.

  “Where you been?” she’d demand whenever Marie stayed away for more than a day. “I know about children like you, born under that mean old scorpion. They’re full of secrets. I bet you been having big dreams, waking up red-eyed. You been keeping them secret when you know they could win us the jackpot, when you know how I need that money to retire.”

  Marie stared at the ground. It was true—she’d been having those nightmares she couldn’t remember. They couldn’t help Marie Saloppe. Suddenly she was tired of hearing that she was second-sighted, tired of feeling like a freak. Besides, they hadn’t won for two years.

  “I quit,” she said.

  “Why, baby? Don’t you like gambling?”

  “I love it. But I won’t have time. Papa’s sending me to school.”

  Marie Saloppe raised her eyebrows. “How do you like that?”

  Marie thought quickly. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I might not go.”

  “You better go. You better learn everything you can. Take everything you can get ’cause you’ll need it all someday.”

  “I’ll consider it,” said Marie.

  Marie didn’t need to consider it. The whole story was a lie she’d invented on the spot. So that evening at dinner when Victor announced she’d be starting at the Ursuline School in October, she choked on her gumbo. She’d wished it on herself. Her white lie had made it happen.

  Actually Victor had made his decision months before, in reaction to a darker truth: Marie didn’t like him.

  Victor had always prided himself on his lady-luck. He’d never met a girl he couldn’t charm—except Marie. Now her coldness caused him the kind of pain which was easy to confuse with love.

  For the first time he considered Marie’s future. She was only a shade lighter than Delphine—no different from the colored girls at the dances. If she were smart, she’d find a good “protector” like himself. If not, she’d wind up as a hairdresser, a milliner or a cook, frying somebody’s catfish for the rest of her life.

  Victor suspected that his daughter was prouder and wilder than she was smart. So he decided to educate her. The sisters would tame her. They’d teach her how to please a man.

  “Wait till the Nativity Pageant,” said Delphine, remembering her own misery as the only quadroon at the Ursuline School. “They’ll make her play the black Magus every year.”

  “You survived,” said Victor. “And learned those little graces which won my heart.”

  “It wasn’t any convent graces won your heart. Anyway, the sisters won’t accept her. Her mama and daddy are living in sin.”

  “Even the sisters have their price.”

&n
bsp; “She doesn’t need school. I’ve taught her to read and write.”

  “That’s not enough. I want her to learn some culture—art, music, history. I want her to learn where she comes from.”

  “Where do you come from?” shouted Delphine, taking it as a slur on her own bloodlines.

  Victor smiled. “From Adam and Eve,” he said.

  CHAPTER IV

  ON HER FIRST day at school, Marie was appalled by the neat rows of girls at full attention, stiff in their starched uniforms as the soldiers in the Louisiana Purchase Parade. All morning Mother Thafese—a doughty -faced Frenchwoman who’d come over with the Ninth Ursuline Expedition—cateqhized them on the first chapters of Genesis.

  “Who created heaven and earth?” she intoned, staring devoutly at the ceiling as if she could see His hand smoothing the plaster.

  “The Lord of Hosts,” answered the girls in perfect unison.

  “How long did it take the Lord of Hosts to create the heavens and the earth?”

  “Six days.”

  “And on the seventh?”

  “He rested.”

  “Who was the first man?”

  “Adam, the father of us all.”

  “And the first woman?”

  “Eve, the temptress, the mother of sin.”

  By noon Marie was off in a daydream mingling old nightmares with sweet memories of her lost freedom. Burying her head in her arms, she prayed for the black priest to sacrifice Mother Therese, for the werewolf to appear at the classroom window ...

  “Marie Laveau!” Mother Therese’s voice shattered her dream. “School is not the place for sleep! Not only are you wasting your own time and mine and your classmates’—you are also wasting God’s time! That’s not just bad manners. That, my child, is a sin! I want you to come up here right now and apologize io the class. Then I want you to apologize to the Lord of Hosts.”

  Still half-dreaming, Marie stumbled up front. “I wasn’t sleeping,” she announced. “I was thinking. If Jesus is mad about that, He can tell me so Himself.”

  “Listen to the colored girl,” whispered the others. “She’s a blasphemer and a heathen.”

  At that instant the thunderstorm began. The sky turned black. Rain poured down the eaves of the convent roof.

  Of course it was hurricane season. There were storms every day. But this one had started just when Marie requested a sign from God. The whispers grew louder. Mother Therese turned as pale as her wimple. Even Marie’s hands shook as she fiddled with her braids.

  “Hear that?” came Mother Therese’s quavering cry. “Does God have to strike you with lightning before you’ll apologize?”

  “That’s not God,” said Marie. “That’s John the Baptist up there. And I wasn’t asking him.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “John the Baptist is an old drunk,” explained Marie, quoting Marie Saloppe. “God gives him one day a year to rule the world. But John gets drunk and sleeps through it. By the time he wakes up, it’s too late. Whenever he thinks about it for the rest of the year, it makes him so mad he slams the thunder and lightning against the sky.”

  Mother Therese clutched at her heart. “Go home at once,” she said. “Come back tomorrow morning. I am reporting this incident to Father Antoine.”

  “Father Antoine is a saint,” said the ladies of New Orleans. They knew stories to prove it. He’d come from Northern Spain, where the rocky hills bred saints like Louisiana bred mosquitoes. They liked to imagine him as a serious dark-eyed boy healing baby sparrows fallen from his father’s tree. They discussed the vision of St. Peter which called him to the priesthood, the vision of unbaptized savages which summoned him to Louisiana. He gave away his money and lived like a monk. He cured the sick, comforted the needy, worked small miracles. “If anyone’s a saint,” said the ladies, “it’s our Father Antoine.”

  “If Father Antoine’s a saint,” replied their husbands, “they’ve started canonizing gorillas.” Among themselves, though, the men were careful to amend this. “He may look like a gorilla,” they smirked, “but that gorilla’s got connections.”

  Father Antoine had contacts in the Spanish court and secret societies. The bishop of Havana was a lifelong friend. In the confessional he heard the darkest secrets of every rich and powerful Creole in New Orleans.

  These secrets had brought him power, and power had brought him trouble. Rumors accused him of being an agent of the Grand Inquisitor, of building dungeons under the cathedral and stocking them with hot pincers and iron maidens. Governor Miro had exiled him to Spain for five years, but he’d arranged to be ordered back. He was suspected of blackmail and intrigue, of spying for the Spanish king, of wanting to burn half of Louisiana at the stake. His power was complicated, his motives unclear.

  One thing was certain, his enemies agreed: he was too powerful to be trusted.

  Mother Therese trusted Father Antoine completely.

  Had she married a farmer, Mother Therese would have kept his life and his accounts in perfect order. She’d have known all the neighborhood gossip and decided which people weren’t “their kind.” But Mother Therese was married to God. And so at the end of the day she hurried to Father Antoine’s run-down cottage to consult him about her Husband’s will.

  “The Laveau child’s got peculiar ideas about God and His saints,” she said. “Crazy notions which could spread like wildfire. My girls will be ruined forever.”

  “Calm down, Mother Therese,” said Father Antoine. “I’ll give this my personal attention. Senclfttafie to see me in the morning.”

  After she left, Father Antoine knelt on the dirt floor for a brief conversation with God. “Lord,” he said, “what would I have done ten years ago if I’d learned my own goddaughter was a little heathen?”

  Until then Father Antoine had almost forgotten how Delphine had persuaded him to be her infant daughter’s godfather. He’d given Marie an especially warm handshake after her first communion. He smiled at her in church. But she was just one colored girl among thousands—and he had a thousand more important things on his mind.

  Yet now Mother Therese’s report had rekindled an old flame in his heart. It wasn’t his affection for Delphine nor his sympathy for quadroon girls. It wasn’t godfatherly fondness for Marie. It was his passion for converting the godless, exposing the heretic—his first love, the Inquisition.

  All the stories were true. As a young prelate, Father Antoine had been obsessed with the idea of purifying his church. He did come to Louisiana as the Grand Inquisitor’s deputy. He did build dungeons and design sophisticated torture implements. He did ask the governor for a hundred troops to help with the first arrests.

  “I’ve got enough trouble,” said the governor. “Sailors, smugglers, pickpockets—everyone hunting some shady port-city deal. I can’t pay decent people to settle here. And you want me to start an Inquisition?”

  But the governor did send troops. That night ten soldiers personally escorted Father Antoine onto a ship bound for Spain.

  Five years later he returned to New Orleans a differment man. His manners had improved. He was no longer so rigid. He’d traded the crude means of the Inquisition for Jhe gentler techniques of education and persuasion.

  He was anxious to try them out on Marie. Excited by the prospect of saving her soul, Father Antoine felt he was being given one last chance to convert the heathen—in the comfort of his own cottage.

  Answering a little girl’s bold knock, Father Antoine found himself staring at Marie’s shoulder. He raised his gaze to meet her wide black eyes. She was almost as tall as he. Judging from the length of her spindly limbs, she hadn’t stopped growing. Her freckled brown skin glowed with health. “Come in,” he said. “Come in.”

  “Strange place for a rich man to live,” thought Marie, slouching uninvited in a hard wooden chair. Marie Saloppe had told her that Father Antoine had made a fortune and given it away like the crazy fool he was. “The Fire of ’88 was his fault,” she’d said. “When it broke ou
t, they wanted him to ring the church bells to warn the city. But that crazy fool wouldn’t touch those bells. It was Good Friday and everything had to be sad and quiet.”

  “How old are you?” asked Father Antoine, taking the other chair.

  “Eleven and a half.”

  “You’ll be a pretty woman soon.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Marie Saloppe was right. He was crazy. Hadn’t he seen the ladies bleaching their skin, sucking in their cheeks, tinting their eyelids, trying to look like consumptives? There was no way she’d ever be pretty.

  “You take after your mother,” he said. “How is she?”

  “Fine.”

  “And your father?”

  “Fine.”

  Father Antoine gazed out the open door. “Nice day,” he said.

  “If it doesn’t storm.”

  The priest laughed. “All right,” he said. “What happened yesterday in Mother Therese’s classroom?”

  “I got off to a bad start,” muttered Marie.

  “Adam and Eve got off to a bad start. I’ll ask a more specific question. What did you do wrong?”

  “Mother Therese caught me daydreaming. Then it started to rain and she got upset. But I don’t know what I did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I swear it on Damballah's beard.”

  “Damballah’s beard?”

  “Yes. I swear it.”

  “I see.” Father Antoine scratched his own reddish beard. “May I ask you some questions? Nothing hard, I promise. I’d just like to evaluate your education.”

  “My mama taught me to read and write,” volunteered Marie.

  “Good. How about your Bible? What has she taught you about God?”

  “He created the world in seven days,” answered Marie, trying to recall Mother Therese’s lesson.

  “Excellent. Now tell me about His blessed saints.”

  “Well... There’s St. Matthew who wrote the book and St. Michael who fought the snake and St. Joe who watched over little baby Jesus ...”