Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  Marie Laveau looked into the mirror.

  She saw a shrunken old man in evening clothes and dark glasses, smoking a cigar that billowed green smoke. Violins played a shrill waltz. The old man was dancing. His partner was a crumbling skeleton.

  Marie Laveau looked into the mirror.

  She saw a handsome young man holding a chunk of amber, a golden fish, and a plank of wood in his strong brown hands. He was laughing, standing with his feet wide apart, head back.

  A jeweled dagger was sticking out of his chest. His shirt was soaked bright blood-red. Marie wondered how he could keep laughing with that dagger in his heart. Then she saw that his face was exactly like hers. The young man was her double.

  She looked into the mirror and saw a lifetime of bad dreams.

  The blood came and went. The moon grew round and fat then vanished. Black cats shrieked beneath the waning moon. Sorcerers cast evil spells.

  Marie Saloppe knocked on the door and went away. Father Antoine knocked twice and went away. Doctor John knocked three times and went away.

  The fire sputtered out. Cobwebs covered the shutters. A snake died at the bottom of the water trough, filling the air with the stench of decay.

  There was no more time. The clock ticked for itself. No one listened.

  One morning she went to the market. Then she sat in her kitchen, trying to remember Venus’s magic—the colors of the sauces, the perfect combinations of herbs and spices.

  She melted some butter'in a copper skillet, chopped three onions and fried them golden. She sprinkled them with flour, then added boiling water, diced tomatoes, sliced okra, peppers, com, seasoned the boiling stock with salt and pepper. After an hour she added the shelled prawns and crayfish, moved the pan to a cooler part of the stove and stirred in the file gumbo. The sauce swirled thick around her wooden spoon.

  At last it was time to eat. Marie set three places at the table.

  That night Delphine and Victor came to dinner, their ghosts as polite and formal as ever. The gaslight shone through their diaphanous forms. Bashful as a young man dining with a new mistress, Victor held his wife’s chair, then Marie’s. Delphine seemed pleased with Marie’s fancy table—the silver, the linen, the jonquils she’d always loved.

  Marie ladled out the gumbo. Delphine bowed her head and said a short grace, stumbling over the prayer as if she’d gotten out of practice in the other world.

  Marie was wondering how to begin when Delphine broke the silence. “We’ve been watching you,” she said. “And it hurts us. We want you to know: It wasn’t your fault. Like Doctor John said—the spirits were calling you. Our time had come. The loas were using you to do their work. Those red eyes, those bad dreams—Marie Saloppe was right, you were marked from the start. And there’s nothing you can do. When the spirits call, you listen. You can’t shut your ears. You do what they say.”

  “She’s right,” said Victor in a dull monotonous voice. “You haven’t got any choice. You were born to it, you can’t change ...”

  “Oh, Marie!” interrupted Delphine. “If I were you, I’d have myself a good time. I’d dance hard, get drunk and fat, fall in love. I’d have all the fun I could as soon as I could. Enjoy yourself, baby. ’Cause there’ll be a time when the spirits will be wanting you to do some serious work.”

  Choking on an empty spoon, Marie looked down and saw that all her gumbo was gone, though she couldn’t recall eating any. The meal was over. “Some coffee?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Delphine.

  “No, thank you,” said Victor. “Coffee keeps me awake. And you know how hard it is to sleep under that cold water.”

  Marie woke early. The house was silent. Sunlight streamed in through the cracked shutters. She went out into the courtyard and splashed cold water on her face. Back in her room she took out a red satin dress, a white kerchief, gold earrings, felt slippers.

  Marie Laveau looked into the mirror.

  She saw men and women dancing in a circle. She saw a stooped old man with a long white beard tapping his cane in time to the music. A beautiful woman in a pink lace dress embroidered with blue hearts. Three soldiers in white uniforms pinned with ribbons and gold coins. The Virgin Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist. The voodoo priest from her dream. An old lady with a green snake around her neck.

  Marie saw herself dancing in the center of their circle, spinning wildly while the others whirled around her. Occasionally she toppled back. Strong arms reached out to keep her from falling.

  Suddenly Doctor John appeared beside her, shaking an orange rattle to his own singsong chant. “Come back,” he chanted again and again. “Come back from the depths of the water.”

  At last Marie heard a disembodied voice—the voice of the crazy boy from her dream. “It’s so cold,” said the voice. “So wet.”

  “Come back,” chanted Doctor John. “Come back to the warm dry air, the world of living souls. Come back to those who await your return.”

  Marie saw a flash of light, a cloud of green smoke. Gentle rain began to fall on the other world. Still whirling, the dancers cheered and reached toward Marie.

  Each one held a large cup of steaming Garden of Gilead tea. The dancers offered their cups to Marie but she couldn’t stop dancing. The music filled and satisfied her. She didn’t need tea. Her pain was gone, healed by the dance and the drums.

  As the quick snare-drum beat rose through her shoulders, she found herself dancing on both sides of the mirror. Hands on her hips, eyes closed, she danced to the fifes and drums, brass, chimes, carillons, pealing church bells from St. Louis Cathedral, danced to the shouts and whistles of a joyful crowd.

  Marie ran to her window in time to see the commander of General Andrew Jackson’s Colored Regiment ride his black steed through a brilliant storm of confetti. Royal Street was thronged with ecstatic people watching the parade.

  It was the twenty-third of January, 1815. The war was over. Victory had been declared.

  CHAPTER IX

  MARIE HAD A lot to learn. There were new worlds to conquer, new languages to learn. Gentlemen addressed their ladies in the language of flowers. A pink gardenia meant: Will you be mine? A red rose: I love you. A white moonflower: Meet me after the dance. A yellow lily: I am dying for love of you. A blue aster: I am sorry. A purple orchid: Regrets.

  Their ladies answered in the language of fans: A tortoise-shell fan meant: Patience. Snapped open three times: My patience is wearing thin. A fan of ostrich feathers: I will always love you. Tapped against the right wrist: I will meet you after the dance. A fan embroidered with dragonflies: Tomorrow in the governor’s park. Opened, then snapped shut: Why weren’t you there? A fan set with mirrors: You think only of yourself. A fan of black Chantilly lace: I love another. A fan of ivory: Regrets.

  Together they spoke the language of wines. A gentleman buying a lady champagne meant one thing. Absinthe meant quite another. And when a couple was seen drinking brandy, everyone understood.

  There was the language of names, relations, family trees. The language of bloodlines, shades of black. The language of friends, lovers, suitors, protectors.

  And most important was the language of the dance itself.

  At the start of the season in October, Marie began attending the quadroon balls.

  Every night she put on her ugliest dress and went down to the St. Philip Street Ballroom. On her way she passed dressed-up boys spitting fine sprays of alcohol and poking each other with their dueling canes, overtook colored girls and their chaperones traipsing daintily through the mud, calling ahead to the slaves carrying their lanterns and dancing shoes.

  She walked past the liveried black doormen into the entrance hall with its marble staircase and alabaster urns, through the downstairs gambling rooms, past roulette wheels, whist and faro tables; through the banquet room, past spreads of cold meats, pates, cheeses; through the dark courtyard, past couples whispering and kissing in the shadows of three tall oaks; through the dressing rooms where the girls preened befo
re the mirrors, fixing their hair and gossiping about the boys who’d just come home from war.

  At last she walked upstairs to the ballroom. She recognized it from her dream—the same chandeliers, curtains, two tiers of balconies overlooking the polished dance floor. Yet now, thank the Lord, the men had faces. And she wasn’t sick to her stomach.

  The room reminded her of a chicken coop stocked with human fowl. Roosting on the top balcony were the old hens—elderly chaperones still cackling and fluttering in the charming style they’d learned in dancing class. On the lower tier beneath five layers of wrought-iron grapes sat the young chickens—girls with empty places on their programs. They talked less than the chaperones and paid closer attention to the dance floor, craning their necks as they followed choice roosters with their eyes.

  Marie watched the dancers like a chicken hawk. She studied every motion, every turn—the bows and curtsies of the minuet, the light skips of the contradance, the gliding sweeps of the waltz. She listened to the violins and basses.

  Leaning against the velvet-covered walls and praying that no one would notice her, she watched every night for months. Then she went home and practiced. One evening, waltzing in front of her mirror, Marie realized she’d learned to dance.

  Marie Laveau looked into the mirror. Her appearance was all wrong. Her face was too full. Her skin was too dark. She had freckles. She was too tall, too broad-shouldered, too old for the Creole boys who liked to take their mistresses young and mold them like God forming Eve.

  Obviously her social career would have to depend on something besides youth or beauty . . . perhaps the right clothes. She laced herself into a corset and put on her best dress, red silk embossed with Chinese dragons.

  For a while her plan seemed to be working. A lively red-headed boy asked her for the fifth waltz. “You’re the only girl wearing red tonight,” he murmured in her ear as they spun to the music. “It’s such an attractive color.”

  But Marie didn’t know how to answer. “Thanks,” she mumbled. “Yes . . . red’s the color of the sky in the spirit world. It’s the color of the scorpion, the ram, of blood, of Mars ...”

  Her partner tensed. His fingers drummed against her back. For the rest of the evening, Marie leaned against the wall and watched.

  “You got a lot to learn,” said Marie Saloppe. “A little pride. Dignity. A little mystery wouldn’t hurt either. Even your mama knew that. And your grandma—Madame Henriette knew it better than anybody. Neither of them were beauty queens—but they had the boys knocking down the door.”

  Marie Saloppe could hardly stop grinning. It warmed her heart to see some color in Marie’s cheeks, to know she’d stopped hiding in her house. She vowed to stop bothering her about the other world. The spirits could take care of their own selves.

  “I know what you want,” she said when Marie asked her advice about the quadroon balls. “A good time. Lots of boyfriends. You want to dance every dance. Well . . . you got your work cut out for you, baby, freckle-faced and nineteen already.

  “So you better start learning to keep your distance. Distance is where the mystery comes from. Keep your shoulders back and your head up and your mouth shut. Pray to Freda-Erzili, the loa of love—she’s the only one who can help.

  “That’s what you need to learn. And that’s the only way you’ll do this dance.”

  Marie learned fast. By Christmas she’d learned that the St. Philip Street Ballroom was a marketplace. She watched the girls compete like fishwomen—only subtler, using softer voices, the language of fans and flowers, kohl, long looks, flattery, and gossip.

  But finally their stock was judged like the fishwo-men’s tuna: blood and meat and skin. The girls knew their bloodlines, their ancestors, the precise chemistry of white and black in their veins. They knew their family trees better than the begats in the Bible and recited them often, marking their value and price: the whitest girls got the highest bids.

  Lucky girls got generous white protectors—French wines, Paris gowns, lovely cottages on Ramparts Row. Unlucky girls married unlucky colored boys and washed laundry, hair or dishes all week for a glass of beer on Friday night.

  The women saw it as a matter of survival. The men were more inclined to see it as a lucky combination of harmless pleasure and Christian charity. Father Antoine and his monks saw it both ways and assigned light penances for sins born in the St. Philip Street Ballroom.

  Marie saw it as a marketplace—lively as the Cotton Exchange, ugly as a slave auction, a cruel cutthroat buyer’s market. But she didn’t care. All she cared about was having a good time.

  So she learned the language of flowers and fans, learned to lower her lashes, to flirt, to drink champagne and make the bubbles seem to sparkle in her eyes. She learned what to wear and what to say when gentlemen murmured in her ear. She learned to dance, bow, curtsy, glide as if there were butter on the soles of her shoes. She learned to keep her distance and her dignity, to listen more than she spoke, to remember what men said, to smile as if she knew powerful secrets, to seem open and closed, ordinary and exotic, simple and complex. She learned to confuse and to charm.

  Soon she was dancing every dance. And one night in the midst of a fast quadrille, she discovered she was actually having a good time.

  Delphine’s ghost was right. She did feel better. The stale air echoing with her parents’ voices had blown away.

  Inside the ballroom the night seemed fresh, sweet with perfume, bright with violin music and clever talk. Marie felt happy. Twirling beneath her partner’s arm, she leaned back and laughed—natural laughter she’d never had to learn.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have broken the Seventh Commandment. I have taken a lover.”

  “Who was it?”

  “His name’s Pascal Chartier.”

  “Of the Chartiers?”

  “The youngest boy.”

  “Why him?”

  “Because he’s so good-looking—carrot-topped, blue-eyed ... He’s tall. He’s a good dancer. He’s a poet, too—he’s writing a sonnet just for me. He was the one who asked me to dance that first night I wore red. So it was fated we’d be lovers.”

  “Why did you sin with him?”

  “I don’t know ... I was curious. It’s all the girls in the dressing room ever talk about—kissing, loving, men making them see colors and howl like polecats. I got tired of listening. I wanted to find out for myself. ”

  “Is that why you did it? Curiosity?”

  “Partly. But also ... it sounded like fun. The girls told me how nice it felt, how they begged their men to love them all night long. You know how I like good times, Father. And loving sounded like the best time of all.”

  “So you went to bed with him?”

  “Yes ... but not right away. One morning he sent a bouquet of pink gardenias to my door. That evening I went to the dance with gardenias in my hair. The next day he sent me roses, then lilies. And on the night he sent me white moonflowers—meaning I should meet him after the dance, I looked at him across the ballroom and brushed a peacock fan against my lips: Yes.”

  “Were you conscious of your sin?”

  “I didn’t know what was happening. I thought: Here I am naked with a man pressing into me. How strange. The next morning it took me a while to remember what he was doing in my bed. I watched Pascal asleep on his stomach, drooling on the pillow. His back looked very handsome. I thought: There must be more to it than a pretty back. But what? What were those girls talking about? He hadn’t made me see colors or howl like a polecat. It wasn’t half so much fun as dancing ...”

  “You have committed a mortal sin.”

  “But why? Why should it be so bad?”

  “My child,” said Father Antoine after a long silence, “not once in your confession have you mentioned the word ‘love.’ ”

  Marie knew there was no love between them. Even Pascal had to agree. “My dear,” he told her one night, “they say Creole girls are like fine sherry and yellow girls are like isl
and rum. That is, wives were made for a little warmth around the hearth, mistresses for madness and heat lightning. And if there’s no island rum, as they say, one might as well stay home sipping sherry.”

  The next morning Marie received a purple orchid: Regrets. She pressed it in the heavy Bible she’d gotten from Father Antoine, between the same pages as Pascal’s rose, lily, and moonflower. She wasn’t sorry or even surprised.

  No one at the ballroom was surprised. The only surprising thing, they agreed, was that the affair had started at all. How could Marie Laveau waste herself on Pascal Chartier? Didn’t she know that all the sonnets in the world couldn’t improve his youngest-son’s share of the Chartier inheritance?

  Each man asked himself the same questions and came up with the same answer: Marie was born for high romance. All she needed was a little awakening.

  Each man decided that he was die one to do it.

  There was another reason for Marie’s popularity: she was extremely lucky at gambling. Of course, ladies didn’t play the wheel at the St. Philip Street Ballroom—-but gentlemen did. And Marie Laveau’s escort was usually the big winner. Standing behind his chair, bending occasionally to whisper in his ear, Marie made his number come up.

  The boys joked about it. They called Marie their rabbit’s foot, their holy medal, their voodoo queen. Everyone knew her name. Strangers asked friends for introductions. Marie’s companionship in the gaming room was considered an honor. There were good sums to be made at roulette—easy money earmarked for securing more good times.

  The money was also earmarked few' Marie. That was part of the magic—a portion of the winnings had to be spent priming the pump of her good luck. So the gamblers bought her presents—doeskin gloves, silver beads, inlaid fans. They sent her the freshest flowers, the finest wines, and took her to candlelit champagne suppers at the St. Julian Hotel.