Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  Marie circled the ballroom so people would notice she’d arrived. Staring intently at Baron Fauve, she tapped her brocade fan against her left wirst. Immediately he came over and asked her to dance.

  The baron was a terrible dancer. Unaware that the fiddles were playing a waltz, he pressed his meaty fingers into Marie’s back and forced her to follow his own clumsy two-step. “Thank heaven the funeral was over in time for dinner,” he whispered in her ear. “If I weren’t such a good Catholic, I’d challenge God to a duel for spoiling my fun.”

  “It’s not worth it,” thought Marie. “No amount of money. After this dance ...”

  At that moment someone asked to cut in. All Marie could see was a hand reaching up to touch the baron’s shoulder. She leaned around her partner for a better look. Then she lost her balance and fell back against the baron—who promptly increased his already impossible pressure on her back.

  Standing behind the baron was a withered, hunchbacked black man with skin like charred leather. He wore dark glasses and a high top hat like Doctor John’s. Beneath it clumps of hair, matted with mud, hung down past his sunken chin. He had the face of a skull, leprous and decayed. His nostrils were stuffed with wads of bloody cotton. He was dressed in an evening coat like the other men at the dance. But his was coal-black and dusty, many sizes too big for his tiny frame. His bent back and bowed legs made his coattails stick out like the tailfeathers of a duck.

  He carried a dirty pick and shovel in one hand, a fat cigar in the other. Raising the cigar to his lips with a grand flourish, he took a deep puff and vanished behind a thick cloud of smoke.

  The cigar smoke was a sickly phosphorescent green. As it billowed up toward the chandeliers, the lamps shone through it, bathing the ballroom in pulsating green light. The acrid smoke smelled exactly like burning corpses.

  Marie clung to the baron, so dizzy from the smoke she could hardly dance. But her partner’s eyes weren’t watering. He paid no attention to the old man tapping his shoulder. He was whispering, laughing, stumbling obliviously through his ragged paces.

  Finally the little man left the baron alone. He shrugged and whinnied like a horse. Using his dusty pick as a walking cane, he scurried out of the ballroom.

  Marie excused herself abruptly and left the baron in the middle of the floor. Leaning against a pillar, she pressed her cheek into the cool iron tracery. Eventually the dizziness subsided and she looked around.

  The light was clear and golden. The air smelled of lilies and roses. The old man was nowhere in sight.

  She giggled with relief. She was starving. Hunger and fatigue were making her hallucinate ...

  At the door of the banquet hall, her hunger disappeared.

  Suffused with green light, the room reeked of grab-age and rotting food. Peering through the green smoke, Marie spotted the old man gorging himself at the table, stuffing his toothless mouth with pastries, spraying the air with cake crumbs and spit. Around him men and women calmly filled their plates. No one noticed the light, the smell, the old man’s presence. No one wondered why whole platters of cream puffs were suddenly vanishing.

  The little man began to tease them. He snatched the food from their mouths and crammed it into his own, threw their dishes to the floor. But the gentlemen apologized as if they’d dropped them themselves and went back for second helpings.

  Watching the old man consume two bowls of candied violets. Marie realized where she’d seen him before. She shut her eyes and pressed her fingernails into her palm, praying that she was dreaming, recalling him from some old nightmare.

  When she opened her eyes there were four purple crescents on her hand. And the man was gone.

  Groping through the crowd, she made her way to the table and forced herself to eat some cold chicken. The food calmed her. She promised herself to stop working all day without eating. Fortified with new energy, she walked back upstairs to the ballroom ...

  The old man was dancing in the center of the foul, smoky room.

  The violins were playing a minuet, but the old man danced as if drummers were pounding out some savage rhythm. All alone among the curtseying couples, he squatted down in a low duck-walk, pumping and grinding his pelvis, waving his pick and shovel in the air. He thrust and bumped his way through a gavotte, two waltzes, and an English reel. After a while, he began to sing in a wailing nasal voice:

  He loves her, she loves him

  Loves to see his eyes grow dim.

  I love her, she loves me,

  Down beneath the waters we ...

  He stopped singing and stared at the women around him, searching for a partner. Leaning on his pick, he duck-walked around the room, selecting certain couples and dancing alongside them, mimicking their steps, tapping the men’s shoulders. Other dancers were purposely left alone. Yet none of them felt his touch or turned to look at him, no one seemed aware ...

  Suddenly Marie knew exactly who he was. She’d seen his picture on an altar at Marie Saloppe’s. He was Baron Cemetery—the god of death, guardian of the graveyard, lord of magicians and restless spirits, of healing and resurrection.

  Death had come to dance at the ballroom. He was picking men out, tapping their shoulders.

  Marie’s knees buckled. Her left leg went numb. She lurched forward, fighting to clear her mind, to get outside away from the bad smell and the green light, anywhere ...

  Half-running, half-staggering, she rushed through the steaming, muddy streets without stopping until she was well inside the doors of the Charity Hospital.

  CHAPTER XI

  THEY STOOD BESIDE the bayou watching five thick bubbles float on the surface of the muddy water. A large gull flew overhead, breaking the bubbles with its shadow.

  He gave her a heavy chunk of rough amber strung on a black silk cord. She held it up to the sunshine. Inside the amber were golden rivers stocked with golden fish, craggy brown mountains, ruined cities, deep veins of black earth.

  “What’s inside?” she asked.

  “A secret,” he said. “A secret the rock told the tree sap.”

  She took off the silver beads she’d gotten from a lover at the quadroon ball and fastened the black silk cord around her neck.

  It was midnight. The room was silent except for the noise of their quick shallow panting. She looked up into his face. His lips were drawn back, baring his sharp teeth. His eyes stared into hers. He moved inside her, quick and hard.

  Suddenly her soul exploded and rose out of her body toward the ceiling, where it hovered, intertwined with his, dancing to the rhythm of pounding blood.

  Afterwards they shared an apple. They examined the perfect red apple gleaming in the candlelight and began to laugh.

  The house was covered with sperm. There were stains on the sheets, white blotches on the blankets, the bedspreads, the carpets, the upholstered chairs.

  Lying in bed, they joked about it. When the house became unlivable, a river of sperm would start to flow. It would wash them out the front door. A white flood would carry them gently through the streets, down to the harbor, out into the warm Gulf waters.

  She dreamed he caught a golden fish and brought it to her home. On the chopping block, the fish began to talk.

  “I’m the magic fish,” it said. “Remember that old story your mama told you? I can grant you three wishes—anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything. But think it over carefully.”

  “I don’t need to think,” she said. “I know what I want. Wild love, the kind of love we’re feeling now—I want it to last forever.”

  The fish was silent. “I’m sorry,” it said at last. “But there’s just no way.”

  “Please,” she begged, crying herself awake, half-remembering another golden fish, a childhood dream of longing and sweet lost calm.

  In the morning her lover kissed her red-rimmed eyes.

  Marie Laveau and Jacques Paris were madly in love. That was the gossip of New Orleans in the winter of 1819.

  Up
in the top balcony of the St. Philip Street Ballroom, the chaperones clucked with dismay. “She had such a brilliant dancing career,” they murmured as if it were already a legend, a distant memory sweet and faded as a pressed rose. “She could’ve landed the richest protector in town and sat pretty for the rest of her life. How could she fall for a mulatto with nothing to his name but sawdust? Poor Marie, she doesn’t even come to the dance anymore. It’s such a pity ...”

  Downstairs none of the dancers were wasting their pity on Marie. They’d seen her with Jacques Paris. They’d noticed how handsome the couple looked together, how they complemented each other like a matched pair of family portraits.”

  “Of course she fell in love with him,” said the girls in the dressing room. “The cobra would’ve fallen for the mongoose after a meeting like that.”

  The story of their meeting was almost as romantic and thrilling as a melodrama at the St. Charles Theater. That summer, at the height of the yellow fever, Jacques was dying of plague at the Charity Hospital. Marie had nursed him through a night of raging fever and violent hallucinations. The next morning Jacques opened his eyes to find that he was still alive, in perfect health, and madly in love.

  That was the version everyone knew. But if they’d known the true story, even the chaperones might have understood.

  On the night Marie saw Baron Cemetery at the St. Philip Street Ballroom, she ran to the Charity Hospital to find Father Antoine. When she got there she was still terrified.

  She couldn’t get the images out of her mind—that repulsive skeleton face, that obscene dance, the complacent smiles on the Creole men, oblivious to the presence of death. Even if they had noticed the old man and felt his bony touch—she knew they would have turned and bowed like their mamas taught them. Too polite to resist, they’d have let him cut in. They were cowards. She could never go back to the ballroom and dance with men like that again.

  Still her terror went deeper than contempt and pity for the men Baron Cemetery had picked to die in the plague. Reaching back in her memory, it dredged up the ghost of a drowned man, revived her fear of the spirits who’d chosen her to do their work. Marie Saloppe couldn’t help. There was only one way: confess everything to Father Antoine and beg him to exorcise her.

  But Father Antoine was too busy with the dying to bother with a healthy woman’s demons. Marie found him in the west wing, sponging a child’s yellowed face.

  “It’s ... too hot to sleep,” she stammered. “I might as well work.”

  “You worked all day,” said Father Antoine, wiping his hands on a filthy apron. “Go home and get some rest.” Marie shook her head. “All right,” he said. “There’s a big mulatto boy on the second floor. Dying. He’s been making a racket, disturbing the whole ward. Go see what you can do.”

  The dying man’s bed had been shoved into an alcove but his screams led Marie right to him. Dying or not, he looked stronger than anyone she’d seen all summer. He was tall, big-boned, with powerful hands and a soft wide cloud of kinky black hair. His skin was the same rich coffee-color as her own. In the shadowy glow of the oil lamp, his staring eyes changed from yellow to hazel to blue-gray.

  He began to yell again—wild, hoarse cries from the pit of his stomach. Arched tight as a bow, he half-rose off the bed. The sinews in his neck protruded, thick with pulsing blood. Sweating, gritting his teeth, he thrashed his long arms and legs.

  Suddenly Marie recalled a painting in the church: Jacob wrestling God’s angel on a vasf expanse of desert. Two beautiful light-filled bodies on a black starry night. Then she understood: this man was wrestling with the angel of death.

  She brewed a pot of Indian Root tea and filled a basin with rags and cool water. All night she forced the tea down his throat and mopped the sweat from his face. The mindless repetitive motions calmed her.

  The fever broke at dawn. He opened his eyes and smiled weakly.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “You won.”

  “Won?” he croaked. He cleared his throat. “Won?”

  “You were fighting someone,” she said. “Fighting pretty hard. It looked to me like you were fighting the angel of death.”

  “That wasn’t fighting, honey.” His laugh was healthy and full. “That was dancing. And it wasn’t no angel. It was a little black man, the ugliest old man I ever saw. We were dancing and I was calling the steps.”

  Marie swallowed hard. “Who are you?” she said.

  “Jacques Paris.”

  “Well, Mister Jacques Paris,” she said. “When it gets a little cooler, come see me, understand? I live in that white cottage on Royal and St. Ann. I’m Marie Laveau.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  One September evening, Jacques appeared at Marie’s kitchen door. “Remember me?” he said quietly.

  Marie turned from the stove. Jacques’s dusty work clothes flattered him. He looked strong and healthy, much handsomer than the man she’d nursed at the Charity Hospital. “You’ve recovered,” she said. “Come on in. Sit down. You can’t be comfortable banging your head on that doorway.”

  “No, thanks.” He slouched against the frame. “I’m full of sawdust from the shop.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It does.” He fixed her with a hard look.

  “All right,” she said. “Want some gumbo?”

  Jacques cast a suspicious glance at the copper pot. “Who’s that gumbo for?” he asked. “You expecting somebody?”

  “You,” she said, the word popping out before she realized it was true. She smiled quickly to show him she was joking. But it was too late.

  Wide-eyed, he drew back. “No gumbo for me,” he said.

  He refused a slice of pie and a cup of tea. He stayed where he was, slouching in the doorway, always slightly tense as if he were just about to leave. “Who’s paying for that gumbo?” he asked after awhile.

  “I am,” said Marie.

  “No white boy protecting you?”

  “I can protect myself.”

  Jacques smiled. “See you later,” he said.

  Marie gave the gumbo a vicious stir.

  The next morning she burned a Fix-It-Tonight Candle to St. Rita. That night Jacques returned. Again he remained in the doorway beneath the iron horseshoe Marie hung there that afternoon, thinking that if he were going to stand somewhere, it might as well be a lucky spot. Again he left after ten minutes.

  That was how they courted—on their feet in ten-minute intervals night after night. That was how they got acquainted. Jacques knew how to make Marie talk and how to listen. He got her to tell him about her life, though she was careful to omit the dreams, the visions, the bad time alone in her house.

  He didn’t talk about himself at all. Instead he told stories about the different kinds of wood: the magic of amber, petrified sap, the palms in the Garden of Eden, the good-natured cherry bending to give the Virgin Mary some fruit, the Semper Virens turning boiling water to ice; the mean oak, the only tree willing to furnish wood for Jesus’ cross, condemned to stay awake all night and whisper His name; the girl who turned into the willow, the Lady-Tree, so soft on the outside but full of secrets and hard surprises.

  While he spoke, Jacques ran his hand along the doorpost, caressing the polished wood. A shiver ran down Marie’s spine.

  He told her about the creatures which lived in trees: evil owls, hanging sloths, vampire bats; woodpeckers, death birds digging for the secrets of the coffin; hoop-snakes rolling down treetrunks with their tails in their mouth; the loup garou; werewolves, cursed souls doomed to fly among the branches leaving luminous red trails.

  “There’s no such thing,” Marie said uneasily. “Only in dreams.”

  “Sure there is. I’ll take you to the bayou and show you. And I’ll show you something better. God’s handprint—the place He squeezed too hard shaping the boulders—a giant handprint in the rocks, bigger than this house. Imagine.”

  Marie tried to imagine. The effort made her feel strangely warm and sl
eepy. Then an image flashed before her: Two naked bodies nestled in the huge stone handprint beneath a bright sun. Flushed, she busied herself at the stove.

  She began to understand. The trees and rocks were Jacques’s world, as real as the world of the St. Philip Street Ballroom, as private and special as the world of her dreams.

  She began to like him more and more.

  Her days stretched out. The hours became impossible to fill. When she awoke in the morning and saw how early it was, she rolled over and went back to sleep. She tried to keep busy but there weren’t enough chores to occupy the long hours. The worst times were the evenings just after he left, when she realized how long she’d have to wait to see him again.

  “This is crazy,” she thought. “I could be having champagne suppers at the St. Julian. Instead I’m stuck home mooning over some poor mulatto. Why did I let this happen?”

  She knew exactly why. She wanted Jacques Paris to stay all night. And he never stayed longer than ten minutes.

  That was the mystery. The white boys had sent her flowers, begged her to let them in bed. If Jacques didn’t like her, he wouldn’t keep coming back. But he didn’t seem to want to be her man. Maybe she was just his after-work entertainment, like a beer with the boys at the tavern.

  One sleepless night, Marie pulled on her dress and ran out to Marie Saloppe’s. Marie Saloppe hugged her, then stepped back for a good look. “You look awful,” she said. “You look sick. And I hear you’ve stopped going to the dances. What’s wrong?”

  “I am sick,” groaned Marie. “Love sick.”

  “Who’s been treating you mean? Who’s been doing you wrong?”