Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  New Orleans was a gossip’s paradise. But no one was gossiping about anything but Marie Laveau’s hair.

  “Have you seen it?” the women asked each other. “Have you seen her hair?” They discussed it after dinner, after their men had retired for brandy and cigars. They asked one another, but they didn’t bother asking their men. For each one knew exactly when her husband had first seen Marie’s hair.

  The sight of it had struck the men of New Orleans like a plague. Their wives learned to recognize the symptoms, which they shared with each other like the signs of the children’s measles: Restlessness. Sleeplessness. Complaints about the food and the weather. Grumpiness. Impatience with the children. Some women reported that their husbands’ bad humor had infected the rest of the household so that small accidents had begun occurring: the pumps broke, the fires wouldn’t light, the cooks cut themselves. But they all agreed that the most distressing symptom was the puzzled expression on their husbands’ faces, the haunted look of men with a terrible craving for something lost in childhood.

  Fortunately the malady never lasted more than a few days. And though its onset was sudden, its course was predictable. It always began when a man came home with the news that he’d seen a woman at the carnival with the most astounding hairdo. The women asked their husbands to describe it but could never form a clear picture from their descriptions. So they decided to see for themselves. Down in the Quarter they saw a knot of gawking people buzzing through the streets like bees. At the center of the swarm was Marie Laveau—whose name they remembered from gossip about the quadroon balls. She was a big yellow freckle-faced woman who stared straight ahead with a stuck-up look in her red-rimmed eyes.

  Her hair was fixed to look like the sky at night, a bright sky full of stars, planets, the signs of the zodiac. Stretched high above the crowd on a series of invisible frames, it cascaded down her back in a smooth black waterfall. The full moon shone in her hair, an enormous pearl reflecting the torchlight, casting a pale blue glow down her shoulders. The planets hung frozen in their orbits—a milky opal Venus, a blood-red ruby Mars. Brilliant stars twinkled around them—the sign of the scorpion, the ram, the bull. Stars fell, galaxies exploded and died. Blazing comets appeared and vanished in the dark night of Marie’s hair.

  The white ladies agreed that the yellow girl had achieved some amazing effects. Bot they couldn’t understand why it had exerted such a peculiar and powerful influence over their men.

  They never understood that Marie’s hair had stopped their men cold and suspended them in time as still as the jewel-planets in their orbits. For one instant, the men remembered the power of Eve, the strength of Samson, the death of Absalom, the salvation of Mary Magdalene, their mother’s soft hair grazing their cheeks as they nursed. They felt the magic of women’s hair, of their own, of hair which grew before birth and beyond the grave, which kept and revealed the secrets of the mystery. For that instant they felt as if those secrets were finally being revealed to them.

  An instant later, the men forgot their sudden flash of insight. They were left with the puzzled expression and vague discontent which their wives never understood.

  One morning, a few days after Mardi Gras, the corner of Royal and St. Ann was crowded by an army of ladies’ maids, whose mistresses—the richest women in New Orleans—had sent them to find out the name of Marie Laveau’s hairdresser.

  CHAPTER XV

  THERE WAS A story people told about Marie Saloppe.

  Once she had a teacher named Two-Headed Alexander, an ex-slave and a pureblood Congo like herself. They were close as sister and brother. The root doctor taught Marie Saloppe everything he knew. He had the biggest business in the city, and she assisted him on every case.

  Then one spring an elderly freedman came all the way from Charleston for Two-Headed Alexander’s Guaranteed Drinking Cure. The cure didn’t work though the freedman—whose name was Grandpa Joel—spent all summer trying. In September he and Marie Saloppe were married.

  Two-Headed Alexander was furious. He claimed that Grandpa Joel was a dissatisfied customer from way back who’d tracked him down and turned Marie Saloppe against him. He claimed that the couple was putting a strong revenge fix on him and that Madame Henriette was helping them with tricks she’d learned from Makandal.

  Marie Saloppe denied it. Madame Henriette didn’t bother. Grandpa Joel was too drunk to care. But no one could deny that Two-Headed Alexander was sinking. His cures weren’t working. His clients were dying like flies. He looked like he needed some doctoring himself.

  One morning in the presence of two helpless clients, Two-Headed Alexander’s heart dried up in his chest and blew out of his mouth in a fine mist of talcum.

  Marie Saloppe inherited his entire practice. “Did you and Grandpa Joel and Madame Henriette really fix Two-Headed Alexander?” asked her clients.

  “No,” she said. “Two-Headed Alexander put that fix on himself. He should’ve known better than to trust another doctor.”

  In the spring of 1823, when Marie Laveau suddenly became the hairdresser in New Orleans, people remembered that story. “Poor Sister Delilah,” they said. “She should’ve known. Marie Laveau didn’t spend twenty years with Marie Saloppe for nothing. ” But the few old people who did remember moved in certain select circles which never moved through the elegant dressing rooms of Marie’s new clientele.

  Sister Delilah was horrified by her bad turn of luck. One by one, her rich ladies canceled their regular appointments—some with brutal announcements of their plans to try “that new hairdresser” Marie Laveau. She was reduced to working full time at the House of Beauty for nickels and dimes.

  One morning she caught up with Marie on the corner of Bourbon and St. Charles and belligerently blocked her path. “Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “Haven’t seen you since before Mardi Gras.”

  “I’ve been busy,” said Marie, looking off into the distance. “I’m late for an appointment right now.” “How can you stand there and say it?” Sister Delilah bobbed up and down, pecking the air like an angry chicken.

  “How could you set me up and trick me like that—pretending to be my friend?”

  “I didn’t set out to steal your business,” said Marie. “I just wanted to fix my hair nice. I just used what you taught me. I didn’t know it would attract all those customers. And once they came around, I couldn’t send them away.” She stopped—that wasn’t what she wanted to say. She wanted to apologize, to explain about the times when she didn’t know what she was doing, when she felt strange powers guiding her—sending her bad dreams, trapping her in the mirror, stealing her man, fixing her hair ...

  “If you didn’t mean to do it,” Sister Delilah was screaming, “you can undo it. Retire from the business. Give my clients back.”

  “Sorry,” said Marie. “If that’s how it went, that’s how it was meant to go. Now let me by. I got an appointment to keep.”

  Sister Delilah scowled after her. She couldn’t get over the way she’d been tricked. It was worse than the treason of a best friend—it was an insult to her good judgment and her business sense. “Marie Laveau’ll get hers,” she said. “I’ll get my business back, and she’ll get what’s coming to her. I can’t wait to see the day.”

  And so Marie’s first real friend became her first real enemy. Marie felt the loss. There were times when she missed Sister Delilah, longed to hear her laugh and complain about the price of avocados. Those times were rare, though—because most of the time Marie was too busy to think.

  December 1, 1823. 7:55 a.m. Carrying her bag of scissors and combs down Royal Street, Marie tied her hair up in a checked kerchief and thought of Delphine taking her to be baptized in the wet December fog.

  8 a.m. Lucie Raphael. 22 Ramparts Row.

  Lucie Raphael was the quadroon mistress of Armand Recamier, scion of the prominent and devout Recamier family. Armand himself was so religious that he wouldn’t visit his mistress on Sunday. If Lucie got up early Monday morning, she could ge
t her hair done before he arrived for breakfast.

  Lucie was twenty-six. Armand thirty-six. They’d been lovers ten years. At the start of their romance, Armand’s wife Clarisse had come down to Ramparts Row in tears, begging Lucie to leave her man alone.

  “It’s our destiny, Clarisse,” Lucie said gently. “Didn’t your mama tell you?”

  At last Armand’s mother told Clarisse about her destiny; Lucie and Armand were left in peace. Armand was generous, not the type to go chasing younger girls. It looked as if he’d support her all his life.

  When Marie walked into Lucie’s white stucco cottage, that high-class courtesan’s parlor full of Persian scarves and French carpets, she was entering the tranquil world in which she and Delphine were supposed to have lived.

  Like all the ladies on Ramparts Row, Lucie had a fancy dressing room decorated with lace frills and gilded mirrors. Armand liked passing through it on his way to her bedroom. “It’s just like Lucie,” he said. “Heady as a rose garden, only cleaner and more charming.”

  Had Armand passed through early Monday morning, he’d have met the woman who secretly tended and pruned his garden.

  “How’re you doin’?” asked Lucie, who remembered Marie from the St. Philip Street Ballroom and treated her with due respect.

  “I think I’ll be all right,” Marie answered laconically, removing her cloak and tying a white apron over her dress. “It’s your nails this week, right?”

  Lucie nodded. She was a high yellow woman at the height of her beauty, with black hair and gray-green eyes. All she needed was a weekly wash, a biweekly trim, and manicure. As Marie unpacked her vanity chest, Lucie stretched and yawned.

  “I’ll never,” she murmured, spreading out her fingers on Marie’s little table. “I’ll never understand men as long as I live.”

  Marie glanced into the mirror, then down at Lucie’s hand. “What do you mean?” She prodded a cuticle with her orange stick.

  “Armand. I’ve slept in the same bed with that man for ten years, but I still don’t know him. He fought a duel Friday, something about an old gambling debt. He was nervous all week. ‘You’re too old for this,’ I told him. ‘Especially about gambling.’ But he wouldn’t listen. Friday morning he came here and told me he’d won, killed the other man—”

  “Who’d he fight?” whispered Marie, so softly that Lucie wasn’t sure she’d heard.

  “Pascal Chartier.”

  Marie sighed, crossing herself for her first lover from the ballroom, that carrot-topped “poet” whose cool kisses had made her wonder if she’d ever know true love.

  “Rest in peace,” said Lucie. “Anyhow ... Armand walked in Friday and dragged me back to bed before I could drink my coffee. You’d think he’d have some respect—straight from killing a man. But he said the duel made him so hot, he’d barely made it over. Imagine ...”

  “What goes on in their heads?” asked Lucie, inspecting her newly manicured hand.

  “Men have their own reasons,” said Marie. “Don’t ask me.”

  9 A.M. Adele Dulong. 58 Ramparts Row.

  Madame Adele was an ancient octoroon dowager, a pillar of colored society and a chaperone at the St. Philip Street Ballroom. Her lifelong protector had bequeathed her enough to maintain the style to which she’d always been accustomed—a style out of fashion for thirty years. Her furniture, her paintings, even her clothes reminded Marie of things she’d seen Delphine give away to her cook.

  Madame’s appointment with Marie was not so much a matter of beauty as of time. Instructing Marie to rouge her cheeks and fix her hair like a turn of the century belle, she never imagined it would make her beautiful; she knew how silly she looked with those curls and those red spots on her waxy yellow skin. But when she saw those sweet reminders of her youth in the mirror, she could pretend that time had turned back for her, that the last thirty years had never happened.

  It was hard work. Marie spent two hours darkening her hair with antimony, rubbing avocado oil into her dry skin. While Marie worked, Madame Adele kept up an impassioned monologue on her favorite subject: black blood.

  Sixty-five years in colored society had given her a sharp eye for different shades of color. She was always hearing rumors, tracing bloodlines, uncovering family secrets. While Marie applied the curling irons to her brittle dyed hair, Madame Adele told her which griffes were really octoroons, which quadroons were really mulattoes. While Marie arranged the curls to cover her bald spots, the dowager told her how often the mayor’s brother stole away to his slave quarters, how many nights his uncle spent on Ramparts Row, how many tiny colored babies took after the mayor himself. She ranted on about an old yellow lady passing herself off as the governor’s aunt and three yellow girls passing for white at the Ursuline School.

  “They’ve all got some black blood in them somewhere,” said Madame Adele, flirting with her own image in the mirror. “Just know where to look and you’ll see: there’s not a white man in New Orleans.” She smiled at herself, proud with conviction. And for an instant her eyes shone with the mischievous gleam of a young colored beauty.

  11 A.M. Elspeth Nedermeyer. 14 Bienville Street.

  Elspeth Nedermeyer was the daughter of Karl Nedermeyer, a successful silver importer, the richest man in the German immigrant community. Determined to climb up into Creole high society, Herr Nedermeyer and his wife Lotte had just bought an old house in the Quarter and season tickets to the French Opera.

  But sixteen-year-old Elspeth was the weak rung in their ladder. Had she been pretty, her unintelligible English might have been one of her charms. But she was homely—tall and broad as a Prussian cavalry officer. So she stopped talking in her thick accent and stopped trying to understand; she’d developed the dumb vacant manner of a thick-tongued Bavarian cow.

  She took no interest in Marie’s efforts to improve her appearance. Staring in the mirror, her face stayed blank and impassive. Elspeth’s mother supervised the operation in her own dressing room decorated with whimsical wooden elves from the Black Forest. “Some fluffy curls on her forehead,” ordered Frau Nedermeyer. “Some fullness on the sides. What are they doing in Paris for girls with horse faces?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Marie. “I know just what she needs.”

  Only then did Frau Nedermeyer retire to her bedroom, leaving them alone. Usually Elspeth submitted passively while Marie worked to kindle the light in her dull yellow hair and blue eyes. But this morning, as Marie was painting on a thin film of rouge, Elspeth’s jaw shot out, causing a red splotch to land on her chin.

  “Martin Harris,” she said slowly, cradling the words in her mouth like two eggs. “You know him?”

  “No.” Marie wiped the rouge from her chin. “Who is he?”

  “Boy,” said Elspeth. “Comes to see me.”

  “I don’t know him,” said Marie. “But I’ll find out.”

  11:50 A.M. Shielding herself against the damp wind, Marie crossed Canal Street into the American Quarter.

  12 Noon. Abigail Dobbs. 30 Carondelet Street.

  Abby Dobbs was the bright star of the young American scene. She’d attended the Protestant School and every party since her debut. She’d be married within the year—though no one knew who the lucky boy would be. Abby had five boyfriends—three Americans, two Creoles—but didn’t have the heart to disappoint a single one.

  While Marie fixed her hair according to the latest fashion sheets from Paris, Abby chattered continually, comparing her boyfriends’ looks and manners. Often she reminded Marie of herself talking to Marie Saloppe at the height of her dancing days.

  It took the length of a shampoo and rinse for Abby to bring her up to date on the week’s developments. “I wonder what’ll happen by Christmas. Well ... I’ll decide by Mardi Gras. I can’t bear to do it. But if they all hold on till then, I’ll know they really love me, that they’re not just after my pretty face, like some boys I know, or my money—”

  “Like Martin Harris?” Marie whispered the words in her ear.
/>
  “Lord, Marie.” Abby giggled. “Who told you about that? But oh isn’t it shameful? Two days after Martin’s papa disinherits him, he starts courting that homely German girl. The boys can’t stop teasing him ...”

  Marie picked up a soft towel and dried Abby’s hair. Looking in the mirror, she saw Elspeth Nedermeyer kneeling in prayer to the Virgin at St. Louis Cathedral.

  1 P.M. Emma Sands. 112 Jackson Avenue.

  If Abby Dobbs were to develop in a perfectly straight line, she’d spend the next twenty years becoming Emma Sands.

  Emma Sands was everything an American woman was supposed to be. Consequently she had everything an American woman was supposed to have: A rich husband. Old family money. Three healthy children. A custom-built mansion on Jackson Avenue. Fifteen slaves and ten paid servants. A permanent box at the American Theater. A conversational knowledge of French language and culture, a lively interest in city politics, and an important role in the American Ladies’ Benevolent Association. She was considered a charming hostess, a model of the good life. But as Marie gathered Emma’s'graying hair into a tight chignon, she often felt like a mortician trying to beautify a corpse.

  Fortunately Ms. Sands was quite satisfied with her appearance. In fact she was so satisfied with everything about herself that everything else suffered by comparison.

  She was a vicious gossip. She knew every scandal and secret in town. She could hear a quarrel or a creaking bedspring from two miles away and follow the guilty tracks of the most discreet husband. She was full of inside information: Mrs. A. had come to the Ladies’ Benevolent Meeting with a black eye. Mr. B. had bought his mistress a new coach. Mrs. Citycouncilman C. had ordered her maid to keep the master out of her bedroom ...