Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

“I see you’re in pain,” she said. “There’s a woman in my part of town who sells remedies for that pain.”

  “Will you bring me some?” asked Lucinda Brown.

  “Directly into your hand,” said Marie. “And I know I don’t have to worry ’bout you telling.”

  3 P.M. The heat made Angelique Collins throw temper tantrums. Often she refused to eat dinner. The city councilman was afraid she’d throw a fit at one of his parties. He wondered what had happened to the serene child he’d married.

  This afternoon his placid doll was red in the face, stubbornly refusing to let Marie touch her hair.

  “It’ll just take a minute,” pleaded City Councilman Collins. But Angelique stamped her foot and crossed her arms over her tiny breasts. A fat tear rolled out of one eye.

  Finally Marie took a red heart-shaped candy from her pocket. “Taste this,” she told Angelique. “It’s delicious.”

  After great hesitation, Angelique popped the candy into her mouth. She chewed it thoughtfully, then smiled the sweet contented smile of babies chewing Cloud of Joy Root. Grinning, she unclenched her fists and submitted to the hairdressing like a good little girl.

  An hour later the city councilman returned to thank Marie. “Ten dollars will buy you a whole box of that candy,” she said. “Don’t say a thing about it.”

  4 P.M. Alice Morton was finally sporting the face of a hard-drinking woman: Watery eyes, a cherry nose, hanging bulldog jowls.

  “Judge started again,” she said, her voice thick with alcohol and heat. “Threatening to divorce me if I don’t quit drinking. But how can I quit drinking if I don’t drink? Anyhow ... it’s not me. They’ve got something on him. They’ve had it for years. That’s what’s making him so mean.”

  “Find out what it is,” said Marie, powdering over the blood blisters on Alice’s cheeks. “Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a secret place. Then tell him you’ve got it. He’ll leave you alone. He won’t divorce you, either.”

  “How do I find out?” Alice blinked slowly, straining to comprehend.

  “You can do it,” said Marie. “But don’t tell anyone where you got the idea.”

  5 P.M. Unlike Marie’s other customers, Clarisse Recamier was flourishing in the humidity. “Just wash and fix it simply,” she told Marie. “I’m going for a week’s retreat at the Carmelite convent in Jefferson Parish.”

  “Madame’s looking forward to it?”

  “Very much. It will be good to spend a week so close to Jesus. That’s what I keep.telling Armand. But he’s miserable—he doesn’t want me to go. He’s being so kind, so attentive. So sweet ...” said Clarisse, her smile hinting that her pure love for Jesus was still tinged with the traces of an adulterous passion for her husband.

  “He’ll recover when Madame actually leaves,” said Marie.

  “I suppose so. But that’s not for three days.”

  In the mirror, Lucie Raphael gathered nine lemons and nine grains of salt, lit three red candles to send away the woman who was fixing Armand’s heart. Marie smiled.

  “What’s so amusing?” asked Clarisse.

  “I was just thinking: Perhaps Madame ought to go away more often,” said Marie. “But don’t tell anyonel said so.”

  Everyone told everyone else. The word traveled slowly but steadily until all Marie’s hairdressing clients were patronizing her business. They bought her gris-gris and followed her advice—-though most would have fainted at the suggestion that they were practising voodoo.

  The true believers were harder to convince. When they heard Marie was going into business, they were surprised it hadn’t happened earlier. But months passed before she got her first customer—a mulatto girlfriend of Lucie Raphael’s who came for a feather charm to put in her lover’s pillow.

  Eventually the slaves and free colored brought the most challenging cases. Unlike the fainthearted ladies, they believed in voodoo and unashamedly asked Marie to make their bosses generous and their wives’ lovers impotent, to break their masters’ arms and free their sons from jail. Eventually they became her most loyal customers.

  But these customers came slowly, dragging their feet—especially Doctor John’s following, who weren’t about to switch doctors without positive proof that Marie was strong enough to protect them. Even after they’d given her their business, many kept going to Doctor John to keep him from taking offense and turning his powers against them.

  And so Marie began her business—working so slowly and secretly that the secret was soon known to everyone but Doctor John and Father Antoine.

  CHAPTER XIX

  FATHER ANTOINE WOULD never find out. He claimed to be “semiretired”; in fact he rarely left his cottage except to attend mass. He delegated the parish work to younger priests who believed he was becoming a saint and gossiped in hushed tones about his soaring soul-travels through time and space. They’d never disturb the^e journeys with the news that a yellow hairdresser had confessed to selling love potions—nor did they suspect that this same hairdresser was paying late-night visits to their saint.

  Even if they had told Father Antoine about Marie, he wouldn’t have cared. He’d retreated from his earthly city. When parishioners stopped him on the street, he gave them blank polite stares, like a little boy humoring some elderly relative who’d last seen him as a baby. One morning an Irishwoman with three children accosted him after mass.

  “Here he is,” she told her children. “Here’s the man who saved my life in the ’19 plague.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Father Antoine. “You must be thinking of someone else.”

  Puzzled, the woman wondered if she was mistaken. She was. Father Antoine was a different man from the “Father Five-Arms” she’d known at the Charity Hospital. He didn’t even look the same. He’d shrunk six inches and fifty pounds. His complexion was as white and translucent as onionskin. The doctors diagnosed anemia, but the ladies insisted that Father Antoine’s spiritual light was finally shining through. Even their husbands had to admit that he was looking more like a distinguished old angel, less like the powerful gorilla who’d once ruled the jungle of Louisiana politics.

  Father Antoine no longer cared about Louisiana politics or any power except God’s.

  “Why did Jesus let Himself be crucified?” he asked one evening before Marie had her cloak off.

  “To save mankind,” she answered.

  “That’s what Mother Therese taught you. Is that what you really think?”

  Marie considered it while she folded her cloak over a chair. “No,” she said. “I don’t think Jesus had a good reason in His head. Maybe some power made Him do it. Maybe He was fixed. Maybe He just wanted to see how it would turn out.”

  Father Antoine laughed. “My child,” he said. “If you weren’t a woman—and a yellow one at that—I’d make you my successor. But there is an old duty of mine you could take over.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Visiting the prisoners. They need it so badly. All you have to do is sit there. They’ll do the talking. Or you can play cards, bring an occasional bowl of gumbo ...”

  “I’ll do it,” said Marie.

  “Good,” said Father Antoine. “But don’t tell me anything about it. I don’t want to know.”

  The men in Parish Prison talked to keep their minds off the gallows. Sometimes they talked politics and current events; sometimes they reminisced or complained about their families.

  But mostly they talked about their daring and dangerous lives in crime. In Marie’s quiet presence, horse thieves and poachers carried on like Jean Lafitte the pirate king. Men who’d knifed their dead-drunk partners in the back became heroes in sagas of treachery and deceit. Pickpockets, arsonists and con men revealed their games. Blackmailers told her their big secrets.

  Marie listened patiently, never showing shock or surprise. Actually nothing shocked her because the worst criminals seemed no more depraved than some of her hairdressing clients. The only thing which surprised her was how slowly t
hey talked—dragging their stories out with blind alleys, sidetracks, useless details, and a ponderous pace.

  One day, hearing the Kansas Killer recall what he’d eaten for breakfast the morning he’d shot twelve people, Marie understood. The convicts had all the time in the world. Their days were passing slower than any days she’d ever passed. They had an eternity to fill.

  So she let them take their time. Knowing their secrets were good for her business, she kept quiet and listened. She got to know and love the most famous bad men in Louisiana. She brought them presents, newspapers, cornbread, bowls of homemade gumbo. Even the warden noticed that only during Marie’s visits did the men act as if their time hadn’t already come.

  Marie’s time had come. She knew it the minute Sweet Medicine answered the door. For months she’d been searching Sweet Medicine’s face for the first signs. Now she realized she needn’t have looked so hard.

  “Come in.” Sweet Medicine’s eyes were empty. “The Doctor wants to see you.”

  The house was silent and tense. The arrangement of women, children and clutter had a static frozen quality, like a school tableau. The red chandelier globes were gone; the light was dazzling. Crossing the room, Marie felt the eyes of all six wives and eleven children.

  She knocked on Doctor John’s door. There was no answer. Sweet Medicine whispered for her to go inside.

  Seated at the low table, Doctor John stared at a card spread. He looked up, his eyes shielded by opaque glasses. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m reading the cards on you.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Pain and trouble, lying, back-stabbing, stealing ...”

  “I heard a story at the jail today ...”

  “They’re talking about you. Now what do you think they mean?”

  “Can I have some whiskey?” asked Marie.

  “No. I don’t drink with sorcerers.”

  “Sorcerers?”

  “Ladies trying to fix me.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like you, Miss Marie. Don’t play dumb with me. You know what I mean. I mean my old client who came crying ’cause my Come to Me Powder hadn’t brought back her man. I told her I hadn’t given her any powder. Didn’t know the gentleman was gone. She began crying again. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘maybe it wasn’t you, maybe it was Marie Laveau.’”

  “Your clients are crazy,” said Marie. “You say it yourself. They drink, they make up things. The lady was imagining—”

  “She wasn’t. And that poor white man wasn’t imagining the bellyful of lizards he brought me. ‘You’re the only real doctor I know about,’ he said.

  “ ‘That makes two of us,’ I said. ‘But we must be wrong. ’Cause someone else put that Belly-Lizard Fix on you. It wasn’t me.’

  “ ‘I couldn’t believe a woman could do it,” he said. ‘But it must be. It must be that Marie Laveau.’ ”

  “No,” said Marie. Doctor John’s glasses collected the candlelight in two bright points. Snake eyes. She looked away. “Suppose it is true,” she said. “Itdidn’t bother you when I stole Sister Delilah’s business. And isn’t this what you’ve been saying all along, that I was bora with the gift?”

  “I didn’t say you were born to steal it from me. I wouldn’t’ve taught you so much.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Certainly not. I don’t do business with back-stab-bers.”

  “I think you would’ve. I think you knew, all of you—you and those spirits and Marie Saloppe ...”

  Suddenly Doctor John smiled the sly grin of someone dying to reveal a secret. “What is it?” asked Marie, glad for the break in their fight.

  “Marie Saloppe’s dead. I just got a letter from Pinhead Helen—the most beautiful handwriting, who would’ve thought?—saying Marie Saloppe’s old heart gave out on her swimming in the ocean, trying to keep all that weight afloat.”

  Marie flinched. “You’re lying,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Then don’t believe it,” said Doctor John. “Time will tell.”

  But time wasn’t telling a thing. Something was happening but Marie didn’t know what it was. The next Monday, Doctor John was perfectly gracious. They talked as if nothing had happened, maintained the uneasy charade.

  She left more frightened than before. Now she believed he’d known all along, read her mind from the day she took on her first client. Then why had he mentioned it at all?

  It was all part of his plan. He was waiting and there was nothing to do but wait with him.

  Meanwhile her business grew. Doctor John’s dwindled. She and the snake and Doctor John waited for something to happen.

  CHAPTER XX

  IT HAPPENED TO MARIE.

  Half-asleep, she heard three loud knocks: This. Means. Business. She put on a robe and got up to answer the door. Outside were two big police lieutenants, one blond Germanic-looking, the other younger, blue-eyed Irish.

  “Marie Laveau?” said the German.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re under arrest. Come with us.”

  “What for?”

  “Fraud and breach of contract.”

  She thought: The secret’s out. “Do you know who I am?” she demanded, focussing on the younger man. “I’m a hoodoo woman. Do you know what I can do to you?”

  The Irishman’s horrified face told her how red her eyes looked. “Orders are orders,” said the other.

  They took her to Parish Prison. The same warden who’d escorted her like a queen on her weekly visits now shoved her down a corridor and locked her in. “You did good here,” he said. “Forgive me, but I always thought you couldn’t have done so well if you hadn’t had a talent for crime yourself.” Then he left her alone in the tiny dark cell. The dank walls smelled foul. A cesspool overflowed in the middle of the floor.

  “The fourth circle of hell,” thought Marie. Powerless, she needed power more than ever She had no recourse, no more privilege. Her gossiping ladies couldn’t help her. So what if she was Father Antoine’s favorite? She could die before he’d hear. She certainly couldn’t count on Doctor John. She didn’t even understand the charge. Fraud? They might fine her. They might hang her.

  She knelt on the slimy floor and prayed to Jesus, Mary, all the saints and loas. “If you really want me,” said, “spring me.”

  In the morning she was brought before Chief Justice Henry Morton. “The defendant is charged with numerous incidents of fraud involving large sums of money,” said the judge, proceeding to read a long list of fictitious cases. “How does she plead?”

  “I don’t plead for anything,” said Marie, staring hard at him. “Let me write you a little note.”

  “Give her a pen and paper,” ordered the judge, unsettled by a sudden deja vu.

  “Treat your wife’s hairdresser nice,” scrawled Marie. “Or be ready to hang me on the spot. Let’s talk.”

  The case was adjourned to chambers.

  “Your wife’s got a big mouth,” said Marie as soon as she and Judge Morton were alone. “She knows plenty and she tells me everything. Two words from me could turn this city upside-down.”

  The judge—a self-satisfied old man with a broad, shiny forehead, a moth-eaten barrister’s wig and jowls like his wife’s—nervously rapped his gavel against his desk. “That’s blackmail,” he said.

  “At least it’s the truth,” said Marie. “Those charges of yours are a pack of lies.”

  Judge Morton lowered his voice. “I know you can keep a secret... so just between us ... there’s a secret plaintiff in this case. A certain John Bayou collected the evidence.”

  Marie gasped. “I knew it,” she said. “He’s the fraud.”

  “Now, I don’t believe in this hoodoo you people go in for. But that Doctor John certainly had some effect on my predecessor, Franklin Carter, may he rest in peace.”

  “I fix AnnaLouise Carter’s hair,” said Marie with a meaningful look. “Just like I fix your wife Alice’s.”

  “What do you want?” aske
d the judge after a long silence.

  “I want to get out of here. I want this case wiped off the books. I want immunity from now on. I want a little power around here. I want to be able to ask you a couple favors in the future.”

  “I’ll let you off. And I’ll leave you alone, I promise. But please, no favors. I couldn’t afford ...”

  “I won’t ask anything you wouldn’t do for someone else.” Marie smiled meanly. “And I won’t ask too often. I respect you, Your Honor, I do. And you'll come to respect me. We’ll do business together. Let’s see what happens.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  It happened to Father Antoine at the stroke of midnight on a moonless rainswept January night: three knocks on his door.

  Father Antoine’s spirit was high over the Holy Land, coasting on warm breezes with the Archangel Gabriel. Three shots brought him down to earth.

  He wondered who’d bother him in the middle of the night. Marie never knocked to avoid interrupting ecstasies like the one just interrupted. Before his soul had soared on that first high current, he’d heard the bells strike eleven. He knew the monks were in bed by ten. Most likely it was some parishioner who hadn’t heard that his door was no longer open to everyone in town.

  The priest waited for the intruder to give up and go away. Three more knocks shook the cottage. Just as Father Antoine shrugged and rose to answer, someone pushed open the door.

  A tiny wizened old black man strutted in. Dressed in a tophat, evening clothes, and dark glasses, he carried a pick, a shovel, a large bundle wrapped in black cloth. His face was shrunken back on his skull, his nostrils stuffed with bloody cotton. He was puffing on a cigar, blowing thick clouds of phosphorescent green smoke.

  Father Antoine sat back down, so astounded he couldn’t react to anything but the cigar. He gagged, outraged, thinking that no one had ever dared use tobacco in his home ...