Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  “I know that. But Marie’s your name now.”

  “You can call me that.”

  “They’ll all call you that—now that you’re taking over the business.”

  Ti-Marie listened for the reproach in his voice—after all, His own church condemned her business as devil’s work. But there was none. “What do you know about the business?” She forced a smile.

  “Everything,” He said. “It’s my work.”

  “Your work?”

  “It’s a work of love. Of charity. Doing good in this world. No one else in town has the power to do so much good in My name.”

  “What about the priests?” thought Ti-Marie, but her heart was beating too fast for speech. She thought: This is how love feels. “Then you want me to go on with the business?” she asked.

  “I require you to do my work,” said Jesus with a wry self-mocking smile, as if His nature were too gentle to demand anything from anyone.

  “In your name?”

  “In your mama’s name. That’s how you can do it best. Tell them you’re her. After she’s joined me—the baron told me to expect her within the year—keep on being her. Dress like her. Talk like her. Become her. Keep the faith alive.”

  “But couldn’t I...?”

  “It wouldn’t work as well.” said Jesus, reading her mind. “Suppose I’d come back changed. Suppose I’d risen on that third day—no just transfigured, but totally different. No one would have believed. It would have shaken their faith too hard.”

  “But that’s a sin—pretending to be someone else.”

  “Consider the ends. Not the means. Consider the charity and the good. Consider my love.”

  Ti-Marie bowed her head so he wouldn’t see her blush. “But what about my normal life ... family, children, John Eustis...?”

  Then for the first time, Jesus seemed angry—a jealous, wounded anger which made His eyes burn in a way which thrilled and flattered her.

  “When you come back from the dead,” he said, “you’ll be a woman of fifty-six. That’s how you’ll act. No husband. No children. Just work, decent widowhood. And my love.”

  Ti-Marie lowered her head again. She heard Jesus approach. Placing a finger under her chin, He tilted her head until she was looking into His eyes. Her vision blurred. Jesus’ face was all around her. “Don’t worry,” He said, sweet and desperate as a boy in love. “No one else could treat you like I can. You’ll never need anyone else. I’m the best lover you’ll ever have. I’ll never leave you. Just tell me you’ll do the work in your mama’s name.”

  He bent and softly kissed her forehead, then granted her a moment of silence to think. There was a hush, like the pause before a marriage vow is taken.

  “I promise,” said Ti-Marie. Light and heat flooded her body. She felt weak, but extremely happy, hopeful as a loving bride.

  “I’ll be with you always,” said Jesus. He walked away, then paused. “One thing more. It’s our secret, all right? Our promise and our secret. Understand?”

  “I do,” said Ti-Marie. But Jesus was already gone.

  So she kept her vow to Jesus, stronger even than her promise to Marie. She worked for her mother. But she changed herself for Jesus. She learned to answer to “Marie,” put on her mother’s clothes, her mother’s voice. Her mother’s business.

  She no longer worried about lacking the magic. Now she knew: The magic was Jesus’. He helped her cure the sick and divine the secrets she could trade for power.

  For Jesus and Marie, she soaked herself in the bayou and stopped at a filthy house on Lepers’ Row to find a witness to her resurrection. For Marie and Jesus, she lost herself and became Marie Laveau. Her secret name was Ti-Marie.

  No one wanted their hearts to dry up like talcum. They stopped saying that the resurrected Marie was really her daughter. Instead they said: Marie Laveau has found Christ in the eye of the hurricane. She’s been changed.

  The change revealed itself gradually. Marie was spending more time in church—mass every morning. She worked nights in the Charity Hospital, devoted twice as many hours to the prisoners. She talked less about the loas, more about Jesus and the saints. Now her cures and fixes always involved a few high masses and Hail Marys. She was handling fewer lawsuits, more healings.

  “It’s not my power,” she told grateful clients. “It’s a gift from Jesus.”

  People said: “Marie Laveau would never have said that before she died and came back.”

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her voice filled her daughter’s dream: “Don’t you tell them it’s Jesus’ power—it isn’t! It’s the power of the saints and loas. Your own magic. Mine. Jesus is just a star in that sky. You’re a voodoo woman with Makan-dal’s blood, not some white-trash faith healer. You’ll ruin the business. Nobody will fear you anymore. The power’s in the fear as well as the love. You’ll lose the power I worked so hard to get!

  “You won’t be queen—just some penny-saint. Is that what you want? That’s not power. That’s bondage. Bondage to Jesus. Is that what you’re doing with my power?”

  People said: “The years are beginning to tell on Marie Laveau. Her power is declining.”

  One Sunday she asked the drummers in Congo Square to play a slower rhythm. It was too hot. Her old body couldn’t take it. The next Sunday she didn’t show up at all. The crowd disbanded. There was no dance.

  The lines stopped forming outside her house. Clients accused her of indifference, of preferring talk about Jesus to their own troubled histories. She didn’t seem to want their business. Customers drifted off to other doctors—a woman across the water in Algiers, three sisters in Jefferson Parish.

  The only ones pleased by fhe changes were the Charity Hospital patients who kissed Marie’s hands when she brought their Indian Root tea. And the prisoners: Long-term inmates who’d known Marie for years were amazed. She’d stopped pumping them for information. She brought more gumbo, flowers, presents, holy books. She offered to pray with them.

  Often they weren’t in the mood to pray and missed the old Marie’s company. But they couldn’t complain about the presents and the gumbo.

  “She’s getting on,” the prisoners said. “That’s what all the gumbo and Jesus-talk is about. She always was a smart one. She’s getting ready for heaven, and she wants a saint’s credentials by the time she’s ready to go.

  “She’s getting ready fast. Saints don’t last long—not half so long as voodoo queens.”

  Saint Marie the voodoo queen lasted twenty years.

  She never renounced voodoo. She just stopped doing it. She cleaned the roots and herbs out of her house. The only objects left were candles, crucifixes, pictures of the saints. She closed down her office and worked outside her house at prisons, hospitals, orphanages. During the Civil War she nursed the Confederate wounded.

  She never married and lived like a nun. She attended every mass and went to confession regularly. She let it be known that she was leaving her entire fortune to the church.

  She aged quickly. No one was surprised—after all, she was in her eighties, some said older.

  Over her last twenty years, Marie Laveau shrunk twenty inches, dwindled into a tiny withered yellow woman with long snow-white hair, hobbling around from one good deed to another.

  On June 16 [said the Louisiana Daily Picayune], Marie Laveau, “voodoo queen” of this city for more than half a century, passed away peacefully in her sleep at her cottage on the corner of Royal and St. Ann.

  All in all, Marie Laveau was a wonderful woman.

  Doing good for the sake of doing good alone, she obtained no reward, ofttimes meeting with prejudice and loathing; she was nevertheless contented and did not lag in her work. She always had the cause of the people at heart and was with them in everything. During the late rebellion she proved her loyalty to the South at every opportunity and fully dispensed help to those who suffered in defense of the “lost cause”... She spent her last days surrounded by sacred pictures and other ev
idences of religion, and she died with a firm trust in Heaven. While God’s sunshine plays around the little tomb (in St. Louis Cemetery) where her remains are buried, Marie’s name will not be forgotten in New Orleans.

  CHAPTER XL

  MARIE LAVEAU HAS come back from the dead. Her spirit has returned in the body of her own daughter.

  A month after Marie’s death, a middle-aged woman sets up shop in Algiers. She claims that her name is Marie Laveau, that she is the long-lost daughter, disappeared since the night of the hurricane when her mother died and returned.

  “I heard my mama was grinding her knees down on the church floors,” says this new Marie. “I figured her spirit must’ve floated out of her in that water. So I waited till she died and freed her spirit. I waited till I felt her spirit jump into me.”

  People believe her enough to give her fixes a try. They haven’t had a real voodoo queen since Marie got religion—just a long train of doctors and sisters. No one to rule.

  But her daughter in Algiers isn’t the one. She does some healings, some horoscopes. Yet other doctors can be found to undo her fixes. She has power, but it’s not the power of a queen.

  Many don’t believe her. “I knew that Ti-Marie,” say Marie’s former clients. “She’d never have gotten a cobra tattooed by her eye. She had better taste than that.”

  Nevertheless, the woman in Algiers does good business for almost two years. Then one day she vanishes as suddenly and mysteriously as she came.

  “Marie Laveau’s come back from the dead,” people said. “Punishing that lady pretending to be her daughter.”

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  At the turn of the century she takes the Illinois Central from New Orleans to Natchez with no luggage but one huge bag full of roots, candles, and powders, all stamped with the words: Marie Laveau Louisiana Voodoo Genuine Article.

  She continues on the train to Philadelphia, where she stops and opens a business. Six months later, she’s made enough money to send train fare back to New Orleans—enough for her family of fifteen to come up north.

  In the middle of February, the family moves to Philadelphia to look for work. The train is already in the station before they realize that they and Marie have made a terrible mistake.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  She is the star of the choir at the Sacred Blood Gospel Church of New Orleans. One Sunday morning a Chicago pimp in town to visit his mother attends a service and stays after church.

  “You’ll have to wait on heaven for Jesus to make you a star,” he tells her. “I can do it right here on earth.”

  That night they become lovers. Later he takes her to the South Side, where he gets her singing the blues in small clubs, making less than the homeliest street whore. Gradually she builds a reputation, until she’s bringing home good money from the fashionable Prohibition hot-spot.

  Everyone—black and white—agree that she’s magic. A reporter from the Sun-Times compares her to a jungle priestess. The bartender calls her his Louisiana voodoo queen.

  She remembers the magic of the music and the dance, but forgets the rest and dies of an alcohol liver at the age of thirty-two.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her name is Zora Neal Hurston.

  She is born to a Florida preacher, educated in black colleges, then up'to Harlem Renaissance New York. She travels through the South and the Caribbean, listening to people’s secrets, writing their stories, her own novels.

  She is initiated into the secrets of voodoo in New Orleans by Father “Frizzly Rooster” Joe Watson and by Turner, who has inherited the crown of power from Marie Laveau. But she will not say how deep her initiation goes.

  At forty her luck turns. The loas turn against her. Friends fail her. Publishers fail her. Society fails her and covers its failure with a scandal.

  Her body is buried in Florida, but her spirit keeps returning in the magic of her words.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her name is Sister Marie. She is an old lady in wartime Harlem with an evening reader-adviser business on the second floor of an office building on 125th Street. During the day she works downtown as a maid.

  Her business card says: Born with a veil on my face. Nobody knows where she gets her strange-tasting medicines. They see her toting the roots to her office in two huge shopping bags, perfectly balanced, the kind of bags in which other crazy old ladies carry all their earthly possessions.

  Like those old ladies, Sister Marie wears too much rouge. People say she’s gone in the head. But her cures work—she knows something. So they bring her their questions, their pleas for help:

  Help me get pregnant. Make it a boy. Make it an easy labor.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her name is Rosa Parks.

  One afternoon in Birmingham she sits down in the front of a bus. She just sits there—saying and doing nothing—even when they arrest her and take her to jail.

  After so many years, she’s come back remembering the power of secrets and silence.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her name is Maria Inez, black Puerto Rican, fifteen years old. Nearsighted, she wears thick glasses. She speaks no English but she can heal.

  Clients climb six flights to her room in the South Bronx. She lights three candles to San Antonio and says twelve Hail Marys. Then she lays both hands on her client’s head and babbles in tongues, mumbling gibberish until she passes out cold.

  An attendant takes the money. Always her clients offet. more than the fee. Money seems like nothing. They feel as if a candle has been lit in their hearts and their souls have been cleansed.

  Marie Laveau has come back from the dead.

  Her spirit is divided like bread among a dozen men and women squatting over a campfire in the hills of Santo Domingo, killing and eating the chickens they’ve bought from a local farmer. Their talk traces a rebellion along the lines of Makandal’s—armed now with stronger magic, stronger hopes for success.

  They drink the chicken’s blood and take new names. No bullets can touch them.

  Marie Laveau will come back from the dead.

  Call her name and she will return in the eye of the hurricane, the depths of the water. She will appear at the comer of your eye, in your brightest and darkest dreams, on the other side of the mirror. She will shine in the foxfire, the will-o’-the-wisp, the full red moon.

  Call her name and she will help you get pregnant. She will make it an easy labor. Your great-great-grandchildren will remember you when you’re gone. She will heal you. She will rid your house of snakes. Your demons will flee in terror.

  Call her name and she will get you out of jail. She will teach you to dance. She will stand as your second in every duel. Call her name and your fires will light, your pumps will flow like rivers.

  Call her name and she will tell you her story. But she will keep her own secrets. Call her name and she will answer because she can never let go.

  Call her name and she will ease your pain. She knows who you are and she’s expecting you. Call her name and she will read your mind. She will tell you what you want to hear.

  “Everything will be all right,” she will say. “Everything will be all right.”

  Everything will be all right.