American Gods (43 page)

The slaves on the sugar plantations of St. Domingue rarely
lived more than a decade. The free time they were given—two hours in the heat
of noon and five hours in the dark of the night (from eleven until four)—was
also the only time they had to grow and tend the food they would eat (for they
were not fed by their masters, merely given small plots of land to cultivate,
with which to feed themselves), and it was also the time they had to sleep and
to dream. Even so, they would take that time and they would gather and dance,
and sing and worship. The soil of St. Domingue was a fertile soil and the gods
of Dahomey and the Congo and the Niger put down thick roots there and grew lush
and huge and deep, and they promised freedom to those who worshiped them at
night in the groves.

Hyacinth was twenty-five years of age when a spider bit the
back of his right hand. The bite became infected and the flesh on the back of
his hand was necrotic: soon enough his whole arm was swollen and purple, and
the hand stank. It throbbed and it burned.

They gave him crude rum to drink, and they heated the blade
of a machete hi the fire until it glowed red and white. They cut his arm off at
the shoulder with a saw, and they cauterized it with the burning blade. He lay
in a fever for a week. Then he returned to work.

The one-armed slave called Hyacinth took part in the slave revolt
of 1791.

Elegba himself took possession of Hyacinth in the grove,
riding him as a white man rode a horse, and spoke through him. He remembered
little of what was said, but the others who were with him told him that he had
promised them freedom from their captivity. He remembered only his erection,
rodlike and painful; and raising both hands—the one he had, and the one he no
longer possessed—to the moon.

A pig was killed, and the men and the women of that
plantation drank the hot blood of the pig, pledging themselves and binding
themselves into a, brotherhood. They swore that they were an army of
freedomrpledged themselves once more to the gods of all the, lands from which
they had been dragged as plunder.

“If we die in battle with the whites,” tWfy told each other,
“we will be reborn in Africa, in our homes, in our own tribes.”

There was another Hyacinth in the uprising, so they now called
Agasu by the name of Big One-Arm. He fought, he worshiped, he sacrificed, he
planned. He saw his friends and his lovers killed, and he kept fighting.

They fought for twelve years, a maddening, bloody struggle
with the plantation owners, with the troops brought over from France. They
fought, and they kept fighting, and, impossibly, they won.

On January 1, 1804, the independence of St. Domingue, soon
to be known to the world as the Republic of Haiti, was declared. Big One-Ann
did not live to see it. He had died in August 1802, bayoneted by a French
soldier.

At the precise moment of the death of Big One-Arm (who had
once been called Hyacinth, and before that, Inky Jack, and who was forever in
his heart Agasu), his sister, whom he had known as Wututu, who had been called
Mary on her first plantation in the Carolinas, and Daisy when she had become a
house slave, and Sukey when she was sold to the Lavere family down the river to
New Orleans, felt the cold bayonet slide between her ribs and started to scream
and weep uncontrollably. Her twin daughters woke and began to howl. They were
cream-and-coffee colored, her new babies, not like the black children she had
borne when she was on the plantation and little more than a girl herself—children
she had not seen since they were fifteen and ten years old. The middle girl had
been dead for a year, when she was sold away from them.

Sukey had been whipped many times since she had come
ashore—once, salt had been rubbed into the wounds, on another occasion she had
been whipped so hard and for so long that she could not sit, or allow anything
to touch her back, for several days. She had been raped a number of times when
younger: by black men who had been ordered to share her wooden palette, and by
white men. She had been chained. She had not wept then, though. Since her
brother had been taken from her she had only wept once. It was in North
Carolina, when she had seen the food for the slave children and the dogs poured
into the same trough, and she had seen her little children scrabbling with the
dogs for the scraps. She saw that happen one day—and she had seen it before,
every day on that plantation, and she would see it again many times before she
left—she saw it that one day and it broke her heart.

She had been beautiful for a while. Then the years of pain
had taken their toll, and she was no longer beautiful. Her face was lined, and
there was too much pain in those brown eyes.

Eleven years earlier, when she was twenty-five, her right
arm had withered. None of the white folk had known what to make of it. The
flesh seemed to melt from the bones, and now her right arm hung by her side,
little more than a skeletal arm covered in skin, and almost immobile. After
this she had become a house slave.

The Casterton family, who had owned the plantation, were impressed
by her cooking and house skills, but Mrs. Casterton found the withered arm
unsettling, and so she was sold to the Lavere family, who were out for a year
from Louisiana: M. Lavere was a fat, cheerful man who was in need of a cook and
a maid of all work, and who was not in the slightest repulsed by the slave
Daisy’s withered arm. When, a year later, they returned to Louisiana, slave
Sukey went with them.

In New Orleans the women came to her, and the men also, to
buy cures and love charms and little fetishes, black folks, yes, of course, but
white folks too. The;Lavere family turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps they
enjoyed the_prestige of having a slave who was feared and respected. They would
not, however, sell her her freedom.

Sukey went into the bayou late at night, and she danced the
Calinda and the Bamboula. Like the dancers of St. Domingue and the dancers of
her native land, trie dancers in the bayou had a black snake as their voudon;
even so, the gods of her homeland and of the other African nations did not
possess her people as they had possessed her brother and the folk of St.
Domingue. She would still invoke them and call their names, to beg them for
favors.

She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St.
Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed to fail—”Think of it! A
cannibal land!”—and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it.

Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never
had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never
mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could,
by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer
exist merely by willing it so.

A generation of Lavere children grew up under §ukey’s watchful
eye. The youngest, unable to say “Sukey” as a child, had called her Mama
Zouzou, and the name had stuck. Now the year was 1821, and Sukey was in her
mid-fifties. She looked much older.

She knew more of the secrets than old Sanit6 D6d£, who sold
candies in front of the Cabildo, more than Marie Sa-loppe”, who called herself
the voodoo queen: both were free women of color, while Mama Zouzou was a slave,
and would die a slave, or so her master had said.

The young woman who came to her to find what had happened to
her husband styled herself the Widow Paris. She was high-breasted and young and
proud. She had African blood in her, and European blood, and Indian blood. Her
skin was reddish, her hair was a gleaming black. Her eyes were black and
haughty. Her husband,’Jacques Paris, was, perhaps, dead. He was three-quarters
white as these things were calculated, and the bastard of a once-proud family,
one of the many immigrants who had fled from St. Domingo, and as free-born as
his striking young wife.

“My Jacques. Is he dead?” asked the Widow Paris. She was a
hairdresser who went from home to home, arranging the coiffures of the elegant
ladies of New Orleans before their demanding social engagements.

Mama Zouzou consulted the bones, then shook her head. “He is
with a white woman, somewhere north of here,” she said. “A white woman with
golden hair. He is alive.”

This was not magic. It was common knowledge in New Orleans
just with whom Jacques Paris had run off, and the color of her hair.

Mama Zouzou was surprised to realize that the Widow Paris
did not already know that her Jacques was sticking his quadroon little pipi
into a pink-skinned girl up in Colfax every night. Well, on the nights that he
was not so drunk that he could use it for nothing better than pissing. Perhaps
she knew. Perhaps she had another reason for coming.

The Widow Paris came to see the old slave woman one or two
times a week. After a month she brought gifts for the old woman: hair ribbons,
and a seedcake, and a black rooster.

“Mama Zouzou,” said the girl, “it is time for you to teach
me what you know.”

“Yes,” said Mama Zouzou, who knew which way the wind blew.
And besides, the Widow Paris had confessed that she had been born with webbed
toes, which meant that she was a twin and she had killed her twin in the womb.
What choice did Mama Zouzou have?

She taught the girl that two nutmegs hung upon a string
around the neck until the string breaks will cure heart murmurs, while a pigeon
that has never flown, cpt open and laid on the patient’s head, will draw a
fever. She ;shbwed her how to make a wishing bag, a small leather
bag-etmtaining thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds and the bristles of a black
hog, and how to rub the bag to mak’e wishes come true.

The Widow Paris learned everything that Mama Zouzou told
her. She had no real interest in the gods, though. Not really. Her interests
were in the practicalities. She was delighted to learn that if you dip a live
frog in honey and place it in an ants’ nest, then, when the bones are cleaned
and white, a close examination will reveal a flat, heart-shaped bone, and
another with a hook on it: the bone with the hook on it must be hooked onto the
garment of the one you wish to love you, while the heart-shaped bone must be
kept safely (for if it is lost, your loved one will turn on you like an angry
dog). Infallibly, if you do this, the one you love will be yours.

She learned that dried snake powder, placed in the face
powder of an enemy, will produce blindness, and that an enemy can be made to
drown herself by taking a piece of her underwear, turning it inside out, and
burying it at midnight under a brick.

Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris the Wodd Won-. der Root,
the great and the little roots of John the Conqueror, she showed her dragon’s
blood, and valerian and five-finger grass. She showed her how to brew
waste-away tea, and follow-me-water and faire-Shingo water.

All these things and more Mama Zouzou showed the Widow
Paris. Still, it was disappointing for the old woman. She did her best to teach
her the hidden truths, the deep knowledge, to tell her of Papa ‘Legba, of Mawu,
of Aido-Hwedo the voudon serpent, and the rest, but the Widow Paris (I shall
now tell you the name she was born with, and the name she later made famous: it
was Marie Laveau. But this was not the great Marie Laveau, the one you have
heard of, this was her mother, who eventually became the Widow Glapion), she
had no interest in the gods of the distant land. If St. Domingo had been a lush
black earth for the African gods to grow in, this land, with its corn and its
melons, its crawfish and its cotton, was barren and infertile.

“She does not want to know,” complained Mama Zouzou to
Clementine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in
that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clementine had a blossom
of bums on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a
copper overturned.

“Then do not teach her,” says Clementine.

“I teach her, but she does not see what is valuable—all she
sees is what she can do with it. I give her diamonds, but she cares only for
pretty glass. I give her a demi-bouteille of the best claret and she drinks
river water. I give her quail and she wishes to eat only rat.”

“Then why do you persist?” asks Clementine. Mama Zouzou
shrugs her thin shoulders, causing her withered arm to shake.

She cannot answer. She could say that she teaches because
she is grateful to be alive, and she is: she has seen too many die. She could
say that she dreams that one day the slaves will rise, as they rose (and were
defeated) in LaPlace, but that she knows in her heart that without the gods of
Africa, without the favor of ‘Legba and Mawu, they will never overcome their
white captors, will never return to their homelands.

When she woke, on that terrible night almost twenty years earlier,,
and felt the cold steel between her ribs, that was when Mama Zouzou’s life had
ended. Now she was someone who did not live, who simply hated. If you asked her
about the hate she would have been unable to tell you about a twelve-year-old
girl on a stinking ship: that had scabbed over in her mind—there had been too
many whippings and beatings, too many nights in manacles, too many partings,
too much pain. She could have told you about her son, though, and how his thumb
had been cut off when their master discovered the boy was able to read and to
write. She could have told you of her daughter, ftweive’years old and already
eight months pregnant by an overseer, and how they dug a hole in the red earth
to take her’daughter’s pregnant belly, and then they whipped her until her back
had bled. Despite the carefully dug hole, her daughter had lost her baby and
her life on a Sunday morning, when all the white folks were in church ...

Too much pain.

“Worship them,” Mama Zouzou told the young Widow Paris in
the bayou, one hour after midnight. They were both naked to the waist, sweating
in the humid night, their skins given accents by the white moonlight.