Now Let's Talk of Graves (19 page)

They sat, and G.T. started: “She was a powerful woman in the same way women, especially black women, have always been powerful.” Her smile was wry. “Manipulating, hiding, slipping, and sliding.”

Then she leaned back and spun out the tale. Marie LaVeau was a free mulatto born in New Orleans around 1800. A hairdresser, and a surrogate mother for many quadroon (one-quarter black) women, she arranged for their common-law (for there was no other kind) marriages to white men through
le placage,
a tradition in which a woman of color was courted by a wealthy white suitor, usually after having met at a quadroon ball. Through a surrogate such as Marie LaVeau, the white paramour would meet the woman's parents, agree to buy her a house and to settle a certain amount of money on each of their issue.

Thus Mam'zelle had entree to the rich and powerful white men of the city whom she manipulated with gossip collected from their servants—and from her own psychic abilities. The house she owned on St. Ann was given to her by the father of a young white man whom she saved from the law with a gris-gris—a charm.

The location of the house—where Ida lived now—right at the foot of Congo Square, now Beauregard Square, part of Louis Armstrong Park, and directly in front of the Municipal Auditorium where the Carnival balls were held—was convenient for a voudou queen.

V-o-u-d-o-u, said G.T., was the proper spelling of that word. Then she pointed down the street. They could see the auditorium, the square, the places she was talking about.

To placate whites who were suspicious of voudou, Marie ordered public dances performed in the square every week. Whites thought them magic, but actually they were pleasure dances, Dahomey mating dances, handkerchief dances, conducted to the drumming of a donkey's shinbone.

Mam'zelle invited the police to these bogus entertainments. When the curfew cannon was fired at nine o'clock, the slaves returned to their quarters behind their masters' houses, but the free woman Mam'zelle took her wealthy white clients home to serve them drinks and take their money for powerful charms.

Her compassion was legendary. She tended victims of the yellow fever that plagued the city in the 1850s. Her house became a refuge for orphans and women in distress. And, through her contacts with the rich and powerful, she frequently intervened between the courts and the black community.

“Marie the Sainted” they called her for her work with prisoners. She visited those condemned to death, building an altar, praying with them, giving them gumbo laced with painkilling hallucinogens.

Legend has it that when Mam'zelle grew old and tired, she stepped into a cabin on Bayou St. John and emerged the next morning as a young woman who was known as Marie II, her daughter. After her there may have been a Marie III.

“What is for sure,” said G.T., “is that her practices have been handed down through generations of women and are still alive and well.”

“In you?”

“And in others.”

Sam considered. Maybe it was mumbo jumbo. Maybe it wasn't. But what could it hurt to go pay their respects, unless muggers got them in the cemetery— “Okay, but everybody's told me to stay out of these places.”

“When you're
alone,
that's for sure.” G.T. pointed a warning finger in her face. “But with me you're safe.” Then apparently judging that her audience was warmed up, she handed Sam one of the flowers she'd been carrying. “Ready?”

Sam nodded.

“Now just watch me and do what I do, and stay close beside me.”

So Sam followed G.T. the few steps to the cemetery gate, where the young woman kissed her white carnation, gave it a long look, and tucked it inside her bra. She motioned to Sam to do the same. Then G.T. knocked three times on the gate with her left hand, scraped the soles of her sneakers on the sidewalk, and called in a low voice: “St. Peter, St. Peter, please let me in.”

Sam repeated the words. She was starting to get into this thing. Besides, if she ever wrote a piece on New Orleans, she'd be hell on local color.

G.T. paused and seemed to sniff the air, then smiled. “I feel a tingling in my spine, a glowing in my belly. That means it's okay.”

“Great,” said Sam. “What next?”

G.T., motioning her to follow, stepped over the threshold. She stopped on the other side and then turned left, walking loose-hipped down the aisle to the first right turning.

There she stopped. “This is it.” She pointed. “Mam'zelle's tomb.”

The mass of dirty white marble looked no different from its neighbors except for the hundreds of X's inscribed on every surface.

“Lots of people been here before,” said G.T., then reached inside her shirt, pulled out the carnation, kissed it again, and dropped it on the ground in front of the grave.

Sam played Follow the Leader.

“Mam'zelle, it's General Taylor Johnson,” said G.T. in a loud voice, then gave Sam the nod.

“And Samantha Adams.” Sam felt only a
little
foolish, talking to a grave.

“We're here because we need your help and your guidance. We want to know what happened to Church Lee. We want to know who ran him down.” Then G.T. stepped back a bit and motioned to Sam to speak.

She didn't know what else to add. “What should I tell her?” she whispered.

G.T. gave her a sharp look. “Why
you're
here.”

To humor you, sweetie, she thought. Then—okay. Why not? You get one wish from the voudou queen. Make it good. Then to her surprise she heard her mouth saying, “I need your help with Zoe Lee.”

G.T. nodded approvingly. “Follow me.” She began walking around the tomb, stopping every few feet. “It's called Making the Four Corners.” Then, with her back to the tomb, she raised her arms to the sky, lowered them back to the earth. Her lips were moving. “Say a prayer,” she ordered.

Sam wasn't real big on religion, but one petition
was
familiar to her: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That said, she followed G.T. back to the front of the tomb, where they pressed their foreheads against it. G.T. reached into her jeans pocket, fished out her seven dimes, and dropped them in the basket hooked to the front of the tomb. Sam did the same with the coins G.T. had asked her to bring. Then G.T. picked up a piece of red brick lying on the ground and used it to add her X to the thousands on the tomb. A
big
X. Sam's was even bigger.

“Thank you,” G.T. said to Mam'zelle.

“Thank you,” echoed Sam.

“Now wait. Shhhhh. Listen.”

Sam didn't hear a thing.

“Listen harder.”

She closed her eyes again. And then the message came. It was the one she'd heard a thousand times before. One word, the hardest one for her.

Patience.

When she opened her eyes, G.T. was reaching out to her. They left the cemetery hand in hand, pausing to knock again at the gate with their right hands, scrape their feet once more. “Please let us out, St. Peter,” they chorused. Then they stepped up over the threshold, stepped
big,
like little girls playing a game.

Out on the sidewalk G.T. asked, “Do you feel sad?”

“No.”

“Scared?”

“Not anymore.”

“Good, then we don't have to back up and do this again. Let's go have ourselves a drink over at the Napoleon House instead and start figuring this thing out.”

*

Pavarotti was belting out an aria from
Madame Butterfly
over the speakers above the ancient bar at the corner of Chartres and Toulouse. The Napoleon House was the kind of place where they replastered every hundred years whether they needed to or not. It sported bare light bulbs, opera posters, checkerboard tile floors, and had been one of Sam's favorites when she was drinking. Sober, she still liked it.

They sat at a dark wooden table beside an open arched door. G.T. sipped a beer in the late afternoon light. For a while the music was enough, and they were quiet.

Sam gazed out at the tourists draped with cameras out on Toulouse. She'd bet none of them had been taken to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 for a blessing from Mam'zelle by a New Age voudou queen.

Ah, New Orleans, New Orleans, she sighed to herself. She truly loved this city, one that casual visitors never got to see, though they thought they did. They flew back home with their Mardi Gras beads, T-shirts, Hurricane glasses, a little smug about their hangovers, proud that they'd let it all hang out on Bourbon Street, done a little too much partying in the town that care forgot.

That time forgot was more like it. That's what the city was all about. Time. Blistering heat. Water.

The oil companies could come and build all the bronze glass towers they wanted to on Poydras Street, pretending that progress had come to town in a big way.

But progress had already failed. The bottom had fallen out of the oil market, and the Poydras towers were mostly empty like many other buildings in the city. Empty except for ghosts.

No, New Orleans wasn't what the tourists thought, nor was it about business. New Orleans was a state of mind—slow, Mediterranean, indolent, easy. It was stuck in the fifties. The 1850s Uptown in the Garden District. The 1950s Downtown.

It was a living museum of its proprietors—Indians, French, Spanish, then the French again before Napoleon sold the whole territory to Jefferson for a few bucks.

The very bar where they were sitting was so named because a group of loyalists bought the building for the little emperor in case he needed a safe place. Most certainly he would have preferred it to the island of Saint Helena, where he spent his last miserable days constipated from the English gruel.

Then, too, New Orleans was a swamp, a yellow-fever-ridden bog perched on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, a favored destination of Caribbean hurricanes, and at the bottom of the muddy Mississip, the drain for the continent.

It was a lazy city that would rather preserve itself and its ways than fight. The Confederate flag had flown less than a year when David “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut asked the mayor nicely to lower it please, and Reconstruction began.

New Orleanians had always relished good food, good music, and they loved to dance. They adored political intrigue and still talked about redneck Huey Long as if he were a present-day threat to gentility and the Old Guard and their way of life. It was home to a state comptroller who—just before they hauled him off to jail for being more greedy than was seemly even in a climate of consummate corruption—said that when he took the oath of office he hadn't also taken a vow of poverty. Over long lunches in the city, the line still got a big laugh.

But mostly, and forever, it was a flat place of water and light. Here the sky was a huge bowl that on hot days filled with mile-high clouds, and, just when you thought you couldn't stand the heat one more minute, it dumped down afternoon rains with a violence that was both sudden and magical. New Orleans grew and thrived in the midst of swamp and lake and bog. It smelled of heat and rot and boundless vegetation. It was bayous and thick, clipped lawns, bearded live oaks and fuchsia crepe myrtle, banana trees, pink azaleas, bamboo, roses, camellias, bougainvillea, hibiscus, oleander, and jacaranda blooming trumpets of blue. Its outskirts were populated with alligators and muskrat and water moccasins waiting for a chance to creep in and settle on your patio just when you thought yourself safe behind thick, cool walls that bespoke civilization.

And then there was the black/white thing. Look at General Taylor sipping her beer. Kitty had told Sam the young black woman was named after the street on which she was born when her mother's taxi didn't make it to the hospital on time. She lived on that Garden District street still, a street dubbed for a slave-holding general, Old Rough and Ready, who later became president of the United States. Now, wasn't that New Orleans?

Fabulously wealthy landowners like Kitty's ancestor, Augustus Lee, had brought blacks from Africa to New Orleans to work their plantations, grow their rice, raise their children, build their houses in the Garden District. Now those slaves' descendants, like General Taylor Johnson, were in the majority, a majority that elected light-skinned mayors with names like Morial and Barthelemy, who were part of the black aristocracy.

So on the surface, at least, those slaves' descendants ran the Big Easy. In truth, however, that old dictum still held: In the North, whites said to blacks, Get as big as you want, but don't get too close. In the South, Get as close as you want, but not too big. So New Orleans's black mayors
looked
big, but the real power was where it had always been, in the hands of their close, Uptown, white neighbors.

Now in the Napoleon House, Pavarotti had long finished his aria, and the mournful thrumming of Beethoven's “Waldstein Sonata” filled the air.

It was time to get down to it, thought Sam.

So she asked the young voudou priestess, pre-med student, ambulance driver, “G.T., tell me about Jimbo King.”