Paula Morris (16 page)

"That mimosa I had at breakfast must have been strong,"
she heard one very-much-alive woman tell her husband, after Rebecca careened
into her. "I'm banging into things I don't even see. I think I must be
drunk."

Lisette dragged Rebecca into the road, because cars were easier to
avoid than people. Some ghosts were very easy to spot, like the woman with dark
ringlets wearing a flowing blue ball gown, picking her way back and forth
across Royal Street, gazing up at a flower-bedecked balcony. She didn't have
any shoes on, Rebecca noticed, so she nudged Lisette.

"She died before the streets were paved," Lisette
explained. "Before there were even
banquettes."

"What?" Rebecca didn't know what bang-kets were.

"You call them sidewalks."

"So people walked around without shoes on?"

"Ladies did, when it had been raining and they were going to
a dance." Lisette tugged Rebecca around a group of tourists ogling a
silver-painted human statue. "They had their servants or slaves carry
their shoes for them, because the roads were so muddy. See all the mud around
the hem of her dress?"

Rebecca looked back, peering so hard at the dark tidal

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line around the bottom of the beautiful gown that she walked
straight into a bicycle chained to a lamppost.

"Ow!" she moaned, Lisette's hand almost slipping free
from her grasp.

"Watch out," Lisette warned her. "We should turn
here. If we keep walking this way, we'll run into all the Sicilian guys from
the market, and they're still really angry. Down by the river it's bad, as
well. Lots of people died in fights there. And there's a mean drug addict down
on Ursulines -- he's been there since the 1950s and I try to keep out of his
way. He says terrible things about black people."

"Ghosts can be racist?"

"Ghosts are the people they always were. Death doesn't change
you. It just ... well, it freezes you, I suppose, in a moment in time. People
who were crazy or mean before are still crazy or mean after they're dead."

There weren't so many of the living up on Rampart Street, at the
edge of the French Quarter, but there were plenty of ghosts -- Spanish-speaking
soldiers playing some sort of marbles game with brass buttons ripped from their
coats; slaves of both genders and all ages; a sallow-faced man in a frock coat
clutching a dueling pistol; and a sullen teenager sitting on the curb, a nasty,
dark wound blooming across the side of his head like some exotic flower. He was
wearing low-slung jeans and a baggy white T-shirt; his sneakers were Nikes.

"He wasn't here last year," Lisette whispered as they
crossed the street. "He must be a recent arrival. It takes a while to get
used to being a ghost. Sometimes people are

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unhappy about it for a long, long time. That's why everyone's
leaving him alone, see?"

Rebecca had seen Armstrong Park before, because Aunt Claudia always
parked near Rampart Street when she came down to the Quarter, and they drove
past it on the way home. But Rebecca hadn't realized before today that this
used to be a neighborhood as well -- another black neighborhood, torn down
years and years ago.

"That was Storyville," Lisette said, gesturing with her
free hand. "You know, where all the bad places were. The clubs, they call
them, where they play music. And the
brothels."

"Where they played jazz, right?" Rebecca remembered
hearing something about this, or maybe reading something in one of the local
history books. "Didn't Louis Armstrong grow up around here? And Jelly Roll
Morton?"

"Are they ghosts?"

"Well -- not exactly. I mean, they're dead, but I don't think
they died here. And I don't think either of them was murdered or
anything."

"I recognize that first name -- I think one of the ghosts up
here used to say he'd played with him back in the day. He pronounced it
'Lewis,' in the Anglo way. I don't know where that ghost is now. Someone must
have avenged his death. I haven't seen him for years and years."

That was another thing Rebecca hadn't realized until today:
Lisette really only knew about history before her death. Unless some other
ghost had explained something to her, the world after 1853 was a mysterious and
complicated puzzle. She only knew little pieces of things. For example,

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she knew all about Storyville -- which grew up after her death --
because she'd spent years walking through it, and she knew about a historical
figure like Abraham Lincoln because she'd heard a lot of ghosts talking about
him during the Civil War. But when Rebecca asked her about other historical
events -- like, say, the sinking of the
Titanic,
or the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima -- Lisette didn't have a clue. No other ghost had ever
mentioned them.

"Mainly they like to talk about themselves," she
explained.

Once they'd crossed Rampart and cut down a street alongside the
park, Lisette started pausing more often to chat with a ghost or two, and
though Rebecca said hello to them, nobody ever spoke to her.

"Who dat, baby?" one woman asked Lisette, nodding in
Rebecca's direction. "She not one of us, now."

"It's a long story," Lisette told her.

"Save it for next year," said the woman, sashaying up
the stairs of a small green house and disappearing -- literally -- by walking
through the wall.

"They can see and hear you, but they can't speak to
you," Lisette explained. "We can see the living, but we can only talk
to other ghosts."

"And the people you haunt," Rebecca reminded her.

"The people we haunt." Lisette smiled. "Even if we
don't know why."

"How far is it now to Tremé?" Rebecca asked. It felt as
though they'd been walking for hours. She was exhausted, overwhelmed with
everything -- and everyone -- she'd seen. The ghostly version of New Orleans
was crowded with more strange costumes and ghoulish, bloody sights than
Greenwich

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Village during the Halloween Parade. One thing was sure: Rebecca
would never doubt Lisette again. She was a ghost, all right.

"This is it!" Lisette squeezed her hand. "But we
have to walk a ways further."

This part of Tremé looked just like the French Quarter, Rebecca
thought, its streets jammed with small, shuttered houses -- Creole cottages,
she thought they were called -- painted in pretty colors. As they walked
farther, the style of houses didn't change all that much, but she started to
see the difference between the wealthy Quarter and this neighborhood. Homes
were a little shabbier, a little creakier, some leaning and peeling, some in a
state of obvious disrepair. The "real" people -- that is, nonghosts
-- of the neighborhood were out and about, some sitting on their stoops or
riding bikes, others working on their houses. Everyone Rebecca saw was black.

"I read how this is the oldest African-American suburb in the
country," she told Lisette, but her friend didn't reply. She seemed
focused now, quickening her pace as they walked up St. Philip Street.

"They complaining about a foot of water!" one ghost in a
bloodied sailor's uniform shouted to them. He gestured with his head at some
people carrying a fat roll of moldy carpet down their front steps. Rebecca
couldn't believe that they were just cleaning the house out now, three years
after the storm. "I want to tell them, walk a ways up there, up toward
Broad Street and see what the water did. They got nothing to be muttering
about."

Rebecca smiled at him, but the sailor seemed to look right

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through her. Lisette didn't say a word. In fact, she didn't speak
at all until she came to an abrupt stop outside a house that looked as though
it was about to fall down.

It was a small house that once, long ago, must have been a clean
sky blue, but now its paint had rubbed away; it looked scoured by years of wind
and rain. Weed-spouting cracks splintered its foundation. One shutter hung
broken from its hinges; the others were missing. The roof had caved in, and the
remnants of a ragged blue tarp were loosely fixed over its gaping hole.

"This is my house," Lisette whispered. They stood
staring up at it.

"And this is what the storm did to it?" The house was a
depressing sight. It looked as though it was about to collapse.

"Not just the storm. My mama, she took care of it. It was
her
house. But for years it's been getting this way. People buy it, but they
don't live there -- they rent it out and do nothing to keep it together. Every
year it looks worse and worse. And since Katrina, nobody lives here at all.
Nobody bothers to fix it. One of the ghosts down on St. Claude told me there
was talk of pulling it down. 'Houses are coming down all over,' he said.
'Easier to wipe them away than put them right.'"

"That's terrible!" Rebecca thought how sad it had to be
for Lisette, coming here year after year and seeing the home she grew up in and
loved crumbling into a ruin. "But aren't historic homes protected here?
This house must be nearly two hundred years old."

Lisette shrugged.

"All those houses in Storyville were old," she said.
"And up there -- see?"

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She pointed up the street, and Rebecca looked. Ahead of them
stretched another branch of the interstate, humming with unseen traffic, its
overpass running above what Rebecca thought was Claiborne Avenue.

"That used to be a beautiful street," Lisette said.
"Big oak trees, just like St. Charles Avenue. It was the heart of Tremé --
the green heart, some people said. But they pulled down all the old houses and
the old trees so that the big road up there could go in. Lots of ghosts there
are real unhappy still. All they got to haunt is a pile of concrete."

"It's strange to think of how the past gets swept away,"
Rebecca mused. She wondered how long it would be before Lisette's house was
demolished, cleared away with no trace, like all those houses and streets in
old Storyville.

"The past doesn't go away." Lisette gazed up at her
house. "You just can't see it anymore."

"I don't know about
jour
past," Rebecca told her.
"Not really."

Lisette glanced over: Her dark eyes were glittering, her cheeks
flushed. Her skin was the color of burnished gold, Rebecca thought. Where her
sleeve was ripped away from her shoulder, Rebecca could see a small, purplish
hint of a bruise.

"Perhaps now's the time," Lisette said. "On our
walk home. If you have the stomach for it."

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***

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

***

I didn't die from yellow fever," lisette told Rebecca.
"That was what they said to my mother, and to the notary, but it wasn't
true."

Rebecca could barely breathe. At last, Lisette was going to tell
the story of how she became a ghost.

That summer, Lisette explained, not long before her seventeenth
birthday, another yellow fever epidemic descended on the steamy city, its first
outbreaks recorded at the docks, and soon taking hold of the neighborhood
people were starting to call the Irish Channel. Before long, people in the
wealthier, leafier Garden District were falling sick as well.

Business wasn't good during the times of the fever and her school
was closed, Lisette said, but she and her mother were getting by. One day, when
they were both working in the small front parlor of their house, starting work
on the trousseau of the daughter of a Creole family up on Esplanade Ridge, a
note was delivered.

"I never read the note, but I could tell from my mother's
face it was something bad," Lisette said. She paused so they

143

could cross Rampart without Rebecca getting run over. "And
that evening she asked me if I would consider going to nurse someone who was
sick. Someone who'd been very good to our family, who'd just fallen ill."

"Why would she send you?" Rebecca was aghast.
"Wasn't she worried about you catching yellow fever as well?"

"You don't catch it from other people," Lisette told
her. "We knew that much, even then."

"Of course -- duh." Rebecca was ashamed of the lapse in
her scientific knowledge.

"And I'd already caught it -- when I was five," Lisette
told her. "It wasn't so bad -- lots of children had the fever and lived to
see the next week, especially children of color like me. Something in our
genes, I think, from Africa. So after that I was immune."

Although she'd never worked as a maid or nurse of any kind before,
Lisette agreed to go -- even though the house she'd be staying in was a long
way away, on the American side of the city.

"Everyone we knew spoke French, or something like it,"
she said. "A mixture of French and English, most times. Upriver was a
different world to me, like a foreign country. That was my one and only time on
the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, that day."

"There was a streetcar then? What -- was it pulled by
horses?"