Marie Laveau Read online

  The competition for her favors grew fierce. One night as Marie was dancing with her current favorite, Ramon Echeverria, his younger brother Alejandro tried to cut in. The waltzing couples stopped to cross themselves for poor Alejandro. A scuffle broke out. By the time the flailing dueling canes were untangled, the brothers had agreed to meet at dawn in St. Anthony’s garden.

  The next morning Marie awoke with a headache: at that moment two men were dueling over her. One might die. She sighed and fell back against the pillows—that was how all the girls acted when their men were dueling. She felt sorry for the brothers, sorrier for having caused such an unnecessary mess.

  Then she realized—there wasn’t anything to feel sorry about. She hadn’t interrupted the dance. She hadn’t brought a dueling cane to the ballroom. It was the brothers’ passion—their game.

  She got up and lit a blue Immediate Help Candle to the Good Shepherd. “Don’t let them kill each other,” she asked Jesus. “And if they do, please don’t blame me.”

  Jesus didn’t need to intervene. The brothers had no intention of killing each other and were good enough fencers to fake a good show. Ramon opened Alejandro’s cheek and was declared the winner.

  But when Alejandro returned to the ballroom that night with his face swathed in bandages, it was clear that Marie had her own idea of victory. She danced every dance with him and followed him downstairs, where he promptly won three hundred dollars at the wheel.

  Everyone—even Ramon—had to admit: This was high romance. The affair lasted two months. When people heard it was over, they crossed themselves again—not in sympathy for Alejandro, but in immediate recognition:

  The price of courting Marie had just skyrocketed. Her heart could no longer be won with gifts or champagne. Now a man had to risk his neck in a duel.

  The stakes had been raised. The gamblers threw themselves into the new game with so much passion that it was easy to confuse the game with love.

  Marie knew their game had nothing to do with love. They were ready to die for a face, a name, a lucky charm, for their honor, for each other—but certainly not for love of her.

  She didn’t care. She loved waking to find her front steps carpeted with flowers, loved dressing in front of the mirror, eating at the St. Julian, getting high on champagne. She loved seeing every head turn to watch her enter the ballroom, loved how the girls in the dressing room listened respectfully when she spoke, loved betting other people’s money. She loved the exhilaration of dancing all night and taking new lovers home to bed, loved the touch of their hands and lips.

  It wasn’t true love—but Marie didn’t care. She was fixed on her pleasure, determined to get more. So she used every trick she’d learned. Remembering her mother’s frail ghost, she counted her blessings and decided not to think too hard about her strange good luck.

  One November night Marie stopped in to visit Marie Saloppe. She knocked three times before the familiar gravelly croak invited her in.

  Marie was surprised. Marie Saloppe usually met her at the door with a kiss and a warm sloppy hug. Recently their friendship had deepened. Marie Saloppe seemed kinder, more solicitous. She'd stopped talking about winning the jackpot and retiring to Santo Domingo, stopped nagging her about dreams.

  Instead they gossiped about the ballroom. Marie Saloppe dredged up old history from the days when the chaperones had twirled on the floor. She questioned Marie about her lovers—their looks, their characters, their manners in and out of bed—and supplied her with Clean Sweep Root to keep her from getting pregnant. Sipping herbal tea, they joked about Marie’s love life until they were laughing so hard that Grandpa Joel tossed in his rum stupor and Dr. Brown escaped to the highest minaret on Madame Henriette’s cage.

  But that night something was wrong. Marie knew it the minute she entered the cottage. “Hey,” said Marie Saloppe, pounding her roots as if the mortar were full of live scorpions.

  Marie Saloppe glared as Marie approached the table. “Nice new dress you got on,” she said. “You buy that dress yourself?”

  “Alejandro got it for me,” said Marie. “I told you.”

  “How come you never tell me the truth?” screamed Marie Saloppe. “How come you never told me about the gambling, never told me where your boyfriends were getting the money to buy you presents?”

  “It didn’t seem important ...”

  “You’re lying! You knew it was important. Here I’ve been so good, never troubling you for your dreams when you know how I want that jackpot to retire. You knew how mad I’d be when I found you wasting your luck on those rich boys—”

  “Who told you?” asked Marie. “Some old lover making trouble?”

  “It wasn’t a Creole boy,” said Marie Saloppe. “None of them would be smart enough to tattle. No, honey, a black man told me, an ex-slave like myself, the only kind you can trust. An African gentleman with the scars on his face to prove it. I believe you know the man I mean.”

  Marie cringed. She and Marie Saloppe had gossiped a bit about Doctor John’s slow-growing practice. But after all the time she’d spent brooding after his visit, she hadn’t really wanted to discuss it. Since that night she’d passed him occasionally on the street; he’d stared at her so hard she’d had to dance five fast reels to get her heart pumping again. But there’d been no reason to mention it to Marie Saloppe. “What did Doctor John say?” asked Marie.

  “He said he was worried about your welfare. ‘Marie Saloppe,’ he said, ‘I’m mighty worried ’bout our little friend Marie. I hear she’s been using her magic to help her boyfriends’ gambling. She doesn’t know the spirits are right behind those mirrors in the roulette wheel. She doesn’t know what kind of game she’s playing, how high the stakes are getting to be.’

  “ ‘Doctor John,’ I told him, ‘I don’t know why you’re so worried. But I agree with everything you say.’

  “You’re fooling with the spirits!” cried Marie Saloppe, too angry to be tactful. “If those boys are getting so lucky, you’re calling up the power. You’re wasting it!”

  Running from the cottage, Marie hurried to the ballroom. Inside, the glare of the chandeliers dazzled her. The walls shone like mirrors. The smell of food and liquor made her sick.

  Not until the last quadrille did she lose herself in the dance. Her mind went blank. She couldn’t imagine why she’d been upset. She begged the fiddler to play an extra reel and took Alejandro Echeverria home for old time’s sake. The next week she returned to Marie Saloppe’s as if nothing had happened.

  Marie kept on dancing—dancing as the seasons changed, as lovers came and went, as other girls settled down and stopped dancing, as the ballroom grew more crowded, as the summers grew hotter, as New Orleans swelled with immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain. She kept on dancing across the polished floor as the mud in the streets outside grew deep and black and thick.

  CHAPTER X

  THERE WAS A poor family, the O’Connells and their five children, simple people from Londonderry. They crossed the Atlantic in March on the HMS King James.

  Philip O’Connell was pale consumptive black-Irish, with the look of a poet and a poet’s fondness for alcohol. His wife Eileen was a stout, discontented know-it-all redhead.

  On the boat she acted as if she’d lived in America her whole life. She lectured the other passengers about the fortunes they could make, the plantations they could buy, the Indians who’d shower them from the docks with tributes of beads and com. “In Londonderry I lived like a princess,” she told them. “In New Orleans I plan to live like a queen.”

  But the truth about her plans was written in her husband’s bleary eyes. Her main plan was to put three thousand miles of ocean between Philip and his local pub.

  In New Orleans all her plans failed. Philip got work as a printer’s apprentice for less than he’d made in Ireland. They moved in with a second cousin, a generous woman with six children of her own, who let all seven O’Connells sleep in a single bed in the front parlor.

&nb
sp; Philip found it more restful to spend his nights in the corner tavern, where people bought him drinks because he had a beautiful tenor and could sing about die emerald hills of Connemara.

  One May night, Eileen heard him come in. He was drunk but he’d learned to be quiet to avoid waking the children. He lay down on the edge of the bed. As he brushed against her, Eileen was irritated by his touch, as if his skin were a bristle brush. She wanted to scream at him but remembered the children and decided to wait until he got up for work.

  Naturally he overslept. She called him twice. He didn’t answer. She slapped his shoulder. Still he slept on. “Philip!” she yelled with all the fury she’d stored up from the night before. “Get up, dammit, or go to hell!” She pushed and pulled him until at last he rolled over.

  His skin was yellow and waxy. A stream of watery blood was already drying on his undershirt. There was a smear of black vomit at the comer of his mouth.

  Eileen O’Connell sat up in bed. As the blankets fell back, she saw her children stained with the same blood, the same dark bile.

  That was how the plague of 1819 came to New Orleans.

  The plague had visited the city before. Each visit had been worse than the last. That was why no one would admit that it was knocking on their door again.

  For the first week, people pretended that their neighbors were suffering from some mild fever which they called by a variety of pet names. They called it “La Grippe,” as if that could somehow make it fashionable. They called it “a touch of the hot season,” as if that was what it was.

  By the end of the second week five hundred people had died of “a touch of the hot season.” Still unable to pronounce the words “yellow fever,” people coined new names. Now they called it “The Rattlesnake” because of its vicious speed. They called it “Swamp Arm,” as if some powerful hand were reaching up to pull men down into the oozing marsh. They called it “Bronze John,” imagining a giant sorcerer who stiffened his victims and painted their skins that waxy death-yellow.

  Finally, though, it didn’t matter what they called their visitor. Everyone recognized his face.

  The streets were filled with nauseating smoke, the suffocating stench of death. The air buzzed with horseflies fat from their ghoulish meal. Swollen corpses lay in the gutters until the gravediggers dragged them off. The sewers ran red with blood, then black with the vomit, the death sign.

  The altars of St. Louis Cathedral were covered with candles, burning prayers for the sick and the dead. But there were no priests to say the requiem masses—they were all busy helping at the overcrowded Charity Hospital. Father Antoine read aloud from the Book of Exodus, hoping his flock would find comfort in the Hebrews’ deliverance from the plagues. But his parishioners could only envy the lucky Egyptians who’d been spared after the death of their firstborn.

  The unwelcome visitor left his calling card in every parlor. Everyone heard reports of his ghastly stay:

  He’d come uninvited to an elegant dinner; the hostess excused herself to check the dessert and never returned from the kitchen. He’d dropped in on the schoolhouse in the midst of an arithmetic lesson, and the children’s pencils rolled from their hands. He’d visited the hospital to admire his work and had struck the doctors and nurses out of his path. He’d bought some fruit at the market; the apples and peaches shriveled beneath his touch.

  Everyone heard the same stories and suffered the same nightmare. They dreamed they awoke in the morning with a headache, a slight chill. At noon they fainted on the street. At night when they looked in the mirror to wash, they saw the smear of blood, the black vomit. They woke up trembling, sweating as if they’d already caught the plague.

  Yet still they couldn’t bring themselves to call their visitor by his proper name.

  Marie Saloppe had no such qualms. “It’s the yellow fever!” she cried, squatting beside heaps of unsold fritters and shaking her heavy fist at City Hall. “It’s the yellow fever and it’ll get worse. No one’s taking the precautions. You can’t treat the dead like that, heaping them on wagons, throwing them in trenches like sacks of garbage.

  “You need to be careful. You need to take the steps. Tear their pockets. Stop the clocks. Turn the mirrors to the wall. Let them sleep beneath the surface of the water. Treat them with respect. It’s no wonder the spirits are rising up to take their friends and relations back down with them!”

  Then one morning for the first time in anyone’s memory, Marie Saloppe failed to show up at her spot in the square.

  “She’ s fine, ” Helen reassured their worried customers. “She’s just too busy. Ever since this yellow fever came on, her root business has skyrocketed. She’ll be back as soon as the weather gets cold.”

  The city officials were glad she was gone. They were tired of the shrill harangues rising up from the square. Of course they’d never listened to her nonsense. They had their own opinions about the plague.

  These opinions changed from week to week. At first they blamed the epidemic on rotting wood and ordered several lumberyards destroyed. Then they decided it came from black specks in the air; so they purified the atmosphere by shooting off cannons. At last they abandoned the search for a cause and concentrated on prevention and cure. They advised the citizens to use leeches and cups, to drink quinine, eat oysters, and wear a slice of onion in the soles of their shoes.

  That was all the city fathers knew about the plague. But their sons—the young men who danced every night at the St. Philip Street Ballroom—thought they knew more.

  Thirty years later, a Spanish dancer visited New Orleans. Backstage, after the final curtain, she thanked her admirers for their bouquets. “I’m glad you liked the show,” she said. “But if I were only permitted to dance on tombstones, then you would see me dance.”

  The older gentlemen—the ones who’d survived the epidemic of 1819—knew exactly what she meant. They remembered the quadroon balls of that summer and recalled that the dancing had never been so extraordinary. The chandeliers had never blazed so brightly, the conversation had never been smarter or the fiddles livelier.

  And the girls had never been so beautiful. By some quirk of nature, mixed blood was virtually immune to yellow fever. While the white Creole ladies huddled and prayed in their camphor-choked bedrooms, the yellow girls ruled the streets like lionesses, moving freely among the sick, helping at the understaffed hospitals.

  They were heroines. They spent their days among the dying, coming to life at night to forget their days. They put on their best dresses. Their eyes shone. As they spun across the ballroom, they seemed to float on their air like angels.

  The gentlemen thanked God for sending them magic creatures blessed with the secret charms of health and immortality. Inspired by their mistresses’ immunity, they devised their own theories about the plague. They decided that the fever selected its victims from among the old, the ugly, the clumsy, the dried-out and self-righteous. The young and beautiful escaped untouched—they enjoyed life; they wanted to live.

  So the young men pursued their pleasure as if that were the medicine which could save them. Love affairs were passionate and intense. There was a dance every night, a duel every morning. The tables were loaded with delicacies. The fountains bubbled with pink champagne.

  And no one mentioned the pestilence raging just outside the fine lace curtains.

  One hot July night Marie walked down St. Philip Street toward the ballroom.

  The Get-Lively Powder she’d gotten from Marie Saloppe that morning had long since worn off. Exhaustion transformed the familiar streets into a dangerous maze. Sinister shadows crept up the walls. Hooded figures scurried through dark alleys. Mad dogs lurched across her path.

  The plague was going strong. A fog of pitch and camphor smoke hung over everything. Marie paused by an open window to hear some slaves chanting a dirge. Two funeral processions collided in a narrow street; she watched the dazed mourners stumble off after the wrong coffins.

  She made herself keep walking. S
he was anxious to reach the dance and forget her day at the Charity Hospital—a day of overflowing urinals and bad air, vomit-stained sheets and endless rows of crammed-together cots, work she hated.

  “Helping the sick is God’s work,” said Father Antoine, who’d gotten so good at his twenty-four-hour-a-day job that he could give extreme unction to one patient while changing the sheets on another’s bed; his patients called him “Father Five-Arms.”

  “We’re not helping,” said Marie. “They’re too many—we can’t do anything. I’m here out of loyalty to you, eating and sleeping in this awful place two months ...”

  “You’re here because God’s keeping you healthy to do His work,” he said. “Now get up to that ward and do it.”

  So she swallowed her Get-Lively Powder and her hatred, smiled, straightened pillows, soothed hot foreheads with her cool hands. She even got permission to doctor her patients with Marie Saloppe’s Indian Root tea which made them sweat and lowered their fevers. Soon everyone was requesting the tea, saying that Marie’s smile cured them, calling her a healer and a saint.

  Marie was tired of sick men seeing angels behind every dry hand. Now, walking down St. Philip, she was too tired to rest. She’d just bathed, masked the disinfectant in her hair with attar of roses. She’d put on her indigo silk dress and her grandmother’s gold jewelry. She was going to the ballroom to dance herself senseless and find a new man to bring home for a long, sweet night of love.

  Brushing her hair in the dressing room, Marie listened to the gossip. Unlike their partners, the free women of color had no illusions about the plague. Perhaps it wouldn’t kill them—but it could certainly change their lives.

  Just that afternoon, for example, Baron Fauve’s wife had died of fever. All the girls thought it disgusting that the old pig was out dancing with the corpse still warm. But none of them thought it disgusting enough to refuse his invitation to dance. The baron needed a woman to comfort him in his loss—and the baron was; a very rich man.