Sometime or other before we reached the house, Merrick stopped crying, and a somber expression settled over her features which I have seen many times.
"Cold Sandra doesn't know," she said suddenly without preamble. The car moved sluggishly through the soft rain. "If she knew, she would have come. "
"She is your mother?" Aaron asked reverently.
Merrick nodded. "That whats she always said," she answered, and she broke into a fairly playful smile. She shook her head and looked out the car window. "Oh, don't you worry about it, Mr. Lightner," she said. "Cold Sandra didn't really leave me. She went off and just didn't come back. "
That seemed to make perfect sense at the moment, perhaps only because I wanted it to make sense, so that Merrick would not be deeply hurt by some more commanding truth.
"When was the last time you saw her?" Aaron ventured.
"When I was ten years old and we came back from South America. When Matthew was still alive. You have to understand Cold Sandra. She was the only one of twelve children who didn't pass. "
"Didn't pass?" asked Aaron.
"For white," I said before I could stop myself.
Once again, Merrick smiled.
"Ah, I see," said Aaron.
"She's beautiful," said Merrick, "no one could ever say she wasn't, and she could fix any man she wanted. They never got away. "
"Fix?" asked Aaron.
"To fix with a spell," I said under my breath.
Again, Merrick smiled at me.
"Ah, I see," said Aaron again.
"My grandfather, when he saw how tan my mother was, he said that wasn't his child, and my grandmother, she came and dumped Cold Sandra on Great Nananne's doorstep. Her sisters and brothers, they all married white people. 'Course my grandfather was a white man too. Chicago is where they are all are. That man who was Cold Sandra's father, he owned a jazz club up in Chicago. When people like Chicago and New York, they don't want to stay down here anymore. Myself, I didn't like either one. "
"You mean you've traveled there?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, I went with Cold Sandra," she said. " 'Course we didn't see those white people. But we did look them up in the book. Cold Sandra wanted to set eyes on her mother, she said, but not to talk to her. And who knows, maybe she did her bad magic. She might have done that to all of them. Cold Sandra was so afraid of flying to Chicago, but she was more afraid of driving up there too. And drowning? She had nightmares about drowning. She wouldn't drive across the Causeway for anything in this world. Afraid of the lake like it was going to get her. She was so afraid of so many things. " She broke off. Her face went blank. Then, with a small touch of a frown, she went on:
"I don't remember liking Chicago very much. New York had no trees that I ever saw. I couldn't wait to come back home. Cold Sandra, she loved New Orleans too. She always came back, until the last time. "
"Was she a smart woman, your mother?" I asked. "Was she bright the way you are?"
This gave her pause for thought.
"She's got no education," said Merrick. "She doesn't read books. I myself, I like to read. When you read you can learn things, you know. I read old magazines that people left lying around. One time I got stacks and stacks of Time magazine from some old house they were tearing down. I read everything I could in those magazines, I mean every one of them; I read about art and science and books and music and politics and every single thing till those magazines were falling apart. I read books from the library, from the grocery store racks; I read the newspaper. I read old prayer books. I've read books of magic. I have many books of magic that I haven't even showed you yet. "
She gave a little shrug with her shoulders, looking small and weary but still the child in her puzzlement of all that had happened.
"Cold Sandra wouldn't read anything," she said. "You'd never see Cold Sandra watching the six o'clock news. Great Nananne sent her to the nuns, she always said, but Cold Sandra misbehaved and they were always sending her home. Besides, Cold Sandra was plenty light enough to not like dark people herself, you know. You'd think she knew better, with her own father dumping her, but she did not. Fact is she was the color of an almond, if you see the picture. But she had those light yellow eyes, and that's a dead giveaway, those yellow eyes. She hated it when they started calling her Cold Sandra too. "
"How did the nickname come about?" I asked. "Did the children start it?''
We had almost reached our destination. I remember there was so much more I wanted to know about this strange society, so alien to what I knew. At that moment, I felt that my opportunities in Brazil had been largely wasted. The old woman's words had stung me to the heart.
"No, it started right in our house," said Merrick. "That's the worst kind of nickname, I figure. When the neighbors and the children heard it, they said 'Your own Nananne calls you Cold Sandra. ' But it stuck on account of the things she did. She used all the magic to fix people, like I said. She put the Evil Eye o
n people. I saw her skin a black cat once and I never want to see that again. "
I must have flinched because a tiny smile settled on her lips for a moment. Then she went on.