A generation of Lavere children grew up under Sukey’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 Sanité Dédé, who sold candies in front of the Cabildo, more than Marie Saloppé, 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, cut open and laid on the patient’s head, will draw a fever. She showed her how to make a wishing bag, a small leather bag containing thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds and the bristles of a black hog, and how to rub the bag to make 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 World Wonder 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 Clémentine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clémentine had a blossom of burns on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a copper overturned.
“Then do not teach her,” says Clémentine.
“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-bout
eille 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 Clémentine.
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, twelve 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.
The Widow Paris’s husband, Jacques (whose own death, three years later, would have several remarkable features), had told Marie a little about the gods of St. Domingo, but she did not care. Power came from the rituals, not from the gods.
Together Mama Zouzou and the Widow Paris crooned and stamped and keened in the swamp. They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm.
“There is more to it than just you prosper, your enemies fail,” said Mama Zouzou.
Many of the words of the ceremonies, words she knew once, words her brother had also known, these words had fled from her memory. She told pretty Marie Laveau that the words did not matter, only the tunes and the beats, and there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough.
She turns to pretty Marie and sees herself through Marie’s eyes, a black-skinned old woman, her face lined, her bony arm hanging stiffly by her side, her eyes the eyes of one who has seen her children fight in the trough for food from the dogs. She saw herself, and she knew then for the first time the revulsion and the fear the younger woman had for her.