The Casterton family, who had owned the plantation, were impressed by her cooking and house skills, but Mrs. Casterton found the withered arm unsettling, and so she was sold to the Lavere family, who were out for a year from Louisiana: M. Lavere was a fat, cheerful man, who was in need of a cook and a maid of all work, and who was not in the slightest repulsed by the slave Daisy’s withered arm. When, a year later, they returned to Louisiana, slave Sukey went with them.
In New Orleans the women came to her, and the men also, to buy cures and love charms and little fetishes, black folks, yes, of course, but white folks too. The Lavere family turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps they enjoyed the prestige of having a slave who was feared and respected. They would not, however, sell her her freedom.
Sukey went into the bayou late at night, and she danced the Calinda and the Bamboula. Like the dancers of St. Domingue and the dancers of her native land, the dancers in the bayou had a black snake as their voudon; even so, the gods of her homeland and of the other African nations did not possess her people as they had possessed her brother and the folk of St. Domingue. She would still invoke them and call their names, to beg them for favors.
She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St. Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed to fail—“Think of it! A cannibal land!”—and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it.
Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could, by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer exist merely by willing it so.
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 freeborn as his striking young wife.
“My Jacques. Is he dead?” asked the Widow Paris. She was a hair-dresser 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 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 he could use it for nothing better than pissing. Perhaps she did know. 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 seed-cake, 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 Elegba, 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 confidant, 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-bouteille 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 they will never overcome their white captors, will never return to their homelands.
When she woke 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…