Hoodoo
You ought to be ashamed of yourself, coming here looking like you do, Caroline Bliguet,” Sister Slidell hissed at me while pretending to look for her seat in St. Mary’s Church.
New Orleans was sweating through its corset by nine o’clock—the magnolias wilting, the streetcars moaning, and every woman at this shock wedding patting her pressed hair, praying it wouldn’t rise up and embarrass her.
I didn’t so much as blink, just kept fanning myself.
There was nothing to do about it now but die of heatstroke.
Through the gauzy gloom of my black mourning veil, I glanced down at my bodice, which was stiff enough to chafe the soul.
The only thing more oppressive than the Louisiana heat was the rough starch on this dress.
St. Mary’s was packed to the rafters with people pretending to love the bride. No one looked toward the altar. No one cared about the exchange of vows. Every eye in the building was trained on me.
Sister Slidell leaned in over my pew; her voice was low but sharp enough to cut ribbon. “Why don’t you get up and dance for coins, if you’re so determined to steal the show?”
“I’m mourning”—I paused, dabbing my forehead with a handkerchief—“the death of good sense around here.”
She clicked her tongue. “Mean as a snake. It’s the poor girl’s wedding day, and you’ve come dressed like your maman done passed for the second time.”
I turned my fan toward her with slow ceremony. “Poor girl?” I echoed.
Sure, she didn’t have two red beans to rub together, but the bride Eliza Beno?t was no poor girl.
She had swept into their parish like yellow fever: unwelcome and inevitable.
Too brown for polite circles and too unbothered to care.
Not a beauty by traditional measure, no.
But when she walked into a room, people adjusted their postures.
New Orleans society was a narrow little kingdom, where sometimes the right shade of skin mattered more than the right heart. It was the kind of world you could live in your whole life and still not belong to—unless you married well, and never, ever forgot your place.
I had hoped to marry into it. To take my rightful place as the pinnacle of a scholarly woman—genteel, educated, admired in all the proper rooms. But now, sitting in this heat-drenched church, watching Eliza Beno?t—who had no private tutors, no finishing school, and called herself autodidactic—I wondered:
Did she have any idea what she’d signed up for?
“She’ll embarrass him. Embarrass all of us,” I whispered. “You know she cussed out Lady D—”
“Didn’t Lady D say you weren’t pretty enough for Toussaint?” Sister Slidell cocked her head.
I stiffened. “Well. Maybe Lady D deserved a good cussing out. Still,” I amended, smoothing my skirt, “those wild sisters… married or not, I know the youngest ran off with that card counter before Toussaint tracked him down. That’s the stock she comes from. They’re not our kind of people.”
Up front, her family was wailing like they’d buried the bride instead of married her off.
Some of them were brown as chicory coffee and dressed like they were headed to revival.
One sister was taking notes on the sermon, raising her hand like the priest might call on her mid-blessing.
I half expected someone to fry catfish on the front pew and call it a reception.
And still—they were. Loud. Joyful. Unapologetic. I simply couldn’t imagine Toussaint ever being happy among them.
Sister Slidell looked at me then, tight-lipped. As if reading my mind. “That family is yours now, too, Caroline. Don’t forget your brother Lil’ Charlie married her sister Janey not three months ago. That table’s set.”
The blade of my fan snapped shut with high theatricality. “Well, I won’t sit at it.”
Eliza was unnatural. I suspected hoodoo. Or, at the very least, she’d tampered with Toussaint’s food—stirred something unspeakable into his sauce piquante.
We had grown up together, Toussaint and I, two shining stars in the carefully calibrated constellation of New Orleans’s gens de couleur.
It was a world with rules, unspoken but ironclad.
Our pairing was practically preordained, like the tides or Lent.
I’d known him as a boy, tousled and mischievous, and as a man, polished and aloof.
We had an understanding. Not formally spoken, of course, but understood nonetheless.
The first crack in my certainty came when Eliza arrived, catching crawfish in the bayou in her bare feet at a low-country boil we attended only out of politeness.
Eliza was a mess. The muddy Mississippi on the bottom of her skirt, her wild sisters making merry.
You wouldn’t know it from the way he acted, but Toussaint had been lost to me even then.
Defied logic. And I was nothing if not a logical woman.
“That’s a mighty high horse you’re on,” Sister Slidell said. “I just hope your Ealy Washington is worth the climb.”
In these instances, it’s best not to respond. Silence does more damage than wit. I simply let her comment settle into the heat-heavy air of St. Mary’s.
The woman huffed and walked away, and my sister Louisa elbowed me sharply. “Caroline Elizabeth Bliguet. Really. You’ve been some kind of terrible since you said yes to that man. Sight unseen, I might add.”
This again.
“Lordy,” Louisa went on, eyes darting toward the altar. “What if he’s ugly as sin?”
I sighed, adjusting the angle of my veil to block both her and the altar.
“It’s not about his face. I’m restoring our name. I’d marry a haint to keep from smiling in their faces for the next fifty years. You will never see a scandal attached to my name.”
My engagement to Ealy Washington was a declaration. Let the world see how a Bliguet recovers. With poise. With purpose. With monogrammed gloves and a railway ticket out of this collapsing soufflé.
I unfolded the telegram for the hundredth time, its corners softening from wear. I didn’t need to read it. I knew every word.
MISS CAROLINE BLIGUET STOP
ARRIVAL EXPECTED AND ACCOMMODATIONS PREPARED STOP
A NEW LIFE AWAITS IN CARSONDALE STOP
— E. WASHINGTON
Five short lines, but it read like scripture. It promised structure. Placement. A version of myself with title and dignity intact. It said someone was waiting. That the table had been set. That I still belonged somewhere.
“I don’t want to see that old paper again, Caroline. It’s breaking my heart,” Louisa said, sniffing into her sleeve. “What kind of name is Ealy anyway?”
I hadn’t met him yet, but Ealy’s telegrams were spelled correctly, and his mother was “Dearly Departed.” If that isn’t the foundation of a strong marriage, I don’t know what is.
“I just don’t understand what went wrong,” Louisa continued, looking ahead to Eliza stumbling shakily over her vows.
“Nothing,” I say, and I mean it. I had followed every rule. No scandals. No musicians. I cut out articles from Woman’s Home Companion. I earned a nursing certificate from Spelman Seminary, and my hair obeyed a comb with the proper amount of docility. I excelled at order.
Toussaint was the one who had done wrong. Men like him didn’t marry women like her. Not in public. Not with a brass band.
Now Eliza, with her too-loud laugh and dirty hems, gets to occupy Pemberly House. She would bring them low with scandal. I knew it.
If the world insisted on descending into chaos, I didn’t have to follow it.
Let Toussaint D’Arcy and his brown bride keep New Orleans. I was choosing the world. The wide one. The untamed one.
But scandal—well, scandal has a way of chasing you clear across the country, doesn’t it?
What follows is the entirely true (and only slightly embellished) account of how I, Caroline Bliguet, a cautious girl from a very proper family, became embroiled in the most whispered-about scandal west of the Mississippi.
And honestly?
I regret very little.