Chapter Two Ree #3
Every Sunday, in these hallowed halls, Marie Laveau too could be seen consulting her saints.
Her dueling faiths as a devout Catholic and a Voodoo Priestess had certainly confused many of her enemies and followers.
Other Voodoos had followed in her footsteps and attended mass by day and conducted their own rituals by night.
But not Ree. How could she be any good at serving a god she could not see or hear when she was still having trouble serving the Voodoo gods who were as real to her as the ground beneath her feet, the sun in the sky?
She didn’t know much about the goings-on of religion outside of New Orleans—mostly because she had never stepped foot outside the city—but outsiders who came down on the steamboats were aghast at New Orleans’s rampant spiritual mixing, so different from the ways in which Christianity was practiced in the rest of the South.
Ree had heard of the white Baptist preachers in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi spewing the coming of brimstone and damnation, the separate churches and back rows for blacks and coloreds.
But that was not New Orleans. While Christianity was certainly upheld in the city, woven, in fact, into its very fabric—into the many holidays and observances and festivities—Voodoo had mixed itself into its blood.
Curiously, Father Antoine welcomed Voodoos into the fold, much to the dismay of his religious superiors (some even said the Pope himself).
Would he still welcome them now, Ree wondered, even with talk of a demonic Harbinger?
Since Ree was a child, her mother had sought Père Antoine’s council on numerous occasions.
Ree had made it something of a game—as she did all things—to eavesdrop on their conversations when the opportunity presented itself.
She slipped into a small broom closet adjacent to Antoine’s private quarters and pried the old wooden slat away, revealing a small wedge.
She peered inside, seeing first her mother, pacing the length of the room, uncharacteristically upset, then Antoine himself.
Her mother had said he had been quite fetching once, but now he was a frail old man, tall and thin, with snow-white hair that fell to his collar and a pallid complexion that suggested he hadn’t seen the sun in some time.
“Of course I have heard,” Antoine was saying. “The discussions of demons are well within my purview.”
Marie reeled away from him. “How can you jest about this, Antoine? There has not been a Harbinger spoken in seventy years.” A pause. “Surely you know what this must mean.”
This drew a grim nod from the priest. “They said the work of the first Holy Inquisition was never finished.”
Ree inhaled sharply. Talk of the Inquisition was rare.
Not one person of magical blood was eager to summon the terror of its name.
The First Holy Inquisition had been before her mother’s time, seventy-two years ago, under the order of the Spanish monarchy, who had seized control of New Orleans from the French, keen to see heretics and witches scourged from their newly acquired and very profitable land in the New World, all with the Pope’s blessing.
They had succeeded too. The first Quarter Queen had been set to flame on a pyre.
“What will the Church’s answer be?” Marie demanded. “Antoine, I must know.”
Father Antoine paused. “There is talk of a tribunal forming.”
Ree watched her mother’s dark eyebrows draw together, the look of desperate calculation in her eyes.
It was not like her mother to be afraid of anything, least of all the Church.
“You must delay their coming,” Marie said at last. “Antoine, please. I would need time to gather protections for my people. For my daughter.”
“You overestimate my abilities, dear one. As you always have.” A note of fondness in his voice, the barest touch of a smile. “I am but a lowly priest, my child. But for you, I will try. Although it is not the threat of an Inquisition that ails you so, is it, Marie? It is Jon.”
There it was again—that name. Jon.
“It has always been Jon.” Silence stretched between them, and for a moment the only sound that rose up from the quiet was the distant melancholy singing of the nuns preparing for evening mass, the swell of an organ’s chords.
“I am a fool. A lovesick fool. I thought that I had killed the past. And that whatever had remained of Jon had died along with it.”
“And now?”
“Jon taught me better, didn’t he?” A bitter laugh escaped from Marie’s lips. Her eyes slid toward the far wall, to the space where Ree’s face was wedged in the darkness. “Some things never die.”
Had her mother seen her? Quickly, Ree slipped out from the closet and back into the street.
She knew Jon the Conjurer as the rest of New Orleans knew him—as a dark blight on its history, a would-be Voodoo King of malevolent magic, an old evil that had been thwarted by the powerful Marie Laveau, never to be conjured again.
But her mother had spoken of him as if he had been something else… something more.
“Gather, gather, all around!”
At the corner of Royal Street, Ree joined the crowd in front of the Théatre des Lys, its high golden walls dwarfing nearby establishments.
A show had already started at the base of its grand spiraled steps, where a puppeteer wore a carnival mask made to look like a cheap imitation of the loa Papa Legba.
Children sat cross-legged around the stage as stringed shadow puppets danced across an embroidered partition.
“Come ye, hear the tale of this city’s bloodied war, and Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, the witch of lore.”
The silhouette of a figure in a long coat and top hat emerged.
“His name was Jon the Conjurer, a man, a witch, and a monster all in one. His darkness swept through the streets, chasing away the sun.”
From puppet-Jon’s coat, swirling shadows emerged. From the way that the puppeteer so nimbly worked his fingers, Ree almost believed he was using magic to enrich his performance. Perhaps he was.
“From the depths of hell, High Jon called forth the power of the devil. And all the good people of the Quarter bent the knee beneath a king who reveled in misery.”
The shadows encased a crowd of puppets cowering with their arms raised in fright. The puppet-crowd sank to their knees.
“But there was one who did stand. A fair creole witch with power beyond man. With all the light of heaven and Voodoo, this witch banished the dark spell, and with one mighty blow, Jon’s reign she did quell.”
A female puppet in a high turban appeared. She gestured her arms out toward puppet-Jon, and he was unceremoniously flung across the partition and out of sight. On cue, the crowd of onlooking children clapped.
“Hair of raven. Skin of gold. Blood of new. Blood of old. Here be thy queen forevermore, Marie Laveau!”
With a pop of sparkling smoke that made the watching children applaud and laugh, the turban upon the Marie Laveau puppet transfigured into a golden crown.
Her hands rose into the air, the war won.
The puppet figurines bowed in her shadow.
The curtains drew to a sweeping close, the show concluded.
Ree watched, unnerved. She’d seen the show dozens of times, and she could no more blame the children for being enraptured with the puppeteer’s tall tales than she could blame the city for peddling them.
The real Quarter Quarrel was not something her mother liked to discuss.
Ree had only just been born then, and she didn’t know much beyond the street shows and puppet-fodder for tourists.
The puppeteer was looking her way now. “There she is! There she is! Our Quarter Queen.”
Ree shuffled on her feet, slightly embarrassed at the dozens of gazes directed her way. They were seeing her mother, she knew. Not her. “I am not your queen. I’m—”
“Your name is Marie Laveau, is it not?” There was challenge in his voice.
“That is not my name.” She’d said it before thinking. Marie Laveau was her name, but she didn’t feel like Marie Laveau—she never had. Nor did she want to. And she was not the Quarter Queen, nor did she ever want to be, despite her mother’s hopes.
Ree felt the sudden weight of a hand on her shoulder. She whirled to find her mother staring back at her, her expression unreadable. But Ree saw the way the muscle in her jaw ticked, the tightness at the corners of her eyes. She’d wounded her.
“You would renounce me? Your legacy?” Marie asked stiffly.
Ree looked away, both ashamed and triumphant in her insolence. “That’s the trouble with you, Mother. You believe those two to be one and the same.”