Merrick (12 page)

It will come as no surprise to most readers of my narrative that people exist who can tell the age of such a book at a glance. I was not one such person, but I believed firmly that what I held had been copied out in some monastery somewhere in Christendom, somewhere before William the Conqueror had ever come to the English shores.

To put it more simply, the book was probably eighth or ninth century. And as I leant over to read the opening page I saw that it claimed to be a “faithful copy” of a much earlier text that had come down, of course, from Noah’s son, Ham, himself.

There were so many rich legends surrounding these names. But the marvelous thing was that this text belonged to Merrick and that she was revealing it to us.

“This is my book,” she said again. “And I know how to work the charms and spells in it. I know them all.”

“But who taught you to read it?” I asked, unable to conceal my enthusiasm.

“Matthew,” she answered, “the man who took me and Cold Sandra to South America. He was so excited when he saw this book, and the others. Of course I could already read it a little, and Great Nananne could read every word. Matthew was the best of the men my mother ever brought home. Things were safe and cheerful when Matthew was with us. But we can’t talk about these matters now. You have to let me keep my book.”

“Amen, you shall,” said Aaron quickly. I think he was afraid that I meant to spirit away the text but nothing of the sort was true. I wanted time with it, yes, but only when the child would permit.

As for Merrick’s mention of her mother, I had been more than curious. In fact, I felt we should question her on that point immediately, but Aaron shook his head sternly when I started to inquire.

“Come on, let’s us go back now,” said Merrick. “The body will be laid out.”

Leaving the precious book in Merrick’s upstairs bedroom, back we went to the city of dreams once more.

The body had been brought back in a dove-gray casket lined in satin, and set upon a portable bier in the grim front parlor which I described before. By the light of numerous candles—the overhead chandelier was naked and harsh and therefore turned off—the room was almost beautiful, and Great Nananne was now dressed in a fine gown of white silk with tiny pink roses stitched to the collar, a favorite from her own chifforobe.

A beautiful rosary of crystal beads was wound around her clasped fingers, and above her head, against the satin of the lid of the coffin, there hung a gold crucifix. A prie-dieu of red velvet, furnished no doubt by the undertaker, stood beside the coffin, and many came up to kneel there, to make the Sign of the Cross, and to pray.

Once again there came hordes of people, and indeed they did tend to break into groups according to race, just as if someone had commanded them to do so, the light of skin clumping together, as well as whites clumped with whites, and blacks with blacks.

Since this time I have seen many situations in the city of New Orleans in which people self-segregate according to color in a most marked way. But then, I didn’t know the city. I knew only that the monstrous injustice of Legal Segregation no longer existed, and I marveled at the way color seemed to dominate the separation in this group.

On tenterhooks, Aaron and I waited to be questioned about Merrick, and what was to happen to her, but no one spoke a single word. Indeed, people merely embraced Merrick, kissed her and whispered to her, and then went their way. Once more there was a bowl, and money was put in it, but for what I did not know. Probably for Merrick, because surely people knew she had no mother or father there.

Only as we prepared to go to sleep on cots in a rear room (the body would remain exposed all night), which was totally unfurnished otherwise, did Merrick bring in the priest to speak to us, saying to him in very good and rapid French that we were her uncles and she would live with us.

“So that is the story,” I thought. We were uncles of Merrick. Merrick was definitely going away to school.

“It’s exactly what I meant to recommend to her,” said Aaron. “I wonder how she knew it. I thought she would quarrel with me about such a change.”

I didn’t know what I thought. This sober, serious, and beautiful child disturbed me and attracted me. The whole spectacle made me doubt my mind.

That night, we slept only fitfully. The cots were uncomfortable, the empty room was hot, and people were going and coming and forever whispering in the hall.

Many times I went into the parlor to find Merrick dozing quietly in her chair. The old priest himself went to sleep sometime near morning. I could see out the back door into a yard shrouded in shadow where distant candles or lamps flickered wildly. It was disturbing. I fell asleep while there were still a few stars in the sky.

At last, there came the morning, and it was time for the funeral service to begin.

The priest appeared in the proper vestments, and with his altar boy, and intoned the prayers which the entire crowd seemed to know. The English language service, for that is what it was, was no less awe inspiring than the old Latin Rite, which had been cast aside. The coffin was closed.

Merrick began to shake all over and then to sob. It was a dreadful thing to behold. She had pushed away her straw hat, and her head was bare. She began to sob louder and louder. Several well-dressed women of color gathered around her and escorted her down the front steps. They rubbed her arms vigorously and wiped her forehead. Her sobs came like hiccups. The women cooed to her and kissed her. At one point Merrick let out a scream.

To see this composed little girl now near hysterics wrenched my heart.

They all but carried her to the funeral service limousine. The coffin came behind her, accompanied by solemn pallbearers to the hearse, and then off to the cemetery we rode, Aaron and I in the Talamasca car, uncomfortably separated from Merrick but resigned that it was for the best.

The sorrowful theatricality was not diminished as the rain came steadily down upon us, and the body of Great Nananne was carried through the wildly overgrown path of St. Louis No. 1 amid high marble tombs with pointed roofs, to be placed in an oven-like vault of a three-story grave.

The mosquitoes were almost unbearable. The weeds seemed alive with invisible insects, and Merrick, at the sight of the coffin being put in its place, screamed again.

Once more the genteel women rubbed her arms and wiped her head, and kissed her cheeks.

Then Merrick let out a terrible cry in French.

“Where are you, Cold Sandra, where are you, Honey in the Sunshine? Why didn’t you come home!”

There were rosary beads aplenty, and people praying aloud, as Merrick leant against the grave, with her right hand on the exposed coffin.

Finally, having spent herself for the moment, she grew quiet and turned and moved decisively, with the help of the women, towards Aaron and me. As the women patted her, she threw her arms around Aaron and buried her head in his neck.

I could see nothing of the young woman in her now. I felt utter compassion for her. I felt the Talamasca must embrace her with every conceivable element of fantasy that she should ever desire.

The priest meanwhile insisted the cemetery attendants bolt the stone into place NOW, which caused some argument, but eventually this did happen, the stone thereby sealing up the little grave slot and the coffin now officially removed from touch or view.

I remember taking out my handkerchief and wiping my eyes.

Aaron stroked Merrick’s long brown hair and told her in French that Great Nananne had lived a marvelous and long life, and that her one deathbed wish—that Merrick be safe—had been fulfilled.

Merrick lifted her head and uttered only one sentence. “Cold Sandra should have come.” I remember it because when she said it several of the onlookers shook their heads and exchanged condemnatory glances with one another.

I felt rather helpless. I studied the faces of the men and women around me. I saw some of the blackest people of African blood I have ever beheld in America, and some of the lightest as well. I saw people of extraordinary beauty and others who were merely simple. Almost no one was ordinary, as we understand that word. It seemed quite impossible to guess the lineage or racial history of anyone I saw.

But none of these people were close to Merrick. Except for Aaron and for me, she was basically alone. The well-dressed genteel women had done their duty, but they really did not know her. That was plain. And they were happy for her that she had two rich uncles who were there to take her away.

As for the “white Mayfairs” whom Aaron had spotted yesterday, none had appeared. This was “great luck,” according to Aaron. If they had known a Mayfair child was friendless in the wide world, they would have insisted upon filling the need. Indeed, I realize now, they had not been at the wake, either. They had done their duty, Merrick had told them something satisfactory, and they had gone their way.

Now it was back towards the old house.

A truck from Oak Haven was already waiting for the transport of Merrick’s possessions. Merrick had no intention of leaving her aunt’s dwelling without everything that was hers.

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 what’s 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 on people. I saw her skin a black cat once and I never want to see that again.”