Paula Morris (17 page)

"Not then. It was the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad,
pulled by a steam engine. It was loud and smelly, and it moved quite fast.
There were too many people pressed together inside. I didn't like it at all.
But my mother held on

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to me, and I knew nothing terrible would happen if she was there.
I was right about that, I guess."

Lisette gave an enigmatic, sad little smile. "But my mother
left me at the gate. She didn't come into the house."

"Why?" Rebecca asked, but Lisette just shook her head.
She didn't say anything at all for a while, so Rebecca tried a different sort
of question. "Who did you have to look after?"

"Two people. A wealthy man -- he was a sugar factor....
"

"A what?"

"A go-between, maybe? Or you would say a broker? He bought
sugarcane from the planters upriver and sold it on. And he arranged loans for
them, investments. He was from New York, but he'd lived in Mississippi, coming
back and forth to New Orleans for almost twenty years. He'd made a lot of
money. Just that year, he'd built this big house in the Garden District for him
and his wife, and his son and his daughter. It wasn't even really finished, but
they were already living there. The son was away for the summer, and they told
him to stay away. The man was sick, and so was his daughter. She was not much
older than I was. That winter she was going to make her big social debut."

Lisette was used to much smaller houses and a very different kind
of neighborhood. Everyone who worked in the house was a slave, and, unlike the
black people she'd grown up around, none of them spoke French. They regarded
her, she said, with some suspicion.

"My skin was light, and when I told them my grandparents had
come from Haiti, and that my mother had her own little business, and that we
lived in Faubourg Tremé -- well, they

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acted as though they didn't know
what
I was doing there.
And I didn't know myself, really. I knew a few Americans, but I'd never met
this man in my life. But he knew me." "Really?"

"He said my name when I was taken to his bedside. He tried to
smile at me. But he was already very ill, shivering and soaked with sweat. His
lips were cracked, like a dry riverbed." Lisette shuddered at the memory.
"Already yellow with the jaundice, but his tongue was dark, almost purple,
as though it was rotting away in his mouth. I could see he didn't have
long."

"But how did he know you?" Rebecca wasn't worried about
bumping into other people now: She was intent on Lisette's story.

"At first, I didn't understand. All I knew was that my mother
had said
she
would go, but that was not possible. And this man, he'd
asked for me. But to everyone else in the house I was a stranger. I had to
sleep in the building out back, where the kitchen was, and it was so hot -- so
very, very hot. The cook did not like me. She said I had fancy ways. And the
lady of the house, she didn't like me much, either. She never called me by my
name. I was in the house less than a week, and on the last night she said I had
to sleep on the floor by the daughter's bed. Things were very bad by then. The
girl was vomiting up the black blood. I had to hold her down when she was sick,
even when the blood sprayed into my face. The father, he was already
dead."

"How horrible!" Rebecca had read a little about yellow
fever: It sounded like a painful, ugly way to die.

"That day was so hot, so terrible -- totally still."
Lisette raised her face to the sky.

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There was no warmth in the sun this afternoon, Rebecca thought.
The sky was darkening to gray, as though rain was coming. She hoped they made
it home before it started.

"And no breeze was almost a relief, in a way," Lisette
went on, "because the wind brought the smell of the river. Everything on
the ships and barges, they were going bad. The stink of death was everywhere.
Each morning, outside the cemetery gates, there were bodies. Their faces all
sunken, agonized. It was horrible. We kept the shutters closed so we did not
have to see, but we could still smell them. This is a bad thing to admit, but
all I wanted was for the girl to die so I could go home again."

"But she didn't die?"

"Oh, no, she died." Lisette sighed. "In the night,
she died. The mother, she was mad with grief. Screaming, pulling and clawing on
the drapes. The doctor and his son came, and the lawyer came -- men in black,
swarming through the house like flies. The bodies needed to be buried quickly
in the family vault, they said, before they swelled up in the heat and burst
open."

That's disgusting,
Rebecca thought, waiting for Lisette to go
on. But she was distracted, it seemed, by someone who
had
to be a ghost,
sitting slumped on the front steps of a narrow house. He was wearing a
tight-fitting black suit and a sharp trilby-style hat; his shoes were pointed.
He was looking at Rebecca and Lisette with interest.

"Hi, Marco," Lisette said as they approached. Marco sat
up a little, but his hangdog expression didn't change.

"I never took no money," he said. "I never took no
money from nobody. But this is what they did to me!"

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He opened his jacket to reveal a blackened gash down his
shirtfront. Rebecca recoiled: She'd seen plenty of congealed blood today, but
this seemed a particularly large and jagged wound. Marco seemed pleased with
her reaction.

"Dat's right," he said. "I never did nothing, and
this is what they did to me."

Lisette pulled Rebecca along the sidewalk, picking up her pace.

"Hurry," she whispered. "Otherwise he'll ask me to
touch it."

"Yuck!" Rebecca said, though she couldn't resist
glancing back. Marco had settled back against the steps and was rebuttoning his
jacket. "At least he didn't die from yellow fever."

"The doctor kept saying you couldn't catch the fever from a
dead body," Lisette continued, "but no one else in the house believed
him. We didn't know then, exactly, what brought yellow fever to the city summer
after summer."

"Mosquitoes carry it, right?" Rebecca was trying to make
up for her earlier brain freeze. "Like malaria."

"That's what some ghost told me, years ago --Johnny, remember
him?" Rebecca nodded, thinking of the guy in scrubs pacing back and forth
along Canal Street. "But back then we thought it lived in the city, in the
hot air, in the dirty streets. We thought it was the price we paid for living
here."

Lisette fell silent, the only sound now the slap of Rebecca's feet
along the sidewalk-- Lisette, she noticed, walked without making noise of any
kind -- and the surge of passing cars. Lisette's grip on her hand grew tighter,
as though she was steeling herself for the next part of the story. Rebecca

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didn't want to ask any questions or push her too hard. She knew
that what was coming was the saddest part of all.

"I was stripping the sheets off the bed," she said
softly. "Taking all the linens to be burned. The first coffin had already
been carried over to the family vault, and some of the servants were on their
way down the back stairs with the daughter's. I should have gone out through
the back gallery, but I didn't want anything else to do with that body. And
besides, I was curious. Downstairs there were raised voices, and I could hear
the lady shouting something over and over. So I crept down the front staircase,
and though the doors to the parlor were closed, I could still hear what they
were saying."

"What was she shouting?" Rebecca was almost whispering
now. It seemed incredible to her that while Lisette was telling her this story,
they were still walking, still holding hands -- incredible that around them the
citizens of New Orleans were still going about their Saturday-afternoon
business. Just across the road, someone was walking out of a chiropractor's
office, rubbing at his neck; someone else was doing a terrible job of parallel
parking his car. A woman was hanging red and green plastic beads from the
railings of her porch, talking in a high-pitched baby voice to a little dog.

"She was shouting, 'Who is she? Who is she?' I could hear her
screaming this. And then the lawyer's deep voice would go on for a while, and
she would start screaming again. She didn't sound sad anymore. She just sounded
angry."

"Were you frightened?" Rebecca asked her. It must have
been so hard for Lisette -- in this strange part of town and

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strange house, with dead bodies, and an enraged woman screaming.

"I wasn't scared -- not then, anyway." Lisette had stood
with her ear against the heavy door, trying to make sense of the lawyer's low
drone. "I thought --
why doesn't this woman know who her own daughter
is? Why is she asking this lawyer?
But then I realized she wasn't talking
about her daughter. They were going over her husband's will; and that's why she
was asking this question. I heard the lawyer say my name -- Lisette Villieux. She
was talking about me."

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***

CHAPTER NINETEEN

***

Rebecca felt feverish with excitement: she could barely take in
what Lisette was telling her. She no longer cared about looking out for ghosts
or asking about how they died: All she wanted to do was barrage Lisette with
questions about her own life. How did the lawyer know her name? Why did the
dying man send for her? Why was everyone arguing about her after the man was
dead?

"In his will," Lisette said, her pace slowing again.
"I was mentioned in his will. And my mother -- I heard her name as well,
Rose Villieux. That was why I couldn't move away from the door, you see? I had
to stay and listen. I wanted to know what they were saying about us, and
why."

"I understand," Rebecca told her. She would do exactly
the same thing, she thought, even if her brain was telling her to run for her
life out the front door.

"It took a while for me to make sense of what they were
saying, but eventually it was clear. The dead man -- he was my father. Our
house in Tremé, he'd bought it for my mother

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and me. In his will, he gave it to her. That's what the lawyer was
telling his wife -- that was why they were speaking my mother's name. And there
was some money for me, so I could keep going to school."

"You were his
daughter?"
Rebecca couldn't believe
it.

"Natural daughter, as we used to say. It was the way things
went back then. Lots of men in New Orleans had two families, one white and one
black. Some of the girls I knew at school had rich Creole fathers who gave them
gifts and saw to their education. Some of them had fathers who spent a lot of
time with them and their mothers."

"But where did they all meet -- these white men and black
women? Were the women originally their servants? Their slaves?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes they met at one of the quadroon balls
in the Quarter. If you were a young woman of color, you could meet some fine,
rich young Creole at a ball and your mama, she would make a deal with him. To
get you a house, and money for life."

"That sounds like prostitution, almost!" Rebecca said,
instantly regretting it: She didn't want to insinuate anything about Lisette's
mother. But although Lisette was shaking her head, she didn't look offended.

"It's no different from the way white girls met their
husbands at balls and parties." She pulled on Rebecca's hand to draw her
back onto the sidewalk; a pickup was careering around the corner in front of
them. "And weren't
their
parents doing the same thing, making sure
they had a nice house and things for the rest of their lives? It was just that

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black and white people couldn't get married, by law. So some
gentlemen, they never married at all. They just spent their time with their
colored wife and family."

"But your father ..." Rebecca began, and then stopped.
It was too awkward to say:
Your father had nothing to do with you.

"He was an American, not a Creole," Lisette said
quietly. "Maybe it was hard for him, having that double life. That day he
sent the note to my mother, I think he knew he was dying. Maybe he wanted to
see me one last time. Maybe he saw me many times when I was growing up, and I
didn't realize. I mean, maybe he saw me in the street and knew me. I think
about this a lot -- how I didn't know him, but he knew me."

Rebecca imagined Lisette's father, watching her from afar --
looking at her as she skipped to the market, swinging a basket; looking into
her little classroom from the hallway, making sure she was hard at work.

"So did he meet your mother at one of those balls?" she
asked. Lisette shrugged.

"I don't think so. My mother was too dark-skinned to go to
them, and she told me she'd never allow me to attend one. Maybe she'd done some
work for him, some tailoring -- I don't know. I never had the chance to ask
her. One moment, I was standing outside the parlor doors listening, thinking --
here is this secret that my mother never, ever told me. Thinking that the man
who just died was my father. And then the doors burst open, and suddenly the
lady is there. And she's wild."