Season

A Marie Laveau Mystery

Jewell Parker Rhodes

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781451617061
• eBook ISBN: 9781416510376
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Jewell Parker Rhodes, who has earned legions of fans with her masterful fiction, launched her career as an award-winning novelist with Voodoo Dreams, based on the legend of New Orleans's most famous voodoo priestess, Marie Laveau.
Voodoo Season, Rhodes's fourth novel, revisits the mystical landscape of Louisiana, but now, for the first time, the celebrated author of historical fiction presents a mystery set in the here and now. This is the story of Marie Levant, a great-great granddaughter of Marie Laveau and a medical doctor compelled by unseen forces to relocate from Chicago to her family's native home. This is New Orleans, where the slave-holding past merges with the twenty-first century, a place where women of color are still being abused, raped, and -- even more horrifying -- rendered "un-dead, " zombie-like Sleeping Beauties. The Quadroon Balls of yesterday are a present reality and only Marie Levant can untangle the medical mystery.
A smart modern-day heroine, unafraid of her sexuality, Marie Levant extends the Laveau legacy of spiritual empowerment, prophetic vision, and voodoo possession. Voodoo Season is a fresh and original work of fiction that is a magical womanist tale of mystery and power.

THE BEGINNING

Two Thousand and Five

arie could recall a time when it felt good to be held, rocked—daytime, nighttime, “all around the town time” in her mother’s honeysuckle arms. No one else had had the sweet scent. She didn’t recognize it until she came to New Orleans. Where did her mother ever get it? Honeysuckle during Chicago winters? Year after year? In and out of season?

In the South, honeysuckle bloomed year-round. The scent was cloying, overwhelming. Even the bees seemed irritated by the smell.

But this newborn baby smelled like the flower. Delicate. Like her mother.

Sometimes Marie had felt their roles were reversed: she, the grown-up; her mother, the child. Sweet, withdrawn, her mother often seemed in another world. Humming off-key in a distant place where it never snowed, money wasn’t needed, and where she didn’t clean houses, collect bottles for pennies, and didn’t sew or patch their clothes.

When Marie hurt most, when school kids taunted her about her worn shoes, ketchup sandwiches, and her crazy, muttering mother, it was the memory of her mother’s sweet aroma that calmed her.

Saturdays, when her mother went to St. Teresa’s Retirement Home to wipe tired bodies, change bedpans, sheets, and listen to old nun’s stories, Marie would lie in her mother’s bed, inhaling her warm scent, whiling away the hours pretending her mother was home, rich enough to put her feet up and be bored on a Saturday.

Her mother said she went to St. Teresa’s for penance, but, afterward, she was always pleased when the nuns gave her beans, rice, a can of Spam. They’d have a feast on Sunday. Her mother, stirring red beans, smelling of honeysuckle; she, Marie, reading a book, and they’d pretend they were safe, secure, and happy.

* * *

The moment Marie walked into pediatric intensive care, she could pick out the scent. She wondered if anybody else could. During breaks, after work, before work, she stared into the baby’s bright, glassy eyes. Inhaling the aroma, she thought she was drowning, seeing her mother’s face.

Marie went to Maison Blanche, the city’s finest department store. They had myriad perfumes blended with flowers, chemicals, and oils, but none of them, pure honeysuckle.

At night when policemen were riding stallions at the other end of the park, Marie plucked honeysuckle from vines where it grew wild, untamable. Sometimes it shivered in the night air, and Marie felt the blooms were alive, offering themselves to her. Using an old pharmacist’s pestle, she ground the flowers until they yielded droplets of heaven.

Marie dabbed honeysuckle behind her ears, along her cleavage. She felt comforted—even though her dreams hadn’t lessened, even though each morning, she woke in a sweat, on the verge of screaming.

She wanted to confide in El, to tell her about her strange dreams, about the baby’s sweet scent.

But El always warned, “It ain’t your baby.”

* * *

Marie couldn’t help the hours spent holding the motherless child. Before shifts, during breaks, after work.

Each day, the infant was getting stronger. Each day, she became more attached, afraid to let go.

“What’s going to happen to her?” she asked Antoinette, the social services director.

“Foster care.”

Marie knew what foster care could be like. Indifferent, at best; cruel, at worst. But she imagined someone would rescue the child. The dead mother’s people. They’d sweep in, declaring, “That’s our child. Our family.”

But sometimes, just sometimes, late, when she’d awakened from her dream, after she’d fed the baby Similac (when her womb strangely ached, when her lips feathered the baby’s brow with kisses), the thought would hover, echo through her consciousness—the child could be hers.

Another black single mother—how stereotypical.

She didn’t have time for a child. Still, she was tempted.

Even the baby seemed to know her. Four pounds, six ounces, at birth, the baby wouldn’t feed. A tiny pink tongue spat out the latex nipple. Only Marie could encourage her to start taking a bottle. To suck rather than be fed intravenously. Now six pounds, two ounces, Marie was proud of the baby’s small mound of a belly.

Sometimes the baby cried, wailed like she was dying, pained by some hidden wound. Nobody else could calm her.

Marie was the baby’s medicine.

Something wonderful, magical happened between them. For hours, the child watched her; she watched the child as if no one else in the world existed.

Mon piti bébé. Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

The baby’s lids would struggle to stay open. But, always, the lilting tune lulled the baby to sleep. The child would go limp like a rag doll. It was startling how the child would go from bright, red rage, fists balled and tears raining down her face, to utter calm. The first couple of times, Marie panicked and unbundled the blanket, unsnapped the undershirt to make certain the lungs were expanding, the chest rising and falling.

Mon piti bébé. Fais dodo. Mon piti bébé.

My little baby. Go to sleep. My little baby.

Except it wasn’t accurate French. It should’ve been Ma petite. “Go to sleep” should’ve been “Endors-toi.” It was Creole. How’d she learn it?

She couldn’t remember. She just knew the song. Knew all its verses:

Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

La lune toute jaune, se lève.

Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

Quand tu rêveras, rêve des esprits

qui survolent la mer.

Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

Quand tu te réveilleras, seize ans tu auras.

Réveille-toi mort.

Fais dodo, mon piti bébé, mon piti si doux.

Fais dodo!

It always worked. When she’d tried the song in English:

Sssh, my little baby. Go to sleep, my little baby.

The moon is yellow, rising high.

Little baby, go to sleep.

When you dream, dream of spirits

flying across the sea.

My little baby, sleep.

When you wake, sixteen you’ll be.

Wake yourself from the dead.

Go to sleep, little baby, my pretty baby.

Sleep!

It never worked. The baby cried and cried, gasping for air.

* * *

“We’ll be moving her to the nursery tomorrow.”

Marie shuddered. “Has anyone come to claim her?”

Antoinette shook her head. “Two weeks, not a word. Not even an ID on the mother.”

Marie buried her nose against the baby’s cheek. She stroked the fragile fingers, the tiny nails.

“You could name her, you know?” Antoinette dressed like a banker instead of a social worker. Silk suits with clean lines.

“Doesn’t seem right.”

“Why? Are you afraid of keeping her?”

“No. Afraid of letting her go.”

Marie laid the baby in the bassinet. “Don’t worry. I’ll find your people.” She kissed the child’s brow.

* * *

The elevator slid smoothly down.

“You didn’t name her yet, did you?” El didn’t look up from the papers at her station. Marie noticed her nails were blue this week.

“What can I help with?” Marie put on her white coat, a stethoscope dangling from her pocket. “Pneumonia? Fever? Vision impairment? Ears going deaf?”

“Don’t name her. If you do, you won’t let her go.”

“I liked it better when you were asking about my love life.”

“So did I. You got one?”

Marie laughed. “No.” Then she leaned over the counter, embracing El.

Flustered, El pushed her away.

Marie smiled. “Put me to work, El. Otherwise, I’ll hug you again.”

“Sass. Nothing but sass. Red peppers in you.”

“And not in you?”

El slapped a clipboard on the counter. It held a pencil and a blank sheet.

“I got an odd one for you. DuLac wants you to help him with a patient. ’Course the boy’s dead, but he said he needed your help.”

“What does he think I can do?”

“Lord knows. But do I ask the almighty doctor? Last time I checked, he was still the boss.”

“Right. I’m going.”

“Good. Last urgent care room.”

“That’s unusual for a dead man.”

“You bet. Taking up my space,” El grumbled. “Stop by later,” she called after Marie. “I’ve got a rattle for the baby.”

* * *

Marie stopped at the door. Through the glass, she knew someone was sitting in the corner. Smoke spiraled upward, hovering in a thin layer on the ceiling.

“Smoking’s not allowed. Bad for the patients.”

“I didn’t think it much mattered to him.”

Marie was glad her hand was still on the door; it steadied her. She felt—what? Recognition? Déjà vu?

He was average height like her. More interesting than handsome. Arched brows. High cheekbones like a Choctaw’s. Lashes so long, they touched his cheeks when he blinked. His hair was jet black, pulled tight in a ponytail. He was dressed in black shirt, black pants, a leather bomber jacket, and wore a gold cross dangling in his left ear.

Marie exhaled. She realized she’d been holding herself incredibly still because he’d been still. Like a stop-motion character. Paused. Expectant.

He pinched off the cigarette. Ash was on his index finger and thumb. “If you say I’m as still as an Indian, I’ll have to arrest you.”

He drawled. Marie grinned.

“You know everybody in Louisiana mixed with something. I’m just a good old southern boy.”

“Like hell.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

Marie shook his hand. “Doctor Levant.”

“Reneaux.”

She raised her brow.

“Frenchmen used to own my family. I’m plain southern, through and through. Work for the New Orleans Police Department.”

“Undercover?”

“Naw. Just a detective.”

“No uniform? Not even a suit?”

“Even nuns have given up the habit. Don’t you get tired of that white coat?”

“Very funny.”

DuLac swept in, snapping his gloves on. Marie flinched at the sound.

“You two been getting to know one another? Bon. Reneaux i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• The Middle: Two Thousand and Five
• The Beginning: Two Thousand and Five
• Another Beginning: Two Thousand and Five
• The End: Two Thousand and Five
• Never Ending: Two Thousand and Five
• Author’s Note
• About Jewell Parker Rhodes
• Copyright