Lies Agreed Upon (8 page)

The
old woman frowned for a moment and then exclaimed excitedly, “Josephine Chastant! Of course, I know that little painting. It’s on loan to us. Well, now I know where at least one of the properties can be found. Out off U.S. 10, there is a restaurant created from the stables of the old Chastant plantation. The restaurant is called The Lost Lady, which is a reference to Josephine in fact. My goodness, and you are her descendant. Are you named Chastant?” she quizzed, eying Tess with sharper interest.

“No, my name is Therese Parnell. I’m descended from Josephine’s husband
’s family. I’m going to take a ‘River Road’ plantation tour tomorrow. Will I be able to see the plantation house?” Tess asked.

“I’m afraid not. I believe the main house was torn down long ago. Just the stable buil
dings survived to become the restaurant,” the woman replied, with a mournful shake of her head. But she quickly returned to perky helpfulness and added, “Many tourists routinely stop at The Lost Lady Restaurant for lunch. If I recall, they have a little write-up on Josephine and the origin of the restaurant name, a sort of ghost story.”

Piqued, Tess asked, “I know Josephine died young, but why a ghost story?”

The little woman looked down at her pink-painted nails and chewed uncertainly at a thin lower lip carefully outlined in matching pink lipstick. “I believe people sometimes report seeing a lady in white walking toward the river. I think Josephine drowned in the river.”

“Well, then I’ll have to stop there and find out more details,”
responded Tess with a smile, but the notion of Josephine as unquiet spirit created an unpleasant little prickle at the nape of her neck. She wondered why Dreux had not thrown in this melodramatic twist, although it perhaps explained his reference to “love stories and ghost stories.”

“Do you recognize the names Cabrera or Arnoult? Those are other family branches,” Tess said on the off chance that she might get lucky again.

The old lady frowned and pinched the thin skin between her brows as if trying to pull out a memory. “Arnoult is a common name here, and Cabrera sounds familiar…”

“Antonio Cabrera married Josephine Chastant, and they had one son named Benjamin,” Tess added with no real expectation of recognition. She was startled when the elderly guide su
ddenly clapped her hand to her forehead.

“Of course, Benjamin Cabrera,” the woman exclaimed. “This is fascinating. I have a very good friend with a distant family connection to Benjamin Cabrera. In fact, she is the owner of Josephine’s picture.
Gracious, I’m sure she can tell you some interesting stories. Strange how small the world is—six degrees of separation and all that. I can find out if my friend will talk with you and share what she knows of your ancestors. Are you taking the walking tour? Why don’t you come back after that? I’ll show you Josephine’s portrait. In the meantime, I’ll call my dear friend and see if she can meet you. Will you be in New Orleans for a few days more?”

“I’ll certainly stop back after the walk. Meeting your friend would be wonderful if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble. I know absolutely nothing about my family history here, and I’m eager to learn. But I’ll be here next week, so no rush,” answered Tess earnestly, amazed at the little woman’s sudden excited burst of rapid-fire questions and decisions.

“Lovely, and it’s no trouble at all. It will be a little adventure for me. At my age, conversations about the past are certainly more interesting than ones about the future. My name is Mimi Walker, by the way. I was raised right here in the ‘Vieux Carré,’ and my maiden name was Pilié. I’m old enough to remember when it was a world apart. You know, when I was a little girl, my darling Creole maman even used to warn me not to go beyond Canal Street because of the danger from ‘les americains.’ Imagine how much things have changed! But since I married a nice man named Walker, I guess you can see that I wasn’t a very obedient girl,” she laughed, showing snowy white dentures to match her hair.

“Oh, I see your guide is here and about to begin,” she added and gestured toward the front of the gift shop. “Now be sure to stop by after the walking tour, Therese, if I’m remembering your name correctly.” At Tess’s acknowledgement that her memory was indeed reliable, Mimi trotted to the rear of the shop and waved
farewell with an excited smile.

Tess was a little unnerved by Mimi’s enthusiastic involvement. Why was the woman so eager to help a complete stranger, even in a city noted for its warmth to visitors? She was like a hungry little bird that hoped, or knew, it was about to peck up something juicy. She’s just a kind old lady, Tess told herself
. “And she’s bored and enjoys a good gossip.”

At the front of the shop, tourists were gathering around an eccentric-looking old gentl
eman wearing a white panama hat and a badge identifying him as the walking-tour guide. A neat white mustache and goatee accented a bulbous red-veined nose and rosy cheeks, and he wore a khaki bush shirt that spread like a bivouac tent over a Falstaffian girth. From long khaki shorts emerged bony pink knees, high black socks and a pair of lace-up hiking boots.

“
A Crescent City original. But don’t you think his get-up is lacking some essential accessory
—
say a butterfly net, or a palmetto fan, or a big tumbler of bourbon on the rocks?”

As if he could hear the thoughts
of her maternal alter ego, the old man reached over and snatched up a large, furled red umbrella. With its crook handle, the umbrella was long enough to act as a sort of walking stick, and he placed both hands atop the handle and leaned forward to address the group, introducing himself as “your urban safari leader.”

“
Ah,
perfect.”

“I am Jack Casey, and I’m going to take you on a walking tour of the French Quarter,” the guide announced and motioned his listeners closer. “This part of the city is also called the ‘Vieux Carré,’ meaning ‘Old Square,’ and as we walk you’ll learn some of the history of the grid of streets that make up that square. Please follow me.”

Casey spoke in a booming Southern voice that would have rallied the most pusillanimous Confederate regiment and certainly brought order to the cowed tourists. He turned, opened the door with a flourish, and set a brisk pace toward the statue of Jackson, his umbrella point swinging and tapping the pavement commandingly.

Halting in a patch of shade near the statue, Casey gathered his charges and launched into his narrative
: “Before we start our walk, I want you to keep something in mind. We are going to be touring the ‘French Quarter,’ but most of what you will see is not French. Does that surprise you? It might be just as accurate to say that this is the Spanish Quarter. Yes, the French were the first Europeans to come here, but…”

Tess listened attentively as Casey went all the way back to French exploration
of the Mississippi River in 1682 and France’s claim to all lands drained by the great river, an area dubbed Louisiana for King Louis XIV, whose family name Bourbon would mark a street of modern revelry. Seventeen years later, on Mardi Gras day appropriately, Pierre Le Moyne, the Sieur d’Iberville, rediscovered and secured the Mississippi delta. In 1718, his brother Jean-Baptiste, the Sieur de Bienville and governor of Louisiana, founded the port of La Nouvelle Orléans, or New Orleans, in honor of the regent Duc d’Orléans. The two brothers were later honored by French Quarter streets named Iberville and Bienville—and by my hotel, too, Tess thought.

French settlement
grew slowly, but in 1762, King Louis XV nevertheless handed off the Louisiana colony to his cousin and ally, the king of Spain, Casey explained. The Spanish then came to rule the less-than-thrilled French inhabitants—and planted the seed of Antonio’s family legacy, added Tess in a mental footnote.

“When the Spanish took over, the city
of New Orleans consisted of French colonial houses,” lectured Casey. “Then two great fires destroyed 80% of the city. It was the Spanish who rebuilt New Orleans, creating most of what you see today in their own colonial style of tile roofs, stucco over brick, central courtyards and wrought-iron or cast-iron trimmed balconies.”

Casey could
not have missed noticing that his cavalcade of names and dates was generating a glassy-eyed stupor in his audience, and he began to speed up his history lesson. However, the barest historical bones required that he explain how New Orleans went briefly back to the French under Napoleon Bonaparte, who then sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. From then on “Les Americains” provided the economic lifeblood of the city. By 1850, their commercial energies made New Orleans the second largest U.S. port after New York—and the largest slave market. So Antonio and Josephine were playing out their personal drama against the backdrop of the city’s heyday, Tess realized.

“But that is only part of the cultural mixing that makes
up what people call our ethnic ‘gumbo,’” Casey continued. “Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, slave revolts in what is now Haiti sent the city a multitude of French ‘gens de couleur libre,’ which translates as ‘free people of color.’ They brought their Caribbean music, spices and voodoo religion.” Tess supposed from Dreux’s brief description that Solange Beauvoir was connected to this immigration.

“You may also be surprised to sometimes detect a sort of Brooklyn accent here,
” continued Casey. “That’s because, just as they were drawn to New York, nineteenth-century Irish and Italian immigrants began to flow into the booming port of New Orleans. The so called ‘Irish Channel’ area recalls that big Irish labor community.” Tess wondered briefly if Charles Donovan could have been one of these poor Irish. But then how had he won the hand of Elaine, the elite Creole Cabrera?

Casey gave a sad shake of his head as he continued. “The Irish who settled here also died in droves from the yellow fever. In fact, rather than hurricanes, the deadliest natural disasters in New Orleans history were probably the yellow fever epidemics. Repeated epidemics, to as late as 1905, killed thousands, sometimes so quickly that stinking corpses stacked up in churches, cemeteries and even the streets.”

Tess had noticed many early deaths in her family tree. Were any of them victims of yellow fever?

“Or
killed by less natural causes. Remember Josephine’s ghost.”

The guide paused, tapping his umbrella. “Any questions?” The group shifted restively. “OK, then,” the guide continued briskly, “let’s talk briefly about the famous Battle of New Orl
eans in 1815, and how General Andrew Jackson defeated the British with the aid of Jean Lafitte and his Barataria pirates…”

Casey soon herded them
down the alley between the Cabildo and cathedral, regaling his sluggish audience with a series of stories about the city’s popular saints, but “not the football team.” His joke drew only a few polite smiles. An anecdote about St. Expedite was the only part of Casey’s talk that Tess would recall later—thanks to surprise encounters with the saint in the next few days of her stay.

“A popular but
quite apocryphal story about St. Expedite,” Casey narrated, “is that he arrived when Our Lady of Guadalupe Church ordered a statue of the Virgin Mary. Two crates were delivered. One crate contained the requested Virgin, but the other crate held a statue of a cross-bearing Roman centurion. Since the only information on the shipping label was the word ‘Expedite,’ the simple clerics installed the godsend as St. Expedite, and he now has a devoted following among those needing a quick fix.”

Behind the cathedral
, they dutifully peered at a garden famous for a spot-lit statue of Christ that cast a huge shadow on the back of the cathedral at night. “By the way, there’s a recent ‘miracle’ involving the statue, which wags call our ‘touchdown Jesus’ because of his raised, outstretched arms,” Casey added.

When this flippant remark drew frowns from a middle-aged co
uple, he quickly donned a sober manner. “During Katrina, the winds toppled massive trees in the small garden, which should have smashed the statue to smithereens, but the Savior miraculously emerged nearly unscathed,” he said piously.

This reminder of Katrina generated a barrage of questions about the 2005 disaster from the tourists, who clearly hoped for some personal survivor stories. But Casey, a transplanted Georgian with an antique shop in the Quarter,
had no harrowing tales and instead started to bemoan damage to his shop and his house in Faubourg Marigny. As bored tour members started to drift toward nearby shop windows, Casey realized his error and hastened to add that Marigny is also famous for gracious antebellum homes created by rich white men for their “placées,” or “free colored” mistresses. This regained him immediate, rapt attention.

Casey explained that the custom of “plaçage”
began before the Civil War and involved a wealthy white man taking a free woman of color as his mistress. He would agree as her protector to provide her with a furnished home and to support and educate any resulting children. The plaçage affairs were often launched at the famous “quadroon balls” on Chartres Street, where young women of color “debuted” under the watchful chaperonage of their mothers. While the wealthy white men also married white brides, they might keep nonwhite liaisons for a lifetime and sometimes recognized shadow families with inheritances, added Casey.

Tess pondered the implications for her own sketchy family story. Dreux had said
the mysterious Solange Beauvoir was a free woman of color, meaning not bought and sold by others. Based on Jack Casey’s narrative, Tess concluded that this meant Solange was free only to decide where and how she sold herself, a prisoner in the gray borderland between black slave and white master. Beautiful Solange had not chosen plaçage as her form of servitude—or perhaps she had and that was the family connection to which Dreux alluded. It was a question for Samuel Beauvoir. Tess decided she needed to speed her effort to meet Beauvoir.