She Walks in Shadows (12 page)

HAIRWORK

Gemma Files

NO PLANT CAN
thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.

These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.

“
Ici, c’est elle,
” you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline Bedard, 1909 — from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from; I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”

Ferris looks at the
carte,
gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”

“‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”

“Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected — you know, high yaller? Same as me.”

“Oh yes,
une métisse,
bien sur.
She was cagey about her background,
la belle Marceline,
liked to preserve mystery. But the rumor was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto; when she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”

“She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”

“Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair — that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made
from
hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a
long
time, centuries ... I mean,
c’est folle
to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far
as
Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”

“Mummies got hair like that, though, don’t they? Never rots. Good enough you can take DNA off it.”

You nod. “And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular — they cover their hair with a wig, too, a
sheitel,
so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I can see perhaps an added benefit to her
courtesanerie
from allowing no one who was not
un amant,
her intimate, to see her uncovered. The wig’s hair might look much the same as her own, only longer; it would save her having to ... relax it?
Ça ira?
”

“Yeah, back then, they’d’ve used lye, I guess. Nasty. Burn you, you leave it on too long.”

“
Exactement.
”

Tully rocks back a bit on his heels, gives a sigh. “Better start off soon, you lookin’ to make Riverside ‘fore nightfall — we twenty miles up the road here from where the turn-off’d be, there was one, so we gotta drive cross Barker’s Crick, park by the pass, then hike the rest. Not much left still standin’, but I guess you probably know that, right?”

“Mmm. I read testimony from 1930, a man trying for Cape Girardeau who claimed he stayed overnight, spoke to Antoine de Russy. Not possible, of course, given the time — yet he knew many details of the events of 1922, without ever reading or hearing about them, previously. Or so he said.”

“The murders, the fire?” You nod. “Yeah, well — takes all sorts, don’t it? Ready to go, ma’am?”

“If you are, yes.”

“Best get to it, then — be dark sooner’n you think and we sure don’t wanna be walkin’ ‘round in
that.
”

A mourning sampler embroidered in 15 different De Russy family members’ hair once hung upstairs, just outside my husband’s childhood bedroom door: such a pretty garden scene, at first glance, soft and gracious, depicting the linden-tree border separating river and dock from well-manicured green lawn and edging flowerbeds — that useless clutter of exotic blooms, completely unsuited to local climate or soil, which routinely drank up half the fresh water diverted from the slave quarter’s meager vegetable patch. The lindens also performed a second function, of course, making sure De Russy eyes were never knowingly forced to contemplate what their
negres
called the bone-field, a wet clay sump where slaves’ corpses were buried at night and without ceremony, once their squeamish masters were safely asleep. Landscaping as
maquillage,
a false face over rot, the skull skin-hid. But then, we all look the same underneath, no matter our outward shade,
ne c’est pas?

In 1912, I took Denis’s hand at a Paris soiree and knew him immediately for my own blood, from the way the very touch of him made my skin crawl — that oh-so-desirable
peau si-blanche,
olive-inflected like old ivory, light enough to shine under candle-flame. I had my Tanit-wig on that night, coils of it hung down in tiers far as my hips, my thighs, far enough to brush the very backs of my bare knees; I’d been rehearsing most of the day, preparing to chant the old rites in Shona while doing what my posters called a “Roodmas dance” for fools with deep pockets. Frank Marsh was there, too, of course, his fishy eyes hung out on strings — he introduced Denis to me, then pulled me aside and begged me once again to allow him to paint me “as the gods intended,” with only my ancestors’ hair for modesty. But I laughed in his face and turned back to Denis instead, for here was the touch of true fate at last, culmination of my mother’s many prayers and sacrifices. Mine to bend myself to him and bind him fast, make him bring me back to Riverside to do what must be done, just as it’d been Frank’s unwitting destiny to make that introduction all along and suffer the consequences.

Antoine De Russy liked to boast he kept Denis unworldly and I must suppose it to be so, for he never saw me with my wig off, my Tanit-locks set by and the not-so-soft fuzz of black which anchored it on display. As he was raised to think himself a gentleman, it would never have occurred to Denis to demand such intimacies. By the time his father pressed him to do so, I had him well-trained:
Something odd about that woman, boy,
I heard him whisper more than once, before they fell out.
Makes my blood run cold to see it.
For all she’s foreign-born, I’d almost swear I know her face ....

Ha! As though the man had no memory, or no mirrors. Yet, I was far too fair for the one, I suspect, and far too ... different, though in “deceitfully slight proportion”— to quote that Northerner who wrote your vaunted
testimony —
for the other. It being difficult to acknowledge your own features in so alien a mirror, not even when they come echoing back to you over generations of mixed blood, let alone on your only son’s arm.

You got in touch with Tully last Tuesday, little seeker, securing his services via Bell’s machine — its latest version, any rate — and by yesterday, meanwhile, you’d flown here from Paris already, through the air. Things move so
fast
these days and I don’t understand the half of it; it’s magic to me, more so than magic itself, that dark, mechanical force I hold so close to my dead heart. But then, this is a problem with where I am now,
how
I am; things come to me unasked-for, under the earth, out of the river. Knowledge just reveals itself to me, simple and secret, the same way soil is disturbed by footfalls or silt rises to meet the ripple: no questions and no answers, likewise. Nothing explained outright, ever.

That’s why I don’t know your name, or anything else about you, aside from the fact you think in a language I’ve long discarded and hold an image of me in your mind, forever searching after its twin: that portrait poor Frank did eventually conjure out of me during our last long, hot, wet summer at Riverside, when I led my husband’s father to believe I was unfaithful expressly in order to tempt Denis back early from his New York trip ... so he might discover me in Frank’s rooms, naked but for my wig, and kill us both.

Workings have a price, you see, and the single best currency for such transactions is blood, always — my blood, the De Russys’ blood, and poor Frank’s added in on top as mere afterthought. All of our blood together and a hundred years’ more besides, let from ten thousand poor
negres
’ veins one at a time by whip or knife, closed fist or open-handed blow, crying out forever from this slavery-tainted ground.

After Denis’s grandfather bred my mother’s mother ‘til she died — before his eyes fell on her in turn —
Maman
ran all the way from Riverside to New Orleans and further, as you’ve told Tully: crossed the ocean to France’s main port, then its capital, an uphill road traveled one set of sheets to the next, equal-paved with vaudeville stages, dance-floors, séance-rooms, and men’s beds. Which is why those were the trades she taught me, along with my other, deeper callings. Too white to be black, a lost half-girl, she birthed me into the
demi-monde
several shades lighter still, which allowed me to climb my way back out; perception has its uses, after all, especially to
une sorciére.
From earliest years, however, I knew that nothing I did was for myself — that the only reason I existed at all was to bring about her curse, and her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s.

There’s a woman at Riverside, Marceline, ma mie,
my mother told me before I left her that last time, stepping aboard the steam-ship bound for America.
An old one, from Home — who can say how old? She knew my mother and hers; she’ll know you on sight,
know your works, and help you in them.
And so there was: Kaayakire, whom those fools who bought her named Sophonisba — Aunt Sophy — before setting her to live alone in her bone-yard shack, tending the linden path. It was she who taught me the next part of my duty, how to use my ancestors’ power to knit our dead fellow captives’ pain together like a braid, a long black snake of justice, fit to choke all De Russys to death at once. To stop this flow of evil blood at last, at its very source.

That I was part De Russy myself, of course, meant I could not be allowed to escape, either, in the end. Yet only blood pays for blood, so the bargain seemed well worth it, at the time.

But I have been down here so long, now — years and years, decades: almost fifty, by your reckoning, with the De Russy line
proper
long-extirpated, myself very much included. Which is more than long enough to begin to change my mind on that particular subject.