{"collection":"African","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/afr/vno/vno13.htm","path":"afr/vno/vno13.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/afr/vno/vno13.htm","text":"AGING CREOLES in New Orleans have a favorite Marie Laveau love story. There was, they will tell you, once a certain Monsieur S., a very wealthy old bachelor, who owned a handsome mansion not far from the Laveau cottage.\nMonsieur S. fell madly in love with the lovely daughter of another Creole gentleman and, despite the fact that he was old enough to be her grandfather, came to court the young lady. The girl would have none of him, but her father, whose finances were in a somewhat dismal state, approved the match and attempted to force his daughter to marry the man. When she flatly refused the father locked the girl in a cabin near the lake, and here each night Monsieur S., always attended by the father, came to woo her. It is said that the father would use harsh words and threats, on one occasion even beating the girl severely in the presence of her decrepit suitor. Nightly her piteous sobbing could be heard by passersby.\nAnd it was all in vain. The girl swore she would die rather than marry Monsieur S. He was ugly and repulsive and, besides, she had already given her heart to a young soldier and adventurer, whom she expected to return any day now from the West Indies, where he had gone to make his fortune.\n{p. 107}\nAt last, in desperation, the father and the rich man went together to seek the services of Marie Laveau. The sorceress listened to their story and informed them that she could promise that the marriage would take place. Powders were given the father to be placed in the girl's food, and Monsieur S. was given a gris-gris consisting of the dried testicles of a black cat, which he was to wear close to his own genitals to relieve his condition of impotency. She advised the men to be patient and not to ask the girl to marry Monsieur for a period of two weeks.\nOne night two weeks later the girl, very pale, her voice trembling, announced to her father that she had changed her mind and that she was ready to marry the old man. Monsieur S. fell to his knees and kissed her hands and the father nearly fainted with joy.\nPlans were made immediately to have the wedding take place at once. In another fortnight all of Creole society packed the Cathedral for the ceremony. There was much whispering and clucking of tongues as the lovely bride, wearing an exquisite satin gown and a string of magnificent pearls--a wedding gift from her husband--stood beside the aged man with the slightly bent knees and the coal-black toupee while the priest united them in a state of matrimony. That evening there was an elaborate reception in the mansion of Monsieur S., where champagne flowed as from a fountain and there was every sort of delicious and rare food.\nAs the guests imbibed freely of the champagne, the party grew gayer and there were demands that the bride and groom dance alone on the ballroom floor. At last, his wrinkled face flushed with excitement, Monsieur led his slender bride to the center of the floor, signaled the musicians, and, as they began a brisk waltz, swung the new Madame S. across the room in his arms. For a few moments he seemed half his years.\nBut, very suddenly, he stopped dancing and the guests saw the bride break away from his grasp and step back with one hand across her mouth. As Monsieur S., his face turning from\n{p. 108}\nred to purple, swayed for a few seconds and then crumpled to the floor, she uttered a shriek that caused the music to stop with a crash and brought the spectators to her side. A doctor was summoned, but it was too late. Monsieur S. was dead. The excitement and the exercise had been too much for his heart.\nThey still talk about it. Madame S. inherited a large fortune and was able to summon her young lover home from the Indies. After a year, during which she, being properly reared, observed conventional mourning, they were married and lived happily ever afterward. And it is said that when people asked Marie Laveau a question regarding the affair, she would look at them with some amusement in her strange eyes and would say, with the trace of a smile, \"I promised only that the wedding would take place.\"\nLove probably brought more people to the Laveau cottage than anything else. New Orleans is a very romantic city and the Creoles were an amorous race. Men were always asking Marie to help them to win certain girls, and the girls came to her seeking husbands.\nThe most commonly used gris-gris in affairs of the affections always included something belonging to the object of adoration. A young girl would be told to bring Marie the glove of the man she loved. This would be filled with a mixture of steel dust, sugar and honey--the sugar and honey were to \"sweeten\" the man, the steel dust was for power--and the girl was instructed to sleep with the glove under her mattress. One keeps wondering about ants!\nIf a woman wanted a married man, Marie would write the name of the man and his wife on a piece of paper, place the paper in a bladder (obtained from the slaughterhouse), and hang it in the sun to dry. The man would leave his wife, and all the woman had to do then, to keep him, was to use sufficient gris-gris of such types as love powders and oils. She might be even more successful if during their \"love play\"\n{p. 109}\nshe would measure his sexual organ with a piece of string and tie nine knots in this string and wear it about her person from that day on. As long as she wore this he would be \"tied to her.\"\nAnother way a woman could hold a man was to take some of the blood from her menstrual flow and mix it in her man's food. Once the man ate this he was hers forever and she had him completely under her domination. Negroes in New Orleans today swear that this is still practiced, and Negro men live in fear of it being done to them Every henpecked husband in the lower colored strata is the subject of such speculation. Negresses will sometimes boast of having done this to their men; they refer to this as a \"Marie Laveau trick.\"\nParents would often ask Marie to prevent their daughter or son from marrying a person of whom they did not approve. One of her favorite gris-gris to break up such an affair was a mixture of gunpowder, mud from a wasp nest, flaxseed, cayenne pepper, BB shots, fil\u00e9, bluestone and dragon's blood. All these were mixed and then thrown on the front steps of the undesirable person's house.\nSometimes when business was not as brisk as she liked it Marie II would create her own. One such instance is a favorite story among those who remember her. On this occasion a young man came to her house, complaining that he was \"broke\" and hungry. Marie, somewhat in need of cash herself, determined to make some money for both of them. She stretched the man out upon a couch in the front room of her cottage, covered him with a sheet and lighted candles at his head and feet. Then she went outside and sat on her front steps. As neighbors passed, she burst into sobs and loud cries of grief. There was the corpse of a dear friend within, she told them, and there was no money with which to defray his burial expenses. She knew the Negro's love for funerals and \"wakes,\" and soon the room in which the \"corpse\" lay was crowded with the curious. Marie then took a stand by the couch, a bowl in her hand and as the visitors passed they\n{p. 110}\ndropped in coins. Soon the bowl was filled, so she requested that she be left alone with her dead. The room emptied, the \"corpse\" sat up, and he and Marie divided the money.\nShe did the same sort of thing with the lovers who came to her. She would attempt to create upheavals on all sides and to profit from every angle.\n\"That kind of foolin' was always wit' white people,\" said Mary Ellis. \"She was never interested in colored folks for those things, 'cause she knowed they didn't have enough money to make it worth her while. White people was different. She knew their ways; she had learned men's ways from the women and the women's ways from the men. Sometimes she'd really fix 'em. She'd git a gal for some married man and when he and this gal got to layin' up, Marie Laveau would see that his wife found out about it. She wouldn't tell the wife herself, understand? She would just start it spreadin' by word of mouth 'til the wife got hold of it. Then the wife would come to her to git her husband back. That would cost her money. After that the man would be told his wife had found out he was messin' 'round and he'd better stop it. In cases like that all she had to do was fool the white people--and that was easy. Sometimes she'd collect both ways, and she'd git money from both the wife and the husband. God, that was a smart woman!\"\nMary said that most of the things she knew about Marie Laveau had been told her by an aunt who had been a Voodoo.\n\"My aunt told me one time she had trouble wit' her landlord. He told her to git out of her house or he'd have her put in jail,\" Mary said. \"He even sent a policeman after her. The next day she went to Marie Laveau and she told my aunt to burn twelve blue candles in a barrel half full of sand. She done that and my aunt never did have to move and she never went to jail in her whole life. Marie Laveau used to tell people not to burn candles in church 'cause that gived their luck to somebody else, so they burned 'em in her house instead. She'd tell my aunt, 'If you gonna fool 'em, fool 'em\n{p. 111}\ngood, Alice.' She was real good to my aunt. She even taught her a Voodoo song. It went like this:\nSt. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,\nI'm callin' you, come to me!\nSt. Peter, St. Peter, open the door . . .\n\"That's all I can remember. Marie Laveau used to call St. Peter somethin' like 'Laba.' She called St. Michael 'Daniel Blanc,' and St. Anthony 'Yon Sue.' There was another one she called 'On Za Tier'; I think that was St. Paul. I never did know where them names come from. They sounded Chinee to me. You know the Chinee emperor sent her a shawl? She wore it all the time, my aunt told me.\"\nThe shawl from the Emperor of China was another example of the Laveau boasting. Probably it had been given to one of the Maries by a seafaring customer. The Widow Paris bragged of having been kissed by Lafayette when he visited New Orleans. Once another member of the household gave a visitor a vase which, it was claimed, had been presented to the Widow Paris by Louis Philippe.\n\"C'est l'amour, oui maman, c'est l'amour!\" chanted the cultists as dawn brought their ceremonies to an end. Yet we have little definite knowledge of the private amours of Marie II.\nWe must remember that Marie II was understudying her mother, that she was a sort of living legend and that professionally she was an extension of another person. We do know that she never married.\n\"Marie Laveau was an old maid,\" said Mrs. Dixon, an old white woman who claimed to remember her well. \"She had plenty men, but she never married none of them. I guess she was too smart. She know a lot about love, though.\n\"My mother had a friend named Mrs. Flaguet. Her husband used to beat her all the time. He'd kick her out of\n{p. 112}\nbed and make her sleep on the floor. He'd come home drunk and bring fancy women with big hats into her home.\n\"Well, she got tired of it, so she went to see Marie Laveau. That great Voodoo woman was sitting in the front room of her house with her eyes closed and hardly any lights in the room, but she said right away, 'Come on in, Mrs. Flaguet, I've been waiting for you.' In Creole, you know; she didn't speak much English, of course, and neither did my mother's friend--we're all very French. Well, Mrs. Flaguet was certainly surprised. She said, 'How did you know my name?' And Marie Laveau said, 'I know everything, Mrs. Flaguet. I know your husband beats you and makes you sleep on the floor, and that ain't right.'\n\"Mrs. Flaguet broke down then and started crying. I remember my mother said she cried so much she ruined her veil. Then she told Marie Laveau all about her trouble. And you know what Marie Laveau told her to do? It isn't very nice, but I'll tell you. She said for her to take a towel she and her husband used when they was together and to wave it in his face when he was sleeping. She said it was sure to work.\n\"Do you know that after Mrs. Flaguet did that her husband ain't never hit her again? And he never did put her out of the bed again or fool with other women. They lived together for thirty-eight years and they died the same week, her first and him right afterward. You see she had such a hold on him he couldn't even live without her. He had been fixed by Marie Laveau.\n\"She could do all those things. You know she invented Follow-Me Water; if a lady puts some of this on her handkerchief and waves the handkerchief in the face of a young man she likes he is sure to follow her. She used to sell men Go-Away Powder. They'd throw this on a woman they wanted to get rid of and she would go away. Another thing she'd tell men to do to stop women from bothering them was to make crosses with brown chalk on their front steps. If any woman stepped on one of those brown crosses she'd fall\n{p. 113}\nown and break one of her legs. She knew all that kind of thing. That's why she never got married. She didn't need to have any man bossing her around the place.\"\nJennie Collins, a very black old woman, said, with a giggle, \"That Marie Laveau sure had the men following her. Me, always thought my pa was messin' wit' her, but I didn't ever tell my ma that. Did you know she had children all over the place? Some was almost white and some was almost black. Nobody never did know who they fathers was. Her and her brother John. Did you ever hear 'bout John Laveau? That was a rascal. He was what the womens called a sweet. He never did no work in his life and Marie Laveau helped him git women wit' love powders and all that stuff. He was sure a sweet, all right.\"\nJennie probably exaggerated about the number of children, but undoubtedly Marie II did have many lovers, both white and colored. At least several of them were prominent men of the city, one being a rather distinguished judge.\nHer relationship with Lafcadio Hearn was public gossip around 1880. Hearn himself wrote of having lived in the house of a woman whom he describes, somewhat curiously, as \"a vampire.\" As disliked personally as his genius was admired, Hearn seems to have spent nearly all his sojourn in New Orleans in the company of Negroes and Voodoos. He was an undersized and repulsive little man. A modern psychologist could have explained what a terrible burden of complexes and frustrations must have made him shut himself off from his own kind and race and seek association with another sort, but then he was dismissed as being guilty of depravity. A year after his death the New York Sun published an account of how a Negress in Cincinnati was claiming to be his widow and was fighting for a share of the American royalties on his fine literary works, and told how he had married a Japanese girl and had spent his last years in Japan. The New Orleans Daily News, reprinting the story on August 6, 1906, recalled how he had spent his years in New Orleans \"with Negroes--not the ordinary cornfield type, but\n{p. 114}\nthe Congo priestesses and prophetesses; as a matter of fact with no less a personage than Marie Laveau, the Voodoo queen.\" It is interesting to wonder what a child of this pair would have been like. Unfortunately Marie II was in her fifties when she met Hearn.\nHe was a late lover. All her life she had been pursued by men. Most of her suitors, we are told, were coolly rejected. Many a gallant, seeking her services, became intrigued with the exotic quadroon, but he had small chance of success. Apparently she preferred to choose her own sweethearts, rather than to be won by masculine persuasions. Even in her love affairs she was boss; and most of her lovers, in keeping with the mystery surrounding her, remain anonymous.\nJennie Collins said, \"She knew all other people's business, but they didn't know much about her. She kept things like her mens quiet. But, don't worry, she had 'em. She knew all about love and stuff like that.\n\"She would tell young gals what wanted husbands to take the juice from four lemons and rub the legs of their beds wit' it for nine nights. Every night they got to put a glass of water under the bed. When they git in bed they had to lie still wit' their knees bent up and spread wide, and they was supposed to wish hard as they could until they fell asleep. That is one thing I believes in, 'cause I has seen it work.\n\"Another thing she used to always tell gals to do was to take a dime and a piece of stale bread and git on the ferry goin' 'cross the river. When they gits in the middle they is supposed to throw the money and bread in the water. Then they goes to church and makes a Flyin' Novena. That is still good. I knows gals what does it now.\"","title":"12. C'est l'Amour, Maman!","type":"page"}