“Then why do you persist?” asks Clementine. Mama Zouzou shrugs her thin shoulders, causing her withered arm to shake.
She cannot answer. She could say that she teaches because she is grateful to be alive, and she is: she has seen too many die. She could say that she dreams that one day the slaves will rise, as they rose (and were defeated) in LaPlace, but that she knows in her heart that without the gods of Africa, without the favor of ‘Legba and Mawu, they will never overcome their white captors, will never return to their homelands.
When she woke, on that terrible night almost twenty years earlier,, and felt the cold steel between her ribs, that was when Mama Zouzou’s life had ended. Now she was someone who did not live, who simply hated. If you asked her about the hate she would have been unable to tell you about a twelve-year-old girl on a stinking ship: that had scabbed over in her mind—there had been too many whippings and beatings, too many nights in manacles, too many partings, too much pain. She could have told you about her son, though, and how his thumb had been cut off when their master discovered the boy was able to read and to write. She could have told you of her daughter, ftweive’years old and already eight months pregnant by an overseer, and how they dug a hole in the red earth to take her’daughter’s pregnant belly, and then they whipped her until her back had bled. Despite the carefully dug hole, her daughter had lost her baby and her life on a Sunday morning, when all the white folks were in church ...
Too much pain.
“Worship them,” Mama Zouzou told the young Widow Paris in the bayou, one hour after midnight. They were both naked to the waist, sweating in the humid night, their skins given accents by the white moonlight.
The Widow Paris’s husband, Jacques (whose own death, three years later, would have several remarkable features), had told Marie a little about the gods of St. Domingo, but she did not care. Power came from the rituals, not from the—gods.
Together Mama Zouzou and the Widow Paris crooned and stamped and keened in the swamp. They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm.
“There is more to it than just you prosper, your enemies fail,” said Mama Zouzou.
Many of the words of the ceremonies, words she knew once, words her brother had also known, these words had fled from her memory. She told pretty Marie Laveau that the words did not matter, only the tunes and the beats, and there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough.
She turns to pretty Marie and sees herself through Marie’s eyes, a black-skinned old woman, her face lined, her bony arm hanging stiffly by her side, her eyes the eyes of one who has seen her children fight in the trough for food from the dogs. She saw-herself, and she knew men for the first time the revulsion and the fear the younger woman had for her.
Then she laughed, and crouched, and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ship’s rope.
“Here,” she said. “Here will be our voudon”
She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying.
And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. He was not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete. His right arm was barely a stump.
She reached out her own good left hand.
“Stay, stay awhile,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”
And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her.
Chapter Twelve
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
—Agnes Repplier, Times and Tendencies.
Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country.
Wednesday had traded the Lincoln Town Car, which Shadow had liked to drive, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, which he didn’t enjoy driving at all.