Merrick Read Free

in her soft voice.
    They couldn’t break her of the barefoot habit. It had been dreadfully enticing, those bare feet on the wool carpet. She’d grown up in the country, I thought, but no, they said, it was merely in an old tumbledown part of New Orleans where there were no sidewalks anymore and the weather-beaten houses were neglected and the blossoming and poisonous oleander grew as big as trees.
    She had lived there with her godmother, Great Nananne, the witch who’d taught her all the things that she knew. Her mother, a powerful seer, known to me then only by the mysterious name of Cold Sandra, had been in love with an explorer. There was no father of memory. She’d never gone to a real school.
    “Merrick Mayfair,” I’d said warmly. I took her in my arms.
    She had been tall for her fourteen years, with beautifully shaped breasts quite natural under her simple cotton shift, and her soft dry hair had been loose down her back. She might have been a Spanish beauty to anyone outside of this bizarre part of the Southland, where the history of the slaves and their free descendants was so full of complex alliances and erotic romance. But any New Orleanean could see African blood in her by the lovely café au lait of her skin.
    Sure enough, when I poured the cream into the thick chicory coffee that they gave me, I understood those words.
    “All my people are colored,” she said, with the French in her voice then. “Those that pass for white leave and go north. That’s been happening forever. They don’t want Great Nananne to visit. They don’t want anyone to know. I could pass for white. But what about the family? What about all that’s been handed down? I would never leave Great Nananne. I came here ’cause she told me to come.”
    She had a temptress’s poise as she sat there, small in the great winged chair of oxblood leather, a tiny tantalizing gold chain around her ankle, another with a small diamond-studded cross around her neck.
    “See these pictures?” she said invitingly. She had them in a shoe box which rested in her lap. “There’s no witchcraft in them. You can look as you please.”
    She laid them out on the table for me, daguerreotypes—stark clear photographs on glass, each one fitted into a crumbling little case of gutter perche, heavily embossed with rings of flowers or grapevines, many of which could be closed and clasped shut like little books.
    “They come from the 1840s,” she said, “and they’re all our people. One of our own took these pictures. He was known for taking portraits. They loved him. He left some stories—I know where they are. They’re all written with beautiful handwriting. They’re in a box in the attic of Great Nananne’s house.”
    She had moved to the edge of the chair, her knees poking out from under her skimpy hem. Her hair made a big mass of shadows behind her. Her hairline was clean and her forehead smooth and beautiful. Though the night had been only cool, there was a fire in the fireplace, and the room, with its shelves of books and its random Grecian sculptures, had been fragrant and comfortable, conducive to a spell.
    Aaron had been watching her proudly, yet full of concern.
    “See, these are all my people from the old days.” She might have been laying out a deck of cards. The flash of the shadows was lovely on her oval face and the distinct bones of her cheeks. “You see, they kept together. But as I said, the ones that could pass are long gone. Look what they gave up, just think of it, so much history. See this?”
    I studied the small picture, glinting in the light of the oil lamp.
    “This is Lucy Nancy Marie Mayfair, she was the daughter of a white man, but we never knew much about him. All along there would be white men. Always white men. What these women did for white men. My mother went to South America with a white man. I went with them. I remember the jungles.” Had she hesitated, picking up something from my thoughts, perhaps, or merely