Authors: Daniel Hecht
H
IGHWAY 23 RAN STRAIGHT
southeast from New Orleans, following the Mississippi almost to the point where it divided into multiple channels and petered out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a flat, wet country. The shapes of land and water on Cree's road map told the story: Depositing its silt over millions of years, the patient river had extended the coastline by two hundred miles, leaving a lacework of low-lying Delta soil, brackish bayous, and meandering channels.
Just south of New Orleans, the road ran through a seemingly endless series of commercial strips separated by areas dominated by heavy industry and shipping. From the relative height of highway overpasses, Cree could see horizons defined only by rearing loading gantries, the superstructures of gigantic freighters, and tall chimneys spilling smoke.
Farther south, the countryside became less cluttered. On the right, the land was empty, scrubby fields; on the left, when the levee didn't block the view, Cree could see a dense, snarled low-growth forest. Chemical plants rose out of the landscape every few miles, industrial necropolises of towers, pipelines, vents, rail tank cars, and razor-wire-topped fences. For two miles on either side of the Oronite plant, the air stank so badly of chemicals that she had to breathe through her handkerchief, yet just beyond it she passed orange groves and strawberry plantations, complete with cheery roadside stands. Road-kill armadillos broiled on hot highway asphalt.
From the map, Cree figured that Port Sulphur was about fifty miles southeast of New Orleans. One long, long hour from Canal Street.
Deelie had done what only a black woman, smart and personable and persistent and skilled at interviewing, could do: She'd gone back to Treme, Josephine's last known address, and, starting with friends and relatives and acquaintances, had identified the oldest residents of the project. From there, it was a matter of going door to door, talking to old people who might have been around in the 1970s. At last she found a grandmother who remembered Josephine, describing her as a tall, serious woman who had a worked for some rich white family for many years. She vaguely recalled that Josephine had lived next door only a few years, until her own mother died; then she'd moved back down to where she'd been born, some no-count town 'way deep Delta.
It took a few hours more to find another old woman who had attended Josephine's church back then. She even remembered the minister's name. Josephine had been a true believer, a good Christian woman, and this Reverend Washington had won her lasting loyalty with his fiery piety and commitment. Deelie then called the church offices until she found someone who could tell her where Reverend Washington was; the answer was that he was dead. But looking through their records, the church secretary found Josephine: She'd moved down to Port Sulphur, where she attended an affiliated splinter church, Mount of Olives Sunrise Congregation. Deelie called and spoke to the minister, Rev. Bernard Huggins, who told her that, yes, Josephine Dupree was still a devout member of the congregation, a mainstay of the church community.
No, Josephine didn't have a phone. But she did have an address.
"Piece of proverbial cake," Deelie crowed. Then her voice darkened. "Gotta warn you about one thing, though. Couple people said there'd been some white guys asking about this same Josephine, like two years back? They went around saying she'd inherited some money, could anybody help them find her so they could give it to her? I don't have to tell you how well that flew in Treme. You black in New Orleans, you know when to open your mouth and when to keep it shut. Rule one is you keep it shut when a white guy in a suit comes asking."
"So who were these guys?"
"Nobody knew. Not cops exactly, maybe like private dicks. What ever, it suggests that this Josephine's messed up in something, and you're not the only one trying to find her. I don't know what this is all about, but, you - watch yourself. You know?"
Deelie had let Cree off the line only after she'd sworn a blood oath to give her first access to the story. If indeed there was any story.
Cree's curiosity grew as she drove, and she had to make a conscious effort to keep her foot light on the accelerator. Josephine was deeply connected to this; she was the key that could unlock the whole case. But would she tell Cree anything? Cree had debated asking Deelie to come with her, but the reporter had other obligations, and besides, this had to be a very, very confidential meeting.
Beyond the basic distrust between black and white Deelie had pointed out, Josephine would certainly not want to talk about her murder of Richard Beauforte. And then there was the apparent tie-in, whatever it was, to the Chase murder and the fact that others were looking for her. Josephine would probably feel too at risk to say anything at all to anyone - black, white, or green.
Here and there along the road, Cree saw the remains of old plantations: sagging, magnificent pillared houses deep at the end of tunnels of massive live oaks. In their weary-looking, moss-stained roofs and hollow windows, their overgrown grounds, Cree could still feel the history that saturated this place. There was the public history of Southern chivalry, decorous soirees, and great events, and there was the hidden, very different tale of intimate lives lived in the long days and steamy Delta nights.
In both cases, time had moved on, and the old mansions were few and far between. Now most of the houses were small and poor, desperately ramshackle, sharing their lots with buckling sheds, dusty truck gardens, and abandoned vehicles. Every fifteen miles or so she encountered new enclaves of gigantically ostentatious, upscale new mansions in pseudoTudor or Creole-modern style, safely isolated by perimeter walls and guardhouses.
And always, just over the levee, the marine terminals: gantries, mountains of coal, huge conveyors, fuel tanks. And a chemical stink the car's air-conditioner couldn't hide. Cree mistook the first cemetery she saw for a self-storage place: neat rows of little white buildings with gabled roofs.
When she'd told Cree how to get to Port Sulphur, Deelie had called this "Religion Alley," and faith did run strong here, Cree saw. For miles, every telephone pole wore a blue-and-white plastic sign that said simply
JESUS.
The same sign appeared on lawns, in storefronts and living room windows, something like an election sign. The declarations of faith brought up another question: If Josephine believed in that return from the dead, would she accept that other ways were possible, too? What if Josephine refused to talk to her on the basis of her beliefs?
It struck Cree that there were a lot of reasons for Josephine to say nothing, and only one reason for her to talk.
Port Sulphur wasn't much: the Tennessee Gas pipeline, a dead opossum in the road, Fremin's Foodliner and a few other stores, lower-middle-class and poorer houses. Residential streets branched to the left and right of the highway, lined with trailers, aluminum-sided ranch houses, or ragtag shacks. The streets all ended at the levee, a sloped wall of green at the end of each tree-shaded corridor. It took only a minute to find the Mount of Olives Sunrise church, a one-story wooden building with scaling white clapboard siding and a squat, humble steeple no bigger than a camping tent. From there, she followed Reverend Huggins's instructions to Josephine's house on the last cross street, out at the edge of town. Beyond it, the tangled forest and scrub fields began again.
There were no numbers on the houses, but Reverend Huggins had been clear that Josephine's was the last one on the right, an old place up against the levee. Cree cruised slowly past dilapidated one-story houses, drawing the attention of residents who paused at their tasks or came to screen doors to give her suspicious stares.
Josephine's house was an old wooden building in an overgrown lot, windows dark behind shrubs and vines, porch roof sagging under the weight of leaf detritus, screens patched or rusted through. Cree pulled into the driveway behind an old Ford and got out into heat that hit like a body blow. The smell of the bayou just over the levee was humid, rich with the smell of rot and carrying just a hint of some exotic spice, and it brought to her forcefully just how far from home she was.
Josephine had not visibly aged much from the photos Cree had seen: tall, straight-backed, her corded neck emerging from a floral-patterned dress, flat chest and sinewy arms, long dark face with a sober expression carved into its lines and folds. Coming close to the screen, she regarded Cree in silence for a moment. Her eyes were steady, deep brown irises in rheumy yellow sclera. Cree could feel her presence, a deep gravitas, somber, dark.
Josephine pushed the screen door out and half turned to make way for Cree. "You can come in. I been waitin'." Her voice was deep, almost a man's voice.
"You know who I am?"
"No, don't know who you are. Just know what you after. Been expectin'."
Cree followed her into the dark interior. The floorboards were uneven but were mostly covered with fine rag rugs Josephine had no doubt made herself. Josephine led Cree through a dark living room of sagging furniture covered in patch quilts and handmade white lace. It was clearly the room of a person who made the best of very little income, clean and well ordered. A television took up most of one small table, but it didn't have the altarlike status of most living rooms. No - in one corner stood a real altar, dominated by a large Bible surrounded by candles and a collection of crosses of different sizes; above hung a portrait of a chestnut-haired, Anglo-Saxon Jesus framed in a wreath of thorns. Near the door to the back hallway stood a small bookshelf, topped with half a dozen photos propped in plastic frames.
One white face stood out from the dark faces, and when Cree recognized it her breath caught in her throat: Lila Beauforte, aged twelve or thirteen. When she still gave forth that glow.
The old woman led Cree through a hallway and past a couple of dark bedrooms to a kitchen that was a little brighter. The tired yellow linoleum had worn through in paths of brown. A vinyl-topped tube table and four chairs stood in the center, and clean-scrubbed wooden counters lined two walls, along with a deep zinc-plated sink, an electric stove, and a round-topped refrigerator from the 1940s. Another portrait of Jesus hung above the sink. Above the counter, open shelves held a few dishes, some canned goods, and jars of preserved vegetables and plants. Dried herbs and roots hung in bunches tacked along the shelves. Cree spotted a little
gris-gris
bag nailed above the back door.
Josephine gestured to the window, where through the screen of the back porch Cree saw a powerful, shirtless man working a garden bed with a mattock.
"My grandnephew help in' me with the garden today," Josephine explained. She went to the stove to poke a spoon into ajar of steaming dark fluid. "Just makin' tea when you knock," she said. "Offer you some, but it a remedy for my joints, taste like the devil." She stirred it, sniffed the steam, and turned back to Cree. "How'd ol' Miz Beauforte find me? Huh! Real question is, What she gone do now she find me?"
"You mean Charmian? She doesn't know I'm here. Nobody knows I'm here."
That surprised Josephine, and she looked at Cree with heightened interest. "Then who are you? What you want here?"
"I need your help. I have to learn more about what happened at Beauforte House in 1971 and '72."
Josephine considered that, eyes dubious. "What make you think I know anything at all about anything? Can't remember anyhow."
"You do know. You do remember. You came back two years ago and put those hexes at the house. You - "
"I don't gotta tell you nothin'. I don't
know
nothin'. You wastin' your time here." She turned back to the counter, brought down a smaller jar, and began pouring the tea into it through a patch of cheesecloth. Her movements were clumsy: The gnarled hands were stiff, Cree saw, with tension or arthritis.
"I don't believe you. You would never forget. I think you're just afraid of me."
"Oh, and why I be 'fraid of you?"
"Because you killed a man. And you're afraid you'll get in trouble for it."
The board-straight back didn't flinch. "Don't know what you talkin' 'bout. You sounding like a crazy. I'se eighty-one years old. Can't kill nobody!"
It was going as Cree feared. Josephine wasn't going to tell her anything.
There was only one solution, only one way to break through her resistance. Cree walked back into the living room, found the little oval photo of Lila, and returned with it to the kitchen. Josephine had turned and watched her, distrusting and disapproving.
"I'm sorry," Cree told her. "Let me start over. Josephine, I'm trying to help Lila, and I can't do it without you. I know how much you cared for her, and I think you still do. I don't care that you killed him. I just need you to help me find a way to let Lila go free of what happened."
Cree held the photo in front of her like a talisman, and Josephine stared at it for a moment before returning her eyes to Cree's face. "You some kind of doctor? Some kind of psychology doctor? Lila got so sick now she need a psychology doctor?" Then the yellow eyes narrowed as she seemed to see something in Cree's face. "No. No, you different. You a . . . healin' woman. You a seein' woman."
"Are you a seeing woman, Josephine? Is that how you know what I am?
"Don't got no sight. Don't
want
no sight - all it ever bring is grief, I know that much. I know 'cause my mama was a healin' woman, you got some her look 'bout you."