American Gods Read online

  Sukey had been whipped many times since she had come ashore—once, salt had been rubbed into the wounds, on another occasion she had been whipped so hard and for so long that she could not sit, or allow anything to touch her back, for several days. She had been raped a number of times when younger: by black men who had been ordered to share her wooden palette, and by white men. She had been chained. She had not wept then, though. Since her brother had been taken from her she had only wept once. It was in North Carolina, when she had seen the food for the slave children and the dogs poured into the same trough, and she had seen her little children scrabbling with the dogs for the scraps. She saw that happen one day—and she had seen it before, every day on that plantation, and she would see it again many times before she left—she saw it that one day and it broke her heart.

  She had been beautiful for a while. Then the years of pain had taken their toll, and she was no longer beautiful. Her face was lined, and there was too much pain in those brown eyes.

  Eleven years earlier, when she was twenty-five, her right arm had withered. None of the white folk had known what to make of it. The flesh seemed to melt from the bones, and now her right arm hung by her side, little more than a skeletal arm covered in skin, and almost immobile. After this she had become a house slave.

  The Casterton family, who had owned the plantation, were impressed by her cooking and house skills, but Mrs. Casterton found the withered arm unsettling, and so she was sold to the Lavere family, who were out for a year from Louisiana: M. Lavere was a fat, cheerful man who was in need of a cook and a maid of all work, and who was not in the slightest repulsed by the slave Daisy’s withered arm. When, a year later, they returned to Louisiana, slave Sukey went with them.

  In New Orleans the women came to her, and the men also, to buy cures and love charms and little fetishes, black folks, yes, of course, but white folks too. The Lavere family turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps they enjoyed the prestige of having a slave who was feared and respected. They would not, however, sell her her freedom.

  Sukey went into the bayou late at night, and she danced the Calinda and the Bamboula. Like the dancers of St. Domingue and the dancers of her native land, the dancers in the bayou had a black snake as their voudon; even so, the gods of her homeland and of the other African nations did not possess her people as they had possessed her brother and the folk of St. Domingue. She would still invoke them and call their names, to beg them for favors.

  She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St. Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed to fail—“Think of it! A cannibal land!”—and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it.

  Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could, by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer exist merely by willing it so.

  A generation of Lavere children grew up under Sukey’s watchful eye. The youngest, unable to say “Sukey” as a child, had called her Mama Zouzou, and the name had stuck. Now the year was 1821, and Sukey was in her mid-fifties. She looked much older.

  She knew more of the secrets than old Sanité Dédé, who sold candies in front of the Cabildo, more than Marie Saloppé, who called herself the voodoo queen: both were free women of color, while Mama Zouzou was a slave, and would die a slave, or so her master had said.

  The young woman who came to her to find what had happened to her husband styled herself the Widow Paris. She was high-breasted and young and proud. She had African blood in her, and European blood, and Indian blood. Her skin was reddish, her hair was a gleaming black. Her eyes were black and haughty. Her husband, Jacques Paris, was, perhaps, dead. He was three-quarters white as these things were calculated, and the bastard of a once-proud family, one of the many immigrants who had fled from St. Domingo, and as free-born as his striking young wife.

  “My Jacques. Is he dead?” asked the Widow Paris. She was a hairdresser who went from home to home, arranging the coiffures of the elegant ladies of New Orleans before their demanding social engagements.

  Mama Zouzou consulted the bones, then shook her head. “He is with a white woman, somewhere north of here,” she said. “A white woman with golden hair. He is alive.”

  This was not magic. It was common knowledge in New Orleans just with whom Jacques Paris had run off, and the color of her hair.

  Mama Zouzou was surprised to realize that the Widow Paris did not already know that her Jacques was sticking his quadroon little pipi into a pink-skinned girl up in Colfax every night. Well, on the nights that he was not so drunk that he could use it for nothing better than pissing. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she had another reason for coming.

  The Widow Paris came to see the old slave woman one or two times a week. After a month she brought gifts for the old woman: hair ribbons, and a seedcake, and a black rooster.

  “Mama Zouzou,” said the girl, “It is time for you to teach me what you know.”

  “Yes,” said Mama Zouzou, who knew which way the wind blew. And besides, the Widow Paris had confessed that she had been born with webbed toes, which meant that she was a twin and she had killed her twin in the womb. What choice did Mama Zouzou have?

  She taught the girl that two nutmegs hung upon a string around the neck until the string breaks will cure heart murmurs, while a pigeon that has never flown, cut open and laid on the patient’s head, will draw a fever. She showed her how to make a wishing bag, a small leather bag containing thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds and the bristles of a black hog, and how to rub the bag to make wishes come true.

  The Widow Paris learned everything that Mama Zouzou told her. She had no real interest in the gods, though. Not really. Her interests were in the practicalities. She was delighted to learn that if you dip a live frog in honey and place it in an ants’ nest, then, when the bones are cleaned and white, a close examination will reveal a flat, heart-shaped bone, and another with a hook on it: the bone with the hook on it must be hooked onto the garment of the one you wish to love you, while the heart-shaped bone must be kept safely (for if it is lost, your loved one will turn on you like an angry dog). Infallibly, if you do this, the one you love will be yours.

  She learned that dried snake powder, placed in the face powder of an enemy, will produce blindness, and that an enemy can be made to drown herself by taking a piece of her underwear, turning it inside out, and burying it at midnight under a brick.

  Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris the World Wonder Root, the great and the little roots of John the Conqueror, she showed her dragon’s blood, and valerian and five-finger grass. She showed her how to brew waste-away tea, and follow-me-water and faire-Shingo water.

  All these things and more Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris. Still, it was disappointing for the old woman. She did her best to teach her the hidden truths, the deep knowledge, to tell her of Papa ‘Legba, of Mawu, of Aido-Hwedo the voudon serpent, and the rest, but the Widow Paris (I shall now tell you the name she was born with, and the name she later made famous: it was Marie Laveau. But this was not the great Marie Laveau, the one you have heard of, this was her mother, who eventually became the Widow Glapion), she had no interest in the gods of the distant land. If St. Domingo had been a lush black earth for the African gods to grow in, this land, with its corn and its melons, its crawfish and its cotton, was barren and infertile.

  “She does not want to know,” complained Mama Zouzou to Clémentine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clémentine had a blossom of burns on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a copper overturned.

  “Then do not teach her,” says Clémentine.

  “I teach her, but she does not see what is valuable—all she sees is what she can do with it. I give her diamonds, but she cares only for pretty glass. I give her a demi-bout
eille of the best claret and she drinks river water. I give her quail and she wishes to eat only rat.”

  “Then why do you persist?” asks Clémentine.

  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, twelve 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 then 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.

  As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. “Now that,” he said, “is a holy place.”

  Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, “I know it used to be sacred to the Indians.”

  “It’s a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That’s the American Way—they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can’t just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum’s tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they’ve already seen on a thousand postcards.”

  “I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the president’s nose.”

  Wednesday guffawed. “Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire?”

  Shadow shrugged. “He never said.”

  Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things.

  It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, “A girl vanished from Lakeside last week. When we were in San Francisco.”

  “Mm?” Wednesday sounded barely interested.

  “Kid named Alison McGovern. She’s not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime.”

  Wednesday furrowed his brow. “It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk cartons—although I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk carton—and on the walls of freeway rest areas. ‘Have you seen me?’ they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. ‘Have you seen me?’ Pull off at the next exit.”

  Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything.

  “Why did you pick Lakeside?” asked Shadow.

  “I told you. It’s a nice quiet place to hide you away. You’re off the board there, under the radar.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way it is. Now hang a left,” said Wednesday.

  Shadow turned left.

  “There’s something wrong,” said Wednesday. “Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don’t stop.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes?”

  “Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota,” said Shadow. “And I don’t know where we’re going.”

  On the other side of the hill something flashed redly, smudged by the mist.

  “Roadblock,” said Wednesday. He pushed his hand deeply into first one pocket of his suit, then another, searching for something.

  “I can stop and turn around.”

  “We can’t turn. They’re behind us as well,�
� said Wednesday. “Take your speed down to ten, fifteen miles per hour.”

  Shadow glanced into the mirror. There were headlights behind them, under a mile back. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  Wednesday snorted. “Sure as eggs is eggs,” he said. “As the turkey farmer said when he hatched his first turtle. Ah, success!” and from the bottom of a pocket he produced a small piece of white chalk.

  He started to scratch with the chalk on the dashboard of the camper, making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzle—or perhaps, Shadow thought, as if he were a hobo, scratching long messages to the other hobos in hobo code—bad dog here, dangerous town, nice woman, soft jail in which to overnight . . .

  “Okay,” said Wednesday. “Now increase your speed to thirty. And don’t slow down from that.”

  One of the cars behind them turned on its lights and siren and accelerated toward them. “Do not slow down,” repeated Wednesday. “They just want us to slow before we get to the roadblock.” Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

  They crested the hill. The roadblock was less than a quarter of a mile away. Twelve cars arranged across the road, and on the side of the road, police cars, and several big black SUVs.

  “There,” said Wednesday, and he put his chalk away. The dashboard of the Winnebago was now covered with runelike scratchings.

  The car with the siren was just behind them. It had slowed to their speed, and an amplified voice was shouting, “Pull over!” Shadow looked at Wednesday.

  “Turn right,” said Wednesday. “Just pull off the road.”

  “I can’t take this thing off-road. We’ll tip.”