The Legend Of The Swamp Witch

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Book excerpt

Chapter 1

Raquel stood trembling in silence by the trunk of the giant cypress as the cries of the last young man echoed through the swamp’s unnatural quiet. The light from the full moon reflected bright on the now-silent pool of quicksand, the last grasping hand sinking from sight.

She had followed the three young men from the cafe where she worked in St. Martinsville, Louisiana. She had been eavesdropping on their conversations over the past few weeks when they came in to make plans to search for the witch’s treasure that was supposed to be hidden somewhere in the swamp. They had caught Raquel’s attention when she heard one of them mention the legendary swamp witch, Angelique Clairvoux. It was a particularly touchy subject with Raquel, as her name was also Clairvoux, and the witch in question was a distant relative.

The three had first come into Le Petit Paris Cafe about a month earlier. One of them, a large African American around twenty-two, carried a load of books, papers and maps, which he laid out on the table of the first booth by the window. The other two, white grunge types about the same age, piled into the seat across from him, and one of them yelled to Raquel, rude, for coffee all around. When she brought over the pot, she could see as she filled their cups that the maps were old and of the local swamp around Bayou Tesche. The nerdy one had marked up the map with red ink, and she noted the phrase ‘A. Clairvoux home’ scrawled to one side of the map. Further in were other big red X marks.

Several local men advertised themselves as Angelique Clairvoux experts and took treasure hunters out into the swamp on supposed expeditions. Thus far, nobody had found any treasure, and several of the men who had gone out into the swamp had never returned. Raquel just rolled her eyes. More treasure hunters who had heard the legends about Angelique Clairvoux’s fabled treasure hidden out there in the swamp.

It was almost a Parish industry. She knew of hunters who had gone out into the swamp and never come out again. There had been many search parties sent out over the years, and none of the bodies were ever recovered. Everyone who grew up around the swamp knows that it does not give up its dead that easily. Between the gators, wolves, coyotes and other scavengers out there, nothing is left to find except maybe a flashlight or phone if it happens to land on dry land, and there is not much of that out there. However, all those disappearances just added to the Angelique Clairvoux fire. There were stories of weird laughter in the woods and sightings of strange lights in the night. However, if a bunch of fools wanted to go out traipsing around the swamp in the dark, who was Raquel to stand in their way?

According to the legends, Angelique sits guarding her treasure with a burning lamp at her side and lures would be thieves in with her sultry laughter. Raquel wrote all that nonsense off to swamp gas and night creatures. Nonetheless, the stories brought business into the town that sorely needed it, so she just shut her mouth and let the business that was Angelique Clairvoux be.

It did bristle her somewhat that the pictures on the tourist brochures always showed Angelique as a milk-faced Reese Witherspoon type done up in Antebellum curls when Raquel knew that it should have been more of a Halle Barry type. Angelique Clairvoux was a mulatto woman, part white and part black.

Raquel grabbed the group’s attention one night when the cook, Danny, yelled at her from the kitchen, “Hey, Clairvoux, your order’s up!” The next time she passed by their table, the nerdy one grabbed her wrist and asked, “You related to the Clairvoux witch?”

“I am a Clairvoux witch!” she replied and moved on.

Raquel had been hearing about the Clairvoux witch’s curse all her life. Kids at school were relentless in their teasing about it after the local paper had done a story about Angelique around Halloween when Raquel was ten. It was not long until enough was enough and she started throwing it right back at her tormenters.

In about the seventh grade, she started reading books about voodoo and witchcraft and started dressing a bit goth. It was not long before she started hissing at her antagonists and making strange hand gestures in their directions. It scared the living shit out of them, and they left her alone for the most part. By the time Raquel graduated high school, she was considered by most of her peers to be the reincarnation of Angelique Clairvoux.

She was also forced to do a genealogy project for a history class in high school and discovered her lineage was that of slaves. Her skin was white. Her eyes were blue. Her hair was as straight as a board. Her mother was blonde and her father a redhead, but his blood traced back to Lucian Clairvoux directly. He was the uncle of Angelique Clairvoux, and he had been born a free black in New Orleans in 1803. His father and his grandfather had been white, but his birth records listed him as a freeborn Negro. This had forced Raquel to look at herself in a very different way.

One evening at the end of her shift, Raquel got a beer and joined ‘the guys,’ as she had taken to calling them, at their booth.

“So what do y’all want to know about Angelique Clairvoux?” she asked, taking a long drink of her beer.

Tony, the African American, jumped right in. “Everything. Where did she come from? How did she end up here in St Martinsville?”

“Angelique’s grandmother, or Maman as she would have been called in French, Elzbiette Clairvoux, was born a slave on a sugar plantation on the island of Martinique,” Raquel informed them as she sipped her beer. She smiled, watching Tony jotting notes as fast as he could in his notebook as she spoke. “When Louis the Fourteenth freed all the slaves in France and her provinces, Elzbiette became a free woman but stayed on as a paid house servant at the plantation until she met a sugar buyer from New Orleans who brought her there and kept her as his mistress.”

One of the other guys, Mike, added, “Yeah, back then white men kept black women more or less as concubines, didn’t they?”

“Oh, yes,” Tony said as he jotted down more notes. “Those white boys loved their nigger on the side. Most of the big plantation owners had two separate households, one for their wives and kids at the big house and another one for their black booty and bastards in town someplace,” he said with disgust.

“That’s how it was with Elzbiette,” Raquel said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “According to papers my dad has from Lucian Clairvoux, my great-great-grand something, Elzbiette took another white lover after the sugar buyer’s wife found out about his pretty black mistress and made him dump her. The next fellow was the son of a cotton plantation owner up in the north of the state and thought it was just fine for him to have a black mistress in New Orleans as long as he didn’t take her around to any of the white society haunts like the opera or the theatre.”

“Sounds about right,” Tony said with a sneer. “Keep your black piece of ass hidden away in a hole somewhere. Don’t take her out where you might be seen with her.”

Raquel could see him getting more and more agitated with the conversation. He kept staring at her when he did not think she was looking, and she could almost guess what he was dying to ask: If she was a direct descendant of Lucian Clairvoux, why was she white? Raquel had dealt with that all her life.

“Elzbiette bore three children by the man: Augustine born in 1801, Angeline born in 1802, and Lucian born in 1803. Just after Lucian was born, the cotton plantation owner arranged a marriage for his son with a girl from France. Her father owned mills there and wanted to buy cotton from the plantation,” Raquel continued while the others listened and sipped their own beers.

“His parents insisted he move Elzbiette and her children out of New Orleans so the new wife would not have to run into his black family in the streets. New Orleans wasn’t such a big city back then.” Raquel glanced at Tony to see if he was going to become angry again, but he seemed to be consumed by his note-taking now.

“According to Lucian’s journals, this is what truly infuriated Elzbiette. They had a cottage somewhere in town, and the man was selling it and making her and the children move away from the city. Other than the Island, she did not know anything else. Somehow, she heard about St Martinsville. The town was one of the only places in the state where free people of color could live, own their own property, and have normal lives. It had been that way since the first French Acadians came down from Canada, I think.”

“That was in 1712,” Bobby chimed in. He was Mike’s brother. Raquel later learned they were fraternal twins and that Bobby was a history major at the university in Shreveport. “It was an Indian outpost. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, the Attakapan Indians are the local tribe. During the Civil War, the Clairvoux brothers hid out with them. Augustine was married to an Indian woman,” Raquel replied.

“What happened to the sister?” Tony asked. “Didn’t you say there was a sister?”

“Yes, Angeline. That was Angelique’s mother. Angeline took a white lover here in St Martinsville, but she died in childbirth. Elzbiette raised Angelique.”

“Where did all the witch stuff come into the story?” Mike asked, puzzled that there had been no mention of it up to this point.

Raquel took the last drink of her beer and answered, “Elzbiette was raised with voodoo on Martinique and brought the practice back here with her. She told fortunes in Jefferson Square when she was in New Orleans and did the same when she came here. She taught Angelique voodoo, also.

“Lucian says in his journal that Elzbiette put a curse on his father’s family and the new wife before leaving New Orleans. He says the plantation failed to thrive, and the parents went broke within a year. He said that his father had to move to France with his wife and died a clerk in one of the old man’s mills. Somehow, Elzbiette kept track over the years.”

“Slave grapevine,” Tony said without looking up from his papers. “They didn’t even need the internet. Word would travel from plantation to plantation as slaves were sold and transported.”

“I read about that somewhere,” Mike said as he dropped more beers in front of everyone. “You keep talking about this Lucian having journals. I didn’t think slaves were allowed to be educated.”

“Elzbiette and her children were not slaves,” Raquel corrected. “She came to Louisiana a free woman. It was still a part of France, and they had freed their slaves. All of her children were born in New Orleans before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, so they were born free citizens of France. Elzbiette had been educated on Martinique by Catholic monks, and she educated her children. They all read and spoke both English and French very well. She also educated Angelique, even though by the time she was born Louisiana was a part of the United States and it was illegal to educate blacks.” Raquel opened a packet of saltines from the basket on the table. “Elzbiette, it seems, was not much of one for the formalities of things like the law. Did I tell you that she cursed a priest and his church?”

Tony looked up from his notes then with interest. “No, tell us everything.”

“According to Lucian, when Angelique was born, Elzbiette took her to the local church to be baptized. The priest, a fat white bigot, refused to baptize the baby because she was a bastard. Her mother was dead, and the father would not claim her because he’d wanted a son.” Raquel popped a cracker into her mouth and chewed while Tony took his notes.

“Because she and her granddaughter had been insulted, Elzbiette called down the Spirits and cursed the priest and his church. Within the week, the church was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The fat priest was found burned up in the basement of the rectory.”

“Serves the bastard right,” Tony growled. “What was he doing in a black town if he didn’t like blacks?”

“I don’t know about that,” Raquel said, “but when the new St Martin du Tours Cathedral was built, the new priest invited Elzbiette to have Angelique be the first christened in the new font.”

“How very forward-thinking of him,” Tony said with a mouth full of crackers. “There are lots of big plantation-type mansions around here. I don’t imagine those were built by free people of color, where they?”

“No, those were built by rich white folks from New Orleans as summer houses. Summers in New Orleans back then were brutal. There were continuous Yellow Fever and Cholera outbreaks. Out here it was cooler, and the local healers like Elzbiette and Angelique knew how to make medicines to fight off the diseases.”

“I guess a black witch doctor is fine if you’re burning up with fever and everyone else is dropping dead around you,” Tony said without looking up from his scribbling.

“Augustine was a blacksmith, and most of the fancy ironwork you see on those old houses was done by him,” Raquel told them as she sipped her beer. “Lucian and his wife were brewers.” She tapped her bottle on the table with the label toward them. “Clairvoux Brewing Company was started by them. They made wine from the wild grapes here in the swamp, too.”

“Is it true that this place was once pretty popular?” Bobby asked as he looked out the window at the hotel across the street, once a grand place but now rundown and empty.

“Oh, yes,” Raquel replied, holding up one of the café’s menus. “Like the café, St Martinsville was called ‘Le Petit Paris,’ The Little Paris. There was the Opera House and The Grande Hotel.” She pointed to the old building across the street. “That was quite the place in its day. People from all over the country came here to see the operas. The best companies played here.” To Tony she added, “All the shops and businesses were owned by blacks, and the whites paid the asking prices, according to Lucian’s journals, anyway.”

“So your family fared pretty well here? Blacksmithing, brewing, and fortunetelling were the family businesses?” Mike asked with a smile. “So what actually happened to Angelique? How did she end up with a treasure?”

Raquel replied in a sadder tone, “After Elzbiette died, Angelique stayed in her cottage and continued her fortunetelling and medicine-making. Lucian says she was very good at it and had many regular clients. He says they all remembered what Elzbiette did to the old priest and the church. Memories are long in the swamp.”

“But what really happened to her?” he persisted.

“No one really knows what happened to her. The family thought she went north, but they never heard from her again. There were just stories and rumors. I suppose Angelique’s story is her own to keep.”