She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paula R. Stiles Page A

Bedard, 1909 — from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from; I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”
    Ferris looks at the carte, gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”
    “‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”
    “Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected — you know, high yaller? Same as me.”
    “Oh yes, une métisse, bien sur. She was cagey about her background, la belle Marceline, liked to preserve mystery. But the rumor was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto; when she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”
    “She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”
    “Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair — that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made from hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a long time, centuries ... I mean, c’est folle to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far as Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”
    “Mummies got hair like that, though, don’t they? Never rots. Good enough you can take DNA off it.”
    You nod. “And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular — they cover their hair with a wig, too, a sheitel, so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I can see perhaps an added benefit to her courtesanerie from allowing no one who was not un amant, her intimate, to see her uncovered. The wig’s hair might look much the same as her own, only longer; it would save her having to ... relax it? Ça ira? ”
    “Yeah, back then, they’d’ve used lye, I guess. Nasty. Burn you, you leave it on too long.”
    “ Exactement. ”
    Tully rocks back a bit on his heels, gives a sigh. “Better start off soon, you lookin’ to make Riverside ‘fore nightfall — we twenty miles up the road here from where the turn-off’d be, there was one, so we gotta drive cross Barker’s Crick, park by the pass, then hike the rest. Not much left still standin’, but I guess you probably know that, right?”
    “Mmm. I read testimony from 1930, a man trying for Cape Girardeau who claimed he stayed overnight, spoke to Antoine de Russy. Not possible, of course, given the time — yet he knew many details of the events of 1922, without ever reading or hearing about them, previously. Or so he said.”
    “The murders, the fire?” You nod. “Yeah, well — takes all sorts, don’t it? Ready to go, ma’am?”
    “If you are, yes.”
    “Best get to it, then — be dark sooner’n you think and we sure don’t wanna be walkin’ ‘round in that. ”

    A mourning sampler embroidered in 15 different De Russy family members’ hair once hung upstairs, just outside my husband’s childhood bedroom door: such a pretty garden scene, at first glance, soft and gracious, depicting the linden-tree border separating river and dock from well-manicured green lawn and edging flowerbeds — that useless clutter of exotic blooms, completely unsuited to local climate or soil, which routinely drank up half the fresh water diverted from the slave quarter’s meager vegetable patch. The lindens also performed a second function, of course, making sure De Russy eyes