The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski Read Free Book Online Page A

was descended from the beautiful Consette, a mulatto girl who’d been born in Haiti, sired by a white man on a girl off a slave ship. Consette had been traded by that white man to a thieving midshipman on the cargo ship Andanza for a dozen cases of bumbo rum. It happened in 1820 when she was just sixteen years old. The midshipman sold her to the captain, who gave her as a gift to one Augustin Tulac, a white Creole plantation owner who lived with his lawful wife and legitimate children outside the city of New Orleans.
    Consette had eyes the color of lapis lazuli, a blend of azure with glimmering turquoise that put the skies of the heavens to shame. Her skin had the feel of an orchid petal. She was structured delicately like a hummingbird, with luxuriant hair that was two shadows blacker than midnight. Consette was altogether enchanting.
    Augustin Tulac kept Consette in a stately home on Esplanade Avenue in Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood famous for marriages de la main gauche , “left-handed marriages” in English. Her patron was generous, and her bank account grew monthly; even her servants possessed a veneer of sophistication. But all that aside, Consette harbored a deep hatred for Tulac. On nights she lay beneath him, she lost herself in memories of the Quarter: the dancing flames and the beating drums and the half-closed eyes of the Mambo sur point , priestess to the Asogwe Eulalie Bibienne. When she thought of these things, a fever would start deep inside Consette’s body, causing her to arch her back and move her hips in a pulsing, pumping rhythm.
    When her loathing of Tulac grew enough, Consette paid a visit to Eulalie Bibienne, seeking her advice. On a hot steamy night, she did as the Asogwe bade her do and took her hatred to the Quarter, where she let the Caplatas do with it as they would. In two short weeks Tulac was dead, a look of terror on his frozen face. No investigation was made; a death like Tulac’s was left alone at that time in New Orleans.
    Consette shed herself of her home and her servants and chose a husband after Tulac’s demise, a freed man named Isaac who was a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave called Zimba. She moved to his farm and gave birth to four dark daughters, whom she endowed with her fascination for the occult. Consette’s fixation passed down her line through all generations to follow.
    In 1913, one of Consette’s descendants gave birth to Trinidad and nurtured the child with superstition and the demon side of plants. Trinidad learned that the bulb of a hyacinth could cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it could be fatal; that oleander leaves are poisonous and harmful to the heart; that all parts of the dieffenbachia will burn the mouth and can swell a tongue enough to cut off air; and that one or two castor beans are deadly things to eat. Trinidad was given all that knowledge, but not a solitary ounce of healthy love.
    She took it all in, but unlike her mother, Trinidad was not interested in the poisonous, the harmful, the burning, or the deadly. Instead, she looked for healing.
     
    Oddly enough, Trinidad had been born with a condition for which there is no herbal remedy. In Latin it is called dextrocardia situs inversus —spoken plainly, her heart was positioned in the right of her chest, a mirror image, completely transposed. But this was not her only distinction, for Trinidad was a Knower and also a receiver of visions. For most of her life, unbidden knowledge had floated itself to the anterior of her body cavity, above and just to the right of her gut, before settling on the surface of her turned-around heart. She’d first found out about the Knowing back in 1922, on the day she turned nine years old.
    The memory of the discovery was this:
    She’d worked alongside her mother in the fields that day, and they had snap beans and boiled potatoes for dinner. It happened to be a Monday, the only day of the week that the hoodoo woman would read your tea leaves if you gave