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worth pondering on that first evening, for it was not our way to encourage our orphans to give full vent to their dangerous powers; we had been devoutly passive in all such respects.
I had banished my unseemly curiosity and set to memorizing her appearance, as was my custom in those days, by looking very carefully at every aspect of her visage and form.
Her limbs had been beautifully molded; her breasts were already too fetching, and the features of her face were large, all of them - with no unique hint of the African large her well shaped mouth, and large her almond eyes and long nose; her neck had been long and uncommonly graceful, and there had been a harmony to her face, even when she had fallen into the deepest thought.
"Keep your secrets of those white Mayfairs," she had said. "Maybe someday we can swap secrets, you and me. They don't even know in these times that we are here. Great Nananne said that Oncle Julien died before she was born. In the dream, he didn't say a word about those white Mayfairs. He said for me to come here." She had gestured to the old glass photographs. "These are my people. If I'd been meant to go to those white Mayfairs, Great Nananne would have seen it long before now." She'd paused, thoughtfully. "Let's us just talk of those old times."
She'd spaced the daguerreotypes lovingly on the mahogany table. She made a neat row, wiping away the crumbly fragments with her hand. And at some moment, I'd noted that all the little figures were upside down from her point of view, and right side up for Aaron and for me.
"There've been white people kin to me that have come down here and tried to destroy records," she said, "You know, tear the page right out of the church register that says their great grandmother was colored. Femme de couleur fibre, that's what some old records say in French.
"Imagine tearing up that much history, the page right out of the church register with all those births and deaths and marriages, and not wanting to know. Imagine going into my great great oncle's house and breaking up those pictures, pictures that ought to be someplace safe for lots of people to see."
She had sighed, rather like a weary woman, gazing down into the worn shoe box and its trophies.
"Now I have these pictures. I have everything, and I'm with you, and they can't find me, and they can't throw all these things away."
She had dipped her hand into the shoe box again and taken out the cartes de visite - old photographs on cardboard from the last decades of the old century. I could see the high slanted letters in faded purple on the backs of these latest pictures as she turned them this way and that.
"See, this here is Oncle Vervain," she said. I had looked at the thin, handsome black haired young man with the dark skin and light eyes like her own. It was rather a romantic portrait. In a finely tailored three piece suit, he stood with his arm on a Greek column before a painted sky. The picture was in rich sepia. The African blood was plainly present in the man's handsome nose and mouth.
"Now, this is dated 1920." She turned it over once, then back again, and laid it down for us to see. "Oncle Vervain was a Voodoo Doctor," she said, "and I knew him well before he died. I was little, but I'll never forget him. He could dance and spit the rum from between his teeth at the altar, and he had everybody scared, I can tell you."
She took her time, then found what she wanted. Next picture.
"And you see here, this one?" She had laid down another old photograph, this time of an elderly gray haired man of color in a stately wooden chair. "The Old Man is what they always called him. I don't even know him by any other name. He went back to Haiti to study the magic, and he taught Oncle Vervain all he knew. Sometimes I feel Oncle Vervain is talking to me. Sometimes I feel he's outside our house watching over Great Nananne. I saw the Old Man once in a dream."
I had wanted so badly to ask questions, but this had not been the time.
"See here, this is Pretty Justine," she had said, laying down perhaps the most impressive portrait of all - a studio picture on thick cardboard inside