"You're my Pearl," Mama always said.
"I found you in a clam shell."
Mama's real name was Persephone Davis, but almost nobody knew that and those who did never called her that. She was Mama to everyone in the Seventh Ward, and the rest of New Orleans proper. Mama was in the French Quarter when the levies broke, boarding store fronts for cash with the rest of the locals that ignored the evacuation. Her four children had been asleep in their home under the shadow of the Pontchartrain expressway, and she never saw them again.
It was days later, wading in ankle-deep filth and in a daze of grief and despair, that she found a white girl crying, alone, sitting in dirt half naked, no more than three years old. That story of how Mama came to be the mother of the only blonde child in the Ward is urban legend, and less people know the truth of it than know Mama's real name.
The other thing Mama was famous for - infamous - was her practice of "old magic." Some called it black magic, others called it voodoo. For Mama, it was a family tradition, passed down the line through the matriarchs since before the white folks had arrived. To her, Pearl was more than a daughter, she was a "good omen." Pearl was special. And because of that, nobody messed with Pearl, and anyone who did faced consequences.
Pearl was nevertheless an outcast. She had few friends and was treated with a mix of disdain and jealousy by the community. She learned how to make up stories just to get people to talk to her. The more elaborate and detailed the story, the longer she could hold someone's attention. The longer she could feel like she belonged.
Mama was often moody, and she would get into spells of despair where she drank and cried and cursed. But she would also say the most frightening things about the world. Countless were the nights Pearl lay awake and terrified beneath her threadbare blankets, her thoughts consumed by the chaotic spirits Mama spoke of. Some of them had names. Pearl remembered those names.
Life was made better by music. Pearl loved to listen to the second lines, and would run toward every funeral procession in the neighborhood, of which there were many. She learned she had a gift and that her voice had a power of its own, a soulfulness that belied her ivory skin and yellow hair. Mama had her singing in clubs by the time she was nine, and she had her own band when she was thirteen. Eager to avoid the misery of school, she dropped out midway through her freshman year and sang every night, earning a reputation and learning the American songbook, which was really the New Orleans songbook. She got to be a regular at clubs across New Orleans, playing simply as Pearl in the haunts across the north end, and taking the stage name Stacey Lang for the white audiences in the French Quarter.
Returning to her apartment in the French Quarter one night, Pearl got a message from one of her few friends back in the Seventh Ward that Mama had a heart attack. An hour later she was at the old home under the expressway, but Mama was already gone. She died before the ambulance arrived, they would later say. Pearl cried until sunrise, until somebody tried to force their way inside the house. She grabbed the sawed-off shotgun Mama kept hidden under the kitchen sink, and scared away the intruder, but it was instantly clear that with Mama gone, the world had changed, and not just for Pearl. She grabbed the bag of cash from under the floorboard, and took one last look around. Inside the closet where Mama kept her old magic, she found a clam shell sitting at the center of a small altar. Beside it was an open letter from someone named Lou Rogers. What did it mean? Who could she trust?
She remembered a man named Mick - hard to forget a white guy in the Seventh, especially one that looked ex-military. He stopped by the house once not too long before Pearl moved out, was looking into something and knew Mama by her reputation. But was he even still around? For some reason it occurred to her to leave a note. Daalia's. Tonight. -P She left the house, for the last time, and it wasn't until she was back at her apartment, drifting to sleep on the couch with the sound of the streetcar running outside that she wondered what made her think to write that note.
It was already late in the evening when she woke. She showered, gathered her few belongings and felt in her bones that she would not come back to this place. The shotgun went into an old leather satchel that used to be a mail bag that she slung over her shoulder. She kept two boxes of shells, a pair of heels, a favorite dress, and another set of clothes, the cash, and of course the clam shell. She was at Daalia's on St Anne Street, two blocks east of the park, by ten-thirty. Would Mick really show? Was that even possible? It seemed so unlikely now, and yet it made sense, like it was the right thing do. She thought she remembered hearing Mama's voice, "If anything ever goes wrong, here's what you do..."
Pearl ordered a black coffee, and waited.
