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Voodoo, for whom a statue of St. Peter with his keys to Heaven might do quite well.
    I had noted that Aaron could not bring himself to question her further on the matter of his role in the dream, the date of Great Nananne’s imminent death. He had nodded, however, and once again, with both hands he’d lifted her hair back from her damp neck where a few errant tendrils had clung to her soft creamy skin.
    Aaron had regarded her with honest wonder as she had gone on with her tale.
    “First thing I knew after that dream, there was an old colored man and a truck ready to take me, and he said, ‘You don’t need your bag, you just come as you are,’ and I climbed up into the truck with him, and he drove me all the way out here, not even talking to me, just listening to some old Blues radio station and smoking cigarettes the whole way. Great Nananne knew it was Oak Haven because Mr. Lightner told her in the dream. . . .
    “Great Nananne knew of Oak Haven of the old days, when it was a different kind of house with a different name. Oncle Julien told her lots of other things, but she didn’t tell me what they were. She said, ‘Go to them, The Talamasca; they’ll take care of you, and it will be the way for you and all the things that you can do.’ ”
    It had chilled:
all the things that you can do.
I remember Aaron’s sad expression. He had only given a little shake of his head. Don’t worry her now, I’d thought a bit crossly, but the child had not been perturbed.
    Oncle Julien of Mayfair fame was no stranger to my memory; I had read many chapters on the career of this powerful witch and seer, the one male in his bizarre family to go against the goad of a male spirit and his female witches over many hundreds of years. Oncle Julien—mentor, madman, cocksman, legend, father of witches—and the child had said that she had come down from him.
    It had to be powerful magic, but Oncle Julien had been Aaron’s field, not mine.
    She had watched me carefully as she spoke.
    “I’m not used to people believing me,” she’d said, “but I am used to making people afraid.”
    “How so, child?” I had asked. But she had frightened me quite enough with her remarkable poise and the penetration of her gaze. What could she do? Would I ever know? It had been 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