In The Flow of Time – September 14, 2024
Here she is, Marie Laveaux. There are some things known historically about her, but actually, not a lot. She was an illiterate woman of color in a white man’s world. There is no portrait or photograph of Marie Laveaux. There is the imagination.
Her internal voyage of growing awareness is my fiction, but plausible and fits what we know. She is a perfect character to find the middle way forward.
She is a priestess of the Voudou religion of her ancestors, and she is a devout Catholic. She leads traditional ceremonies and dances, and goes to church. She is white and Black, and is neither and both. Her people were slaves, but she owns slaves. She knows freedom, and also the restrictions of being not-white. She is a traditional healer who teaches the doctors. She is a woman in a man’s world, but a spiritual and social leader. She is technically powerless, and simultaneously a woman of immense power who, in the end, walks away from the public light to do simple acts of kindness.
I have a heroine, and her journey.
