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 a sepia cardboard 
frame. "Pretty Justine had everybody afraid of her." The young woman was indeed pretty, 
her breasts flat in the style of the 1920s her hair in a bob, her dark skin quite 
beautiful, her eyes and mouth slightly expressionless, or perhaps evincing a certain pain.
  Now came the modern snapshots, thin and curling, the work of common enough hand-held 
cameras of the present time.
  "They were the worst-his sons," she had said as she pointed to the curling 
black-and-white picture. "They were Pretty Justine's grandchildren, all white and living 
in New York. They wanted to get their hands on anything that said they were colored and 
tear it up. Great Nananne knew what they wanted. She didn't fall for their soft manners 
and the way they took me downtown and bought me pretty clothes. I still have those 
clothes. Little dresses nobody ever wore and little shoes with clean soles. They didn't 
leave us an address when they left. See, look at them in the picture. Look how anxious 
they are. But I did bad things to them."
  Aaron had shaken his head, studying the strange tense faces. As the pictures had 
disquieted me, I had kept my eyes on the womanish child.
  "What did you do, Merrick?" I had asked without biting my tongue wisely.
  "Oh, you know, read their secrets in their palms and told them bad things they'd always 
tried to cover up. It wasn't kind to do that, but I did it, just to make them go away. I 
told them our house was full of spirits. I made the spirits come. No, I didn't make them 
come. I called them and they came as I asked. Great Nananne thought it was funny. They 
said, 'Make her stop,' and Great Nananne said, 'What makes you think I can do that?' as 
if I was some wild creature that she couldn't control."
  Again there had come that little sigh.
  "Great Nananne's really dying," she said looking up at me, her green eyes never 
wavering. "She says there is no one now, and I have to keep these things-her books, her 
clippings. See, look here, at these clippings. The old newspaper is so brittle it's 
falling apart. Mr. Lightner's going to help me save these things." She glanced at Aaron. 
"Why are you so afraid for me, Mr. Talbot? Aren't you strong enough? You don't think it's 
so bad to be colored, do you? You're not from here, you're from away."
  Afraid. Was I really feeling it so strongly? She'd spoken with authority, and I'd 
searched for the truth in it, but come quick to my own defense and perhaps to hers as 
well.
  "Read my heart, child," I said. "I think nothing of the sort about being colored, 
though maybe there were times when I've thought that it might have been bad luck in a 
particular case." She'd raised her eyebrows slightly, thoughtfully. I'd continued, 
anxious, perhaps, but not afraid. "I'm sad because you say you have no one, and I'm glad 
because I know that you have us."
  "That's what Great Nananne says, more or less," she answered. And for the first time, 
her long full mouth made a true smile.
  My mind had drifted, remembering the incomparable dark-skinned women I'd seen in India, 
though she was a marvel of different tones, the rich mahogany hair and the pale eyes so 
visible and so meaningful. I'd thought again that to many she must have looked exotic, 
this barefoot girl in the flowered shift.
  Then had come a moment of pure feeling, which had made its indelible and irrational 
impression. I'd perused the many faces laid out upon the table, and it had seemed they 
were all gazing at me. It was a marked impression. The little pictures had been alive all 
along.
  It must be the firelight and the oil lamps, I'd thought dreamily, but I'd been unable 
to shake the feeling; the little people had been laid out to look at Aaron and to look at 
me. Even their placement seemed deliberate and sly, or wondrously meaningful, I'd 
conjectured, as I went smoothly from suspicion to a lulled and tranquil feeling that I 
was in an audience with a host of the dead.
  "They do seem to be looking," Aaron had murmured, I remember, though I'm sure I hadn't 
spoken. The clock had stopped ticking and I'd turned to look at it, uncertain where it 
was. On the mantle, yes, and its hands had been frozen, and the window-panes had given 
that muffled rattle that they do when the wind nudges them, and the house had wrapped me 
securely in its own atmosphere of warmth and secrets, of safety and sanctity, of 
dreaminess and communal might.
  It seemed a long interval had transpired in which none of us had spoken, and Merrick 
had stared at me, and then at Aaron, her hands idle, her face glistening in the light.
  I'd awakened sharply to realize nothing had changed in the room. Had I fallen asleep? 
Unforgivable rudeness. Aaron had been beside me as before. And the pictures had become 
once more inert and sorrowful, ceremonial testimony to mortality as surely as if she'd 
laid out a skull for my perusal from a graveyard fallen to ruin. But the uneasiness I'd 
experienced then stayed with me long after we'd all gone up to our respective rooms.
  Now-after twenty years and many other strange moments-she sat across from me at this 
cafe table in the Rue St. Anne, a beauty gazing at a vampire, and we talked over the