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"I will, Daddy," I promised.

"Let's go, honey," Mommy said.

"We want to go too," Jean whined.

"You two are going home with me," Daddy snapped. "You'll both need castor oil after hogging down all those pralines tonight and eating all that creme brulee, I'm sure. Don't wander out of my sight," he advised. The two of them looking longingly at me.

"Be good boys," I said and nodded at Pierre, who I knew could make Jean behave. He grimaced with unhappiness, but led Jean to chairs where they would sit obediently and wait for Daddy.

Meanwhile Mommy had the restaurant hostess hail us a cab. "Quickly, honey," she told me. We rushed out.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

Mommy gave him the address.

"You sure you want to go there? That's not the safest part of town this time of the night," he said.

"We know where we want to go. Just get us there quickly," Mommy said. Her anxiety made her unusually firm and caustic. No one I knew spoke to servants and service people as kindly as Mommy usually did.

As we drove out of the Vieux Carre and toward a poorer section of the city, Mommy told me of the time Nina Jackson took her to see a voodoo mama so she could get a charm or learn a ritual to keep her sister Gisselle from being cruel to her. She described how she had cast a ribbon belonging to Gisselle into a box containing a snake.

"Not long after that, Gisselle was in the car accident," she said mournfully. "I always felt guilty."

"But, Mommy, you surely don't believe the ritual was the reason for the accident. You said her boyfriend had been smoking pot and driving recklessly."

"Still . . . the voodoo ceremony might have put her in the grip of danger. Afterward, I returned with Nina, and the mama made me reach into the box with the snake in it and take out the ribbon, but she wouldn't guarantee I could rescind the curse. She said once my anger was cast into the wind, the wind had control and I probably couldn't pull it back."

"But, Mommy . ."

"I told Gisselle, you know."

"What did she say?"

"She just used the information to blackmail me into becoming her slave, but I deserved it. I should never have let my anger get the better of me. No one else knew about it but Nina. She was always burning candles to keep evil away from me and giving me good luck charms, like the dime you now wear," Mommy said, smiling.

We turned the corner and started down a long, dark street. The buildings looked no better than shacks. Despite the hour, I saw young ch

ildren still playing on the stoops and on the scarred and bald front yards. Broken-down cars were parked along the sidewalks, and the streets were very dirty, the gutters full of cans, bottles, and paper.

We stopped at a shack that looked somewhat better than its neighbors. The yard and the sidewalk were clean, but I saw bones and feathers hanging above the front door.

"Wait here for us," Mommy ordered the driver. "I won't wait long," he warned.

"I have your name and your license number," she told him. "You had better be here when I step out of that house with my daughter," Mommy countered. He grunted his reluctance, but sat back. Mommy took a deep breath and then found my hand. We walked to the stoop, and Mommy knocked on the door. A moment later a short black woman peered out at us. Her long gray hair hung down to the middle of her back, and she wore what looked like a potato sack and old sneakers without laces. Dangling from her earlobes were two small live lizards. They both held on for dear life.

"We're here to see Nina," Mommy said.

"Nina is not here," the small woman said.

Mommy glanced at the note she had been given. "I was told to come to this address. I was told Nina Jackson was very sick and dying in this house."

"That be told true, but Nina's gone. Zombie take her about an hour ago. She's in paradise."

"Oh, no. We're too late," Mommy moaned. I squeezed her hand, and she straightened her shoulders. "I want to see her anyway," she insisted.

The woman stepped back for us to enter. A sweet aroma flowed from the rear of the house. The old lady nodded toward the left, and we heard the monotonous rat-a-tat of a drum. Slowly Mommy and I walked toward the entrance to the rear room.

It was a small bedroom with the shades drawn. The bed took up most of the space. Around it nearly a hundred candles were burning. Another black woman, not much bigger than the one who had greeted us, sat very still beside the coffin. Across from her, an elderly man with a luminous white beard was tapping a drum made of thin cypress staves hooped with brass and topped with sheepskin. He didn't look our way or move his head an inch when we entered, but when the woman turned toward us, her large, sad eyes brightened with some recognition.