Miss Spellbinder's Point of View: A Biography of the Imagination

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Miss Spellbinder’s Point of View

A Biography of the Imagination

Edward Swift

FOR

Alan Wells

Tracy Pullen Shopkorn

Ronnie Claire Edwards

and

KT Sullivan

Contents

Part 1 Fat Satsuma’s Place of Birth

A Note of Historical Importance

The Black Queen of the Atchafalaya Shortly Before Miss Spellbinder Came to Know Her

How Fat Satusma Met Her Sweet Captain

Part 2 The Isle of Moly

A Note of Historical Importance

Miss Spellbinder’s New Neighbor

What Miss Spellbinder Said About Fat Satsuma Johnson and Her Sweet Captain

Miss Spellbinder’s Point of View

Miss Spellbinder’s Place of Birth

How Miss Spellbinder Decided to Put Away Her Pen

A Short Conversation

What Miss Spellbinder Said About Satsuma and the Seven Who Worshipped Her

The Spellbinding Amelita

Another Conversation Cut Short

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Green-eyed Carpenter

Miss Spellbinder’s Advice to the Yellow-haired Whore

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Opium-smoking Chinaman and His Ubiquitous Hat

Traveling with Lord Spellbinder

A Conversation Cut Short

A Short Conversation with Euphoria

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Barrel-chested Tattoo Artist

Kschessinska’s Balance and the Balletomanes of Russian Hill

Another Conversation with Euphoria

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Baby-faced Muscleman

The Mesmerizer

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Disreputable Turk and His Egyptian Scissors

A Brief Conversation

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Retired Gigolo

The Doctor

A Whore for a Night

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Enchanted Castrato

A Brief Conversation with the Black Queen

Lord Andrew Spellbinder’s Last Voyage

An Attempted Conversation with the Black Queen of the Atchafalaya

Lord Spellbinder’s Dreams

Miss Spellbinder’s Uninvited Visitor

What Miss Spellbinder Said About the Three Kisses, the Sweet Captain, and Satsuma’s Last Supper

Another Conversation

The Feast of Satsuma

Miss Spellbinder’s Point of View

Part 3 The Funeral Barge

After the Feast of Satsuma Another Conversation

In the Port of New Orleans

Lord Spellbinder’s Place of Birth

Miss Spellbinder’s Next Discovery

The Return of the Goddess

Miss Spellbinder’s Last Words

The Sweet Dreams Café

At the Back Door Bar That Once Faced the Sea

About the Author

Part 1

Fat Satsuma’s Place of Birth

A Note of Historical Importance

ONE AND TWO-TENTHS OF a mile from its convergence with the Atchafalaya River, Baudelaire Bayou divides Napoleon from Bonaparte. Although the two communities were settled as separate places, the map makers, lacking space as well as propriety, combined them under one dot and more-or-less one name, Napoleon and Bonaparte. Fat Satsuma Johnson was born on the Bonaparte side of the Baudelaire, but the rest of her family came from Napoleon. This geographical division, along with a certain Gaelic ancestry, contributed greatly, according to Miss Spellbinder’s point of view, to Satsuma’s early rise to fame: she was neither completely Napoleon nor completely Bonaparte, but she was Baudelaire—her mother was Baudelaire also, not by marriage but by blood; and her mother’s mother, a plantation slave by birth, brought forth into this world eight children—five boys and three girls—all of them sired by the Frenchman, Charles Christoph Baudelaire, who made his fortune in sugar cane and his notoriety in women.

All of this Miss Spellbinder learned from Fat Satsuma herself, all of this and more. Scribbling on the back of a brown paper bag, Miss Spellbinder sketched Satsuma’s family tree, beginning with the first Baudelaire to set foot on Louisiana soil and ending with a first cousin’s daughter who was born with two extra toes. It seems to me, Miss Spellbinder said, and the Black Queen of the Atchafalaya agreed, a lot of our Louisiana Baudelaires were born with a little something extra. Sadie Baudelaire wasn’t the only one.

The little extras were of enormous significance, according to Clarissa Spellbinder, who at the age of one hundred and two, considered herself an authority on just about everything. What many people called limitations, Miss Spellbinder called assets, and what many people called assets, Miss Spellbinder was apt to dismiss entirely. During her first and only visit to the Atchafalaya, she was convinced more than ever before that Satsuma’s place of birth, coupled with an ancestry of mixed blessings, contributed not only to what she was but to what she would continue to become. When addressing the members of Satsuma’s fan club, who had returned to the fairgrounds to mourn her death, Miss Spellbinder said that the Black Queen of the Atchafalaya would be remembered until the end of time. Through no fault of her own, she said, and at a very early age, Fat Satsuma Johnson became the most famous citizen to come from either side of the Baudelaire. She is and always will be far more famous than any of the Napoleons, one, two, or three, and certainly more famous than the poet Baudelaire, whose great uncle threw down a sugar cane plantation straight through fourteen miles of swampland which he drained and cleared with the help of a wagonload of Africans, none of whom could speak a word of English, much less French, and one of whom, far more beautiful than Cleopatra herself, gave birth to a child named Zaphira, who went on to live in the Frenchman’s house and with him brought forth eight already-talked about children, all of whom were bred straight back into the Baudelaire line, and in time to come one of the progeny thereof married a freed slave called Frostbite Johnson who had white hair, eleven fingers, and six sons, one of whom settled in Bonaparte and was known as Lafayette Fisherman Johnson, famous for his catch—particularly his beautiful wife, none other than his second cousin, Zaphira Eudoxia Baudelaire. Together they had seven children spaced eleven months apart, but only two of them survived: Satsuma Eudoxia Zaphira and Sadie Eudoxia Baudelaire, born in reverse order and on opposite sides of the bayou.

What Miss Spellbinder did not say about the bayou but might have said had she stayed a little longer: One side looks so much like the other it’s hard to tell where you’re standing, unless of course, you have a point of view.

Today, the floodwater hamlets of Napoleon and Bonaparte are rarely thought of as separate places. Napoleon and Bonaparte is located in the Parish of Napoleon and Bonaparte. The Napoleon and Bonaparte Bank is on one side of the Baudelaire Bridge and the courthouse on the other. The ballpark is not far from the hospital; the hospital not far from the funeral home. And the fairgrounds, only a short distance upriver, have spilled over into the Baudelaire Family Cemetery where the Captain’s stone pillar towers over a marble mausoleum. Over thirty years in construction, the mausoleum contains no fewer than sixteen vaults, and on one of them the finest marble worker the Parish of Napoleon and Bonaparte had ever produced—none other than Fat Satsuma’s third cousin, Charles Marrero Baudelaire III, also known as Crawfish—took it upon himself to carve the following inscription:

Here Lies the Goddess of Love

The Goddess of True Love

Undying Love

And worst of all

Unrequited Love

The Black Queen of the Atchafalaya Shortly Before Miss Spellbinder Came to Know Her

ACCORDING TO THOSE who had seen and those who had not, Fat Satsuma Johnson, the reigning pie-eating queen of southern Louisiana, could stretch her mouth around a twelve-inch crust.

This often-publicized astonishment, along with her enormous size and legendary appetite, drew people into the carnival tent where she sat on a three-legged stool and demonstrated her remarkable ability. "Her remarkable talent," Miss Clarissa Spellbinder called it.

Although the stool on which Fat Satsuma worked was four feet wide and five inches thick, with legs of telephone poles and braces of steel, it wobbled considerably under her weight. Shortly before her final performance, she inspected the stool again, and again she told her carnival boss: This ole stool will go down, and Fat Satsuma will go down with it. You better do something for her while you can.

Vince Lambruso refused to listen. The stool, he said, is a strong one. It will do you another thirty years, at least.

For thirty years Satsuma had been the major attraction at the Lambruso Carnival, and for thirty years she had used every penny of her earnings to construct her family tomb, a mausoleum of marble walls and pillars, with spires and bells and benches and many rooms honoring her long-suffering ancestors. Many times in her career she had considered leaving the carnival for good, but each time she had decided to stay, and for the same two reasons: her family tomb had not yet been completed; and she knew no other means of support except that of a pie-eating fat lady. The Lambruso Carnival was a secure job, and for that she was thankful.

Not hurting for bookings, the carnival made annual appearances at the Napoleon and Bonaparte Fairgrounds, but during the rest of the year the troupe, consisting of a bone man, a sword-swallowing midget, a bearded hermaphrodite, two singing funambulists, and three dancing monkeys, traveled up and down the Atchafalaya River, docking in towns and communities where no other carnival would take the time to visit. Although most of the artists traveled by barge, Satsuma, for the purpose of free advertising, was transported from place to place in the bed of a pickup truck.

Fat Satsuma, the Black Queen of the Atchafalaya, was written in yellow letters on both doors and across the tailgate: Her fame is as wide-spreading as her body.

The truck was fire-engine red and equipped with the best shock absorbers on the market as well as a wrecker’s winch and cable strong enough to support Satsuma’s weight. On her way to the Napoleon and Bonaparte Fairgrounds and what would become her final performance, she sat on two thin mattresses of goose down. A third mattress was rolled up to support her back, and pillows were tucked under each arm to prevent chafing and summer rashes. To the passing cars she waved and shouted:

Fat Satsuma sure does love you, no matter what.

When the carnival stopped in the small towns and docks along the river, the Black Queen of the Atchafalaya sat inside a star spangled tent to display her pie-eating ability to no more than three audiences a day. But when she worked the Napoleon and Bonaparte Fairgrounds, she performed in the open air. Her three-legged stool was placed on the crest of a grassy knoll, and all around her spectators gathered by the hundreds. At the fairgrounds she had been known to give as many as twelve performances a day.

Astonishing, Miss Clarissa Spellbinder told a crowd of newspaper reporters during one of many memorial services. There has never been anything like her. Never has been. Never will be.

At the end of her long and well-publicized career, Satsuma’s reputation was such that people lined up for hours, one pressed tightly against another, just to see the fat lady whose body practically concealed the stool on which she sat, and whose mouth was a cavern into which twelve-inch pies disappeared one right after another. She was the most famous sideshow artist the state of Louisiana had ever produced. A bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River had been erected in her honor. A commemorative arch, thirty feet wide and sixty feet high, had been commissioned by a devoted admirer, and a fancy chicken with plumes of black and gold had been bred in celebration of her fame. Her face was plastered on billboards and printed on envelopes, postcards, and carnival tickets. Wherever she appeared, her name was spelled out in flashing lights. It was written in the sky by daredevils who worshipped her. A high school was named in her honor, as was a gospel choir, a marching band, a four-star restaurant, and a Pentecostal temple. Wherever she went crowds gathered, tickets were purchased, trinkets were sold, autographs were auctioned off, and all to no avail, for neither she nor anyone else could persuade the Lambruso Carnival to provide her with a stronger stool. Nothing can hold itself together forever, she kept saying. It will all be over before you know it. Just let me tell Sister good-bye before I go.

Early on the morning of Satsuma’s final performance, Sadie Baudelaire Johnson was released from jail. She had served a six-week sentence for slugging a veteran on parade, and before the day’s end she would be back in her cell for inciting a riot at the fairgrounds. I’m just one more fancy, cigar-smoking nigger you’ll have to keep an eye on, she told the jailer when he unlocked her cell. And I’m not leaving until you bring me a barber. The barber was summoned, and after he had shaved her head clean, she studied herself in the mirror. I’m looking just the way I did when you got me, she said. All except my clothes. Now go find them. And they ain’t lady clothes neither, so don’t be bringing me no fancy brassieres and frilly panties, for this nigger ain’t putting them on.

In every box and closet the jailer, the barber and the county clerk searched for Sadie’s suit, hat, and shoes. Finally they turned up but not as she remembered them. I ain’t going no where until my pants get pressed out, she said. I didn’t arrive looking like no tramp, and I ain’t leaving looking like one either.

The county clerk, who was also a seamstress, fetched her iron, a board, a clothes brush, and a can of starch. Within the hour the pinstriped suit was pressed, the shoes were polished, and the hat was dusted. At last Sadie Baudelaire Johnson was satisfied with her look and ready to be let go.

Good behavior and this nigger ain’t never been bedfellows, said Sadie. I’m hitchhiking to where they’re showing off my baby sister, and I mean to stir up some terrible kind of celebration when I get there.

Against their better judgment, four policemen escorted her to the nearest highway. There they gave her a ten-dollar bill, two cigars, and a bachelor button for her lapel. We’re releasing you on good behavior, one of the officers said. Think you can remember that?

Twenty miles upriver, Satsuma awoke with a feeling of expectation. I feel celebrated! she exclaimed. I wonder why that is? Inside her dressing tent, she called for her purple tunic and sea-green turban. She called for her red Chinese slippers, her blue parasol, her long strands of Mardi Gras beads, her earrings, finger rings and bracelets for ankles and arms.

While the bone man cooled her with a fan of ostrich feathers, the bearded hermaphrodite touched up her scarlet nails, and the sword-swallowing midget, working with the nimblest of fingers, laid out the jewelry on a low table. Responding to the midget’s constant demands, one of the two funambulists pinned jeweled butterflies on Satsuma’s long braids while the other fastened golden bumblebees on her turban and jade dragonflies on her shoulders. Then the little sword-swallower took over. Standing on a stepladder he wrapped strands of many-colored beads around Satsuma’s neck and arms. He instructed one of the funambulists to push the finger rings into place, the other to hang an amulet of cat-eye marbles around Satsuma’s neck. Working quickly, the funambulists completed their assignments, and after the last anklet had been secured and the last garland of glass beads carefully rearranged, the sword swallower, who was also a ventriloquist, called on the bearded hermaphrodite to steady his balance while he stood on the top rung of the ladder and placed a silver star on Satsuma’s forehead. Suddenly the three dancing monkeys costumed as Harem girls tore loose from their cages and came running into the tent. Discarding their finger cymbals, they leaped upon Satsuma’s braids and swung to and fro as if on jungle vines.

Don’t be letting monkeys swing on my hair, she said in a commanding voice. Today, I feel celebrated!

After inspecting herself in several mirrors, she applied bright orange to her lower lip, her eyelids and cheeks. Then she pronounced herself fully dressed. Satsuma is ready, she told the midget. Hold your monkeys way over there, won’t you, please. The dancing monkeys were held back while the pickup truck came forward to transport the queen in all her finery to the grassy hill where the three-legged stool was surrounded by an unusually large crowd. Some of the spectators had come from Napoleon and some from Bonaparte, but most of them had arrived from parts unknown, and had traveled to get there. Excitement was in the air. The day was very special; somehow, it was more special than ever, but no one could say just why, not even Satsuma. I wonder, I just wonder, she kept saying, I just wonder what Sister is up to nowadays.

While all eyes were riveted upon her, a steel rope was attached to a harness concealed by her robes, and four men operating a windlass hoisted her out of the truck and into the air as if she had decided to levitate for her own pleasure. Slowly she was lowered onto the stool, and when it received her with a quiver, the audience gasped in unison. Under the strain of her full weight, the stool tilted to the left. A leg sank a few inches into the soft earth. The audience gasped again. Ladies covered their eyes with purses and hands. Cameras clicked away. Reporters took notes. And Satsuma leaned to one side until the stool’s two remaining legs sank just enough to balance her weight.

Feeling secure again, she flashed her broad smile. Today, Fat Satsuma feels celebrated, she announced. Today, Fat Satsuma feels like Fat Satsuma!

The crowd had been waiting a very long time, and the first pie was late in arriving. When it was finally brought to her, Satsuma received it on the tips of her fingers. Cherry! she exclaimed, her mouth wide open, revealing for the first time that day her magnificent tongue, amazingly long, sharply pointed, and strawberry in color. Seeing it flying from her mouth like a serpent, the audience leaned forward. A hush settled over the crowd as Satsuma slowly opened her mouth as wide as she could without assistance. Her tiny white teeth, separated by wide spaces, sparkled like a string of seed pearls, and the star on her forehead reflected the afternoon sun.

Can she actually do it? Everyone wanted to know. Even those who had seen her at previous fairs had their doubts—which were soon dispelled. Extending her magnificent tongue, a tongue the likes of which Miss Spellbinder had never seen, not even in India, Bali, or the Boca Islands, Fat Satsuma Johnson placed the pie as far into her mouth as it would go. Then the two singing funambulists, who sometimes doubled as her assistants, stepped forward. With wooden hooks they stretched her lips around the crust, and with both hands she crushed the pie into her mouth.

That day the crust was particularly dry, and she chewed for a long time before attempting to swallow. Her cheeks bulged. Her eyes teared, and sweat poured from her face and neck. Suddenly she lifted both arms and threw back her head, a signal to the funambulists that she needed water.

Give Sister some water! Sadie Baudelaire elbowed her way to a better view. Make some room for this fist-fighting nigger, or you’ll be sorry. And while you’re at it, give my baby sister something to drink before she chokes to death.

The funambulists held a gallon jug of lemonade to Satsuma’s lips, and she took a few sips. Then she chewed loudly and swallowed. She signaled for more lemonade. She drank. She swallowed. And then she drank again. After she had washed down the last crumb, the funambulists stood to one side and led the applause.

Satsuma received a thundering ovation with a smile that seemed to stretch all the way across her face and disappear under her turban. Satsuma feels celebrated! she exclaimed, but her voice did not carry over the cheering mob.

After the applause died down, someone in the audience wanted to know how much she weighed, a question she refused to answer herself. As of this morning, six-hundred and thirty-eight pounds, one of the funambulists said, but when she’s working, her weight increases rapidly. In half an hour she’ll eat another pie, and then she’ll weigh a little more.

But they’re not real pies, someone remarked. They’re made out of chemicals that dissolve in her mouth.

Nobody knows how to believe anything anymore, Satsuma sighed.

Let me tell you something, Sadie Baudelaire shouted. Sister didn’t get that big by eating chemical ingredients. You go up there and eat a dozen of them pies every day, and you’ll see how real they are. She came slugging her way through the crowd. Men or women, it made no difference, fell to the blows of her fists and feet.

Sister. Satsuma shouted. You behave yourself!

Sister? exclaimed an outsider. It looks like a man to me.

Sister, I said for you to behave yourself! Satsuma shouted again. Today I feel celebrated! On seeing two policemen clubbing her sister on the head, a tremor shot through Satsuma’s spine and into the stool. Merciful Lord, she cried. Won’t somebody help me up? While the funambulists were pulling her to her feet, the stool collapsed and Satsuma was flung head first into the screaming crowd. Off came her turban and her red Chinese slippers. Off came her Mardi Gras beads, her earrings, finger rings, bracelets and bows. Off flew the golden bumblebees and the jeweled butterflies. Even the silver star went shooting into the crowd.

Oh, Lord, she moaned as she tumbled through the police barricades. Why do you do Fat Satsuma so?

Clinging to her parasol, she rolled over three times and landed in a muddy ditch