Indigo Fire

A Personal Account of the Events of February 1st, 1972

Written by Professor Kenneth Gamble Ph.D.

To find a man among my colleagues with the same predilection for the occult as myself would be difficult, to say the least. I knew that. I know that now more than ever. But on that late October morning, when Randall Lowry approached me with a Stage 1 archaeological assessment and a spirit of avidity in his manner, I never would have guessed that anyone could be so entirely my opposite.

Lowry was a Professor of Anthropology and the only colored man on the staff of Burghley University. He was incensed by the city’s impending development of this land he’d found. The plot, located in Brooklyn, was the unmarked burial ground of a man named Samuel Laviolette and the twelve slaves in his possession. 

 The existence of this grave filled a little piece of a puzzle I had been working at for months; a loose web of unexplained and possibly supernatural occurrences. My progress had been slowed by the demands of the spring semester, and I worried that the fall would bring similar challenges, but Lowry’s proposition was the perfect excuse to take a research sabbatical. Drawn to the burial ground by its potential to produce evidence of the arcane, I agreed to help him excavate. 

I wonder (selfishly, perhaps) if Lowry’s interest was as unalloyed as he claimed. He seemed a good man and a good anthropologist, anxious to explore this little chunk of history for the sake of its preservation and nothing else. But the mystery of the voodoo arts and its inauspicious practitioners is unendingly captivating to me, and I struggle to believe that someone could not be as seduced as I am by its promises.

But I digress. I have yet to prove with certainty the existence of the afterlife and our ability to commune with it, so it is pointless to speculate on the weight of Lowry’s soul. 

The assessment contained letters and other documentation on the financial affairs of the Laviolette family between the years 1789 and 1791. In the former Saint Domingue, there was an indigo plantation owned by Pierre Laviolette that retained 200 slaves. Laviolette was concerned by the reaction to the French Revolution and the whispers of revolts to come on the Caribbean island. He wrote to his only nephew, Samuel Laviolette of New York, asking for help to secure his assets. Laviolette would sell some of his slaves to Samuel (on credit, as the younger Laviolette was notoriously incompatible with financial prudence and lacked real funds) to hold onto as insurance, so that if the revolution did come to Saint Domingue, Pierre would have a foothold in the states. 

This choice proved to be unwise. No later than the moment the twelve field slaves stepped foot in New York did Samuel contact a slave trader in South Carolina. The records show that Samuel planned to sell the slaves south, with no intention of aiding his uncle.

However, before the trader could come to collect his new wares and give Samuel his profits, a fire broke out in the Laviolette family estate where Samuel resided. He died, along with the twelve Caribbean slaves. 

The younger Laviolette’s wife, Prudence, was away visiting her sister at the time of the fire, so she came into possession of what remained of the manor. There is little evidence that Prudence made an effort to keep the property in the family, except for a single line in a letter to that aforementioned sister, claiming all the bodies were buried on that land. 

This is where my fellow researcher and I diverged in our interests. Lowry, being the meticulous historian he was, advanced his investigation via property ownership documentation from 1790 onward, noting the fact that the bodies were buried on that same property, which was later repossessed by the city of New York. The land went through a few developments, likely destroying much of the remains. But after another mysterious fire in the government office building that stood there in the late 1930s, the lot has remained in disuse.

I chose to probe in the opposite direction: not forward in time, but backward. It occurs to me that might start this regressive timeline with that office fire, despite it being an outlier by many decades. This second fire is relevant to me, not just for its similarity to the first (including its mysterious cause of ignition and the complete destruction of the building), but also because it occurred exactly one hundred and fifty years after the Laviolette fire.

Lowry’s records show that among Pierre’s shipment of slaves were eleven men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven, all well-built. There was only one woman, thirty-three years of age and inexplicably childless. Her name was Anite. 

After reviewing my own private research on the timeline of supernatural occurrences in Brooklyn (other unexplained fires, mysterious disappearances, sightings of the walking dead in unmarked graveyards), I believed Anite to be a chronologically small but spiritually significant element in this series of events. Since then, my hypothesis has only been strengthened. 

Lowry shunned me for my interests. When recruiting an undergrad student from my Anthropology of Religion class to our cause, I led with the voodoo stuff. John was like me: interested in things few courses were willing to teach, and also, maybe, a little off his rocker. So when we started the research process, that was all he could talk about. He blathered on and on, one day, about how excited he was to be working on this dig, how his English major girlfriend, a hippie with a personal investment in ghost stories and Indian burial grounds, was always begging him for details. He pondered aloud about how likely we might be to find enchanted bones, instead of organizing the filing cabinet like I’d told him to. I did not think, at the time, that we would find anything so tangible in the way of magic. Even if there were mystical remains, how would we be able to tell? I sincerely doubted there would be any femurs that shimmered in the light like they were covered in pixie dust. 

I didn’t approve of these musings, but Lowry, who was unfortunately in earshot, didn’t know that. He came over, told me I’d better stop with all this “mumbo jumbo.” It was “unprofessional,” as well as cruel to the boy, to put ideas in his head. I think he was displeased that I'd brought someone like John on at all. He might have been worried that we could overrule him, despite the crew of clean, uninteresting Masters students that he’d brought, who would certainly take his side if the issue grew any further.

I told him that expecting trouble is exactly how you get trouble. He gave me a grim look, his sharp brow low and taught—and walked away.

I sent John home for the afternoon.

A few weeks later, I was digging through my archives, the undergrad’s hopes stuck to the back of my mind like old Dentyne. There was a story in a newspaper clipping from some proto-Brooklyn Gazette that hadn’t lasted long—more gossip column than legitimate rag—about an old woman in 1789 who ran up and down Hubbard Lane telling anyone who would listen about a tree that had been struck down by lightning during a storm the previous night. This was no natural occurrence, according to her. The old woman claimed to have seen a shambling parade of blackened skeletons wander through her neighborhood, only to stop in front of the tree just across from her home. One corpse had raised its hand, and lightning struck. Here, the author of the story notes that the woman could not make up her mind about whether the lightning struck the tree itself, or if the bolt only illuminated the sight of the tree imploding in a burst of orange flame. Either way, a party of the walking dead had starred in this tale of meteorological intrigue, and the phrase “enchanted bones” played again and again in my mind.

The woman was certainly mad, and John was clueless about any historical significance to his wishful thinking. But this was the kind of connection I had come to the project looking for. 

With all the excitement of the discovery buzzing in my veins, it took quite a while for sleep to find me. 

But when it did, I dreamed.

I saw the scene described in the old newspaper—a small army of corpses marching gawkily down a dirt road in the pouring rain. They stumbled like newborn foals, limbs twitching like convicts fresh from the electric chair, “taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life.” But this army, unlike what the old woman had described, was not without a general. 

A woman led them. Her clothes, threadbare linen and wool, were dark and rain-soaked. She was the one to lift her hand to the stormy sky. Lightning struck, and I awoke.

I thought of Tituba, spinning tales and cursing young girls.

I thought of Maman Celie, guiding William Seabrook through bloody rituals. 

I thought, greedily, of Murder Legendre and his retinue of the undead. 

#

By December, we were still yet to uncover any of the remains. Lowry and I stayed steadfast in our belief that they were there, but without physical evidence of the land’s historical significance, the university has been unable to dissuade the city from drafting new development plans for the property. 

Then, on the wings of one of God’s least decorous and seemly angels, Bill Copeland landed on our doorstep. Copeland claimed to be a descendant of the Laviolettes and intended to reclaim ownership of the property. He was, apparently, like Samuel before him, an opportunist. Unlike Samuel, however, Bill was a man of means, so he threw some funding and a lawyer at Lowry to fight to get the property back from the government. Lowry claimed to be uncomfortable with the arrangement—why would putting the land in private hands make it any safer?—but he treated it as a necessary evil.

A month ago, at the start of January, the lawyer rang me with the news. He, Copeland, and Lowry had been unsuccessful in convincing the New York City Land Use Committee representative that Bill Copeland had a stake to claim in the property. We had neither public nor private means of protecting the burial ground. We all went home defeated that day.

That night, I had another vivid dream. I stood at the threshold of a brick mansion, the looming doors opened wide to bathe the veranda in shadow and orange light. There was a parlor, and it was grand, the maple hardwood gleaming and dark. The furniture had been pushed haphazardly into the corners of the room, replaced by a makeshift forge formed of scavenged stones and sand. Twelve bodies stood in a half-moon arch around it. 

A white man was lashed with thick rope to a slate of wood that might have once been a dining table. A woman stood over him. It was her again, in the patchwork petticoat and linen cap. Her hands were raised as she led the others in a dreadful hymn. The man writhed and screamed in terror but his cries were drowned out by the chanting of the bodies in their creole.

One of the circling men reached a gloved hand into the burning forge and produced a small, glowing knife. He wrapped the hilt in a cloth stained with blood and oil, then offered the knife to Anite. She took it in both hands and raised the blade high above Samuel’s twisting form. The chanting crescendoed with a force that seemed to come from beyond the twelve voices. Anite plunged the knife into Samuel Laviolette’s chest.

My vision was overwhelmed by a blast of roiling flame. I could feel the heat lick at my brow, and the searing followed me into the moments after I shot awake in bed.

Possessed by an as-yet uncharted level of fervor, I leaped to my feet, dressed quickly, and left for the burial ground. Before I departed, I made a call to John, a Master's student and assistant researcher at the dig site. 

John met me at the burial ground where the Laviolette manor used to be at three in the morning. He carried with him the excavation tools that I requested, as well as a youthful vigor despite the cold and the early hour. He began to ask questions, but I did not have answers. I was behaving erratically, I will admit, and John eventually rescinded his queries. 

Much of the dark soil had already been scoured by our team. It would seem that there were not many places left to look. But I knew in my core, in a way that I think defines a good archeologist, that the dirt was a sea of secrets that could not be underestimated.

One foot below the bottom of one of our first holes, John found a pair of hip bones. I held an electric lantern over the discovery as John delicately removed some of the debris. I realized he was trying to get a clean shot for the 100 mm Canon, and I waved him away. We didn’t have time.

John asked me what exactly the rush was about, but I again did not answer. I could only focus on extracting the single remains we had found. 

That ample sciatic notch could only mean one thing. This was the pelvis of Anite the priestess.

We hurried to the university’s lab with the pelvis for further examination. It was six o’clock when we got there, and, to my dismay, Lowry was also on campus. He was completely unaware of our discovery, and it may have been more convenient to keep it that way, but I was on the path to proving the existence of voodoo magic, and I will admit that I wanted those accolades for myself.

Standing in front of the lab’s doors, I tried, without mentioning what John and I had achieved in the wee hours of the morning, to convince Lowry to leave the project. It did not work. Lowry pushed past me and through the doors, where I had left John with the bones for only a moment. Lowry let out a shout of terror.

John was sprawled on the floor, blood pooling under his head where he lay, with some streaking the corner of the examination table. Smoke curled from his mouth. I recall Lowry bending down to check for a pulse and recoiling. John’s skin was too hot to the touch, like a door handle to a room engulfed in flame. Then, John’s body spontaneously combusted. 

I am writing about this experience from my home after weeks of hospitalization. I have burns on twenty percent of my body. Lowry and John are dead. Later, the police had plenty of questions for me. Their interrogation showed me the omnipotence of the force I am dealing with; the impossible ignition was truly so impossible that officers suspected me of murder! I was released for lack of evidence (because, of course, there was no gasoline or match to be found at the scene, only inexplicable bodies) but I know a warning when I see one.

Anite does not want me to know her secrets, but I will find them. Her powers, vast and indeterminable as they seem to me now, will someday be recorded. Proven. And I will be the one to do it.

I am heartbroken by this setback in my investigation, but the burial ground’s secrets have not all been uncovered. I am undeterred.

The End.


Author's Note

This story is an exercise in representing “the Africanist presence in the white imagination” as described in Toni Morrison’s contribution to Connie Zweig’s 1992 critical essay collection The New Romanticism, with references to the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft in relation to race and the Gothic genre.