Historical Fiction
575 pages 118,000 words
The year is 1832, a cotton plantation in George where Reyna, an eight-year-old slave girl, is forever changed by the sight of her mother’s public lashing for practicing voodoo. Her mother tells her that she is descended from voodoo royalty. Later, when her mother is sold, Reyna is taken to the Big House to serve the sadistic Mistress Suzanne. Fearing that her mistress will kill her one day, Reyna performs her first voodoo ritual. Her master and mistress are killed in a carriage accident which confirms her mother’s prophecy.
The plantation is sold and Reyna is bought by Joseph Hamber, a traveling merchant who takes Reyna, then thirteen, to a house of prostitution outside New Orleans where he rapes her and leaves her on consignment. There, the women treat her cruelly and Reyna throws herself wholeheartedly into the worship of voodoo, believing that only the religion of her ancestors can protect her.
After a narrow escape from slave hunters, Reyna studies voodoo with the legendary voodooenne Marie Laveau, and as her mystic skills grow, she can’t help herself as her spiritual force thrusts itself to the surface in New Orleans’ Congo Square. As a vassal to Laveau she lives with another young slave, Caroline, who, because of her disobedience, is murdered at a voodoo ritual organized by Laveau. Having taken a lover without Laveau’s approval, Reyna knows she will also suffer Laveau’s wrath and is unsurprised when she must flee to San Francisco because Laveau has identified her to slave catchers.
Although she considers San Francisco, the rat-ridden seaport entrance to the gold fields, her Devil’s Island, she vows, “By Vodu! Someday I’ll be queen of this Godforsaken town.” With that promise, Reyna begins a new life, passing as a widowed white woman who becomes a landowner, a businesswoman, a stock market investor, and the queen of San Francisco voodoo. In order to find work for runaway slaves, she creates businesses, a livery stable, a saloon, a trio of laundries, all of them staffed by runaway slaves. Incredibly, Reyna makes a fortune operating a station in the underground railway.
Because black people cannot testify in court, she takes on a white man as a partner, one who can testify if she is discovered to be a runaway. Unbeknownst to her, however, her partner, Robert MacGill, is a closeted homosexual. Just as she covers her past with a respectable white stockbroker, he uses his beautiful and wealthy partner to hide his sexual orientation. Stalking both of them is Coalman Rocker, Chief Detective of the San Francisco Police. In addition to his police work, Rocker operates a lucrative sideline, blackmailing wealthy San Franciscans whose private lives he can spy upon using his city authority. When he has the evidence he needs, Rocker blackmails MacGill to “protect” his sexual secret. Ultimately, MacGill must steal from Reyna’s account to pay his blackmailer. Reyna overhears MacGill talking to his lawyers as he plans to swindle her and go to South America to escape the continual threat of Rocker. When the lawyers leave, an enraged Reyna attacks MacGill, pushing him over a balcony and fatally breaking his neck. Although she has punished the man who has stolen her fortune, there remains the problem of the lecherous Coalman Rocker. In the final scenes, Reyna arranges an exotic Caribbean religious ritual with the detective as her special guest. Afterwards she is left with the delicious knowledge that when he wakes up from his drunken revelry, he will find that he has been shanghaied onto a ship headed for China.
And she will be headed for the next phase in her reign as Voodoo Queen.
