Percival's Inheritance

Click.

Click click.

Click click clickclick clickclickclick…

The clicking continued, ad infinitum, increasing in frequency and intensity until it sounded like a lizard wearing tap shoes was trying to escape a bird, a cat, and a snake at the same time on a concrete column. Finally, he looked down and realized that his Geiger counter was signifying that his death was inevitable.

World War III was predicted to end life as we know it. Ironically, the proverbial third-world countries were spared. No strategic genius would waste any of the payload from its nuclear triad. Percival’s “vacation” that began on the eve of that August of the Nuclear Summer spared his life. The mostly forgotten, but repurposed slave castle somewhere on the west coast of Africa, along the 1st Parallel South, was his shelter for the last seven years. The Pulitzer Prize winning Executive Editor of the Washington Post knew it was time to make the, now voluntary, sojourn to the land that was once the United States of America. Journalism wasn’t the reason. It was the hole in his heart that was pulling him toward the uncertainty of a nuclear wasteland; more specifically, it was a gold heart-shaped locket.

This wasn’t just any locket. It was the genesis of his lifelong quest for revenge that he had completed seven years ago. It was the last heirloom passed down from the Haitian-born McZeal women of which, Percival was the only male heir. It wasn’t the commercial version of a gold heart-shaped locket. It was, however, exactly what one might expect from a Voodoo priestess from 19th Century Jakmèl, Haiti.

The golden luster was closer to an earthy tone - it actually lacked luster, by the typical definition of the word. It’s shape was that of the human heart. It even tilted from right to left. Where the blood vessels come into and leave from the heart to perfuse the body with oxygen, the locket had ten open notches. It was as if that Voodoo priestess took her satchel out and sprinkled some gold grit-gris in the opened chess of her subject and removed it from the body. Unlike the movies, it wasn’t beating. It was just small, gold, and worth so much that Percival would risk his life to go back to New Orleans to retrieve his birthright.

Percival Bouvier, Ph.D, was an only son of Leonette and John Bouvier. He was accomplished and acclaimed professionally. But that was the Percival that the world knows. The real Percival lived in the shadows of his maternal lineage. He was an heir to rape.

Percival’s mother was born an outstanding McZeal woman. The singular fact that was most prominently outstanding about her was that she was the only woman within four generations of her family, that was not born as a direct result of the crime. Leonette’s mother Lily, made sure of it. Before Leonette was born, Lily moved to Haiti, her mother’s birth home. Lovinia McZeal was Percival’s great-grandmother and although Percival never met her, eighty-seven years ago, she decreed that she shall have her satisfaction through her only male heir.

Lovinia’s last words, before she was executed in a Louisiana prison:

“I shall have my satisfaction and Percival shall avenge me. For the sins of the fathers are blessed upon the sons.”

The warden pulled from her hands a gold heart-shaped locket that hung from a burlap twined necklace. And the only “good man” Lovinia ever met in Louisiana, made sure the inexpensive, yet priceless trinket made its way to the baby girl she had delivered seven weeks earlier.

When Percival would visit his Grandma Lily, in Jakmèl, these were the type stories he heard - the story of his great-grandmother’s execution being the first. Lily made sure that he knew that his path had already been ordered. It was up to him to fill in the details. At the end of his journey, he would receive his birthright - that very same gold heart-shaped locket. But his time to locate it had become severely limited by the very decision to come back to get the locket.

Radiation from the holocaust was still lethal to humans. The streets of New Orleans were littered with beautiful flowers that broke through concrete, asphalt, and felled buildings. The most prominent were lilies. As Percival coughed and walked, seeing his Grandma Lily, as he thought, all around him, made him smile. Nothing that breathed oxygen seemed to be alive. Roaches didn’t even survive as predicted; it appeared.

Percival was usually quick-witted and wise but now he was a wanderer. He was unable to get his bearings to head to where he stowed the directions to retrieve the locket. The only thing he knew was that he was going to die from radiation exposure. His feet, instinctively, moved one after the next on repeat until he made it to the foot of Canal Street. The crypts and above ground burial tombs in the famed cemeteries that survived some of the worst hurricanes in history were destroyed. Filled with depression, despair, and not enough decayed radiation, Percival sat still on an unidentified concrete block. There he slept.

A sudden gasp of air was initiated by a small brownish lizard that crawled across Percival’s slumbered lips and then rested on the same concrete brick at Percival's eye level. Surely he must have been dreaming. The lizard’s mouth parted. It’s throat expanded with air and croaked out the most lovely sound he had heard in over sixty years, a voice that sounded extremely familiar to his late grandmother, Lily.

“Mwen se grandma Lovinia. Finalman, pitit mwen, revanj se pou nou, mèsi Percival.” (I'm Grandma Lovinia. Finally, my child, revenge is ours, thank you Percival)

Percival sat and spoke to the spirit of his great-grandmother for hours, receiving all the knowledge she poured out upon him. His tear ducts lubricated his face. Still he continued conversing. At no point in time did it occur to him that he could be hallucinating from the radiation and exhaustion. She explained to him what happened to her. She started with her trial. He was so engrossed in everything she said, he no longer had to think back to translate her words from Haitian Creole to English, it was instantaneous.

“‘That Negress did it!’

“Gentlemen of the jury, Mrs. LeBlanc is a grieving widow. Her heartfelt words identifying her husband's murderer will never leave your minds, yea hearts.

“My friends, you can’t look at this foreign Negro woman like anything more than what she is - a murderer. Lovinia McZeal is a murderer.

“She’s nothing more than Hoodoo woman from a Black, unchristian country. She illegally came to our city and stole work that a local New Orleans’ Negro woman could have been doing. She repaid the LeBlanc family's generosity by casting her evil spell on the beloved sugarcane magnate, Cecil LeBlanc and when he was in a weakened state, murdered him. Lovinia McZeal is guilty of the malice murder of Mr. Cecil LeBlanc. And if nobody says this to you: Thank you for your service.”

Percival had previously read the trial transcripts, but it was more impactful hearing it from the voice of his great-grandmother. She was there, hearing her name being besmirched and her life being taken away. Cecil LeBlanc wasn’t the victim, although Lovinia did kill him. Lovinia intervened to stop him from having his way with a teenage girl named Lulu. A woman who’s name Percival had heard from Lily, his grandmother. Lulu was Lily’s godmother. After Lovinia was executed by the State of Louisiana, Lulu took care of Lily. She owed it to Lovinia to take care of her child when she no longer could.

As the most beautiful sunset he had ever seen to date overtook Percival, the spirit of Lovinia said softly out of the mouth of the lizard:

“Look at me Percival. I will show you life. Remember the words my precious baby told you all those years ago. ‘Protect my heart and you will never die.’”

Percival was mouthing the very same words as she reminded him. He would never forget the words that his Gran Lily told him in Haiti. If he was on his deathbed, put one drop of his blood on in the uppermost notch of the gold heart-shaped locket and his ancestors would carry him away from death.

While ruminating upon lessons past, all of the sun’s rays shone through the throat of the lizard, and Percival noticed a familiar shape. A heart-shaped locket. And this was no hallucination, because the lizard spit up the very thing Percival looked for, his inheritance. He picked up the locket and, as he looked around for something to draw blood he felt a prick on the middle finger of his left hand. The lizard bit him. The blood he sought was immediately available and, as expected, he followed his ancestral directive. Nothing happened immediately. Percival, now weakened even further, passes out. He didn’t die.

He awakened to four figures in yellow and red hazmat suits with black ventilator masks standing and kneeling over him. He was in and out of consciousness as they worked on him and lifted him into their ambulance. When they had him and the inside of the ambulance decontaminated, they removed their masks. Percival was pleasantly surprised to notice it was an all-female rescue crew. They sped off causing seven-year old Times-Picayune newspaper to fly up in the air with the most ironic headline:

“Sugarcane Heir and Mayor Gunner C. LeBlanc Found Dead Aboard His Yacht Off Coast of West Africa”