They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and rightly so.

Beauregard Lerouge was an ox of a man, broad across the chest and strong of will, but he wasn’t a smart man. When he married the powerful voodoun Marie Méprisant, he married untruly and unfaithfully. After the birth of his daughter, he took up with the belle du jour, Kitty Devareaux, beginning an affair that could neither escape the prying eyes of the community, nor the notice of Marie.

Marie knitted effigies of the offending pair and set about exacting her revenge. In short order, Kitty lost her lustrous golden hair, developed sores on her flesh, and suffered a stroke leaving her paralyzed on her left side, the side of her treacherous heart. No longer the beautiful treasure she had been, Beauregard, nor any other man, had a use for her, and she languished in poverty the rest of her days. Kitty, however, was lucky compared to the adulterous Beauregard, who disappeared on his way home from the tavern on a moonless night and was never heard from again. It is said he was attacked by an alligator which brought his body to Marie, ripped to shreds. Denied an afterlife by the voodoun’s spells, he lived on only as the secret ingredient in Marie’s famous red beans and rice.

by Zabet Stewart