- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: Life is filled with goodbyes, Eve, a million goodbyes, and it hurts every time. Sometimes, I feel like I've lost so much, I have to find new things to lose. All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it's just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we'll say, "So that was the damn point." And sometimes, I think there's no point at all, and maybe that's the point. All I know is most people's lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well... that's sad.
- [last lines]
- Narrator: Like others before me, I have the gift of sight. But the truth changes color, depending on the light. And tomorrow can be clearer than yesterday. Memory is the selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. Each image is like a thread, each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate texture. And the tapestry tells a story, and the story is our past.
- Poe Batiste: [screaming upstairs] I hate her, I hate her! I wish she was dead!
- Roz Batiste: Eve, what did you do to your brother?
- Eve Batiste: I'm going to push him out of a window if I don't get out of this house!
- Roz Batiste: Eve!
- Eve Batiste: Cisely has been in the goddamn tub for an hour!
- [Mozelle slaps her on the butt]
- Eve Batiste: You know that. She stayed in there for three hours yesterday.
- Roz Batiste: Fortunately there is more than one bathroom in this house.
- Eve Batiste: Ain't that much dirt in all Louisiana. Get out of the damn tub!
- Roz Batiste: When I first met Louis, I saw him set the leg of a boy who had fallen out of a tree. And I thought to myself, "Here is a man who can fix things. He's a healer, he'll take care of me." So I leave my family, and I move to this swamp, and I find out he's just a man.
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: We're two of a kind, my brother and I. One day, he'll open his eyes and see that what he's been looking for is right in front of him. Then he'll stop looking for what he already has.
- Roz Batiste: But what if it's too late?
- Eve Batiste: Mama keeps stabbing herself in the kitchen! Show her your hands, Mama.
- Roz Batiste: I think you'd better hush...
- Eve Batiste: And where's Daddy? He's never home. He's supposed to be home sometimes!
- Roz Batiste: Listen, you little ingrate. Your father works hard so we can have a house with four bathrooms!
- Eve Batiste: Not every night he's working, I know he's not!
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: ... if you get careless again with your mama's feelings, I swear I'll do you harm. You understand me?
- [first lines]
- Narrator: Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others imprinted indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old. My brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.
- Narrator: The town we lived in was named after a slave. It was said that when General John Paul Batiste was stricken with cholera, his life was saved by the powerful medicine of an African slave woman called Eve. In return for his life, he freed her, and gave her this piece of land by the Bayou. Perhaps in gratitude, she bore him 16 children. We are the descendants of Eve and John Paul Batiste. I was named for her.
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: You can't possibly marry me. I can't let that happen.
- Julian Grayraven: Is it that you don't love me?
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: No! No, it's not that, it's... Bare with me. I'm cursed. I can't have children. I'm barren.
- Julian Grayraven: You're not barren. You're wounded. Here.
- [putting his hand on her heart]
- Julian Grayraven: And it's here that I'll plant seeds.
- Roz Batiste: Which one of your patients you going to see, Louis?
- Louis Batiste: Woman, go get your palm read and let me do my work.
- Poe Batiste: [about a snake] Maybe it's just sleepin.g
- Eve Batiste: [lifts it up] It's dead, you little chicken.
- [snake suddenly flicks its tongue at them both; they scream and drop it]
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: [looking in mirror, where she sees a reflection of her three dead husbands] I loved him, I swear I did.
- Eve: I know. It's not your fault they die.
- Elzora: Some things are better left unsaid.
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: I paid you a dollar, old woman. Now tell my fortune.
- Elzora: I don't need no cat bones to tell your fortune, Mozelle Batiste. You are a curse. The Black Widow. Next man that marries you is a dead man. Like the others. Always be that way.
- Eve Batiste: How do you kill someone with voodoo?
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: Hmm, I almost forgot you was there. Stick some pins in a doll, perhaps. I really don't know. What made you ask that?
- Eve Batiste: Nothing.
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: Well, you must have been thinking something before you said it. What led you to that particular thought?
- [Glances at Eve]
- Eve Batiste: I don't know...
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: [Expression becomes serious] Is there some you're angry with? Someone you want dead?
- Eve Batiste: [pauses] I'm going inside.
- [Turns to leave]
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: [Stops Eve] No, I think you better tell me what's on your mind!
- Eve Batiste: [while dusting off the pictures of Mozelle's late husbands] Which one did you love best?
- Mozelle Batiste Delacroix: I don't know, Eve. They was all different. Anderson was the handsomest man I had ever seen. Your Uncle Harry, he was the sweetest. And Maynard....Maynard loved me most of all. You know, when I was your age, before I ever did the counseling, I could look at people, complete strangers, and see their whole lives so clear. But when I looked at each of my husbands, I never saw a thing. That's how it always is. Blind to my own life.