"The Quarter Queen"

Kayla Hardy is a mythology expert and multi-hyphenate author and screenwriter of Louisiana Creole descent. She earned her PhD in creative writing and African American literature from SUNY Binghamton University. Hardy is an adjunct professor at SUNY Binghamton University and is an accomplished scholar of Black folklore, mythology, and Voodoo.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Quarter Queen, her first novel, with the following results:

Page 69 of The Quarter Queen takes place right after Marie has saved Ree from a snatcher attack, showing just how far she will go to save her daughter from any threat, even if it includes breaking rules she helps keep in place:

“Not another word.”

“Oh, I think one more will do just fine. It’s your turn to explain yourself—why did you meet with Silas? What is your relationship to the Grand Wizard of the Brotherhood?” Ree was going to be fair about it. She was going to offer her the chance to come clean, to do away with all of her secrets and plots.

A flash of glittering anger in Marie’s eyes. But still she said nothing.

“Silence still makes you a liar, Marie. But since you are so quiet, perhaps I should tell you that I overheard you with Father Antoine, discussing the Harbinger and the Inquisition. And . . .” She hesitated, then said the name anyway: “Jon.”

“Enough!” her mother commanded, vibrant anger radiating from her. The fire flared, smoke filling their small parlor, backlighting her mother in the hearth’s orange-gold light, her face twisted first with sorrow, then with fury.

No, it was not Ree’s mother staring at her. It was the Quarter Queen, her bone-white eyes, the tignon upon her head coming undone, transfiguring itself into her golden fleur-de-lis crown, her long curls floating about her cheeks like seaweed swaying in black water.

“I am your queen,” she spat. “It’s high time you acknowledged that.”

“You are my mother! It’s high time you acknowledged that.”

And there it was. The real trouble between them.

When her mother spoke again, her voice had grown unusually soft, carrying an unmistakable bitter note. “The ways in which I have failed you as a mother are but small sacrifices to the ways in which I have succeeded as Queen of the Quarter. One day you will understand, when you have taken my place.”

As it happens, page 69 of The Quarter Queen is a spookily accurate example of illustrating the emotional dynamic between Marie and her daughter, Ree. They are arguing after Marie has just saved Ree’s life, and thereby showing Marie just how far her mother will go to keep her safe, even to a suffocating degree. But Marie is also a woman of contradictions as Ree rightfully points out—secretive as hell, formidable, and unwilling to bend to anyone’s will but her own. Still shaken from her near encounter with having her freedom ripped away by snatchers (not unlike bounty hunters employed in the real life Antebellum south who retrieved runaway slaves and freedman alike) Ree can’t help but reckon with her own privilege and just how much Marie’s secrecy has contributed to the comforts of her life. It must be a daunting task to be a subject in the fearsome’s Quarter Queen’s court and it must a different beast altogether to be her daughter and sole heir. Ree wrestles within the impossibility of inheriting a legacy she doesn’t even want, let alone one she fears she has no hope of successfully living up to. For Ree she must accept that to live within Marie Laveau’s shadow is to stifle one’s own light.

While The Quarter Queen is a historical novel (an alternate history to be exact), it is also a proper fantasy set within a magically reimagined New Orleans where witches, demons, gods, and spirits walk about freely. I like to think of it as a heightened version of the real New Orleans where the speculative elements are amplified to terrifying degrees. In this world, the city’s magical population known as Les Magiques can be enslaved or freed whose magical prowess is very much a sought-after commodity within the system of slavery. Every character in this novel, including Marie Laveau, are seeking to maintain their fragile sense of freedom and magic within a world hellbent on taking it. It is very much akin to the morally gray world dynamics of books like The Witcher or Game of Thrones.

Visit Kayla Hardy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue