Photo by Anistacia Barber © 1991

September 2004 | Journeys

Queen of the Gypsies

by China Galland

The Camargue in the South of France is a huge delta where the Rhone River empties into the Mediterranean. After a train ride from Switzerland, I am driving through Arles, through the honeyed light of southern France, through field after field of enormous, heady sunflowers, down to the church of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

The Black Mary that I was told to find here turned out not to be Mary but St. Sara. Father Morel, the pastor tells me that the Gypsies call her Sara-la-Kali, though no one knows why. “It is a mystery.”

In the language of the Gypsies, the word Kali means both “gypsy woman” and “the black one,” he explains. It is Sara-Kali, Queen of the Gypsies, who resides in the crypt of this ancient church by the sea.

Each year in late May, Gypsies from all over Europe gather here to venerate St. Sara. “The poor are honored, the rejected welcomed, and the unloved comforted” at this feast, I read in a booklet Father Morel gives me. In a grand procession culminating in days of praying and feasting, they dress the statue in layers of clothes and jewels and take her down to the sea.

“Most of the stories center around the three Marys — Mary Jacobe, Mary Salome, and Mary Magdalene....

In one tradition, Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome are considered Jesus’s aunts, sisters of his mother Mary,” Father Morel tells me.

“According to one legend, Sara,
was already in the Camargue in the first century when the boat full of Marys arrived. Sara waded into the sea to greet them. Yet historically it is believed that the Gypsies didn’t enter Europe until as late as the fifteenth century. In another version she was Sarah of Egypt and she came as a servant with the Marys on the boat as they fled persecution.

“No one knows really,” he assures me. The reasons have been lost to time, blown out to sea. “There is some evidence that there was worship of Ra, the Egyptian sun god, here as well.

“The side altar on the left in the church is pre-Christian and dates back to the fourth century, B.C. This has been a pilgrimage site since at least the sixth century A.D. When this church was built in the ninth century, they simply built it around the old altar and columns. Relics were found here from the first century, women’s skulls, from the Middle East.”

The net of stories that carried Sara and the Marys was knotted with a variety of sources. Was this Sarah the Egyptian, or the Sara who was with Mary and Martha at Christ’s tomb the morning of the Resurrection (according to yet another tradition)? Were the Marys Mary the mother of Salome and Mary mother of Jacobe, or were they Mary Magdalene and Mary, Christ’s mother, as yet more fantastic legends hold, forming the basis of stories of Mary Magdalene carrying Christ’s child to France?

The advent of the Marys arriving here in “a boat without sails” marks the first-century entrance of Christianity into what is now France, Father Morel said. I go to look for Mary and cannot find her without the stream of stories that carried her from one part of the world to another. Seldom have I had a more vivid sense of all the different strands that make up what we call Christianity than in my visit to this ancient church.

It is hot outside, nearly 100 degrees. The Mediterranean is a brilliant cold hard blue. There are white horses and heavy black bulls everywhere; though I looked for them, I did not see the pink flamingos for which the Camargue is famous.

Inside the church, the light is dim. Steps lead down to the crypt below the main altar in front. I descend beneath the curved low ceiling of another world. The room is blackened by hundreds of years of candle smoke and the lack of ventilation. There are no windows. The banks of three-foot-high white tapers burning are the only light, the air is hot from all the candles and smells of wax and the odor of bodies.

To the right of the altar is St. Sara, dark-faced, smiling. She is about five feet tall, slightly elevated on a stand. She is dressed in blue gauze over a gold brocade. She has a lovely deep brown face, almost black, and black hair. There are children’s crutches laid up against the wall behind her, canes, metal braces, testaments to her healing. As I stand in the back letting my eyes adjust, a family of Gypsies walks in. The man lights a candle and then approaches the statue, while his family watches.

He is a tall man, with unruly dark hair. He wears ordinary black cotton pants and a white shirt, half open from the heat. He goes up to St. Sara with a complete lack of self-consciousness and, as he must have done many times before — the movement is so intimate, so familiar — he parts her elaborate robes and finds a way through her dress to the statue underneath. She is suddenly flesh, the way he touches her underneath and gently strokes her. Then he leans over closer, whispers something to her, kisses her on the lips and steps away.

I am breathless.

From Longing for Darkness, Tara and the Black Madonna (Penguin) by China Galland.