American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (12 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
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Page 68
"Yes," echoed Emelda (Gary's wife) "because my body feels full with it."
"Yes," said Lorraine, still in yaguo white, "because I feel the light in my heart."
"
Wrong
," answered Lorita, her mouth twisted in contempt.
She moved down the row like a drill sergeant. First to Doris: "Something in your life is blocking it." To Emelda: "You have a hateful spirit." To Lorraine: "You think you have the Holy Ghost 'cause you have santo? Huh! When you got the Holy Ghost you need nothing else in your life. God has the power. The orisha don't change your life. God has the power."
To us all: "Some of us got the selfish Holy Ghost. When you get the real Holy Ghost nothing stops you from serving Jesus. You leave your father, your mother, your family. It's just like fire."
She started back for the pulpit, then turned so fast her robes whirled. "If you got the Holy Ghost I wouldn't have to pull the service so hard! If you got the Holy Ghost what are you doing for the Master? The Holy Ghost is power. All power."
She went up to fetch her Bible. When she came back down to the pews her gaze fell on Pam, who, like me, had been trying hard to remain invisible. "Come up here, baby." Pam rose. "Read, baby," she commanded. Pam obeyed. "What do it mean, baby?" Pam said it meant that ''through Christ we are forgiven our sins."
"Through
Jesus
," Lorita affirmed. She looked straight at me. "Some people in here don't believe that. They think they can get it without the Lord. They say, 'I used to go to church but the people ain't right.'"
I looked away.
She laughed cruelly. "But I tell you that the Reverend Mitchell don't go to church for
people
!"
"Hup! Hallelujiah!" She threw her arms out, crossing them and bending double in the Spiritual Church way.

 

Page 69
"Spirit say we tied up, wrapped up and confused. Our SpiritHup!a spirit of error. We confuse ourselves with the spirit of Jesus, of the Holy Ghost."
One by one, she singled out other members of her church family by name, smashing the spiritual ego of each. It was the sin of pride she was after, the proud soul that believes it contains the Holy Ghost. Lorita the Leveler brooked no pride; no one was free to set himself up as his own judge on matters of the spirit. This is what she had feltthat we were a proud and thus aloof bunch, and she was going to wipe our noses in it.
She was yelling now, furious. "Why do you think I'm like this? You think I want to? I tell you. I'm doing this so when I get to the promised land I'm gonna see you there! I'm not judging you. I'm telling you what the Holy Ghost said to tell you. When I get through fussing, you're gonna love me or hate me. It don't make no difference."
That night there were no possessions. But each member received a prophecy, queuing up for Lorita to rub oil into every mortal palm and, it seemed, restore some of the ego she had so deliberately demolished during the service. It was quiet, reflective, until the mother and daughter who had been next to me reached the front of the line. Lorita had barely taken the child's hand when she seized up tight, crying out so loudly we could all hear, "Spirit say keep this girl in church or she'll get awayHup!"
The mother froze.
"Spirit say ..." Lorita paused, cocking her head, as if listening. "Spirit say, This girl been gambling.'" Another pause. "With grownups?"
It seemed farfetched, but the mother lowered her head. "Yes."
Lorita clasped the girl forcefully to her breast and shouted into her ear, "Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham ..." and you could see the two of them shaking, Lorita trying to ward something off. She drew the mother up, too, and they prayed

 

Page 70
under her wings. When she had finished, Lorita cleaned the girl with some wild weeds that grew near the church and said to put the roots of the plant under the foot and head of the girl's bed and leave them for a week.
I knew Lorita saw in the girl a desperate and violent karma and knew the momma also saw it and was terrified. They would do all they could to stop it, but their resources were few. God was one resource, and now, because God came in many forms, the orisha were another. The power Lorita sought was the power to protect.
We broke with a hymn and a circle of prayer. In my left hand was Pam's; in my right, that of the woman with the daughter sinking into oblivion. Then it was over and we went outside. A pretty young woman in an aqua blue dress, clearly not a regular, wanted Lorita to read her brother and possibly clean him. Lorita took one look at the man's open-necked black silk shirt and expensive shoes and called him, to his face, a pimp. He didn't change her mind when he said he didn't want a reading, but advice on how he should bet at the track. Lorita told him that was the least of his worries. She asked him if he had made peace with his father. He threw up one hand in dismissal and turned with his sister towards their late model luxury sedan. Walking past me, he paused, looked back at Lorita, and asked if I thought he maybe should have a reading. I said it couldn't hurt.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The next day I left the city.
Voudou had survived here, but New Orleans was a special case, an exceptional sanctuary. Out there in the swamps, the plantation towns, the dirt roads to nowhere, voudou had almost certainly gone deeply underground, mutated, evolved into forms perhaps barely recognizable. It awaited.
I had a last cup of a thick French blend at a cafe on Magazine Street. Then I drove to St. Lazarus, in no hurry, across the town

 

Page 71
where Marie Laveau had once been an underground queen and now was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 amid the finest of the old colonial aristocrats. Lorita was on the street corner, wearing a cotton floral print dress, watching two boys chase a pigeon she had released. It acted punchy, unable to take flight. "I told them not to catch it," she said. "It full of bad spirits." Tufts of feathers stuck to her hands and I knew someone inside had been cleaned. The boys chased it anyway.
But Lorita's attention had turned suddenly to three men sharing a quart beer bottle outside the door of her church. "What you doing drinkin' in the morning?" she demanded, stamping toward them with arms swinging in wide, purposeful arcs. "Why you ain't got no job?"
She tried to take the bottle from the older of the trio, but he tucked it to his chest. "No wonder you got that gout in your knee," she said, huffing with contempt. I looked at the man's badly swollen right leg. He smiled with a helpless indifference. His friends helped him away. "That's right, sister, you tell him," they saidenough to be respectful, but probably not enough to change their ways.
"You be careful," she told me. "And if you go talking to any hoodoo or spiritual people you do what I say. You get you some fruitoranges, bananas, some fresh fruit, and every time you go see one of those people you clean yourself. Like this"she passed her hands up and down her body"and then just throw it away. It take the bad spirit from you."
She turned to go and I got in my car. It was torporous hot out on the street and in the botanica a client was waiting, hoodooed by somebody nasty. "She say snake eggs growing in her stomach," Lorita had said earlier. "But she was smart to come to Reverend Mitchell. I know what to do about it." She had a special herb tea that, with prayer, would rout the invader. But a thousand more battles awaited, and Lorita was but one warrior from the ancient resistance.

 

Page 73
PART TWO
THE ROAD

 

Page 75
7
On the Hoodoo Trail
In her classic 1953 study of Haitian vodun,
The Divine Horsemen
, Maya Deren wrote that what she had really witnessed was that which we see in every culturethe operation of a unifying myth. A myth, to Deren, was "the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter."
1
I sought both the fiction and the matter of the American voudou legacy: spirit condensed into time and place, into persons, into something I could approach.
My task was somewhat more complicated than Deren's. Haitian vodun is more or less openly practiced, and once Deren gained the confidence of the priests, she could be relatively certain that she was studying what she saw. The seeker of American voudou has no such security of observation. Rarely is anything that which it appears to be. I had certainly encountered that phenomenon in New Orleans, but that was but one city, one mutation. In the centuries of its repression in America, voudou had taken as many guises as necessary to survive. I would have little choice but to investigate all these paths: hoodoo, root medicine, spiritual healing, ju-ju, black magic, and dozens of other euphemisms and forms.

 

Page 76
Illustrations from turn-of-the-century newspaper articles depicting voudou
practices in stereotypical paradigms.
None is as authentic, that is to say, as
African
, as the parent religion, or religions, collectively known as voudou, yet all are descendants. Obviously questions of authenticity are value-laden; in this case, implying that a voudou which developed in the New World is a diluted or corrupt form of that found in Africa. But my quest was not one of comparative anthropology; rather, an on-site search for a framework amid destruction. Voudou did exist in Africa; it came to the United States with African slaves; it was prohibited, violently. It either disappeared or became something else. The search for its remains is logically also a search for origins. I settled on two basic questions: (1) how had America changed voudou? and (2) how had voudou changed America?
I had concluded, at least preliminarily, that these questions were inseparable. On the one hand, the harshness of the pogroms against voudou had warped it into practices so peculiar they seemed tied to real voudou only by the most doggedly reductive analysis. But it was equally obvious that as voudou went underground, it left its mark all around, in dance, music,

 

Page 77
medicine, folk culture, even Christianity. In outlawing voudou and forcing it into new forms, America had nonetheless absorbed many of its ways. It was as though the African religion, in disappearing, had actually infiltrated the body of its frightened and hostile host.
In wars, it is axiomatic that each foe slowly takes on the characteristics of the other. The internal American assault on voudou was nothing less than a war. And though voudou, as the religion of slaves, never had a chance on the battlefield against Christianity, the religion of the masters, it hung on in a long, covert resistance. It was my feeling that over the centuries, voudou had exerted such a remarkable staying power that most Americans, black or white, were still reluctant to deal directly with its legacies. But that didn't mean voudou wasn't endemic. Indeed, its presence was, like that of a black hole in space, all the more powerful for the inability to account for its seeming absence in the midst of highly altered activity all around. So in one sense, it didn't matter where I went or who I saw. Voudou was everywhere.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
My plan, after leaving New Orleans, was to move randomly across Louisiana and then the South, on to Miami, eventually, on even into the South Bronx. Not a plan so much as a confession of ignorance. I can take a road map of the southeastern U.S. and say that through a hot, rainy summer I was on this highway or that road, in this small village or that big city, talking to this woman and not that man; in truth I was traveling a territory without cartography.
I figured to trace the old bayou routes westering out of New Orleans and so followed along the Plantation Road abutting the Mississippi River into Cajun country. It was as goodor bada place to start as any. On the one hand, Cajuns (Acadians, driven

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