American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (13 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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out of Nova Scotia in the seventeenth century) are notoriously insular. And racistthe region voted heavily for ex-Klansman David Duke's failed gubernatorial bid. Poking around for voudou in such a place was, at least, problematic. But I had a lead from a former girlfriend and her younger sister. Black, and Catholic, Kathy and Donna had beaucoup relatives in southwestern Louisiana. Given the historic intermingling of voudou and Catholicism, black Catholics in LouisianaCajun country or nohave to be one of the most likely living repositories of voudou ways in this country.
Near the refinery/chemical cancer-laden disaster of a city known as Plaquemine, across the river from Baton Rouge, I cut off the highway to the other side of the tracksin most small Southern towns the "other" side is invariably blackand noticed a house with a hand-lettered "Reverend" sign nailed to a wall. You did not become a preacher in a poor black community without some exposure to all the spirits, not just the Christian ones. But I didn't stop. Rain fell in sheets from thick, sickly black-green clouds; lightning bounced off the Port Allen bridge.
Sarah, a writer friend, was traveling with me as far as Lafayette. She'd have to take a bus back, but she wanted to get out of the city. Four months pregnant, she was going stir crazy in her Uptown apartment. She was also a little curious. Like many of my friends, she thought I was headed into some kind of George Romero film, and looked on voudou with, at best, skepticism. But she hadn't been able to resist an invitation to go to Lorita for a reading. She wouldn't admit it, but riding with me now was a little more than just a day trip.
Sarah had gone to find out about her unborn baby. Lorita had barely gotten into the reading when she saw something bada binding spirit, the kind that can control. With no idea of Sarah's personal life, Lorita promptly tagged the spirit as that of Sarah's late husband, a promising filmmaker who had died of a sudden illness a couple of years earlier. It obviously wasn't his child,

 

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but Sarah had felt debilitating guilt over his death. Lorita said the spirit was powerful enough to require
ebo
, of a goatas a four-legged creature, one of the most powerful animal offerings. But it would cost $350, and Sarah was broke. She hadn't followed the prescription. We could not know then that in the fall, her delivery would be long and troublesome, culminating in a Cesarean, and she would become embroiled in bitter fights with the baby's absent father over monetary support.
Through the downpour, we drove deeper into the bayou country, past long stretches of poverty, most of it white people living in abandoned trailers, sleeping on sofas under make-shift shelters among the cypress, children in soiled shirts and bare feet only an hour or two from the Café du Monde. During summer, at least, they wouldn't die of exposure, but in winter months, the threadbare life would likely bring disease, misery and death.
I had heard plenty of stories about root doctors, hoodoo men, prophets and traiteusses out in these parts. They weren't always black. Latter-day witches, primarily white, and frequently gypsy, usually billed themselves as psychics or spiritual advisors. I knew I'd run into them sooner or later but I didn't want it to be now.
By the time we arrived in Lafayette, it was late afternoon and Sarah was so anxious to get out of the car and jump into a swimming pool she paid for the motel. But while she was changing into her suit, I picked up a local phone book out of an old reporting habit to check anything, now matter how improbable. Sure enough, under a listing for shops selling "religious supplies," was a name I couldn't resist. I jotted down an address and guilted Sarah into temporarily forgoing the spa.
"The Shining Two" operated out of a converted bungalow at the edge of a black neighborhood not far from downtown. Middle-aged black men in dark suits waited in two cars in the gravel lot in front as we pulled up. It looked promising. But as soon as I walked in the door I felt like a kid who falls for a barker's pitch at a traveling carney show. It was no botanica;

 

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rather, an occult shop: astrology, Tarot, Magik, psychic literature, wicca, New Age, channeling. The black-haired young white woman behind the counter was friendly but claimed to know nothing about voudou. My questions made her nervous, and, perhaps to get rid of me, she wrote down the name of ''someone who did," a woman who lived nearby and who gave "readings." She suggested, firmly, that I go there.
It had started to rain again. I wound through narrow residential streets in the black section of town where the best homes had a carport and the worst lacked screens or doors. A dead-end avenue led past a dilapidated frame house where two elderly men and a woman sat on the porch drinking beer. I parked beside a muddy ditch, and walked up. Sarah stayed in the car, reading a novel. The trio smiled as I approached, but their eyes betrayed wariness. I nodded my head in deference and tried to explain why I'd stopped.
The small unshaven man in the fedora finally spoke. "I don't know nothing," he said, "but my grandson might." With that, he pointed to a modest red brick home across the street. I picked my way back through his puddle-filled yard, and hurried across the asphalt. I knocked on his grandson's open screen door.
Kevin Guidry, a thin, fine-boned man of about twenty-five, was home taking care of his preschool daughter. I told him what his grandfather had said. He smiled. So long as I understood he was a Christianraised Catholiche didn't mind discussing voudou. He opened the door and showed me to a cloth couch next to the TV in the living room. He said his grandmother had treated people using the "old remedies," and that his grandfather, despite what he'd just told me, "was into one of those African gods," though Kevin didn't know which. I mentioned a few orisha namesElegba, Ogun, Shango, Obatalabut Kevin didn't recognize any of them. He did know his grandfather often made medicines of garlic, herbs, roots and worms.

 

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For a time, Kevin thought he might pick up the old ways himself, but he had not done so, preferring Jesus. Unlike Lorita Mitchell, he didn't think he could have both. Indeed, he had veered so far from the "old ways" that he had recently joined the Full Gospel Church, an independent Protestant denomination which, like the PTL Club, Word of Faith Ministry and similar charismatic or fundamentalist groups, have sprung up in the age of televangelism and cater mostly to middle-class and lower middle-class whites. But Kevin said he felt more at home there than in his Catholic chapel. He also said I should try his grandfather again, because "he knows more than he lets on." I crossed the street again. For ten minutes, I stood in the light rain trying to ignite a conversation with the old man, but all I learned was how to treat "thrash"a throat infectionin children by blowing three times into the mouth of the sufferer.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was to spend countless days on such seemingly fruitless encounters. But you never knew until you asked, and even dead ends sometimes proved to be trailheads: the way of voudou no less than that of scientific inquiry.
The next morning, Sarah took the bus back to New Orleans. Missing her companionship as I left the downtown station, absorbed with thoughts of the long, solitary search ahead, I barely paid attention to where I was driving, and consequently got lost. Eventually I realized I was stuck in an engineering nightmare of one-way streets around the downtown square. Which is how I found the "Side By Side Bookstore." A cinder-block box building utterly dwarfed by the well-heeled, neo-colonial Baptist church across the street, it advertised itself as offering "African books and handicrafts." I slowed to make sure it was still in business. When I saw an "open" sign in a window, I pulled into a vacant pot-hole lot on the side.

 

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I knew it wasn't another "Shining Two" as soon as I opened the door. The walls were adorned with anti-apartheid T-shirts and black and white posters depicting African scenes and African people. The front display counter was chock-full of Senegalese bracelets and green, leather neck medallions shaped like Africapopular at that time among teenagers. A second room opened to wall shelves of books on black nationalism, Islam, civil rights, slavery, natural healingand voudou. In a third room at the very back I found the store's sole occupantthe owner, a slim, bespectacled man in his thirties sporting a well-clipped goatee. Cowrie shell medallions hung from his neck beside a red leather gris-gris. His hair was bunched Rasta-style under a red, yellow and green banded wool cap.
He introduced himself as Lionel Brown and showed me around the store. I asked about a book on African history, and he asked me why I was interested. I told him, and he showed me some new copper wrist bracelets he'd gotten in. I bought one. We talked about New Orleans. By the time the next customer walked in more than an hour later I knew that, even if I didn't locate Kathy's Creole relatives (I never did) I was going to find what I was seeking.
Until the Louisiana oil bust of the early 1980s, Lionel had worked as a machinist. Following his layoff he tried a few other jobs until a year ago, encouraged by his wife, he decided to turn his skill with his hands and his interest in his African roots into something manifest: a store, a focal point of African tradition. Though he knew little about it, I could tell that voudou was woven into the very fabric of his life. In his family, though, it was never called that. It was just a collection of stories. While he puttered around the shop, he began telling them.
There was his aunt in Port Arthur, Texas, who had suffered a sudden but extended illness, and was unable to walk. Lionel's mother had gone to assist her, and concluded that her sister had been "fixed." She searched her sister's house top to bottom, but

 

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Lionel Brown, Side by Side Bookstore, Lafayette, Louisiana.
found nothing. Then, in a crawl space, she spotted a small bag. She didn't open it, because of what might be inside, but she disposed of it at once. After that, said Lionel, his aunt recovered.
As he recounted other family legends stretching back generations, I remembered the tales of woe and hexing I had heard in Lorita's botanica. I was to hear many more, Louisiana to Miami. Each was unique to each family, and original in the details, but they were not unconnected. In each story, a mother, father, sister, or other relative became mysteriously ill. Conventional remedies, including doctors, were useless. Then someoneusually an aunt or grandmotherintervened and tracked down the cause, a hidden bag or talisman or similar hoodoo object "planted" by an enemy. When the object was found, and removed, the victim got well.
Whether these family tales were objectively true didn't matter. Their very pervasiveness pointed to something much more important. My theory was that these taleswhat W. E. B. Dubois called "the souls of black folk"formed an underground oral

 

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remembrance of voudou. Not of its contentthat was too thoroughly bannedbut its existence. Every family with a voudou story was part of the remembrance. Every telling was the myth made manifest.
Recently, Lionel had begun writing down the cures he heard from his mother, and especially his grandmother, a healer known as "Mother Brown." Each time he returned to St. Martinville, the bayou town where he was reared, he stopped along the roadside to gather plants, herbs and roots for his relativesand now, for himself. As a matter of fact, he told me, he had just battled a high fever by brewing up "mongrea root tea," made from a local plant. He drank it boiling hot, then wrapped himself in blankets all night to sweat out the fever. The next day he had recovered. To Lionel, the method was just standard home medicine. He knew it wasn't something the doctor might have you do, but until I shared a story of my owngiving him something for what he gave meneither of us knew that in curing a simple fever, he also had preserved a tie to Africa. He had "cooked" himself.
I'd learned about "cooking" in New Orleans from a Nigerian acquaintance named Peter, husband of a member of Lorita Mitchell's Spiritual Church congregation. But Peter wasn't a Christian, he was a voudou, initiated in Nigeria into the cult of Ogun. Before coming to the U. S. to attend Xavier University, Peter, now a journalist, had consented to the wishes of his family (his mother was Catholic, his father a worshiper of Shango) to take the traditional ritual to ward off harm. They considered America an evil and dangerous country. Ogun priests wrapped Peter in blankets, then had him sit and meditate with his head over a pot of steaming herbal potions. When they removed the blankets, the priests sliced narrow cuts across Peter's torso and rubbed herbs from the pot into the cuts. "Religion is protection," Peter had told me. "I always carry my scars and I always protect myself."

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