American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (15 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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Sore throat: gargle with a mix of vinegar, salt and black pepper. As you gargle, stick out your tongue "almost to where you swallow, then come up and spit out, to pull out the inflammation."
Like remembering the tales of healing, Lionel's recording of the cures was an act both of creation and preservation. No won-

 

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der African-American folk healers had come to be known as "root doctors." Cutting slaves off from their own culture and religion made sense in terms of demoralizing potential rebellion, but health care was another matter. If slaves could treat themselves, they'd remain more productive at virtually no cost to the plantation. There was profit in suppressing priests, not healers. "My grandmother just learned when she was coming up," Lionel had said. "They didn't go to the doctor too much, so they had to have something for everything."
It is true, of course, that folk remedies among African Americans could have come from numerous sources, including Native Americans or European Americans. And certainly there are many such links. But the obvious point of origin is Africa. Since homeopathy is one of the most important elements of African voudou cultures, and since slaves came from such cultures, from where else would their remedies more likely have originated?
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I drove eastward across Louisiana toward the Mississippi border, passing deep green maize fields and thick stands of hard-woods. It was a rare dozen miles that I didn't come across a church: small or grand, brick or woodor aluminum sidingthrown up for Baptist or Methodists, Catholics or Pentecostals, blacks or whites. It was Sunday afternoon and each church was a godly beehive not only to services, but to wedding parties, prayer meetings, picnics and Bible study.
I had once read an account of a huge multi-racial evangelical assembly in mid-nineteenth-century Georgia at which an observer saw dozens of tentswhites preaching to whites and blacks to blacks, and the hills at night alive with fires around which people danced, sang, and found the Lord. I marveled at the image: probably one of the few times whites and blacks could be together uninhibited, bonded by a common thirst for heaven. A brave idea, betrayed: white churches had allowed their pul-

 

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pits to be used to rationalize slavery; the separatist Black Church movement of the nineteenth century, and the lasting segregation of most American denominations, were the inexorable consequences.
As I got closer to the Mississippi River, I came to a junction. I could turn north and follow Highway 15 as it hugged the western bank of the river and led to Ferriday, Louisiana, just across the water from Natchez. Or I could jag slightly to the west, and pull into the little community of Simmesport. I slowed at the crossroads. Simmesport, close to a hundred per cent black, was a half-dozen blocks of hard-looking clapboard houses and dirt streets. If I drove up into there I would find somebody who would know somebody who knew something about hoodoo.
I don't know why I didn't stop. Time, perhaps. In a few hours it would be dark, and the closest thing to a motel here was a two-pump gas station. I also wanted to push farther, to a place listed on the map as Blackhawkthe name suggested a possible connection with the New Orleans spirit guide of the same name. But time or mission really weren't the issues. Simmesport looked like the kind of place in which you could get lost fast. So I drove on. I berated myself for miles: for lack of courage, for missing a good bet, for feeling white. It didn't help that when I got to Blackhawk it wasn't a town at all but a large and inaccessible plantation.
I turned onto a gravel lane leading up to the banks of the levee. I dug a beer out of my Igloo. I flipped on the radio and leaned against the fender. Down on the river a barge steamed by, maybe headed for St. Louis or for Natchez. The landscape was dead flat; from it, the forest line across the river rose up jagged and green like an Asian jungle. That's what this entire area was 400 years ago. A jungle. Ancestors of the people back in Simmesport carved out wealth from the jungle, but not for themselves.

 

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I turned the radio off. There was no other sound except the engine of the steamer. Then my heart calmed. I was just a human being like everyone else. I had missed a moment but there would be others, and if I were going to follow my intuitionor listen to my spiritI had to show a little trust.
I drove fast all the way north to Ferriday, no traffic on the lonely two-lane. It was dark and the streets were full. I passed drive-through daiquiri stores, dairy marts, muffler shops. I crossed the bridge to Natchez, found a cheap motel and went to sleep thinking about the last time I was at Lorita's house. Her Caddy was still in the shop and I'd driven her and Juanika home again. She was bone-tired but invited me in for a beer. I wandered towards the back porch to look at her Oshun shrine, but Lorita stopped me. I couldn't enter the room, she said, because all her superas were not in their usual places up on the shrines or cabinets, but were spread out along the floor. Lorita said she'd been so low she had to put the spirits down, too, so they could come back up and lift her with them.
1
Maya Deren.
The Divine Horsemen
, 1953, reprinted 1970, McPherson and Co., New York, p. 21.

 

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8
Spirit Wars
At a small corner grocery in Natchez the owner's wife listened to me with bemusement while her teenage rapmaster son looked on like I was an escapee from some honky nuthouse. I wasn't connecting, but was honing my approach. When asking around, I would only mention voudou if someone else did. If not, I would rely on a preamble about researching traditional Southern medicines and healings, and say I was seeking anyone in the area, probably an older person, who might have such knowledge or know someone who did.
People generally got the drift, but I had to be aware of another possible impedimentthey might think I was a cop. There wasn't much I could do about that one, except rely on my looks. I was white and all, but I think people know how cops lookand I don't look like one. It wasn't so much that a cop would be investigating voudou, but that he might be looking for drugs, or trying to bust some preacher/hustler on a minor vice rap. Who knew with what imagined social ills America's police busied themselves?

 

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The woman in the grocery store said she'd heard of somebody, ''an Indian," she thought, to whom people went for readings. I traced the tip to a Romanian palm reader, not unlike some I'd run across before, and decided to skip it. They were three-card monte players, con artists with zero connection to voudou, although I am sure they allowed that association to work in their favor in the black communities, from whom they drew a high percentage of their clients. It was too ironic. An Asian Indian or Romanian psychic could set up shop and advertise with big signs on the highway, but with the exception of certain parts of New Orleans and Miami I've never seen any above-ground voudou shops, let alone billboards.
It's understandable. The Black Codes of colonial and antebellum America so regulated African culture and religious practices that any activity that even smacked of voudou, such as singing, dancing and drumming, was outlawed. Blacks in some states could not even worship as Christians without a white master present. Even today, although anti-voudou laws have vanished, it is widely assumed, among both blacks and whites, that practice of the religion is illegal. Not ineffectiveillegal.
I decided to abandon Natchez. It was becoming apparent to me that either big cities or small hamlets would be the best places to make contact. Mid-sized towns lacked either quick familiarity or urban anonymity. I was anxious to explore Mississippi, but something tugged on my senses to return to Louisiana. I hadn't covered the top half of the state, a big agricultural area relatively white and Protestant, compared to the black and Catholic bottom. But the region had also been home to plantations filled with slaves and their descendants. Isolated from the urbanity of New Orleans and its influence, African Americans in the northern half might have steered voudou along a different path. I thought it was worth a slight backtrack.
I re-crossed the Mississippi River and gradually aimed northwest toward Grambling, home of mostly black Grambling Uni-

 

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versity, and maybe a good place to touch down. But my mind wasn't completely set. I was open to anything. Lafayette had taught me to trust my impulses, take chances. So even as I drove, I was wondering if maybe I should change plans. At any number of the highway junctions, I considered zipping off on a totally different routeperhaps head farther into western Louisiana near the Texas border, for example, or veer sharply up into the Arkansas flatlands. After all, I could go anywhere. It was a burden more than a liberationthe possibilities of choice, the anxiety about narrowing them to one spot, one town, gave me a light-headed feeling, not unlike vertigo.
About midday I came upon an unmarked blacktopmost Louisiana roads are poorly markedat a T-junction next to a beer'n bait store. I drove it a few miles into woods and farmland until I thought it might be a waste of time. So I went back to the T-junction. By then, three black laborers, or farm hands, had assembled to drink beer on a pile of boxes back of the bait store. When I asked for directions, one of the men got surly because I couldn't understand his thick local inflection. He was looking for trouble, but I wasn't, and drove on. In a few miles I came to a patchy asphalt highway, also unmarked by directional signs. I followed it northwest until I saw markers indicating that it was about to fork off. One way led towards Jonesboro, Arkansas, and the other to Ruston, Louisiana, which is adjacent to Grambling.
I was really uncertain which fork to take, but as I downshifted on the approach, a black mechanic standing outside a repair shop walked towards the Ruston side of the shoulder, wiping his hands on a red work cloth. I looked over at him and he was looking directly back at me. He had a mustache. Short hair. Smooth skin and even teeth. He smiled. I turned his way.
It's hard to know what to make of something like that. A voudou priest would've said I had been guided by Elegba: once to warn me off at the bait stand and again to to lead me through

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