American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (18 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 105
nis shoes, and a short-sleeved sweatshirt with a leopard's face on the front. Her head was bound in a scarf, to hide her baldness. She barely acknowledged our entry, other than to spit tobacco into a green-bean can beside her chair. Her face was an unhealthy yellow, and when she forced a smile of greeting, I could see that age or disease had taken most of her teeth. A heavy woman, she also was diabetic with high blood pressure and heart trouble.
We began to talk, generally, about her health. She took insulin twice a day, which she said was the same number of times she read Romans from her Bible. She said she was also very depressed, and never seemed to have any energy. But she didn't think the cause was physiological. She'd been to two doctors and they hadn't found anything other than the obvious. Then she just came out with it.
"I been hit. That's what wrong with me. I been hit lots of times."
She looked to make sure I was listening. "I'm hit right now," she said, her thickly drawled voice so loudshe was a little hard of hearingI would've been listening whether I wanted to or not. "Sometimes I feel crazy and sometimes I can talk to you" Her tone trailed off into the quietness of a child getting ready to pout. "But I might not want to talk to you all the sudden, though." Her head dropped back against her chair.
"Yolanda," said Sarah, "he came here because he wants you to tell him how it happened."
Yolanda leaned forward, looking at Sarah, then me, and spat. "You mean about T.?"
Sarah nodded. She was ramrod straight next to me on the couch, her hands folded atop the white kitchen apron covering her lap. She reminded me of a cat waiting to pounce.
Yolanda exhaled heavily. The thought of her unfaithful ex-husband made her scowl. I wasn't sure she'd go on, and started

 

Page 106
to get up, thinking we'd be leaving. But she shook her head, as if throwing off some muzzle of the past.
"I was havingyou know how ladies come around," she said, leaning forward. "Well, I didn't wash myself right and I put my things up on a shelf till I could wash them later. I had a little bath towel there, too, and later when I went to look for it I asked T. about it. He said he didn't know where it was.
"But I didn't believe him, so I went to look for it. When I opened up his clothes trunk he had two of my sick clothes. I knowed it was mineit was a big diaper and a blue sheet. It was coming so bad I was using anything.
"I got it out and burnt it up. Then I run out of the house. I couldn't stay there. I went to Bastrop looking for a house. Then when I came back I looked for T. down in the Quarters, and he was in bed with Alice." She paused to spit. "But I knew I'd been hit because I was feeling bad."
Sarah's hands moved slowly from her lap, gently gripping the sofa cushions on either side. "Yolanda," she said, her brown eyes flashing knowingly in my direction, "why people hoodoo you?"
Yolanda tensed. She looked away. It took a while to answer. "I don't know."
Sarah pressed. "You know why."
"Sure I do."
The room was silent again. I pretended to scribble something on a notepad.
Yolanda spat. Sarah didn't flinch. Yolanda fussed with a doily on her chair. When it was exactly so, she continued her story. She and T. got back together, she said, but he never admitted he had hit her, and she didn't tell him she knew. Then she went to a hoodoo man to get the fix off, but he told her T. came from a family that knew "the secrets" and had concocted something too powerful to break.

 

Page 107
Then, she said, T. hit her again.
It happened one evening at dinner. "I'd put on a pot of greenshoney, I'm a greens lover. But you know, the pot liquor was white and had, like, a skin on it, you know? The liquor should have been green. But I let the greens cook down. Even the meat wasn't right."
At the table, she whispered to her daddy, "Don't cat none of them greens if T. don't eat 'em. If he don't, you don't eat 'em either." She looked at me. "You know where they went?"
I shook my head.
"Outdoors. I didn't eat 'em and Daddy didn't eat 'em and T. didn't eat 'em. After that time we started sleeping in separate beds."
Despite her tale, Yolanda wouldn't say for sure that her present afflictions were still lingering from the hit from T. To do so, of course, would have been to acknowledge the very thing
"Yolanda," inside her home in Ruston, Louisiana.

 

Page 108
she knew Sarah had come to torment her about, that she had been going to the faith healers. To the voudou.
One, she said, called himself a prophet, but "all he had me do was read scriptures" from her large print Bible, especially the twenty-third Psalm and Romans 10:8 ("But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach.") She read them, she said, "but neither one changed me."
Sarah listened with an almost beatific smile. Actually, she was just waiting for Yolanda to stop talking. It wasn't that Sarah was bored. She just wanted her friendher depressed, ailing, and, very probably, bedeviled friendto see the broom.
Earlier, Sarah had winked at me and slipped into the kitchen, returning with a big straw broom, placing it flat on the wooden floor. I thought the action odd, and Yolanda's failure to comment on it equally strange. But given the dynamic between the two women that afternoon, who knew what was going on? Then I realized it wasn't that Yolanda hadn't seen the broom. It was exactly the opposite.
As soon as Yolanda finished a long and dreary tale about a healer known as Reverend Gray, who had been known to have people soak their feet in Clorox and had humiliated Yolanda by demanding she take off her wig so he could rub her head with expensive oils, Sarah called out, sweetly, "Hand me that broom, will you?"
Yolanda tightened instantly.
Sarah repeated the question.
Yolanda looked at the broom and then, as though the sweep of her vision were the edge of a cutlass, at Sarah.
Sarah turned to me. Loud enough for Yolanda to hear, she said, "She won't pick it up."
"Why?" I resigned myself to playing straight man.
"She afraid to," Sarah said sarcastically. "She superstitious."

 

Page 109
Yolanda glared at both of us. Defiantly then, she got up and hobbled with difficulty over to the broom. Halfway there, she snapped off a deep frown and returned to her chair. "Don't you do that to me, Sarah," she breathed lowly.
Sarah shook her head, got up from the couch and picked up the broom herself. She'd made her point. But there was another of which neither of the women was aware. The broom is a symbol of Sonponna, a.k.a. Babalu Aye, the feared orisha of diseases. "Superstitions" about it might have run deep, indeed.
"If I told you I could heal you, would you believe it?" Sarah asked, returning to stand in the center of the room, relentless.
Yolanda frowned, angry now. She shifted in her chair. "I don't know, Sarah. Explain yourself."
Sarah crossed her arms. She looked at me, then at Yolanda.
"Do you believe I could do it?"
"Well ... no."
"Then why you ask me?"
"The way you said it, like you could do it."
"You believe I could?"
"I know when you put your foot down ... I think you could."
Sarah didn't answer right away. When she did it was with an almost stern confidence. "Well, the first thing is, Gray has you reading the wrong scripture. That's about Holy Spirits, but you need to study
evil
spirits."
Yolanda looked at her, then away.
"Why you go to Gray?" Sarah asked. "You think he's out to get you."
"I don't."
"You lying to me when you say that. You're more likely to trust a stranger than me."
"I didn't say that."
"Then who would you go to around here if you wanted to get some help for being fixed?"

 

Page 110
Yolanda stared at some photos on a shelf. She spat. ''If
you
can, then you do it. There's your answer, sister."
Sarah glanced at me, then looked full upon her charge, and gave us the plan.
She would heal Yolanda by going through all the Scriptures to find out about "voudou, hoodoo and sorcery." She would show her how Satan, or the Devil, is actually behind all three. "We gonna start with the Devil and pick up Christ at the end," Sarah promised. "With Christ you don't believe Satan can win. But first," she said, "we got to know what spirits we dealing with."
"Whether with Christ or with the Devil," Yolanda said slowly.
"'Cause there are two sets of spirits in the Bible," Sarah replied. "The only thing that save you is if you believe Jesus Christ is Jesus. You got to separate Christ from the Devil."
"The Devil is in all of us," Yolanda affirmed, biting down on each word. "So is Christ."
And so they would work it out. Yolanda, like Sarah, like most African Americans, would come to believe that voudouthe true legacy of her own African soulwas the work of Satan. At least that was what Sarah wanted Yolanda to believe. But as I left the house, I knew that there was a place inside the broken old prostitute that would never completely let go.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The last place Sarah took me was to visit Uncle Clem. He was going to be 103 that week, and lived a few miles out of town in one of those ramshackle, tin roof, weather-beaten places you drive by all the time in the South and wonder who lives there. Clem Wright did, and had for the last seventy years, with his wife, Annie, ninety-three. Though now small, frail and bent with age, as a younger man he'd built the house himself with hand-hewn logs. They'd raised nine children and had outlived them all. Now Clem and Annie, who was mostly bed-ridden, tended

 

Page 111
the small farm around the house and kept one cow, one chicken, one dog and one mule, with which Clem still worked his garden.
His parents had been slaves, brought in from the Carolinas to work and die on the northern Louisiana plantations. "They'd set their hoes up in the field and pray for them to do the work," he smiled, then didn't. "They worked 'em so hard." As a boy, he had seen fires out in the woods. That was where the slaves went for dancing. He said his daddy had been to some of those dances, but wasn't allowed to say much about them, or about voudou, or even where he had come from before arriving in Louisiana.
But Uncle Clem had seen plenty for himself. "There was a man named Kandolo. He come in and stayed around here four or five years, I guess that was back in 1897 or '98. He taught people and showed 'em how to pray. But he called himself a preacher man. I stayed away from it.
"I been hearing about it all my life," he said, "but I never did believe in no hoodoo." He pronounced it in a variant I hadn't heard before: "hoe-doe.'' That would be consistent, perhaps, with an adaptation of the Fon word vo-du.
Sarah and I rounded up a couple of straight-back chairs for the bare living room, where the tarpaper walls were decorated with yellowed newspapers and old advertising prints. "They used to have a lady, Aunt Jenny, who did hoodoo work," Clem said. "But I used to take all them hoodoo people to the Lord. I watched people a pretty good while. You can tell when they call themselves fixed. I can tell."
He looked toward the bedroom, where Annie lay sleeping. Three nurses had been in earlier in the day. Sarah explained that I'd come to hear about the "old healing ways" used by Clem and his family. He'd only been to a physician once; most of his life it hadn't been an option. As a younger man, Clem had fallen while working and split his rib cage open so far, he said, "I could see my liver." There was no doctor, so he and Annie smeared coal oil over the wound and it healed. Another time he slipped

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