American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (19 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 112
while feeding some hogs and broke his collar bone. He rubbed himself with coal oil, jimson weed and turpentine and waited for the fracture to mend. It did, though it must have been wildly painful. He opened his shirt to show me a large, disfigured knob on his collar bone.
Ordinary illnesses, he said, were treated mostly with teas brewed from mullein weed, sassafras and "hoe-how"I never learned what that was. You could also boil hog's hooves into a tea for a cold. Jimson weed was effective for diarrhea, which Clem said was "awful common" when he was a boy. Jimson weed and brown cow manure ("depending on what you feed your cows") was good for pneumonia. Mistletoe, when boiled in an iron pot with four or five square nails, would take care of arthritis.
After a half hour, Clem tired, became distracted; anyway, Sarah had to get back for the evening meal. I was sorry; he was one of the last living links from "home remedies" to the primary culture which had generated them. Mixing herbs with iron in an iron pot, the stock-in-trade of Osanyin and Ogun, was but voudou under an assumed name.
Before leaving, Sarah had a final question of her own. "He wants to know"she winked at me"if you know the secret to life? Is it because you live in the country, drink spring water and all that?"
Clem sat bolt upright and stared at his niece. His voice, sometimes barely audible, fairly thundered. "Well, I will tell you girl.
Jesus
!"
He rose to fetch his 'bacco. A smoker all his life, he came back holding a hand-rolled, half-smoked butt, and some fixings.
As ever, Sarah had one more question. She looked at me as she asked it. "Uncle Clem, how do you know there is a God?"
"You get on your knees," he said. "My Lord showed me last night. You can call him, ask him for things. If you worthy, he

 

Page 113
turn it over to you. Don't worry about that." He sat back at his chair, rocking. I think he lost track of us. He said, as though to himself, "It shall be like another world."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I had a cup of coffee and blackberry pie back at the cafe, then told Sarah goodbye. Mounting I-20, I sped eastward through the rain, the inescapable June rain. I listened to the noises around me. The drops striking the windshield, the whirr of the wind in the half-cracked ventilator, the tires spinning at 80 mph, ancestral ghosts in my mind.
I had gone back to Margaret's a couple of days ago for our third meeting. This time she had let me into her house, not just the outside shed. We sat very close to each other on wooden chairs next to a low, dark-stained coffee table. Her teenage daughter stood near a piano, watching. Another woman was also in the house, but kept back.
Margaret made no secret, now, of her acquaintance with voudouincluding the names of the gods. "I was raised in it and around it back in North Carolina," she said, her voice sultry, warm, beguiling. "I remember seeing people in bed being chanted over in African tongues." Brought up Pentecostal, her spirit guide now was Marie Laveau, who gave her "second sight"the same thing the Reverend Buckley meant by having two heads. She said she believed in the god Jehigi, and the lost Book of Moses, from the so-called twelve lost books of the Psalms, and in the works of Allan Kardec, Edgar Cayce, the Books of Seth and others in the mystic genre.
She was clearly more suited to "The Shining Two" than a botanica, and yet she had a powerful personal charisma. As she talked, she dropped into momentary trances, her head rolling back slightly as her green-brown, almond-shaped eyes fluttered upwards. I had seen that look. In and out of states, she told me

 

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Margaret, the "White Witch," on
right, with her daughter. Outside
Ruston, Louisiana.
she had a channeler who had played classical music through her hands, though she herself didn't know how to play. And she had performed strange tasks. She had mixed potions to help people who came in with maggots in their backs. She had laid on hands to excise frogs from a man's arm. Women with black warts she would bathe in "Hebrew salts" for relief, and for difficult afflictions, she said she would kill a black or a white chicken and drop the blood on the troubled parts of the client's body. She broke brown eggs in quart jars and chanted Psalms over the water.
Yet of all that, the only thing that stuck, except in my notes, was one recurrent remark. Despite holding my business card in her hand the entire time we talked, she consistently referred to me as "Don." I had puzzled on the mistake driving the winding

 

Page 115
two-lane farm road back into Ruston. At a Catholic church, as Lorita had counseled, I stopped to light a votive candle.
I was nearly at my motel exit when it hit me. My father's name was Don.
I braked hard off the highway into the lot of an E-Z Mart. I fumbled out a quarter for the graffiti-scarred phone. "Did you know you called me Don the whole time I was there?"
"I know."
"Oh."
"I mean I know that's not your name but I couldn't stop myself. I saw a spirit ghost standing behind you. He had gray hair, thinning, and wore glasses."
"Except for thin you're right."
"I meant his hair," she corrected. "His body wasn't thin. His body was medium, kind of stocky. It was his hair that was thin."
I could feel my voice crack. "Oh," I said. "That's him."
"Well"as if it were routine"he must be there to protect you."
I forgot what I said after that and thanked her and hung up. In a bar late one night on Magazine Street, my friend from New Orleans, the other Sarah, had told me, "If you get in too deep we're going to have to pull you out." But I was thinking I was finally beginning to find my depth.

 

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10
Elvis and Dr. King
Out of Jackson I took Highway 3 north to Yazoo City. The moon alongside the Yazoo River was only a sliver, and a thick lowland fog made the countryside seem like a Yorkshire moor. Off to my left lay the Delta National Forest and Panther National Wildlife Refuge but all I could see were clumps of roadside mailboxes and the occasional porch light. I pulled to the side a couple of times to check my map. I got on a long stretch of blacktop as the mist cleared, and in the dim moonlight the moor had become an enchanted forest, a verdant kaleidoscope, the kind of place in which apparitions might beckon at the end of a silver spoon hanging from a red string. What appeared for me was the back of an old green Ford pickup traveling without any lights and not much speed. I braked hard, swerving into the passing lane to miss it.
Soon I began to see a glow of yellow light to the west, and then I could smell what I'd been watching for miles grow out of the horizon: a big chemical plant along the river, smokestacks coughing out flames like hell's own dragons. Texas to Florida, the rural South has become home to giant backwoods industrial plants, refining chemicals or sugar or petroleum, turning tim-

 

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State highway, rural Mississippi.
ber to pulp to paper, making defense parts and plastics. It was the New Plantation Economy. It doesn't buy slaves these days; it pays wages. It substitutes bank loans for chains and it admits whites. Prefers them. Part of the illusion. Black or white, though, everybody drinks the water; everybody breathes the air. Everybody gets the cancers.
I got to Yazoo City about 10
P.M
., plenty tired, but I couldn't find a motel. I don't know why. I drove around a half hour, which is a long time in Yazoo City; there wasn't much to do but press on towards Greenwood if I wanted make Memphis early the next day. I continued up Highway 49, past farmland and through small towns, blowing off Lorita's warning never to drive late at night or when fatigued, and by that point willing to pass up her other proscription, against staying at an isolated tourist court set amid the woods.
I could've camped but it kept raining and I wanted a bed. I passed more flame-lit chemical plants, more night monsters. At Tchula, I pulled into a convenience store for a drink and to use

 

Page 118
the phone. It was a very black town, except for the white cop cruising. Across the tracks, the roadway was lined on both sides with parked carsolder American models. I saw a few black men walking towards a roadhouse. It was a Friday night and I figured there was plenty of music and action. I would've liked to go, but in my jeans and T-shirt I looked too much like a bubba. At a little after midnight, I finally stopped at Winona, where I-55 led to Memphis. It was a rotten motelI had to switch rooms because the sheets on my bed hadn't been changed. It took me a long time to fall asleep.
Next morning in Batesville I nibbled on a sausage 'n biscuit breakfast next to a table where two local white good ol' boys joked with a black woman who repped for Mary Kay cosmetics. They were telling her about a man who got rid of a Mary Kay saleswoman by telling her he wouldn't let his wife wear "anything but Estelle Lauder." At the table on my other side a black woman was helping her teenage son fill out an employment application for Piggly Wiggly.
I left with a plastic cup of coffee and got on the big highway, turning my radio to the Mississippi classical music networkthere is one, and it's good. I knew why I wanted to go to Memphis. Two American icons had died there. One had taken a lot from African-American culture; the other had given. I didn't know what, of voudou, I expected to find at Graceland or the Lorraine Motel, but I was pretty sure whatever it was would reveal itself.
When I crossed the Tennessee line I stopped at the tourist station for directions. Elvis's memorial was marked clearly enough on the maps, but not Dr. King's. "I can't seem to find the Lorraine Motel," I said, spreading a city guide open before the white desk attendant, referring to the place where the civil rights movement was stunted on April 4, 1968. He seemed surprised but recovered fast and politely excused himself to find the hostess. He said she would know. A black woman in her

 

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thirties, she knew exactly where the motel was. "They're going to raze it, though, and build a museum," she added.
I went to Graceland first. If it was a bust, I'd have the rest of the day free. No lack of signs directed me how to get there most efficiently, and I parked in the crowded lot next to the
Lisa Marie
, the King's private jet, named after his daughterthe same name with which my friend Danica had been temporarily christened. I walked down to the main ticket hall, dodging most of the souvenir shops (okay, a coffee mug) and waited for the tram with my ticket group to ferry us across the road to The Mansion.
Too much has been written and sung about Graceland to add anything, but at the end of the tour, I understood the purpose of
my
visit. I had come not to see how Elvis was praised, but the manner in which he was buried. To see him as egun. Perhaps it was the virulent Elvis cult, the "sightings," the semi-serious denials of his death, like Jim Morrison's, whose Paris grave had more offerings than Marie Laveau's. Perhaps it was the occasional celeb-speak, like a black reggae singer saying, "I always wanted to be like Elvis," or the white Florida rock 'n roller, Tom Petty, describing his boyhood idol: "Elvis didn't look like the people I'd known. He had a real glow about him, like a full-body halo. He looked like a god to me." In my head had formed a notion, and because it had formed, couldn't be ignored: that Elvis, the poor white boy with the black music, might have been some unawareor whimsically disguisedavatar of Elegba, or Shango. Over the top, maybe, but compared to what?
A sidewalk path and black wrought-iron fence curves around the graves, so tourists can walk up pretty close. The flat tombstone is capped with an eternal flame enclosed in protective glass. All day every day, mostly white Americans amble slowly past the grave. Some pray, some leave flowers, some take pictures, some say blessings. Some cry, some talk to him.
For white people to worship the dead, create gods of them, is not considered evil. Odd, perhaps, even camp, but not sacrile-

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