American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (20 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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Elvis's grave, at Graceland, where white America worships the dead.
gious. Conversely, since the landing of the first slave ship in the Caribbean, that form of reverence has been in one way or another prohibited or taboo for Africans. As for their ritual of sacrificeall the altar to an orisha requires is replenishment with fruit, water, candies, from time to time the blood of a fowl or perhaps a goat. Natural and straightforward. The altar of the dead god of commodity culture, on the other hand, requires the ongoing spiritual consumption of thousands a day: humans, in buses, with tickets.
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The Lorraine Motel, 406 Mulberry, isn't far from downtown, surrounded by enclaves of black urban poverty simmering like ongoing affronts to Dr. King's dream. I drove over amid light showers cloaking the hot streets with hazy vapor, blocking the sun just enough to cast a dispiriting grayness over the city.
Sometimes history is forged in banal places. The protective barbed wire fence keeping out vandals couldn't hide the disre-

 

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pair and disrepute into which the motel had been sinking even before it closed for good several years earlier. But wreaths of fresh flowers in front of room 306 on the second floor bore continual witness to the plain brick building's role in American life. But how did it figure in the life of voudou? Graceland was an analogy; The Lorraine was something powerful and direct. Dr. King was standing on the balcony in front of that room when James Earl Ray shot him dead from a window of a rooming house across the street. A preacher had been slain, for preaching. In that violence lay the answer. I didn't have it yet, but soon I would.
It was still possible when I was there to enter a side gate and, with the permission of an on-site caretaker, not used to seeing that many people, to walk up to the second floor. Outside room 306 1 paused to read a plaque on the door bearing a quote from Genesis 37: 1920: ''They said one to another. Behold, here cometh the dreamer ... let us slay him ... and we shall see what will become of his dreams."
Back out on the street I took some pamphlets from Jacqueline Smith, a thirtyish woman sitting under a tent shelter among a mottled row of sidewalk vendors. She'd been living there for over a year, protesting the impending conversion of the motel into the $9.2 million National Civil Rights Museum. Smith's idea was that the motel site should be honored, but as a "living tribute" in the form of a daycare or a drug rehab center, or homeless shelter. Ultimately, Smith was to lose her battle. The museum opened in April 1991.
I ambled around Mulberry for a while, getting drenched. I stared up at room 306 for some time, tried to trace the line of sight back to the killer's flophouse. A homeless black man spinning a red yo-yo walked past me, nodded, and went on to the protest tent. Then he walked off, talking to himself. I glanced up the street. Two white policemen in a patrol car watched me. I hoped they were protecting Ms. Smith, but who knew? Beale Street revival notwithstanding, Memphis was still not dealing

 

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with the King assassination so well. McDonald's had nearly drawn a boycott from the NAACP in January because a sales promotion calendar circulated to sixty-five franchises in the Memphis area listed January 16, the designated date for celebrating Dr. King's birthday, as "National Nothing Day." I sat on the hood of my car while the cops watched.
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In the morning I turned south, vaguely in the direction of Meridian, a fast-growing military base city of about 50,000large for Mississippion the southeast side of the state, near the Alabama border. I wasn't sure how far I'd get before nightfall. By noon I was in Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi. I was always ready to stop if the feeling was right. But I didn't get the feeling.
Tupelo wasn't my town either. Less pretentious than Oxford, but a little too much on the hustle. So I thought maybe I would get all the way down to Meridian after all. About an hour away, at Philadelphia, I turned off the main highway for some coffee. It was a classic small town; winding, tree-lined hills, a traditional city square, a tacky retail strip out on the main highway, a gas station where the locals hung out. But it had the feeling.
There was more than one black neighborhood, of course, as there was more than one white, and I cruised until I came up a gentle hill onto a plateau of modest frame and brick homes with freshly mown yards, scattered tricyles and plenty of shade trees. I glided slowly up and down the quiet streets until I saw a middle-aged black woman standing in her yard. I parked and approached her deferentially, smiling, offering my business card, lamenting the heata normal Southern introduction. I told her I was looking for old people who knew about folk medicines. She didn't know anything about that, of course, but there was an old woman up King street who did. I thanked her and walked up to a tidy,

 

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two-bedroom frame house. It took some knocking, but at last Miss Eddie Lee Mason answered.
Half-Choctaw, her nut-brown cheekbones accentuated by gray hair pulled back into a tight bun, she was in her mid-eighties and now lived alone as a widow. She was cautious at first, but when she saw that some of her neighbors were watching, she said it would be okay if I stayed in sight on the screened sitting porch. It was nearly two hours before I left. I was beginning to find out that although many people didn't want to talk about voudou, when they did, they wanted to tell everything they knew.
"All that used to be bad way back yonder," she said. "People in the old days could get you down just by putting something down. You didn't even have to be near it."
Her most vivid memory reached back to early childhood, when her own mother had gotten "down." Miss Eddie's daddy
Miss Eddie Lee Mason, Philadelphia, Mississippi.

 

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earned extra money calling breakdowns at "frolics." At one dance, a stranger took an interest in Miss Eddie's momma and tried to follow up. She spurned him, and he vowed revenge. First, the family's house caught fire, nearly trapping one of Miss Eddie's sisters, who tried to run back in for a china doll. After that, Miss Eddie's mother took ill. Every time she walked down to the pea patch, she got faint and had to be carried home. The father called the doctor, who could find nothing wrong.
The illness continued. Some of the older people in the area concluded Miss Eddie's momma had been hoodooed. They reasoned that since her illness occurred when she went to the pea patch, something along the route must be responsible. Miss Eddie's daddy searched the area. Finally, looking at a log footbridge over an irrigation ditch, he found "something," possibly a small bagshe never found out what it was or what it had contained.
"The older people told poppa to tell momma to cross further down from then on," Miss Eddie said, rocking slightly in her chair, absorbed in memory of the old days. "And somebody told momma to wear two silver dimes around her left ankle. As long as my momma lived she wore it. She never crossed at that place no more, and she never got sick again."
Sometimes the hexing could backfire. Two of Miss Eddie's neighbors, one married, one not, had been locked in a triangle over the husband of the former. To save her marriage, the wife went to a root woman known to make poisonous hexes out of snake scales. The root woman gave the wife a handful of the scales and told her to crumble them into a glass of whiskey, then serve it to her husband's paramour. Something went wrong, however, and the wife accidentally drank the hoodooed potion herself. Apparently, it was effective. When the wife was found, "She had a spoon in her mouth and she'd chewed her tongue up with fits." Eventually, Miss Eddie said, a snake grew in the wrathful wife's stomach and she died.

 

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I listened with what I hoped was not obvious skepticism. Hoodoo was full of these kinds of snake stories. I've never been sure if the symbolism derives from unconscious ties to the cosmic voudou serpent, Dambada Wedo, or to the Bible, but I rarely met or heard of a hoodoo man or root doctor who hadn't seen a snake growing in or out of a body. In one case, I was told that a snake had burst right out of a woman's big toe, "and after that you never saw her barefoot." Nonetheless, it seemed likely that there must have been at least some basis for the accounts. For example, there is a type of tropical parasitic worm that attaches itself to the bones in your ankle and works its way up the femur; a remedy I had seen in a medical text when I was in the Army was to dig out the tail of the worm through the ankle hole, wind it around a matchstick, and twist the worm out bit by bit. That could be a snake growing out of a foot.
Similarly, a glass with snake scales might, like the legendary zombi potions in Haiti, also contain some other pharmacologically active ingredients. The scales of a snake are not necessarily toxic, in fact are unlikely to be so, but if those scales are mixed in with a real toxin, for example tetradotoxin, a poison common in certain types of toadssaid by Wade Davis in
The Serpent and the Rainbow
to be the practice in Haitithen you'd have a drop-dead Mickey Finn. But the idea of the magic coming from a serpent is altogether more terrifying than saying it's from a frogor a mushroom, or a plant, or fish, or any other of the plentiful natural sources of lethal chemicals. Hoodoo, like any kind of hexing, is a magic of the mind.
Miss Eddie has just begun to tell me about a phony root doctor who came around during World War II using his "cures" to seduce women when we are interrupted by a black deputy sheriff dropping by on his lunch hour. No reason, he said, looking me over good, he just wanted to be sure she was okay. She told me she had lots of friends who checked in on her now that she's on her own. But she didn't want to live with relatives or in some

 

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nursing home. She'd lived in that house since 1926, birthed all eight children by her two late husbands, there. It was her home, her life; it was her memories. She drifted off into some of them, such as the time her son came back from the Air Force with a white friend from the service in the fifties and they got thrown out of a segregationist cafe, and later got the cafe declared off-limits to servicemen by the Pentagon, effectively forcing it out of business.
And then, she said, there was the civil rights trouble.
I could feel my head jerk up as if I'd been shot through with lightning. Of course. That's where I wasPhiladelphia, Mississippi! I was so absorbed in looking for hoodoo I hadn't realized that the place I'd been drawn to on the way to Meridian was ground zero for Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, who had been hijacked and executed on a lonely highway one summer night in 1964 by Ku Klux Klan thugs. The bodies of the three young idealists, two white and one black, were eventually found buried in an earthen dam, following an intensive FBI manhunt. Although the killers drew only light sentences, national outrage was so intense it helped recruit thousands of young white activists to the civil rights cause, gave great moral fervor to black organizations, and, it could be argued, was one of the racist outrages that influenced Congress to pass the remainder of President Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation.
What Miss Eddie remembered of that time was being very afraid, for herself and for her children. When one of them came home with an NAACP lapel pin she "beat and beat" on it till it couldn't be worn. "Whites were shooting at coloreds and coloreds were shooting back." Then the stores stopped selling ammunition, at least to blacks. It was a time when she found out a white man she liked was in the Klan and churches were burned and bombed and when she was afraid to shop for groceries because NAACP black activists knocked the bags from her arms if she

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