American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (21 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 127
bought from white merchants. The most dangerous area, she said, was "across the tracks."
I said goodbye, and drove over.
The poverty was worse than I had seen in Memphis. Among these same semi-paved streets and clapboard houses, Klan nightriderscarloads of beer-drinking, redneck bigots, winked at by local policehad tried to stop the civil rights movement through relentless terrorism. The churches and homes they left in rubble and flames had long since been rebuilt or razed; nonetheless it felt like entering a former war zone, and my color marked me as the enemy.
I spotted a group of old men under a shade tree drinking wine from a paper bag. They were friendly, but they had been on the hard life too longa couple were drifters from farther east. I felt awkward and out of place not so much because of my white skin, but my clean clothes and car. Before I left, though, one of the men, a thin waif of a man with yellow teeth and torn, dusty brown trousers, told me of a hoodoo woman on a nearby street, and pointed the way.
I drove up a gentle hill to a cluster of small stores, mostly boarded up, on what had once been the main street of "colored town." I approached a group of men and women in their twenties enduring the afternoon heat by relaxing in the shade, drinking beer. Children played on the porch of an abandoned store. One of the men said he'd heard of a hoodoo woman in town and thought I'd find her a few streets farther along. I followed his directions to an asphalt street deeper into the ghetto, but all I found was an extremely old womanI guessed she could have been 100sitting alone on the porch of a brick HUD house. She wore a yellow and red head scarf and brightly colored patchwork skirt. When I got close, I could see a milky film over her eyes. I'm not sure if she really heard my words, or could see me, but either way she said she couldn't help.

 

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On the way back to the railroad track demarcation line, I stopped at an intersectiona crossroadsabutting an incongruously suburban one-story brick building with a white steeple. A sign identified it as the Mt. Zion Baptist Church. It looked new, I later learned, because the original church had been blown up by the Klan. The parking lot was emptyit was a weekdayand the yard needed trimming. I almost drove away before I noticed, in a grassy patch near one wing, a gray tombstone with what appeared to be three photos along the top rim. I decided to have a closer look. The use of photos, as well as pieces of glass or tin foil or other shiny objectsconsidered by art historians to be based on African traditionis not uncommon in black cemeteries. But art wasn't what I found. It was the grave of the three civil rights workers.
Of course. Shunned even by white morticians, where else could Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner have been buried but in a black church yard? For all the heroism of their lives, and
Gravestone for slain civil rights workers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner,
Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Philadelphia, Mississippi.

 

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historic impact of their martyrdom, their gravesite, somewhat like the Lorraine Motel, was practically a local secret. Millions had journeyed to see where Elvis lay; I wondered if a single Graceland visitor had even considered paying homage to those who had died here.
I leaned against my car. It was wrong. It was all wrong.
I decided to make an offering. I didn't have anything except the fruit and vegetables I now routinely kept for cleaning, but they would do. I set two ears of corn and an orange at the base of the headstone, near two pots of white flowers. Then I made a silent prayerI guess it was a prayer. I didn't ask for anything. What to request? Justice? Equality? Vengeance? I looked at the three photos, crossed myself and drove back through the crossroads.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
That the path of voudou crossed the path of racial struggle was no more an accident than my repeated stumblings across the juncture. Many writersThomas Gray, William Wordsworth, for examplehave come to their senses among the tombs of the dead. In Philadelphia, I realized I had, too. The synthesis I had been seeking in some corner of my mind now seemed so apparent I couldn't believe it had ever been opaque. Except that it flew in the face of everything my culture had taught me. Except that linking voudou with black liberation bordered on the taboo.
Yet it was undeniable. The long, incessant attack on voudou, from pulpit to newspaper, from university to statehouse, was not simply a reaction against foreign gods. Other, stranger, religions have survived here, even prosperedMormons, Amish, cults such as the Oneidans, Shakers, for example. But those belief systems did not arrive with slaves. They might have been different, and often were markedly at odds with mainstream

 

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America, but they were not black. Nor were they revolutionary. Voudou in America was never anything else.
Although it now seems difficult to imagine, the true religion of the slaves was once the most subversive and feared ideology in the New World. As the quantity of Africans in the colonial New World began to swell in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so did concerns about revolt. On the eve of the Civil War, the 1860 census listed 3.9 million slaves in the South and 8.1 million whites, making slaves about thirty-three percent of the population, though the numbers seem likely to have been undercounted. But in the major states, the proportion of blacks was significantly higher: Fifty-five to fifty-seven percent in South Carolina and Mississippi; forty-seven percent in Louisiana; forty-five percent in Alabama; forty-four percent in Georgia; thirty-one percent in Virginia. In the Caribbean basin the ratio was almost improbable: ninety percent in British Guiana, eighty percent or more in Haiti, Saint-Domingue and many other islands, and probably that high in Brazil.
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Control of slaves became an ongoing obsession of the plantation societies. The well-known cruelties, the Black Codes, the very cultural and moral tone of colonial culture but attest to the bulwark of fear in white society.
Nor were the fears unfounded. The United States alone generated at least nine major revolts or conspiracies, principally: New York City, 1712; Stono, South Carolina, 1739; Point Coupée Parish, Louisiana, 1795; Richmond, Virginia (Gabriel Prosser), 1800; St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, 1811; Charleston, South Carolina (Denmark Vesey), 1822; Southampton County, Virginia (Nat Turner), 1831. In the Caribbean basin, where conditions were even more brutal, but also more remote, large-scale plantation work units increased isolation from whites, and diminished security. Outbreaks were incessant. Bahia, Dominica and Jamaica were so volatile that bands of runaway slaves

 

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known as maroons, or dreadswere able to escape into remote terrain and live as permanent guerillas.
Despite the frequency and pervasiveness of the New World uprisings, the results rarely varied, especially in the southern United States. Rebels were whipped, hanged, shot, drawn and quartered. The spontaneous and ill-led St. John the Baptist Parish revolt, in which 500 or so slaves marched on New Orleans, was perhaps the bloodiest in the U. S., stemmed by U. S. troops and local militia. Nearly seventy of the mutinous African slaves were killed in the battle and many more executedsevered heads were mounted on pikes all along the road to New Orleans. The symbolism of the butchery was not just for the benefit of the Africansmass decapitation had a way of making revolt seem manageable to white society.
But against all the failed insurrections was the shockingto colonial powers and slave-owners everywheresuccess at St. Domingue (Santo Domingo), now known as Haiti. Beginning in 1792, slaves from the maze-like hill country and rural plantations on the western side of the island of Hispaniola began a bloody twelve-year rebellion against Spanish, English and French expeditionary forces, and defeated them all. Spurred by the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who perished at French hands before the final victory, the rebels in 1804 proclaimed the Free Republic of Haiti, the first and only independent black nation in the New World. The defeat so disturbed Napoleon, who lost 60,000 men, that he gave up on a planned expedition to the Lower Mississippi Valley, subsequently under-selling valuable French holdings to the U. S. government: the Louisiana Purchase.
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Panic and backlash spread throughout the American South. Haitiansslaves or citizens; black, white or creolewere refused entry into the major seaports of the U. S. coast. Even Cuban slaves who had once been in Haiti were barred from

 

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American auction blocks. Everything Haitian was bad news. Haiti was the worst thing that could happen. The blacks had risen against their white masters, and destroyed them. At least one of the black leaders of the St. John's revolt, Charles Deslondes, was a free mulatto from Saint-Domingue.
But there was another element to the spectre of black vengeance and victoryless tangible, more disturbing. Voudou priestshoungans and m'ambos, had played critical roles in the Haitian revolt, recruiting and rallying fellow Africans who, even after several generations, continued to look to priests as community and social leaders. To anyone knowledgeable in African culture, the involvement of voudou was ominous. African slaves, almost all of whom came from a contiguous area along the western coast, had lived for centuries in the theocratic tradition. All laws, all ethics, all morality, all social conduct derived from religion. Priests were communal leaders, often kings, and kings were the vestibules of the gods.
If the voudou priests had become active in Haiti, and if Haitian slaves had succeeded, where the other rebels had failed, then any slave society with vast numbers of unassimilated Africansno real contact or interaction with the culture of their masterswas in serious danger. As the South proved, the converse was also true. Any society which had co-opted its slaves had already made it impossible for them to break out.
The plantation economy in the South was far different from that in the Caribbean, resulting in smaller work units and closer supervision. Instead of being left to their own devices and beliefs, rarely even seeing their colonial overlords, as was the case in the islands and Latin America, the North American slaves were drawn to the very bosom of Southern life. In that bosom, they were, like Miss Eddie's grandmother, converted to ''the religion of the master." In the antebellum South, slaves became Christians at a rate estimated by the influential, pro-slavery jour-

 

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nal
Debow's Review
to be five times higher than anywhere else in the world.
Direct repression of the slaves' real religionvoudoufurther enhanced the binding of Africans to the culture of the masters. Every law forbidding dancing, singing or drumming, forbidding social gatherings, even at Christian services, put Africa at more distance, brought slaves more into the fold. In the fold, they came to believe they shared an interest with their captors: Christianity. It would be entirely missing the point to see this process of conversion, coupled with repression, as a matter of saving souls. It was an issue of military and political security.
Slaves allowed to practice their own religion could not be so easily disoriented, deprived of leaders, shorn of purpose. They would not be plantation zombis, working like cattle, their spirits stolen along with their gods, but would be instead African prisoners of wartemporarily held under force of arms. As prisoners, not slaves, they would constantly be thinking of escape and revolt. Through the common culture of voudou, they could communicate one plantation to another, even one colony to another. They might find a religious bond that stretched from the cotton fields of Texas to those of Virginia, the swamps of Brazil to the tobacco and sugar plantations of Cuba. They might find the strength and will to resistsuccessfullyand even to overthrow the white minority, perhaps carve new nation-states in the New World to which they'd been hijacked.
Just as in Haiti.
And then suppose the African usurpersno longer slaves but a full-scale, disciplined force of armed warriors numbering in the millions and occupying huge swaths of the Americasforged an alliance with opportunistic European powers, or with the white working classes also suffering under colonialism and mercantilism?
Class war. Holy war. Hemispheric revolution.
A world we will never know.
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