American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (22 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 134
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But in voudou nothing is all bad or all good, and in the horror of one thing may lie the glory of another. History is no more a vacuum than is nature. Squash something here and it pops up later, as most colonial powers learned in the nineteenth century, and as the imperial ones did in the twentieth. Even amid wholesale destruction, ideas and cultures have a way of surviving.
I knew, of course, that voudou had survived. I was seeing it all around me. The gods had not given up. They had altered form. In the Caribbean, the orisha had learned to syncretize, to align themselves with Christian deities. Africans who wanted to worship Shango but couldn't under law could pray to a Catholic saint who reminded them of himSt. Barbara. Babalu Aye could be St. Lazarus. Jesus could be Obatala. That was working well. Perhaps prevailing.
Hiding "beneath Mary's skirts," a folk idiom for syncretization, may have begun as camouflage, but in time the orisha showed their real faces. The resultant Afro-Christian hybrids known as santeria, candomble, obeah, macumbe, Shango Baptist and so on became strong evidence that, given the right socioeconomic conditions, voudou could not only cloak itself within Christianity, it could dominate it.
At least in the Caribbean.
In the United States, African voudou was not syncretized, or hybridized, or even sanitized. It was eradicated. The smaller, more closely controlled plantations of the American Bible Belt never gave the orisha a chance to become saints or to create spirit world fusions like those in Cuba or Haiti. Yoruba slaves forced to worship in an icon-hating Baptist Church in Mississippi couldn't praise Oshun by calling her the Blessed Virgin. They had to give her up. They had to give them all up.

 

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As I was seeing with my own eyes, the crushing of voudou in America proved so pervasive that almost all that remains in any indigenous form is hoodoo. In fact, I could not see voudou directly at all. I was observing it as though watching a solar eclipse through a pin-hole in a piece of cardboard, catching nothing more than its reversed shadow on the ground. Even with persistent scrutiny, the best I could make out of the originating shape was voudou's distinct, but ghost-like outline in music, dance, poetry, folk medicine ...
And the church.
That was where American voudou had hiddenin plain sight.
The descendants of the slaves are Christians now, at least in name, but that makes them no less African, no less inclined to seek their leaders in the African way, from those who knew the gods. Even if voudou ritual vanished from slave communities, the ancient emphasis on priests as social leaders has not.
It is true, the leaders are no longer called priests. They do not speak of Elegba or Obatala, and they do not cast the opele or peer through the gut of a sacrificed goat to see the future. It is true that they have abandoned the horsetail whisk and the wooden staff for the Bible, and that their words of praise fly up to Jesus, Mary, and the Lord Jehovah. It is also true that the leaders are now called preachers.
It is true that, as DuBois said, the preachers are the priests.
Not that the modern day preachersor ministers, or reverends, or bishopsthemselves will fully acknowledge their voudou lineage, except perhaps in terms of a vague, scholarly, historical link. That's not what I mean. I mean the preachers are the priests. Directly invested. Unlike the Caribbean model, where syncretization allowed voudou to retain much of its ritual and religious essence, and where the priests could continue to function as such, voudou in America turned political. The priests
became
the preachers.

 

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Lacking the opportunity to function even in a cloaked version, the faith withdrew into the bones of its leaders. The hiding place is almost too good. In Cuba, you may look upon a santeria ceremony or visit a babalawo, and know you are seeing the legacy of voudou. In Haiti even more so. And in America?
Let them talk of Jesus and Mary. Were not preachers the leaders of virtually every struggle for black liberation in American history? Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, even Malcolm Xall based their power on religious vision. Perhaps the religions they invoked were no longer called voudou, but their role among the people was the same: to bind society, to provide a forum for the spirit, to produce leaders, to lead in struggle if necessary.
If the martrydom of Dr. King is seen as deriving from Jesus Christ instead of Ogun, Ochosi, and Obatala, the misconception is but a passing quirk of mortal interpretation. Or so I thought, driving away from the quiet graveyard in Philadelphia, my mind at one with what the snake knows.
1
Saint-Domingue is now called Santo Domingo. The population figures are from Eugene D. Genovese,
From Rebellion to Revolution
, 1979, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, and from various almanacs.
2
Of the many excellent histories and analyses of the role of slave religion in the American experience, the most pertinent to my perspective, and from which I draw heavily here, came from Genovese and Alfred N. Hunt's
Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America,
1988, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
3
See Appendix 2 for an extended discussion of voudou's revolutionary potential.

 

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11
Kindred Spirits, Lingering Foes
I set up a temporary base in Meridian. Instead of constant driving, I thought I'd try a hub and spoke strategy. The small towns and rural roads of southeastern Mississippi teemed with spirits. As usual, I relied on hunchesthe look of houses, the feel of the streets, the tone of the woods. The new strategy had its moments, but also, and far more often, frustrating clots of plodding tedium.
Walking up to total strangers with questions about voudou can be hell on your self-esteem. I'm glad my eyes weren't cameras so I can forget some of the expressions. At one apartment complex I yelled up to two young women in tank tops and shorts on an upstairs balcony at dusk. I couldn't tell if they thought I was flirting or just crazy. They didn't know anything about hoodoosurprisebut suggested I ask those two guys in muscle shirts just leaving in a late model Buick; they had an auntie who did. But the guys didn't know anything either. What they had was pressing business that didn't involve strangers.
Later, traversing a thick Southern pine forest en route to Lake Claude Bennett, it came to me that I wasn't just frustrated, I

 

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was a fool. What was I seeking? The presence of the orisha. And how did one contact the orisha? By "hunches," word-of-mouth suggestions? Wrong. Through prayer and sacrifice. I had performed neither. No wonder my path was so often blocked. A few months earlier, before setting out on this journey, I might have ignored the urge. I would no more have considered asking a supernatural power for aid than rubbed a rabbit's foot or prayed on the Bible. Now I was turning off a Mississippi blacktop with Elegba on my mind.
I drove slowly up a narrow access lane to the lake until, under the canopy of the pine boughs, I spotted a public campground along the shoreline. A few families had pitched tents or parked camper-trailers at one end. I doubted if any of those folks would want to see what this white man was about to do, and I knew I didn't want them to, so I drove on until I found a spot all to myself.
I parked and looked around again to be sure I was alone. I was starting to feel jittery, like I'd had too much caffeine. I'd seen much of voudou, had left memorial offerings and cleaned myself, but this was different. I rummaged around in the rear floorboard until I found my fruit sack and dug out an ear of corn and a banana. I was completely improvising the ceremony. I didn't know any of the real African worship words or real protocol, but I thought I could make a reasonable guess, or at least an honest one. For some reason, it came to me that I should add something from the immediate area to my ersatz offering of fruits. I picked up a pine cone. Then I selected a sturdy young conifer, and arranged the offerings into a kind of pyramid altar at its base. I took a deep breath and knelt before it on one knee.
At once, a cold wave of fear rushed over me. I felt myself smiling, as I always do for some reason in moments of personal danger. For a long, terrible moment, I was wracked by deep, unexpected Christian guilt at bowing to a pagan god. But I

 

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remained kneeling. I was all alone in that clearingjust me and any gods who chose to rip me asunder or transport me to glory. Lorita had said to remember Psalm 23 in times of peril. Just then, I didn't, though I was in some kind of valley of the shadow. By any Christian standards I was blaspheming.
But as quickly as the fear had settled on me, it vanished. Just like that, as fast as the snap of your fingers, I felt as though my spirit had moved on. No apologies, no remorse, no guilt. Chains of whose constrictions and weight I wasn't even aware had snapped. I knew, as I knelt, that my instincts had been good. I was here among friends, not enemies, and certainly not devils. I was still a little nervous, but with anticipation, not dread. I asked the god of the crossroads for help in my search.
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On a nearly deserted southeastern Mississippi state highway between Meridian and Hattiesburg, I passed a cluster of black homes set back from the road, a community without a name. I thought: This looks promising. I should stop here. But I didn't. Instead, I drove a mile farther, into the town of Paulding. As soon as I got there I knew I had made a mistake, had passed something up I shouldn't have. As if the realization required punctuation, abruptly a thundershower fell with such intensity I could barely see. I pulled into a gravel parking lot which turned out to be that of a Catholic Churchthe second oldest in Mississippi, according to a sign. Speaking of signs. I sat in the lot with the windows fogged up and my shirt damp against my skin. Fuck it, I thought, I'm going back.
At the nameless community I took a red dirt lane to a trailer home where I saw a young black man on his plant-laden porch arranging fishing gear. I trotted through the drizzle to ask him about local healers. He said he didn't know anythingbut his wife did. She sat inside watching a TV game show and tending

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