American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (23 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 140
an infant. I took a chair at the coffee table. These days, she said, people around here usually went to see Sister Plummer, over in Heidelberg, or Mother Adell, who had gone to Raleigh.
Tracing Mother Adell was tracing a spirit itself. As with Mother Butler in Ruston, I could find nothing of her except a memory. At last, at a service station in Raleigh, one of the mechanics lolling against a tool shed drinking RC told me I was probably looking for Sister Marks, who used to be around. He didn't really know about her, but the station manager did. When I asked him, he frowned, "Why you want to see her? She done hoodooed everybody and skipped out of here one night." Walking back to my car I passed two local black men who'd overheard the conversation and said if I was looking for a hoodoo what I really needed to do was go to Laurel. Sister Mary, that's where everyone went now.
Before adding any more names to the list, I decided to run over to Heidelberg to see if Sister Plummer existed. There wasn't much of a crowd along the two-block main street, but a couple of oldtimers on the corner drinking from brown paper bags seemed open to the questions of wandering writers. The first man didn't know of Sister Plummer, of course, but, passing the bottle, said his friend did. The friend took a short swig and said that was true. When I asked where she was he said he couldn't give me the directions but if I'd give him a ride he'd just show me. We made our way up a hilly road past a farm equipment store and turned into a driveway for a house and a converted trailer. "That's where she is," he said. I parked next to the trailer and he walked over to the house to join a group of his buddies drinking beer. They all waved.
Sister Plummer wore purple culottes and a purple blouse, had curlers in her hair and was frying chicken for lunch. A thirty-eight-year-old black woman, with Asian-Indian blood from her mother's side, she had been brought up in the Holiness church,

 

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Sister Plummer's house, rear, Heidelberg, Mississippi.
a fundamentalist Protestant denomination. We sat at her kitchen table while a teenage son took care of a younger child and watched TV. She said she knew people called her a hoodoo woman but she really only counseled, mostly women and mostly about love, though she also gave readings using the Bible. She felt she had psychic abilities.
Her line on hoodoo was not far from Sarah Albritton's: "It's just like it is with sin. You either for God and have faith in God or you're in with the Devil." It was true, "people with weak minds" did come to see her, thinking they had been fixed, but she considered them more with pity than concern. "If you believe and have faith and trust, how you gonna believe someone can hurt you? That mean you really don't trust God.''

 

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I asked if business were good. She said it was mostly drop-in clientele, and not that much of it. There wasn't a fee, but people usually left something as a gratuity. She laughed. "But if they left a lot I wouldn't be living in no trailer park."
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In Laurel, a sleepy railroad town of 21,000 just above the boot heel, I tried to find Sister Mary. It didn't take long; she advertised. But as soon as I saw the characteristic red out-turned palm on the big sign in her front yard, not far from the airport, I regretted having made the drive. Nothing ventured nothing gained, I parked in the driveway next to a half-dozen late model pickups, probably belonging to clients.
A graying white woman, possibly part-American Indian, barely opened the front porch door. I had to introduce myself like some kind of vacuum cleaner salesman. She gave me a cold once over. I showed her a business card, elaborated a little more, and requested a brief interview. When that failed, I asked for a reading at her regular rates. "Maybe next time," she said, closing the door in my face. I left and swore I'd never visit another palm reader.
But Laurel looked to me like a hoodoo town, and I remembered one of the friends of Reverend Buckley, the two-headed man back in Ruston, saying he'd grown up near Laurel and that there was plenty of hoodooing. So I drove around, past Depression-era storefronts downtown and pre-fab retail strips on the highway. Clearly, the place I had to go was across the tracks.
The town instantly descended into ghetto. Unpaved streets, uncollected trash. Many of the homes, from turn-of-the-century farm houses with the farms long gone, to tarpaper shacks, seemed abandoned. Broken windows and rusty cars everywhere. Each time I went up to a house where someone lived I was utterly rebuffed by walls of silence and suspicion.

 

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Further efforts seemed hopeless so I got back in my car and was driving away when I passed a taxi stand/barbecue jointnot a bad entrepreneurial idea. I needed a lead and sandwich, so I decided to take a chance on both. The dispatcher, a large man cooling in front of a rotary desk fan, suggested if I wanted to find "spiritual healers" I'd be better off trying the "other colored town" down past the fork near the railroad underpass. The chopped pork I could get right there. I took some with me.
I eventually found the place he meant, a modest black working class area of shotgun style houses and narrow, but paved, streets. I'd gone down about two blocks when the deluge resumed. Exasperated and cranky, maybe from hunger, I pulled over to the side and ate, and waited. From time to time I rubbed condensation from the windows to see, but what was there to see? Noah had better weather. I slumped back in the seat. My luck, if any, seemed to be stretching awfully thincould it be Elegba was sporting with me? The Divine Trickster was known for that. He kept you in line. Humble.
Then, as fast as it had turned on, the faucet turned off. The late afternoon sun popped out and the steaming streets were alive with children, dogs, cats, caterpillars and everything else in creation pent up by the storms. Directly across the street, several couples in their twenties emerged from a green frame house to fire up a charcoal grill. They were drinking beer and unwinding from the workday. I felt bad about carping about Elegba. Maybe he was going to give me a break after all. I walked over through the drizzle to introduce myself. Maybe they thought anyone going to that much trouble ought to be heard out, or maybe they were especially convivial from the beer, but they invited me up on the front porch.
All of them had heard hoodoo tales but nobody admitted to believing in hexes: "It don't work unless you got a weak mind," said the handsome, muscular man in a gimme cap tending the

 

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charcoal, echoing Sister Plummer. "I got a strong mind." His wife, a pretty woman in a red striped T-shirt, said hoodooing wasn't all that common, really, though she did recall one man she knew who'd gotten very sick because his girlfriend had been fixing him by putting menstrual blood in his food. The husband and the other two men on the porch nodded; they remembered that. Other than that no one knew anything about hoodoos or root doctors. But they knew someone who did.
"Go talk to Miss Maidie," said the man with the strong mind. "She can tell you about it. She's been around here a long time." He pointed to a house three doors down. I could barely see it because of thick bushes and plants growing all around the front screen porch.
Miss Maidie was shelling snap beans into a bowl when I walked up, but quickly put her labors down to open the door, glad to have company. A small woman in her mid-eighties, with light chocolate skin and hair so gray it seemed to have been powdered, she bore the signs of a long-past beauty; like Miss Eddie, she also was part Choctaw. Pointing to a chair next to her own on the small wooden porch, she invited me to sita welcome invitation not only because of the chance to talk but because it had started sprinkling again.
She said I was wasting my time if I wanted to ask her about voudou because she didn't know much about it. I believed her, but I had learned to put disclaimers in context. Like Uncle Clem, Miss Maidie wouldn't have known an African god from apple juice, but she, too, had lived her entire life influenced by the unacknowledged traditions of such gods. Clem had stories of farm life and home remedies; hers were of a natural way of eating. "What makes us sick today is the food we eating," she told me. "It's all that fertilizer. When I was growing up we didn't have that. Now you get sick from buying food at the store." She pointed out a half-dozen plants, tomatoes to parsley, she maintained in her front yard.

 

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I smiled, thinking of the "new" natural food stores. Black people, especially in the South, have long based their lives around a vegetable-heavy diet, and shunned store-bought ingredients. Down-home cooking, or soul food, is really based on purposeful combinations of home-grown produce or livestock. Poverty has altered that wholesome, natural diet, especially for those in the cities, who have come to rely on cheap starches and drive-through junk, leading in turn to a high incidence of heart disease, obesity and related problems. Older African Americans, at least the ones like Miss Maidie, who haven't been trampled beyond repair, still think of food as "good for you" in the most fundamental sense. The white society which once enslaved them has not yet poisoned them. Like the Rastafarians of the Caribbean, they have stayed close to the earth, which they can trust, and which is, as the ancient priests of voudou knew, the source of mortal power and health.
It had gotten into twilight by the time we finished talking. I decided to drive back to Meridian for the evening. En route, the June rain turned to pelting sheets. The radio talked about tornadoes in Alabama, which wasn't that far away. I got stuck behind a line of pickups and we slowed to ten mph, barely able to see through the downpour. Chunks of pine branches blew out of the forest to litter the highway. Tornado bank clouds of black and green rolled up, filled with lightning flashes.
I didn't quite outrun it. I got back to my motel tired, wet and hungry. Talking to Miss Maidie had deterred me from grabbing a quick greaseburger en route. Another Sarah's Kitchen would've been perfect but I was too exhausted to look for one, so settled on a Thai restaurant called Faraway Places, only four blocks down. I sat at the bar, studying the many Buddhist statues and altars along the walls. Kind of unusual in Missisippi. I said so to the owner, a Thai woman named Tim, as she took my order for lemon grass soup. She laughed and said she was aware of that. We talked a little, and I asked if she knew anything about voudou.

 

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She said she just knew it had something to do with spirits in Africa. I asked if she thought it was satanic. She shook her head. People told her the same thing about Buddhism all the time. She said there were many different ways of believing, and to her, voudou was just one more. It didn't bother her. She was the first person I had met of any gender, race or nationality for whom the mention of voudou did not trigger even the remotest unease.
Just as I was feeling good about that, a thirty-ish blonde holding a highball glass came up to stand next to me. She and her husbandtheir khaki, madras and loafers marked them as Southern gentryhad been eavesdropping from the corner of the bar. She said she was interested in voudou but didn't I know it really
was
a form of satanism? I said that was the kind of remark I'd expect from a Baptist. She laughed aggressively. She was no Baptist. She was Catholic. She turned away and ambled slowly back to her husband, who had just punched in a Jimmy Buffet song at the jukebox.
That night I slept fitfully, thoughts of Buddha, the orisha, of philosophers and poets, and thoughts of Tim's curvy beauty and even thoughts about the blonde's legs, Southern nights being what they are, but mostly thoughts of how and what and why I was where I was. If Elegba was helping me, was this the best I could look foward to?
Some time later, a professor of anthropology challenged me to justify my meanderings. He wanted an empirical methodology. I understood his need, but the spirit world is immune, even hostile, to systematic inquiry. Paradigmatic research produces paradigmatic truths. That is, if you know what you're looking for, you'll certainly find it. So, yes, I was inefficient, random, foolish. Truly, these faults weighed on me. But the hunt was taking its own shape. Voudou in America: So close I could breathe it; so chimerical it evaporated like that same breath on a mirror.
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