American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (25 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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used dogs and cattle prods and fire hoses on marchers and the name Selma was synonymous for violent bigotry. Watching the people come and go on the sidewalks outside the small cafe where I sat, I felt my anger and frustration dissolve. I stopped feeling contemptuous toward Miss Patsy. I remembered what a voudou priest once said to me: "It's true, some of these people working out there might not have the knowledge or even be aware of the spiritthey don't know any of the orishas or anythingbut that doesn't mean the orisha aren't working through them."
"We have a saying among the Yoruba," he had said. "Those people that are born in it, those that are selected for it, and those people who out of their own desire would like to be part of itthe most effective are those who are born in it."
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The next fifty miles of highway, the one the protest marches had taken, led to Montgomery, where the young Martin Luther King, Jr., had preached from the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The highway became a traffic-clogged artery leading past suburban shopping malls into the antebellum gentility that is the capital of Alabama and at least a sentimental holdout of the Old Confederacy. The Stars and Bars flew at the Capitol.
I had a fast-food lunch near the capitol complex downtown and used the pay phone to call the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group which specializes in suits against hate groups. I had thought perhaps someone over there might know of a possible lead in the area. I wasn't expecting much, but I did expect at least to be able to visit. I couldn't. The telephone receptionist, quite politely, refused to tell me how to find the Center. Nor would she make an appointment for me with the director, attorney Morris Dees. Finally she told me it would be better not to come over at all, as I wouldn't be admitted.
I said, "What is this, Beirut?"

 

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"You never know who might come over," she said. "Our old building got bombed."
I tried to visit anyway, and she was right, I couldn't get past the electronically locked entry doors. I remembered Julia Mae Haskins worrying about having dinner with a white man. This was three decades after Rosa Parks ignited the twentieth-century civil rights movement by refusing to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus.
The fear remained, and remained righteous. For a slave religion to have survived it in any form was evidence of a valor and steadfastness that reduced my critiques of hoodoo authenticity to Monday morning quarterbacking. I drove away eastward toward the Georgia border humbled and awed, and also a little sad. There was too much to learn, too much already gone.

 

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12
Crossing the Line
The relentless rain that had dogged me had been no stranger to Atlanta, either. A curtain of gray steam, punctuated here and there by torrential cloudbursts, almost obscured the downtown skyline as I came in from Montgomery. The Georgia capital felt much better to me than had the one in Alabama. Here, blacks had moved into positions of real power, politically and socially. Legions of unsolved problems remained, as they do in every American city, but on the whole, Atlanta was known as a progressive town, a magnet for ambitious young people, black and white. The colonial and antebellum gentility of the older parts of the city often segued into the upscale shopping villages and refurbished homes of the city's yuppie contingents in the north and east. Along with Dallas, Atlanta was the hot place to be in the New Plantation Economy.
I had come to find two voudou priests. Not hoodoo men or root doctors. The real thing. I longed to be back among the true believers. I missed my conversations with Ava Kay Jones, priestess of Oya. I missed my visits with Lorita Mitchell, priestess of Oshun. It was time to accelerate my movement into the true

 

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world of the orisha. I wanted to know more of the complex Ifa divination system, its name derived from the god who bestowed it, of the ritual of voudou life and practice, of the intricacies of the theology. I missed the gods.
The two priests I had come to see were cousins, Panamian-born but U. S. residents for years. The older, Baba Oshun Kunle, was a babalawo, the highest priestly order in voudou, interpreter of Ifa. The other, Baba Tunde, was a priest of Obatala. I had originally met them in New Orleans, where they had flown in to give readings for a weekit is a common practice among priests to maintain a clientele in various cities. We'd had a pleasant conversation in the patio garden behind Ava Kay's botanica, Jambalaya, and they had offered to see me if I ever got to Georgia.
Approaching the southwestern Atlanta neighborhood where they lived, I thought I must have had the directions mixed up. A busy, ugly exit off the interstate descended pitilessly into a blighted tract of duplexes and apartments grisled with corner liquor stores and tough guys hanging out looking for action. It seemed to me the two priests had a good business and could have done better for themselves. And then I considered the nature of their business. Practicing voudou priests would be noticed, but in a bad area, nobody cared what you did for a living. Even the black middle class was a long way from accepting voudou as a valid option, and it would scare hell out of most New Age white people, who probably wouldn't live in integrated parts of town anyway.
I turned right at the street name I'd marked on my map and the scenery got a little better. Weekly rentals with underpowered window units and beer bottles in the yards gave way to sturdy, almost stately wooden homes on sprawling lots full of moss-covered trees. Probably a turn-of-century neighborhood that had hit the skids and, looked at in the right way, might be rebounding. Then I spotted the spacious, robin's egg-blue two-story house Baba Tunde had described.

 

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Rear view, home of Baba Oshun Kunle and Baba Tunde, Atlanta, Georgia.
I parked and walked under droopy oaks still dripping from the rain to the chain link fence gate at the side"where the clients go." As soon as I saw the back yard I could see that the unassuming front really was a façadethe action was all in the opposite direction. How voudou-like. What you see is the reverse of what you get. The yard was about a quarter of a football field deep, covered on each side by trees and fence. A driveway connecting to an alley ran the length of the left side. An old sedan was parked up close to a small concrete patio near the house. Most of the right half of the yard was given over to a garden, laden with vegetables and herbs, and a stock pen, filled with pigeons, chickens and goats. Everything was flooded.
Breaching the gate, I stepped rock to rock through ankle-deep puddles toward the two screen doors at the back of the house. The one on the right was at the top of an exterior wooden staircase, and most likely led to the upstairs living area. The other seemed to be the entry to some sort of basement, perhaps

 

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Basement of Atlanta home. Marcus Garvey Centennial poster on wall. Ibeji
ikenesses on top shelf. Pies and pastries on table for bimbé.
an office. I was pretty sure it was for me. The lower door was partly open, but I thought it best not to just walk in, so I knocked and waited. Presently I heard the mellifluous Caribbean tones of Baba Tunde. When he saw me he smiled broadly and, apologizing for the effects of the rain, showed me into a spartan waiting room.
In Yoruba, "baba tunde" means "grandfather returns," and one thus born is considered to bear the traits of his ancestor. Baba Tunde had been born within twenty-four hours of the death of Baba Kunle's grandfather, and in the same hospital. That not only bound the two cousins, but, according to Tunde, accounted for his psychic sensibilities. He listed himself on his business card as both a priest and a "trance medium," although, strictly speaking, the latter wasn't voudou nomenclature. I think he thought it would be something clients could more easily comprehend. And "trance medium" sounded more professional than saying he was easily possessed by spirits of the dead.

 

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Water had collected in sloshy pools where the floor slanted down, but the second-hand sofa and coffee table were dry. Glancing around what reminded me, oddly, of a graduate student's living room, I noticed a statue of the Ibeji on a metal bookshelf. Also several earthen and wooden pots, and a sign that said, "Prosperity." A shakeree lay on a chair. A discount stereo unit was tuned to a classical station. Among the wall posters was a Senegalese print celebrating the Marcus Garvey Centennial (18871987).
Baba Tunde explained that he had to go back upstairs because he and Baba Kunle were seeing a client, a mortician from Alabama, who had been there all morning. Besides that, he said, tomorrow they were traveling to Jamaica and had to pack. He asked if I could wait, apologized again about the flooding, and excused himself. An hour later, when he returned, apologizing for the delay, he told me that he and his cousin had decided the best way to start our visit was for me to have a reading. It would cost $35. This was slightly unexpected, but I agreed. Later I would learn that an up-front reading with a stranger was virtually de rigeur among priests. It was, if nothing else, a way to screen unwelcome or untruthful visitorscops, for example.
Baba Tunde led me down a white hallway to a maze of other rooms in the lower level. We passed several orisha altars before ducking under a white hanging drape into an all-white ceremonial chamber the size of a small bedroom. A white sheet had been stretched across one corner behind a slim white statue, stylized as an old man, representing Obatala, to whom the room was consecrated. Because the deity is revered for wisdom and intellect, his priests often become arrogant. But there is no justification for it in the religion itself. All the orisha have different qualities, and none is considered "superior" to the othersexcept Olorun, the supreme being.
There wasn't much in the room other than the motif of purity. A low wooden table toward one side held a clear bowl,

 

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candles, a photograph of an unidentified man, and eight glasses of water. A plain mat of woven grass, the kind you can buy for the beach, was positioned opposite a single wicker chair. Between the chair and mat was a shallow basket for cowrie shells and next to that a small bowl of water, some sea shells and small stones.
Baba Tunde offered me the chair, and sat himself cross-legged on the mat at my feet. He began the reading by asking me to fold the $35 and hold it in my right hand. As I did, he began the invocation to the orisha, speaking in the Yoruba language. He then instructed me to put my money on a tray, and gave me a stone and a shell to shake in my cupped hands. After that I took one object in each hand and made a fist, enclosing each. Baba Tunde proceeded to throw the sixteen cowriesthe principal divining instrument of a babalorisha, or iyalorisha, father or mother of the spirits, respectively, a senior priest one rung lower than a babalawo. According to legend, the cowrie secrets were obtained by Oshun through seduction of her husband, Ifa. She had complained that iyalorisha were not permitted to cast with the palm nuts (ikin) or chain (opele) used by male babalawos and thus could not share the secrets of divination. Ifa relented to her charms and imparted his secrets, but only if she restricted their use to the cowries (caracoles in santeria), leaving the opele and ikin exclusively for the powerful, cliquish, and territorial babalawos. In a way, Oshun became a feminist hero of voudou mythology.
Baba Tunde made several throws. I could see by the expression on his face that the reading was not going well for me. He saw waves, he said; he saw difficulties. He marked the odu figures, determined by how many shells in each cast fell ''face up" or "face down," in a spiral notebook, and then leaned back against the wall.
Because he was also a trance medium, Baba Tunde frequently dropped into a possessed state. As though speaking from

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