American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (26 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 162
another body, as the psychic Margaret had done, he began to tell me of problems within my family about which I had told him nothing. He knew of this, he said, because of a spirit which had been speaking very strongly through the readingthe spirit of my father. Baba Tunde's eyelids opened as the trance passed. Perusing his notebook, he returned to the exegesis of the shells.
I was "very close" to Obatala, he said, and should consider his ways. "His pace is very slow. He takes care of things one at a time. You study the snail. It takes its time in its moves. If there's going to be danger, the snail is going to stop. He's going to think before he makes a move. So that any time you make a move it's a sure move. Your reading is speaking strongly of Obatala. He is one of the forces that is close to you.
"You have to thank Obatala for making it possible for you to be receptive, to be allowed in different houses and to meet the people that you have met. It's not a coincidence ... and it's very unusual. It's very seldom you see white folks seeking the knowledge. Somewhere back there your ancestors had some connection with this."
He stopped, as if something had come to him. "In some time another way back, in some incarnation, you was black. You understand? And it happened to be you came into this incarnation. That's why that spirit is there. It's speaking of a black female spirit that is there, that was into all of these things, a black woman, a black spirit. It could be many generations back, you was a black woman who used to deal in this, was a priest but used to deal in this. And you come into this existence as a white person and you don't understand the attraction and the pulling that you have for this whole thing."
I told him my ancestors were all Welsh, German and Irish, which though not a bad pool for the spirit world, nevertheless were not African. Curiously, it was not the last time I would be told this, and the psychic association raised some fundamental questions about divination, especially subjective projection. Was

 

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it so unfathomable that a white man sought familiarity with an African religion that the only explanation was the presence of an African ancestral past? Or was there an ancestry of which I was utterly unaware? Certainly there was nothing within memory of recent generations. But reincarnation did not necessarily follow strict family genealogy. In the world of voudou, a spirit waiting to be reborn petitions to Olorun, who then assigns it an earthly vessel of life. Baba Tunde himself is a reincarnation. In my case, perhaps a black woman from Nigeria had come back as a white boy born in Ohio and then reared in the South. I guess that would explain one or two quirks in my personality. But, if one accepts voudou theology, such a possibility is far from unusual, and no less strange than the idea of the Holy Ghost inhabiting the souls of preachers, prophets, warriors, or messiahs.
Another possibility, raised later by someone else, was that the African spirit guiding me might belong to that of a person that someone in my genealogical family had helped at some time in the pastpossibly a runaway slave. I was never able to corroborate that through any knowledge of family history. Baba Tunde also said I was giving off strong indications of an American Indian background, another link of which I am unaware.
The question of lineage became as pointed as it was crucial. How should I interpret divination which seemed as farfetched as a cross-racial background in the world of my ancestors? And yet that was what the odu had indicated to more than one babalorisha and babalawo. Of course, priests have been wrongthe odu have been interpreted incorrectly, and no, I don't think or presume that I am in any way or in any sense Africanbut why
was
I doing all this? Could I absolutely dismiss the possiblity of an African spirit in my past? Logically, I could not. To that extent, I could not
not
believe in Baba Tunde's intuition, nor anyone else's.

 

Page 164
As Tunde spoke, Baba Kunle quietly entered the room to sit cross-legged on the floor near us. Tall and elegant, like his younger cousin, he wore only a white caftan and sandals. He was more powerfully built than Tunde, and his mid-forties voice much deeper, and although his air of authority intimidated me in a way that his cousin's more easygoing manner did not, in truth he was a kind man.
He studied the sequence of odu in Tunde's notebook. He, too, saw a spirit guiding me, and said it might lead me to eventually want to undertake full voudou initiation rites. I knew that some of the most authoritative of the white voudou scholarsWilliam Bascom, Maya Deren, and Robert Farris Thompsonhad all been initiated in the course of their encounters with the religion, but I told Kunle I was not yet sure if I could take that step. "Anyway," he said, "you have a spirit about you that possibly welcomes you or makes it possible for you to enter certain quarters." He told me to guard against having my research used for disrespectful ends.
Tunde, reviewing his own entries, interrupted: "Obatala is saying you have to organize your life. Everything is in the air, is like at a standstill. It's frustrating you, playing a mental thing with you, playing tricks with you. You have to be careful not to feel that you're losing your mind. Strong Obatala here. He is the one who will help you to put this in order." He said my personal, emotional life was not being taken care of, a topic he'd addressed in his trances. I was alone too much, he said, and needed recreationa woman. No kidding. "Your life seems to be going too much one way. My mother always says, 'Too much of one thing is good for nothing.'"
Kunle nodded. It was now time for the parable, the symbolic tale to illustrate the cautions they had seen in my reading. Known as apataki, parables are an intrinsic element of a true reading. They are both voluminousthousands of themand formal, each parable linked to a specific odu pattern. Priests must memo-

 

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rize the stories in the parables as well as the proper pairing with the odu. Thus priests become not only diviners, but storytellers. Usually, the parables involve animals, or even plants, which act like humans, whether for good or ill. It wasn't much of a stretch to re-see Uncle Remus (Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, etc.), despite his creation" by Joel Chandler Harris, a white author, as another footprint along the voudou trail.
My own apataki was about a pig.
"There is this farmer that raised pigs for slaughter," Kunle began, as though narrating a movie I couldn't see. "He would fatten up his pigs, pen them off and when it's time, the fattest one would go. And there's this one pig that is a little bit wiser that refused to eat because he saw all the fat pigs going for slaughter. In the meantime, he was being thin and not fat like the other pigs. He was digging a hole in the back of the corral so that he could sneak out and not be a candidate for slaughter."
He paused to let me consider the tale. Now it was his duty to interpret it for me. "So the oracle is saying to you, number one, be careful where you eat, who feeds you.... Be very discreet about what you're doing. Let no one know what you're doing."
I could tell that Kunle saw something in the casting of the shells that troubled him. "Your reading says osobo (a blockage). There is some loose ends, some waves in the path."
I wasn't sure what that meant. He told me.
"When there's osobo, we do ebo."
I breathed in a little. So there it was.
Baba Kunle picked up the shells and cast again. He wanted to determine the exact nature and cost of the sacrifice. In ancient Africa, the price was precisely denoted in terms of cowrie shellsfor monetary units, a larger kind than in divination. Now, like Latin Mass, the final tally is stated in the vernacular. I would require both sacrifice and a cleaning, and it would cost $150.

 

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I was asked to leave $60 as a deposit, with which they would purchase, with a substantial professional mark-up, the necessary ingredients: honey, palm oil, gin, and a rooster. Baba Kunle said to come back about nine that night. That would give them time to prepare for Jamaica, and by then it would be dark. It was June 21, the summer solstice. Baba Tunde showed me out, but at the gate I walked right through the puddles, soaking my shoes and pants.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Back in my motel, waiting, I tried meditating on the particulars of my reading, but mostly I was not wanting to think about the ebo. This was a line I had not crossed. Yet the more I considered it, the less it bothered me. It was something I had to do, and something I wanted to do. I felt drawn to it. Compelled. I had already stepped through the looking glass; of course I wanted to experience all the wonders. Not as a voyeur, though. That would never work. Whatever happened would happen. I knew sacrifice was holy, and I would accept it as such. I would cross the line and not look back.
I packed up my suitcase and checked out of the motel. I had decided to drive on later that night to Athens, a college town about ninety miles east of Atlanta. Athens didn't have much to do with my voudou searchit was mostly a nostalgic detour, or so I thought at the time. I'd gone to high school there. There, too, I'd fallen into apostasy. I had been baptized at age twelve in a small sect called the Christian Church in Bryan, Texas, and, after moving to Georgia, had switched to the Methodist denomination along with my family. In Athens, for a couple of yearsin high school, no lessI had turned evangelical. I kept a Bible by my bed and read from it each night, went to church and Methodist Youth Fellowship, tried to convert friends. Then I stopped.
I can't pinpoint the moment, but I remember it had to do with segregation. I couldn't understand why blacks had to have

 

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their own churches, or schools, or drinking fountains. I couldn't understand why black students couldn't enroll at the University of Georgia, where my father taught. I couldn't understand why my minister and deacons let it be that way. Most of all, I couldn't understand why they insisted that the Bible itself believed in keeping the races apart. So I stopped believing in Christianity and in the church. I never went back. Nor had I ever been back to Athens. For the first time in years I thought it might be okay to return.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
It wasn't yet dark when I got back to the home of the priests. In the indigo and burnt orange dusk I could see neighbors moving in adjacent yards and the occasional car pass down the alley. The chickens in the pen were pecking about for the final bits of grain before bedding down for the night. The lush summer garden glistened like green velvet. The rain had stopped and the evening was cool, fresh, alive. I might have been in a painting by Rousseau.
I didn't want to go back into the basementit seemed too claustrophobicbut Baba Tunde instructed me to do so right away. He wanted me to take a few moments to write down the names of all the people I wished to influence or gain access to as a result of the sacrifice. The point of the ebo was to remove what was blocking me. I should therefore know who or what I wanted to find as the result of the cleared path. This wasn't a game. Something would die for me in a few minutes and the gods would be asked to intervene for me. I'd better have a reason.
As I wrote names on a blank piece of paper, I could hear African music from a stereo and the priests singing upstairs. Outside, the skies passed purple into opaque until night provided the requisite cover. When it was completely dark, Baba Tunde came downstairs. He said it was time.

 

Page 168
He led me outside past the patio to a tree at the edge of the yard. Kunle was already outside, leaning against the sedan in the driveway. Even in the dark, I could see the altar he had prepared for me at the base of the tree. It was a simple plate, adorned with candles and fruit, tucked in among altars and offerings for other clients and various godsI recognized the conical, stylized head of Elegba next to my own prepared spot.
I also saw a human skull, I think, but I really couldn't make out everything in detail because of the glutinous, yellowish-orange residue that covered most of the tree trunk and entire altar collection. Oozing wax dripped from thousands of multi-colored candles would have created the same visual effect, but what I was seeing was more accurately the accumulation of months worth of dried blood (red), palm oil (orange-red), honey (yellow) and feathers. Soon I would add my own contribution.
Baba Tunde told me to take off my shoes and socks. When I did, I felt the cool wet mud rise through my toes. I took the remaining $90 for the ebo and wrapped it in a brown paper, folding it three times towards me, silently telling the ebo what I wanted. I gave the folded paper to Baba Kunle. He touched me with it on the forehead, used it to make the sign of the cross on my body, then put both the paper and the money in one of his pockets.
When that was done, Kunle turned to his stock of ingredients on a nearby chair and seemed to be emptying something into his hand. He turned and opened his palm, revealing what looked like birdshot but were actually peppercornsa total of sixteen, the same as the number of cowries used in divination. He told me to open my right hand and when I did he gently poured the peppercorns into the cup of my palm.
"Chew them," he said, "but be careful not to swallow. Keep them in your mouth from now on. It's okay to swallow your spit." I ground them slowly with my molars. They were a little

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