American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (29 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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to the New World, so completely had they been stamped out in the U. S. And Efuntola maintained strong ties to Matanzas.
In the thick of the disagreementsby some accounts, potentially violentEfuntola drove down to South Carolina with friends to look over some rural land one of them had inherited. It was in the middle of nowhere, but Efuntola knew he'd found the place for Oyotunjithe return. Within a few months he'd packed up and left Harlem for good, and, with like-minded spiritual adventurers, began to cut trees, clear brush, build roads. Within a few years, word began to get around that an African revivalist village was being created down South. People interested in hard work and spiritual renewal were needed. For the most part, those who came to the village stayed and saw their lives transformed. Over the years, a thousand or more became full voudou initiates and have subsequently spread throughout America, setting up bookstores in Dallas, boutiques or botanicas in Oakland and San Diego, temples in Washington, D.C., Miami and the Bronx.
There was one casualty. In 1972, a fugitive Black Panther showed up, just after the settlement had moved from its original location, across the highway, to the present ten-acre site. Nobody minded he was a Panther, but they did mind that he was wanted on several warrants. The last thing the fledgling village needed was a reputation as a hideoutjust the sort of thing local authorities could use to bust up the strange "cult" which had moved into the county.
Tensions grew, finally boiling over into a shooting in which the Panther was killed by one of the villagers. It was ruled self-defense and no one was ever tried. The true meaning of the killing, however, lay outside South Carolina courtrooms. In Yoruba tradition, the founding of a new city required human blood sacrifice, which in ancient times meant the killing of a captured enemy or a criminal. "As we thought about it in hindsight," the Oba recalled, "we thought, hey, maybe that's how the

 

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gods arranged that, cornered this dude like that, and then he got killed on that land and we'd already started building the village by then, so we construed it as, hey, look how the gods had worked that deal."
In the seventies, the village reached a peak population of about 200. Homes were built, sewer lines and wells dug, temples erected by hand. There were even plansat least talkof great expansions, to make the village a 100-acre theme park, a Six Flags of African culture, "to bring the best of Africa to America," according to a poster distributed by the African Theological Archministry, Inc., the corporate structure through which the village does business. But the eighties saw most of the great plans dwindle. The population steadily declined, an irony given the upsurge in interest in voudou in America that began about mid-decade. I could not help feeling sad that the mecca had become so hard-pressed after twenty years of heroic survival. But the Oba took it in stride, as a cyclical turn of the mandala. Maybe even a weeding out.
"At first, the people poured in here full of enthusiasm," he said. "They were full of interest in their race and all excited about being voudou priests. They thought, 'Africa!' You sit down and you castigate white people and you don't eat pork and you walk around in robes or something all day long. And they thought that was Africa. But what they found out is that you didn't just become a voudou priest and learn a whole lot of magic overnight."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
About suppertime, Iya Orite came to my squatter's patio to formally greet me and show me the windowless hut, about the size of a supply shack you might see alongside a landing on a seldom-traveled bush country river, in which I'd be quartered. It anchored one side of the bazaar and went for $10 a day. Furnishings consisted of a narrow cot, a small table, and an auto-

 

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The author outside his guest hut in village bazaar.
Inside the guest hut.

 

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mobile battery for a portable TV. I could camp out if I preferred, for $2. I said I'd take the luxury route. I reminded her that I'd like to see the king. She said he was busy because of the festival but that she'd try to set it up in a day or two. It was a mañana pace that at first nettled me but which I soon learned to accept.
I passed the evening drinking a few beers in front of the box fan in The Horseman, where I was the only customer, and retired early. The king and his family remained sequestered in the Afin. The other village residentsaltogether about two dozen adults and childrenwere closed away in their homes.
I couldn't sleep. The only sounds of the night, except for nature, came from a radio in the sentry house. According to longtime procedure, the village's adult males took turns standing armed guard each night. The hut was hot, too. Until I bought my own box fan from K-Mart, there was no air circulation. The only window was stapled over with plastic storm sheeting, and I kept the door rigged shut with a plastic wire. That kept out most of the mosquitoes, but more importantly, the pair of chicken snakes some of the village boys released from a cage just outside my door as a prank (and got scolded for the next day). Yet even with the door shut and a pillow over my ears, I couldn't block the piercing, cat-like cries of the peacocks. Two of them, favorites of Oshun, prowled the grounds at night. Worse, they favored a roost in the big tree directly above my quarters.
I thought about walking down to the new shower stalls, about 100 yards away, to cool off, which would certainly happen, since there was no hot water. Of course then I'd have to choke down the strong smell of sulphur from the new well, and I wasn't sure if the showers had lights. Electricity had only come two years ago. But mostly I didn't think it wise to wander around late at night. And I didn't feel like putting on my shoes. And maybe it would cool off.
About four in the morning I was still awake. Staring at the plaster ceiling had grown boring, so I turned to my side, funky

 

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with insomnia. Across the dark room, I noticed a small, screened, triangular opening in a corner near the ceiling. It was an odd architectural touch I never figured out, but was one of the few places a breeze could enter. It also provided a strange view.
It was while gazing through the triangle at the boughs of the dense trees of the surrounding forest that I saw them, first as seeming coalitions of shadows, and then as solid objects, and then as more than that, as energies of unmistakable definition. I remember a phrase coming to my lips in a whisper: "the Ibeji." My lips were smiling in self-mockery, and yet they were speaking the truth. I was looking at the the orisha known as the Twins, among the most complex of the voudou manifestations, and one of the ultimate symbols of Yoruba theories of linked duality.
The Ibeji connote both the unity of opposites and of their binding contradictions; indeed, the worship of twins is itself an inversion of an ancient Yoruba belief that twins are extremely bad luck, which belief for many years encouraged twin infanticide. I stared hard. The image did not go away. The Ibeji were exactly as I had seen them in sculpture in museums and botanicas and in the half-flooded basement in Atlanta. One twin was male, one female, with oversized, erect penis and pronounced breasts, respectively; both had sleek black hair and wore golden necklaces. The figures were stylized in the ancient mannerelongated bodies, almost oval in shape, with hair piled conically. They were looking at me. At first they lay horizontal, as if in reposein the next instant they were standing upright.
I ran through the standard dismissals: I was projecting, I was seeing Rorschach shapes in the branches, I was dreaming. But I was awake. I closed my eyes a half-dozen times. I looked away and changed my thoughts. But when I looked back the Ibeji were always there.
The next day I mentioned it to some of the villagers. No one was surprised. The place was full of African spirits. It would have been odd had I not seen something. So I eagerly looked

 

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through the triangle every subsequent night I remained at Oyotunji, but I never saw them again. At each daybreak, I could see that the branches in the trees weren't shaped like the Ibeji at all.

 

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14
The Day of the Living Dead
I awoke surrounded by Baptists. Several dozen of them had come down by bus from Durham on a church-sponsored outing, and I threw on jeans and T-shirt hurriedly to get out of my hut before they all congregated in the patio. Most were over fifty, about evenly mixed by gender, but all blackI continued to be the only white person in the village. As they began trickling into the bazaar after an introductory tour of the grounds, most of them looked like they were having serious second thoughts. Trying to be unobtrusive, I perched like a disheveled sprite on a log back near the parking area, sipping orange juice from my Igloo. I heard one woman say she had "always been curious about that African stuff," but most everyone else was fidgety and silent.
Then Chief Elesin showed up. A lanky artisan from East Texas who had been in the village almost from the beginning, he was, by title, "keeper of the king's horses," and in practice the royal bodyguard. But now he was decked out in one of the more salacious "aspects" of his already ultra-flamboyant deity, Elegba: barefoot, in fish-net red shirt, grass skirt, bells on his

 

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ankles, a leather pouch more or less covering his crotch and, atop his head, a bead-draped skull cap with ebony cow horns. He lacked only a tail to be the worst nightmare of everyone present.
''Hi y'all," he said, throwing candies and gum, bumping and grinding his way through the literally open-mouthed, figuratively pole-axed crowd like a Chip 'N Dale stripper the size of an NBA forward. I nearly did a spit take with my Sunkist. But Elegba kept it up, mooning anyone in proximity, laughing and catcalling for sixty-year-old women in sun bonnets to "get off your booty" and join him. It really was unbearable to watch. Then, like some ancient levee giving way, whispering led to titters to open laughter and then a couple of the men started shaking their butts back at Elegba, others egged him on. An impossibly proper matron in floral print dress and white gloves said to her friend, "You can see his ding-a-ling," and they still may not have cared for Oyotunji but they were no longer afraid of it.
Perhaps on cue, perhaps just seizing the moment, a curvy, dark-complected Trinidadian known as Iya Ghandi ("Iya" means mother; Ghandi was the name of her youngest son, which she took for reasons I never understood) suddenly strode into the quadrangle and, waving her arms with exaggerated theatricality, shooed the satyr off, mocking him as a "bad boy who needs to grow up."
When they had settled again, she briefed them. The festival for Yemonja was in progress, she explained, and it had been Elegba's duty to greet the new arrivals, and the thing about Elegba was that you never knew what he'd do and you couldn't control him if you did. It was his nature. Now, though, it was time for the egungun, a ritual for the spirits of the dead. Soon, a procession of villagers dressed as various of the orisha, like the one who had just welcomed them, but "nicer," would dance and sing their way through the village grounds, stopping at each of the altars to pay homage. They would see worship just as carried

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