American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (37 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 237
Iya Orite emerged from her house to greet me for my ebo. She looked beautiful. Her hair was freshly powdered, well set off from the glowing skin of her bare shoulders. As she walked toward me, she tucked her white wrap-around dress, or lapa, in at the top, as the women were always doing to keep the garment up. She seemed almost business-like, though, as she picked a chair from the side of the house and carried it to the middle of the unshaded yard so that it faced directly onto the Esu (Elegba) shrine. Constructed from knee-high concrete blocks stacked against the outer wall of the Afin where it abutted the forest, the altar was arrayed on two levels. The top was mostly for an iron bin filled with machetes, railroad spikes and other metals. The lower step was cluttered with pots, bowls, and ordinary daily items: rolling pins, mousetraps, gourds, pumpkins, coconut bits, candles. A rusted sewing machine sat to one side.
Two red, carved wooden pillars the size of tree trunks framed the sacrificial stage and behind them stylized drawings of the deities in swirls of red and yellow, blue and black, covered the wall. A placard said, "Oyotunji Esu." Below it lay a smattering of feathers and what looked like entrails and gore. Some of it was, but most of the orange and yellow ooze was just palm oil and honey.
Orite told me to sit in the chair. As I did, she went to the altar for a red plastic cup of water. The three roosters sat low in their wire cage to the side. Dipping her fingers in the cup, she sprinkled herself, the altar and the roosters. She opened the door of the cage and carefully snared all three by their legs, then brought them to me to hold. Almost at once, she took them back. She told me to stand, step forward with my eyes closed and extend my palms.
I did, but opened my eyes when I felt the warm bodies being rubbed all over me. Orite chanted in Yoruba until the cleaning was finished, then passed the roosters for me to hold again. I took them as she had, my left hand around their rough yellow-

 

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ish legs, my right hand atop their feathery smooth backs. They barely stirred.
She told me to give her one.
Taking it, she approached the altar again. She turned to me and told me to hold my throat. "No, just a little," she laughed. I loosened my grip until I was just pinching my larynx above the adam's apple. She bent over the altar, holding the rooster, praying. I heard Esu's name, and then my own. Without further ado, she plucked enough feathers from the throat for the skin to show, then took a paring knife from the altar and decapitated the bird in one swift, unapologetic motion. The head dropped to the ground. The body shook in an involuntary spasm of escaping life.
She held the carcass upside down by the legs and allowed blood to drip over the Esu statue. I heard the names of more deities being recited. I was still holding my throat and clutching the legs of the two living birds.
She brought the kill to me and told me to sit. She held the wound directly in front of my face.
"Taste the power of the blood."
She didn't say how, but I couldn't see any other way. I touched my tongue to the severed neck muscle. That seemed to be the way. It was warm, salty, though not unpleasant. It was just blood.
Next, she took my right hand and drew a line of blood along the index finger. She marked a small cross on my palm line. Then she bent low and touched the bird's neck to my right shoe. Remembering Atlanta, I asked if I should remove it. She shook her head. "You're not going to be working barefoot are you?"
The second bird was for Ogun. I tasted the blood but she did not mark me with it.
The third rooster was Ochosi's. I pinched my throat again, and this time, in addition to dripping blood over the rest of the altar, she also let some fall on four coconut husks I hadn't previ-

 

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ously noticed. Again, she brought the carcass to me so I could taste the sticky-sweet fire-energy.
She annointed my forehead, touching her fingers to the neck's protruding stub, painting a spot just above my eyebrows. She laid the body of the final bird next to the altar, alongside the other two, and poured honey and palm oil over everything. Some of the honey went on my forehead, next to the blood, and over the blood on my right hand. I tasted the mix with my left forefinger.
Now that they had been properly seasoned, and therefore likely to be more powerful and accurate, it was time to consult the obi. Iya Orite cast the husks several times, without comment. When finished, she picked up a half-pint bottle of dark rum, filled her mouth with it, and spewed it over the fresh feathers, blood and emoluments. Three times she did this. Then, taking another mouthful, she bent over slightly to spray a mist onto my feet. She handed me the bottle and told me to drink a good mouthful. I did.
Back at the altar, Orite picked up the obi again and made several more casts. She said she was trying to determine Esu's message. As usual, I was a tough read. But on the last throw she stood up and smiled. It was favorable. Esu said I was moving in the right direction, that things would work out. She said there also had been a message from Ogun. It said not to rush, to expect things to be slow at first. Ochosi's input was the same as Esu's; he also might bring me money.
I should get an Ochosi figure, Iya Orite said, and bring it to her for feeding sometime later. I said I'd tried to get one from Chief Elesin but he hadn't delivered it. She shrugged, as if that were expected, and said I could find plenty of Ochosis in Miami. I could send it to her and she could feed it for me even though I wasn't present. They did that for many clients.
As we talked, I was aware of the sun beating down from above, of standing in a patch of yard inside an African renais-

 

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sance village in one of the most virulent Southern slave states, splotched with blood from a ritual no one in my family, none of my friends, and few, perhaps, of you, will ever perceive as other than satanic, or, at best, cruel. But I felt as though I had been baptized.
Orite picked up the rooster bodies and told me to pluck feathers from each, then scatter the tufts over the altar for each of the three orisha. When I had finished, she wiped my head, hands and feet with feathers. I finally swallowed the blood that had been on my tongue. Then I knelt and repeated a Yoruba chant she recited for me.
We rose. As I looked down at the altar, I became aware of rap music. It may have been playing the whole timetwenty minutes, perhapsbut I hadn't heard it. I looked off toward the royal enclave. Two teenagers, one of them a trouble-prone boy from Philadelphia seconded to the village by his mother for discipline, were listening to the radio while repairing a roof.
I thought we were finished, but then Iya Orite picked up the obi and threw them once more. The husks landed ejife, very favorable. She said, "Okay, you have to take the ebo to the railroad tracks." I followed her to a clearing behind her house where we found a metal bucket to hold the heads and bodies. She pointed out a path leading into the woods and said to follow it and dump the remains between the rails.
The narrow trail through the underbrush was well-trodden, strewn here and there with parts of goats and chickens. I came to the cinder shoulders and climbed up an embankment. Along the open track bed, I saw none of the bones, entrails or feathers that littered the forest path. I guessed that rail crews or natural scavengers had kept the right-of-way tidy. Quickly, as though I might be seen, I dumped my ebo as instructed. The birds fell out in a triangle shape, which I considered a sign of good luck. I looked both ways and went back.

 

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Iya Orite was at the shrine, lighting a candle for me. I paid the fee and told her goodbye. I wanted to get out on the road right away. She wished me luck and asked me to send her a couple of gallons of palm oil if I came across any in Miamishe was running low and it wasn't easy to find locally. I said I would, though I never did get around to it. "Aláfia," she called, as I walked in the hot dirt toward the Afin gate.
I checked my hut a last time. No one was around to say goodbye to so I got in my car and drove out the lane, through the verdant tunnel, past the still hard-to-read sign, the caverns measureless to man, and turned east on Highway 21 toward the interstate. I figured to get to northern Florida by evening with a hard push, which was exactly what I wanted. A line of cars had bunched up near the entry ramp. As I got closer, I could see there'd been a big wreck moments before, and smoke was coming up from a truck in the ditch. But I had made ebo. Again. I would be safe, driving so fast.

 

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18
Exiles and Apostles
Florida stretched down to Miami like an endless carny strip. I kept thinking I was going the wrong wayit was all NASA and Gannett media empire and
National Enquirer
and fuzz-busting Canadian Toyotas down the I-95 zipper. To the west lay the interior of the statemostly swampy nothing; the east was the ocean, the beach, the resort outposts of Yankees and other people who still thought Florida was paradise. Miami lay at the very bottoma huge metropolis of too many nationalities to count and, geopolitics being what they were, heavily bent toward the right-wing death squad side of the political morass. But that was where I was headed.
This sideshow state had produced the first American writer to take the path I was on, the journey through the spiritual kingdom of U. S. voudou. In 1929, at age twenty-eight, Zora Neale Hurston of Eatonville, Florida, returned to the South with a B.A. from Barnard and contacts with Langston Hughes and others in the Harlem Renaissance to initiate the studies that would earn her reputation as a pioneer folklorist of rural Southern black culture. Her most original work explored the voudou legacy.

 

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Mules and Men
, 1935, collected oral accounts of hoodoo (as distinct from orisha voudou) in Florida, Alabama and New Orleans, gained by a two-year research trip through the South and parts of the Caribbean.
Tell My Horse
, 1938, recorded the West Indian experience.
Hurston took the Africanized religion of the Southern blacks seriously enough to do what no one had previously: record its many tales and participate in its rituals. In
Mules and Men
, for example, she recounted having lain naked all night in New Orleans to receive the spirit. She drank the blood of sacrifice, was cleansed by hoodoo men, sampled herbs and oils, lit ritual candles. Later, she boiled a black cat to make a mojo of its bone:
When he screamed, I was told to curse him. He screamed three times, the last time weak and resigned. The lid was clamped down the fire kept vigorously alive. At midnight the lid was lifted. Here was the moment! The bones of the cat must be passed through my mouth until one tasted bitter ...
... Maybe I went off in a trance. Great beast-like creatures thundered up to the circle from all sides. Indescribable noises, sights, feelings. Death was at hand! Seemed unavoidable! I don't know. Many times I have thought and felt, but I always have to say the same thing. I don't know. I don't know.
1
Hurston was a pioneer; and, I hoped, a kindred spirit. She knew she was onto something vast, important, and yet so diffused in the American South that trying to grasp it was like trying to hold a handful of sand. Even today I feel in her writing her chill, her doubt, her sense of awe, her despair. To enter the

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