American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (39 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 251
When I climbed the stoop to his house and knocked on the door, I half expected to have my head ripped off. A bowling ball of a man, not tall but heavy and solid, with one milky eye behind his reading glasses, he was all "Yo" and confrontation, sweatshirt, sneakers and torn pants. But it occurred to me it might be a posture. Mason's home was not that of a raging bull; rather, of a sensitive intellectual and family man.
He and his wife had undertaken a huge refurbishing task. Bed-Stuy brownstones are incomparable buys if you have the nerve to live there and patience to remodel. He showed me all four floors, including a stop in his cluttered office where, surrounded by ceiling-high shelves filled with hard-to-find books on Yoruba culture, he labored long hours at his computer. I liked the place instantly. It didn't make any difference what color we wereall writers make dens, and no one but another writer can quite appreciate the complexity amid the chaos of a well-dug burrow. But what he seemed most proud of was the pond in his back yard, where gentle lilies floated in the heart of the big, bad city as though they were in an eddy of the river Niger.
We talked at length about the religion, interrupted frequently by his two small children, whom he babysat while his wife worked. But almost at once we got into the battleground. I had mentioned visiting the African Studies department at the University of Florida at Gainesville and hearing about an aggressive speech he had delivered at a conference on orisha worship. I told him the academics were still talking about his vociferous objections to santeria's validity for African Americans, and the relationship of the religion to Christianity. He asked what they'd said. I smiled. "Well, 'separatist' was the nicest thing they called you."
His rebuttal was so loud my hand shot out to turn down the volume on the Sony recorder.
"I'm not a separatist!" he roared, plunging the cigar he had been inhaling into an ash tray next to his chair. "It has nothing

 

Page 252
to do with separatism. It has to do with calling spade a spade. That's exactly it, because what are you going to call me?"
He was taking a blunt shortcut, but Mason isn't known for obliqueness. He had moved the conversation directly to the heart of his antagonism to santeria, what he considered to be its control by white Cubans.
"Santeria! Where does that name come from? All of a sudden it's strange that we have this attempt to put a wedge between or in the midst of this Africanthey always say this'African-derived' religion. That's bullshit. It's an African religion maintained by and promulgated by, pushed forward by Africans."
He leaned forward. "There ain't no 'African component' of santeria"referring to a phrase frequently used by both popular and academic writers in analyzing the development of the Cuban form of voudou. "Now, see, this is my point. A term like 'African component' does not apply at this stage of the game.... There ain't no Catholicism in santeria."
I laughed, thinking he'd made a joke about "no Catholicism," and was waiting for the follow-up. But his deadpan expression told me he wasn't being ironic. He really meant it. So I laughed again, only this time with perhaps an edge of contempt. I didn't like being baited.
"What do you mean there's no Catholicism in santeria?" I said. "It's filled with Catholicism."
"I hate to tell you this"his deep voice full of sarcasm"Forget that Catholic shit. That's bullshit. That's all modern bullshit. This, this is New World bullshit"
"It's santeria. Santeria was developed in the New World"
"No" His son, Ade, squirmed away to play in the kitchen.
"I'm saying what some people call santeria is"
"I don't give a damn what 'some people' say"
"Well, go look in a botanica."
"You know what a botanica is?"

 

Page 253
"Well, what are you going to say that it is?"
We went on, getting nowhere.
Mason picked up his cigar again. Ade returned to the room and hugged his daddy's leg. Mason returned to his point, but without the temper.
"Here's the thing," he said, gently rubbing his son's head. "Voudou culture is now being redefined as white culture. What gets me is when we have Cubans who are ignorant of their own history, their own culture, saying 'Santeria is not an African religion, it is a Cuban religion.' It's as though some fucking Spaniard from the peninsula came up with this idea. What is this about santeria having an 'African component,' or 'Moorish overtones'?" Looking at santeria that way is racism that's even practiced by blacks against blacks.''
He exhaled a cloud of smoke. "What I'm talking about is this: I'm talking about knowledge. I'm talking about knowledge as a thing that will free us from prejudice and stupidity. That's all we're talking aboutknowledge. My job is to be more knowledgeable."
About 10
P.M
., far longer than I had expected or intended to stay, I thought it might be time for me to be getting back to Manhattan, but I promised to take up Mason's invitation to show up the next day to see him do his "job"to make other people knowledgeable, too. Each Saturday, he taught a class on orisha voudou at the Caribbean Cultural Center on 58th Street, Mid-town.
Maybe a quarter of a million people in the city, Mason figured, had some involvement with voudou. Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Haitian, Nigerianmany countries were represented in the Big Apple. I believed him. You could see signs of voudou's presence all over the place in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queensbotanicas, bimbés in private homes and immigrant social clubs, the occasional string of warrior beads on the neck of a passer-by.

 

Page 254
On the whole, though, those who did not bring voudou with them, who sought to learn about it in New York, had the same kinds of problems they would in New Orleans, Chicago or Oakland. You couldn't just find out about it in the same way you could inquire about becoming a Baptist or Jew or Muslim. So Mason truly was a teacher. But a teacher of voudou in America had to be especially committed; likewise his students. If you signed up for a class, you didn't just get a certificate. You might well be embarking on a path to fundamentally change your life. But each seminar Mason delivered, each student he inculcated, was another vessel of knowledge in a world of ignorance. You could almost see Mason as a missionary of his faith. But missionaries, to Mason, had been the bad guys in history.
1
Zora Neale Hurston,
Mules and Men
, 1935, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, p. 229.

 

Page 255
19
Santeria
The flash is everywhere in Miami. The city is now, to voudou, what New Orleans was a century earlierthe landfall of the Caribbean, the great demographic crossroads of the North American spirits: European, African and Native American. The difference from New Orleans, however, is that in contemporary Miami, the flash is above ground. You can find the spirits in almost every mix imaginable in almost every neighborhood you visit, from Little Haiti to Little Havana, from tenements in Hialeah to wealthy homes in Boca Raton. Botanicas flourishsome, boldly advertising as pet shops, openly sell livestock everybody knows is intended for sacrifice. A storefront santeria church had recently opened to the public. Caribbean music hops with orisha names night and day on the radio. Police officers and health workers are given cultural sensitivity briefings. The other difference is that, with the exception of Little Haiti, voudou in Miami is santeria. It is Cuban. Fueled in part by the Marielito exodus from Cuba in the early 1980s, the number of santeria followers in the city has grown to more than 65,000.

 

Page 256
Coming in from the north, I ducked off I-95 as it cut down through Miami's northeast quadrant, then took an exit toward Hialeah, the staunchly Cuban enclavea city within the city-near the famous racetrack and the airport. I had a few contactsentrepreneurs, priests, scholars, but mostly it was spontaneity otra vez.
I crossed through the grim blocks of Liberty City, where black Americans had rioted for days after a cop shooting. The streets were narrow and filled with downscale retail storefrontsstereos, hair salons, Afro boutiques, like busy subway corners in the Bronx or in Chicago. And they seemed totally segregated-no white faces. And grim: boarded up businesses, unemployed men hanging out. Near one modest office building, a group of young Nation of Islam ministers in their dark suits and red bow ties passed out literature and pasted up posters about an upcoming rally.
I picked up Northwest 60th, just above Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard, and proceeded on to Hialeah. Soon, the terrain shifted and I was in a lower-middle-class Hispanic neighborhood, where house-proud immigrants had made the best of the structures at hand. Cinder-block bungalows were afire with pink or blue pastels, yards freshly mowed, wrought iron patio furniture and plaster statues of the Virgin and the saints populating porches and yards. I slowed down and cruised with the windows open, turning up my radio when I chanced on an FM station playing Pinetop Perkins's version of the Willie Dixon classic, "I'm Your Hootchie Kootchie Man":
... Got a black cat bone
got the mojo, too
got High John the Conquerer
gon' mess with you.

 

Page 257
The rain which had peppered the morning came back. I flicked on the wipers and poked along, just letting the feeling wash over me with the music: raw Delta hoodoo. In a way the blues seemed incongrous on Caribbean streets. I should've been listening to meringue or salsa, maybe. But it felt right.
A half-block ahead, a trio of black Cuban boys ran out into the curbless street. I slowed to avoid them, but they stopped at the edge of the pavement to hop into a broad, ankle-deep puddle. The one in red top and black jams, the colors of Elegba, laughed and flailed his arms.
I drew past as the other two joined in, and I could still see them at it in my rear view mirror, dancing in the rain, for no reason, with boundless energy. I remembered Robert Farris Thompson's way of seeing the flashthe "flash of the spirit," the unmistakable mark of the orishain the folk art and manners of the black South. I knew I was looking at the same thing. Joy to no purpose, save to the fun of it all, the complete pointless eternity of the impulse to rejoice where heaven and earth meet, in a pool of rainwater.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
With some difficulty, I had set up an early morning appointment at the Church of the Lukumí Babalu Aye, a bright yellow and blue peacock of a building, formerly the sales office of a used car lot, at the edge of the Hialeah business district. Whatever I had expected had not included a TV remote truck and a dazzling Cubana reporterslender, curvy, sculpted face, black hair down to her shoulder bladesstanding on the curb with a cordless microphone. A photographer and soundman trailed behind, laden with equipment.
I set my handbrake, cracked my windows and got out of the car. Across the asphalt, a group of working-class men watched from the counter of a sidewalk espresso bar. TV crews and grin-

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