American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (40 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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gos going into the santeria churchwho knew what was going on in that place now?
More than they probably knew. Since the first day it opened, the santeria chapel The Associated Press described as "the first known church in the usually secretive sect" had been under close scrutiny and municipal seige. The most intent assault came through the city of Hialeah's ban on the use of animals in sacrifices. In a celebrated battle that would not be over for six years, the Cuban-American founder of the church, Ernesto Pichardo, filed suit in federal court against the city, saying the ban violated his First Amendment rights. Three years later, the U. S. Supreme Court would agree to hear the case after two lower courts had ruled against Pichardo. In 1993, a landmark majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy sustained sacrifice as a form of religious expression.
Unfortunately, financial pressures, in part from the litigation, forced the church to close before the final ruling. But it later reopened, just a few blocks from its original locationsymbolically, or at least dramaticallywithin a stone's throw of its city hall adversaries. Pichardo, who said the long court fight cost him "money and some hair," gained some credibility from the victory in the essentially hostile Catholic Cuban community around him and even among the media. When the Pope visited Cuba in 1997, Pichardo was one of the people CNN interviewed for background on santeria as practiced in that country.
When I was there, however, Pichardo was still in the thick of the battle with Hialeah and his case still pending its first court hearing. Occasionally, the battle got noticed in the Spanish and English papers, and sometimes on TV. I guessed that was what drew the crew that morning. I was piqued, thoughwhen I had called Ernesto he hadn't mentioned anything about television.
But my qualms were unnecessary. As soon as I walked into the church, Ernesto offered me a paper cup of buche his mother had prepared, and said the reporter had just called, but only

 

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wanted a quick interview on an aspect of the lawsuit in the news that week. There would be plenty of time to show me around afterwards. Considering the local exposure she could give him, I felt more than well accommodated.
I'm not sure about the reporter. As I trailed her and the crew through the interior of the church sanctuary, I noticed her face pale, as if attempting not to look shocked. The room, about the size of a volleyball court, was filled wall to wall with santeria shrines. One of the largest, to Ernesto's patron, Shango, occupied an entire corner. Red drapes hung from the ceiling to form a backdrop to an altar filled with shakerees, cowrie shells and animal skins. To one side was a large statue of St. Barbara, the Christian saint whose colors of red and white and frequent depiction carrying a battle axe led her to be syncretized with Shango. Pichardo briefly explained to the reporter what the shrines meantYemonja, Elegba, and so onbut she seemed
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, in its original location in Hialeah, Miami.
Church has since moved a few blocks down the street, next to City Hall.

 

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most unnerved by his off-hand reference to a room in the back used for sacrifices. Then he pointed to the dumpsters in the fenced parking lot in back. That's where the carcasses were thrown awayone of the big issues in the lawsuit.
I gauged her for an upper-class Cuban, about as likely to be involved in santeria as in a Marxist study group. That was another thing that got Pichardo into trouble. He was upper-class, toohis family had run a lucrative fruit export-import business. In the eyes of the staunchly Catholic and conservative Cuban community in Hialeah where he grew up, people with patrician backgrounds shouldn't be mixed up in black cults.
Pichardo and the reporter returned to the front of the church for the interview, and although I tried to eavesdrop on her questionsin SpanishI couldn't hear much. After she had finished, they all left quickly. The soundman mentioned to me they were on a tight deadline.
Ernesto Pichardo's mother, a small but intense woman in her sixties, brought in a fresh thermos of coffee, then went to sit on the far side of the room with her other son, Ricardo. Ernesto beckoned me to join him at a wooden desk in front of a plate glass window looking out onto the street. He was happy to talk about his religion, he saidit was the center of his life and that of his entire family. He and his brother were priests and so was his mother, given to Yemonja in 1971, the same year of Ernesto's own conversion to santeria. In subsequent years he had continued to study and obtained the rank of italero, the priest who gives a santeria initiate the itá.
Talking rapidly between sips of buche, Ernesto explained that although the church had been in operation only the last two years, the actual incorporation had taken place almost two decades earlier, in 1974. His mother, he said, had been contacted by the spirit of a former Cuban slave. The spirit had said that the family had been drawn into santeria purposefully, that it was their mission to expand the influence of the religion among

 

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the people. It was their mission to set up a temple. The spirit said they should dedicate it to Babalu Aye.
I don't know why I hadn't made the connection earlierBabalu Aye was syncretized with St. Lazarus. It was St. Lazarus who had appeared to Lorita Mitchell in a dream. In Miami, I was duplicating the same route I had made in New Orleans. It seemed altogether symbolic and ironic that the orisha had become manifest in the language of Lorita Mitchell, an African American, in its Christian guiseSt. Lazarus. In the language of Mrs. Pichardo, a white Cuban, the same spirit had emerged in its African nameBabalu Aye.
From the first, Pichardo continued, he had sought to build support and acceptance for his church by trying to educate those who knew nothing, or nothing good, about santeria. He persuaded Miami colleges and universities to allow him to present classes or seminars, he set up a local radio talk show, he even obtained a grant for cultural study from the Florida Endowment for the Humanities. The objective throughout was to actually go public, because it was the only way for santeria to be taken seriouslythe same reasoning that had led Serge King to South Carolina. "Everyone felt that unless we institutionalized," Pichardo said, "we would still be considered occult and barbaric. So we found a way.... Of course what's interesting is that at first the community's complaint was, 'So if you're so legit why don't you have a church?'And then two years ago we turn around and say okay, here's the church, and now they"by which he meant not only the conservative Cubans but also some santeria factions who, probably to retain power, preferred to keep the religion's older, secretive affectations" say, 'No, we don't want this.'"
His unlined face, almost too smooth, too pretty for a thirty-four-year-old, wrinkled with slits of anger. "What I scream and I'll continue to scream is that I refuse for our young generations to continue with this two-faced society. It's like, I don't know,

 

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Reverend Ernesto Pichardo of the Church of the Lukumí Babalu Aye, whose
suit to allow animal sacrifice in religious services was upheld by the U. S.
Supreme Court in 1993.

 

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you're in psychological slavery. It's like jumping back 400 years. It's like you do not have a social right to come out and say, 'This is my religion.'''
That he was white, not black, mattered not at all to him. The name of Pichardo's churchLukumíderives from the Yoruba word olokumi, which means "my friend." In Cuba, slaves who came from the Yoruba lands were known as lukumí. Cubans who adhere more to the African than the Catholic content still refer to santeria as lukumí (sometimes lucumí). Which was another reason the Pichardos were in trouble. They were not only trying to run a santeria church, but one which specifically emphasized the Africanness, not the syncretism. As it turned out, there just weren't many friends of the lukumí in Hialeah.
"Even Communism today publicly allows these practices," Ernesto said. "I mean today when you go to Cuba you can practice santeria openly." He tapped the paper cup on his desk. "Openly! You go to the neighborhood committee, they give you a license, a permit and a permanent document. It classifies you as a religious person. There's no food in Cuba, you know, but there are animals for sacrifices. Everyone's supposed to go to a government center and buy them there. And so here we are: Communist Cuba doesn't have a problem with this, but America, the role model of the world, says, 'No way.' That doesn't make sense."
By "America," he meant the Cuban community in America, and that was what ate at him. "Why do we have to sit here today in America and not admit publicly that these African traditions which intoxicate us so much are part of our make-up," he said, his voice rising, "that this"he waved one arm towards the orisha shrines in the sanctuary"is part of being Cuban? Why can we not simply accept ourselves as we are? Why do we have to try to mirror what we're not to the Americans?"
Pichardo explained how his attorney, deposing a man from the Humane Society, was trying to get him to explain the differ-

 

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ence between sacrifice and euthanasia. "So my attorney asked the guy, 'If I had a pet goat on my farm and I take it to you and ask you to put it to sleep and then incinerate it, would you do that as part of your service?' The humane society guy says, 'yes'
"And then my lawyer says, 'Okay, if I would take the same goatbut deadbring it to you and say that I was a santero and I had just sacrificed it in a ritual and I would like you to incinerate it, would you do it?' The guy says 'no' And the guy was asked why not, and he says, 'Because that's illegal. I would call the police right then and there because the animal was sacrificed.'"
Pichardo pressed one hand to his forehead. One time, he said, he had called the Hialeah waste department to ask if they would pick up chicken carcasses. They wouldn't. Pichardo argued with them, pointing out that the city picked up waste from all kinds of restaurantslobster claws, chicken bones, pork ribswhy not a carcass from the church's dumpster? "But they kept saying no. They wouldn't pick up any carcasses from our waste basket." He smiled almost imperceptibly. "So they can pick up chicken bones over down the street at Kentucky, but can't pick up chicken bones over here."
Ricardo, who had been talking quietly with his mother, came over to remind his brother of "a pending appointment." They spoke in low, rapid Spanish for a moment, then Ernesto stood, stretched and stared across the street at a grocery where, he noted, you could buy freshly killed beef, fish or chicken. "It's not about the life of the animals," he said. Justice Kennedy would say, later: "Legislators may not devise mechanisms, overt or disguised, designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
One of the people I had most wanted to see in Miami came from a time before Pichardo, before the Oba, before Ava Kay Jones, before any of them were possible, so to speak. Lydia

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