American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (41 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 265
Cabrera had grown up in a time when everything they represented was prohibido. Born to an upper-class white creole family in colonial Cuba, she was sent to university in Paris in the 1930s. Her life changed. Studying what were then called "primitive cultures," she realized she had been living in the midst of one.
On returning to Cuba, she asked questions of Tula, her family's longtime Kongolese servant. Tula and her friends took the young mistress into their confidence, and began telling her not only about what life had been like in the Kongo, but what the religion had been like, too. From their stories, Cabrera constructed
El Monte
, published in 1954. Later works, such as
Reglas de Congo: Palo Magombe,
1979, augmented what are considered not only authoritative scholarship, but handbooks of the practices and beliefs of palo mayombe.
I found hera few years before her deathin a well-heeled, gated suburban condo village in southwest Miami. As I walked up to her door, I prepared myself to find a faltering old lady, as I had been told by an intermediary to expect. Nothing could have been more incorrect. Even as I was ushered inside by one of Cabrera's friends, I could sense a wonderful vitality in the house. Well-lighted, cool, full of plants, oil paintings, and artifacts, it felt like a nervy and even outrageous Havana salon, a Cuban moveable feast in which grace, intellect, curiosity and passion were as thick in the air as the scent of flowers.
Cabrera received me in a sunny room just past the foyer. Petite, fine-boned, she sat straight as a pin in a French provincial chair. From a portrait on the wall, I could see she had once been blonde and had doubtless broken some hearts. Now close to ninety and blind, she evoked the same lithe, offhandedly patrician air of the young woman in the painting, who dared delve where only demons were said to live. She shook my hand firmly.
I told her I had come because I had many questions about palo and very few reliable answers. I had heard palo was evil,

 

Page 266
that it was benign, that it was a study of herbs and plants, that it was the province of the dead, that it was unpredictable and destructive. I didn't know what was true.
She said it all was. Palo was practiced by Africans in Cuba for the same reasons it was practiced by Africans in Africa, she saidit offered a way of dealing with the problems of the world, some of which entail confrontation with evil. Palo prepares its practitioners for that struggle. A weapon, it is "both good and bad." But the most important, and difficult, thing to understand about it, she said, is that it works. She herself had seen the inexplicable happen, had seen people physically transformed"things that can't be simulated"by the spirit of the prenda.
She paused, having said the Cuban word for the magical pot of the palo priest. More than anything else, the black kettle is considered the symbol of evildoing in the religion. Through a prenda, a palero (or mayombero) controls the spirits of the dead. Cabrera was quite aware of the implications; I, at the time, was not. I had seen prendas filled with all manner of things, but mostly with herbs, sticks, insects, reptiles, soil and assorted talismans, from items of jewelry or clothing to scissors or nails. But what really makes the pot active are bones. In many parts of America, the bones of animalscats or dogs, usuallyare used, but in strict Kongolese tradition, the bone is supposed to be human. In Matamoros, Constanzo's pots had been full of tibia, femurs and skulls.
Small wonder palo has the worst of all reputations in the voudou-connected religions, even among sympathizers. But I knew there was more to it. Why would Cabrera have spent so much time documenting its nuances? Why were so many voudou priests cross-training themselves in the Kongo rituals? She thought about it a moment, and chose her words sparingly. "I have been very surprised to see people you never thought would be in it," she said. "But why are they doing it?" I pressed. She

 

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thought again. "Faith." Then she smiled. "It's also a good way to do business."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
After our conversation, I went back to my hotel near the airport. The lobby was filled, as usual, with flight crews and international travelers. I often wondered how I looked, heading past the sunken fern bar toward the elevator, clutching my recorder, camera and sheafs of notes. It didn't always look like I'd come from tea. Sometimes I looked like I'd come from places you'd have nightmares about, if you were so disposed.
As soon as I opened the door to my room I could see the message light blinking on the telephone. I dialed right awaya palero, I'd been trying to reach for days. This time he answered. In my crude but effective college Spanish I asked if I could come see him, but in the middle of the conversation he hung up. It was like trying to meet hoodoo men in Mississippi.
I scratched his name from my contact list. I'd been through several failed attempts to meet local paleros and was losing interest. Damn all this cabalistic shit. I'd tried to assure everyone I wasn't out to steal secrets. I really didn't want to know them and thought it unethical to divulge them. And that was beside the point. In fact, I had a starkly personal reason for spending more time chasing paleros than I really needed to, even, in truth, for seeking out Cabrera's insights. I wanted to know why I hadn't become a palero myself.
Lorita Mitchell had tried to talk me into it in New Orleans. I came close. The fee was reasonableabout $400, and the rites wouldn't have taken a fraction of the time required for voudou. Undertaking the intitiation would have been a way to learn a lot about the use of herbspalo was a socio-medicinal system as well as a theology. And maybe I would have learned the source of its psychological power. But I had said no. In the end, I didn't want a prenda. I didn't want to believe what was in it.

 

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Understand: Palo is what it is. It is about the power of the dead over the living. Whatever other propensities it has start and stop there. No heaven, no hell, no nirvana, no trail of spiritual breadcrumbs led from palo back to anything I could connect to. Voudou, Christianity, Islamall essentially formulate a cosmic order based on higher beings. Palo is different. It looks not to the heavens but to the earth and to the dead inside the earth. If you cannot accept thatlook right into it without fearyou are either wasting your time or commiting a dangerous psychological and spiritual act.
Even Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, the santeria popularizer, viewed palo as essentially malevolent:
There are two branches of Palo Mayombe, one that is "good" and one that is "bad." The "good" branch is called "Christian'' Mayombe and the "bad" is called "Jewish" or "unbaptized" Mayombe. This differentiation is made by the paleros because the "Christian" cauldron in which their secrets are kept is sprinkled with holy water and the "Jewish" one is not. To the practitioners of Palo who, like the santeros, are steeped in Catholic tradition, anyone or anything that is not baptized is evil and does not belong to God.
1
However bizarre, anti-Semitic, and perhaps not incidentally Inquisitional in inspiration, such characterizations are more the rule than the exception. Yet I did feel alien from palo in a way I did not feel from voudou at all. Gonzalez-Wippler had not made me feel that way, nor Lorita. Mitchell, nor, now, Cabrera. The person who had finally made me understand why I feared palo initiation, and would never undergo it, was Iya Ghandi. She was the person who made me believe that as much as I wanted to avoid the mistaken ideas about palo and try to see in it the power

 

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for good, or for protection, I also had to accept the other part of the equation. It was also bad. I had suppressed the idea, but now, in Miami, after hearing Cabrera tell me the same, the foreboding of evil with which Iya Ghandi had once shocked me was back, wanting to be dealt with.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I had been sitting in a hard wooden booth with Ghandi in The Horseman waiting out one of the daily Carolinian rain-storms. She was telling me about having been to the Kongo, and, trying to impress her, I mentioned Lorita's offer of initiation. I paid with a long silence and the kind of glare that could silence even the Oba.
"No
way
you can get a real palo initiation in this country," she said, as if it had taken that long even to find words for her contempt. "Anybody tells you you can is taking your money. I wouldn't do it, and I know all the secrets. You can find someone else, but it would take a long time, and you still wouldn't have the full power, and it might cost you at least $2,000."
I laughed off her surprising vehemence. I'd heard palo inflation was fairly simple and told her so. In New Orleans, I said, you could be initiated in a matter of days, although you had to pass at least one night in a cemetery. Now it was Ghandi's turn to laugh, if that's what it was. In the Kongo, she said, you are required, among other things, to sleep seven nights under a ceiba (African teakwood) tree, bury your clothes on three Fridays over a twenty-one-day period, take herbal baths, and at the conclusion make a circle of gunpowder, which is ignited to seal the pact with the prenda spirit. My idea of a quickie rite in New Orleans was worse than a waste of time. "These are dangerous things," she scowled. "You could be killed out there by some entity you don't even know exists."
I smiled and picked at the label on my beer bottle. I told her I didn't see how palo could be that dangerous. Palo didn't have

 

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nearly as many gods as did voudou, and voudou was considered to be more powerful than palo anyway. As for the prenda spirit, I said, how could it be any different than the spirits of the dead of orisha voudou? Actually, I said, I thought palo, sounded more like low-level sorcery, and not as advanced as voudou.
"Really, palo is just a way of worshiping the dead," I concluded.
"Right. Worshiping one entitythe one spirit in that pot."
I understood completely. You worshiped a spirit trapped in a pot and summoned it to do your bidding. It was like rubbing Aladdin's lamp to reach the genie.
Then I caught myself. Did I just hear her right? The
one
spirit in that pot?
"Wait," I said, like a clever student about to trip up a professor on a technicality. "You don't mean just
one
spirit confined to the potyou can use the pot to call any spirit you choose"
I stopped in mid-sentence. A deep and private chuckle spread across her smooth black face. "No," she said, shaking her head. "It could be the spirit you want, but it doesn't have to be. I can tell youin my case, it's not." The grin on her face spread wider.
My stomach fluttered a little, the way it does when my body has just figured out something it will take a while for my brain to accept. It had been my understanding that the pot was simply a focal point for summoning whoever you needed. I knew the ability to call up the dead was activated by a bone, but I had thought
any
old bone would do, animal or human. I thought the bone of palo, like the eucharist of Christianity, was symbolic in its power.
"Any bone can work," she continued, the professor who has once again caught the clever student in the trap, "but the spirit in the pot is the spirit of
that
bone.
"When I was in the Kongo they take you to the cemetery yourself and they go through different rituals for a certain

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