Read American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World Online

Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (45 page)

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World

8.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

Page 293

As I walked in, three older men walked out, tucking their porkpie hats against the sun's glint, engrossed in a passionate conversation in Creole. At the cash register was Jacques, the owner, ringing up a sale. I introduced myself and found him quite willing to talk about voudou, but he said the person I really needed to see was his wife, Yvonne. She was a m'amboas he was a hounganand it was really her store, but she'd gone to Haiti for the week and wouldn't be back before Friday. I told him I'd have to miss her. He said that was too bad and I agreed.

I stayed another ten minutes or so, decided nothing was going to happen for me, and left a card with my hotel phone number, in case Yvonne got into town early. I walked back into the midday heat and turned west in the direction of the overpass, but I didn't get far. Language barriers or no, word traveled fast in Little Haiti.

A street hustler in a white sports car zipped into an open meter space, jumped out, and, asked if I wanted to buy some voudou magazines. I looked him over: cheap reflecto shades, floral pattern rayon shirt open at the second button, lime slacks and faux alligator loafers. How about a tape of a voudou ceremony in New York? Some cassettes?

Yeah, buddy. I hadn't gotten twenty yards down the sidewalk, ignoring his increasingly sarcastic offerstaunts, more likewhen I got called aside again. This time it was a muscular young man I remembered seeing in the botanica. Now, he was standing near the corner of a building at the edge of a small parking lot for some rundown apartments. "Hey," he hissed. He motioned for me to come over. For some reason I did. Sensing my wariness, he extended his hand quickly and introduced himself. Elvis. From Antigua. He didn't want to bother me, he said, only to make sure I understood that Jacques and Yvonne were "for real." He thought maybe I hadn't thought so, since I hadn't stayed.

Page 294

Why he was interested in making the case for the two priests didn't really become clear to me until, as we were talking, I realized they were just a conversational gambit. What Elvis really wanted to find out was who I was. He assumedas had Yolanda, the prostitute in Rustonthat because of my inquiries, I might "know more than I let on." And in case I did, he had a continuing problem I maybe could help with. At any event, telling me his story was a small risk on his part, the kind you take when gambling on faith.

A few months back, Elvis began, he'd been having a bad time with his girlfriend, who was really mad at him. He didn't know what to do about it, so he went to his houngan. Jacques gave him some advicedon't call the girl for awhile. He also gave him a potion. Elvis was to slip it into something she drank. Then she wouldn't be angry anymore.

"Did it work?"

"That was the problem," he smiled shyly. "it did."

She stopped being mad, but he began to have second thoughts. As he put it, "I didn't want to see somebody who'd call the police on me."

I realized some critical details were missing from this story. "
What
police? What happened?"

He looked at the ground. "Oh it, was an argument."

The sun was so hot I was getting dizzy, but I knew Elvis wanted me to hear him out. The short version was that even though she wasn't mad at him anymore, the girlfriend had already filed charges based on the "argument." He would have to go to court. So Elvis went back to Jacques, who gave him two sticks to rub in his hands and told him to recite two secret words outside the courthouse. He did, and his girlfriend didn't show up for the hearing. The charges were dismissed. "It really does work," he concluded. "That's why I tell you this.''

All that left Elvis without a girlfriend, but Jacques gave him the means to get a new one. Put stone fragments from a comet

Page 295

for sale in the botanicain your refrigerator overnight and then drop one in front of the house of the girl you wanted. She'd call you immediately. Elvis hadn't done it yet but intended to.

I told Elvis I didn't know about that. What good would it do to get a girl by trickery? Sure, he said, no question about that, but don't forget she might be under the influence of someone else. You might have to get some tricks just to even the odds.

"There is good magic," he said, then he touched my arm and lowered his voice. "But always remember the truth is that they can make things to hurt people, too, to kill them." He looked into my eyes, almost pleading.

That easily, I suppose, I could have become a spiritual adviser. But I think what Elvis needed was a decent therapist. The appeal of voudou priests, or priests of any religion, however, is that not everyone believes in therapy, but everyone does believe in magic.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

Sunday morning I wanted to go to church, and I knew just where. Storefront ministries had sprouted amid the fix-it shops, beauty parlors and other bootstrap businesses all over Little Haiti. I didn't have any stock riding on any particular Christian sect, but I had a theory that a Protestant service in a working class Haitian environment would be a lot like a Spiritual Church service in New Orleans. There was only one way to find out. A little after eleven, I found a vacant seat in a back pew at the Independent Church of God, a small charismatic denomination temporarily housed on the lower floor of a white, two-story office building about halfway between the botanicas of St. Jean Baptiste and Jacques and Yvonne.

The sanctuary was large enough to hold several hundred people, and as I walked in, I could see that it did. As in the Spiritual churches, the women wore white lace head coverings, often complemented by lace shawls draped across their shoulders. The

Page 296

men were dressed mostly in dark suits, though the inside temperature was in the nineties. The walls were bare, almost spartan. I couldn't see any icons, not even a cross. The only adornments seemed to be a few framed photos of church leaders.

Two ushers, surprised to see a white man, were almost solicitous in finding me a seat, which wasn't easy considering the crowd. A half-dozen working-class men already in place in one of the rear pews slid over to give me room. I sat, nodding a silent greeting to the balding man in the light brown suit to my right. The usher, seeing I had no Bible, found one and gave it to me. It was in French. So were the services, delivered in Creole by the thin, hard-looking, sixty-year-old pastor. In his dark suit and white tie, he looked like a stereotype of the successful houngan, and perhaps in another setting he might have been, running a voudou hounfor (worship area) instead of a fundamentalist Christian mission.

I couldn't understand the words of the sermon, but from the audience response and the cadences of the minister's speech, I could pretty much guess the thematic structure, which in my experience is that of most Sunday preachings, black or white, give or take a few liturgical variants. Put the fear of God into the congregationthe best preachers do the best fearand then show the straying flock the way back to salvation.

I heard Haiti mentioned a few times, and some reference to police.

"Amen," they would respond. "C'est vrai."

I tried to sing the closing hymn, mostly because the man next to me shared his song book, but I couldn't put much into it. My mind was elsewhere. Change a couple of items of apparel and the rows of Haitians standing in front of me, singing to Jesus, I could've been on a Georgia plantation in the eighteenth century. No wonder the Black Codes directed most of their fury at religious expression. The makers of those laws had seen in voudou not the simplistic superstitions they mocked in anti-black

Page 297

propaganda, but the powerful socio-politico-martial force it actually representedin a land where the ratio of blacks to whites, in some states, was as high as 1:1. In the islands of the Caribbean, it was often on the order of 9:1.

I was seeing in Little Haiti what I had been seeing not only in the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans, but throughout African America: the substitution of belief. It was too far gone now, too far assimilated. The substitution was "positioned" over the centuries, to use a modern advertising term, not as repression, or brainwashing, but as conversion, as the saving of pagan African souls. Among some secular thinkers, the mergers and mutations are seen as evidence of a qualitatively new "Atlantic" culture, fresh-forged from the hell of the diaspora. Yet I could not look upon these souls and consider them saved, let alone as phoenixes. Observing what had happened here would always be, for me, the glimpsing of stolen fervor.

But what to do about it? If the pioneers at Oyotunji were right, African Americans, at least spiritually, had to re-group. To regain an identity, as Malcolm X argued, one must first separate and locate it. I remember getting into huge arguments in college, decades ago, over this strategic controversy which has, in one form or another, always divided white and black Americansacross racial linesin cultural, legal and religious matters. Now, as then, I sided with Malcolm X, and with James Baldwin, who exiled himself to Paris, and doubtless that led me to the way I interpreted the voudou renaissance at the end of the twentieth century. I as a white man who had nothing to offer to this discussion but the interjection of my own body and consciousness as long-overdue witness.

Chief Ajamu had said to me: "Every religion has to have a story line, right? It has to have a mythology. So where is that going to come from? It comes from a select group of people. The whole story line is around the history of a particular ethnic group of people, a particular race of people. There's no such thing as a

Page 298

`world' religion. If Christianity is a world religion, then Christianity should be the history of the world, but it isn't, is it? It is the history of one ethnic group of people, and their disputes and wars with people of color."

Page 299

21
Orisha Anew

For months I had followed the spirit, drifting with it from Texas into New Orleans, tracking its peaks and depths across the South like lines on a Richter scale chart. I had jumped up into Brooklyn and back down to Miami. And now I would jump again.

A call had gone out across the voudou network: history was going to be made in Atlanta. For the first time ever, American blacks would conduct, in the symbolic capital of both the Old and the New South, a full orisha voudou initiation in the traditional manner. Not santeria, not hoodoo, not some ersatz mix.

Initiations were not uncommon in the U. S., but mostly they were taking place in the urban portsNew York and Miamior at Oyotunji. To conduct one in Atlanta was evidence the renaissance had moved openly into the heartland. But there was something even more special about the event: the initiate was from New Orleans. With one stroke, the two most important cities of the old slave belt were united in what was once unthinkableperpetuating the vo-du in America. And it was almost too perfect that the woman chosen to forge the link was

Page 300

the dancer Ava. Kay Jones, and that the site of her initiationto the goddess Oyawas the home of Baba Kunle and Baba Tunde, the two priests who had given me my first taste of sacrificial blood.

I arrived for the final ceremony, known as Throne Day. Ava. had been cloistered for a week of traditional Yoruba preparation ritualsprayers, dances, teaching of secretspresided over by Baba Kunle, her spiritual godfather. She also had received her orisha pots and itá. Now she approached the conclusion, a kind of "coming out" gala in which the intitiate emerges from her ring of priests as though from a river of baptism, and greets her friends with a bimbé. Guests, participants and relatives from New York, Oyotunji, Miami, LA, and around the South had been filtering in for days. I had been told a number of important babalawos would be present, and sure enough as I made my way toward the patio there was Dr. Epega in a festive dashiki. We couldn't talk longhe was still helping with the rituals.