American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (48 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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and dark slacks or skirts, and the lay men in the audience wore their best double-breasted suits or fresh-pressed summer shirts and slacks. It could've been Little Haiti.
Archbishop Johnson wound down his sermon, and, as late-comers continued to trickle in, nodded to the organist. It was time for the show most had come to see. With a flourish of white cuffs and ringed fingers, the smiling, heavy-set musician in a blue suit threw up a wall-of-sound gospel riff that utterly dominated the room. Exactly on cue, Gary hit the stage. He was a concentration of powersolid black robes, white cap, face glowing, handsome as the night he'd led me around the French Market. Clapping with each step forward, his rich voice took easy command as the wall of sound became the old standard: "Jesus on the main line/Tell him what you want."
Soon even the Archbishop was clapping and swaying. We all were. The crescendo boiled up like water in a kettle, and just when it was about to scream with release, Lorita emerged, trailed by Anthony, one of the twins. In white to Gary's black, they joined hands to face the congregation.
It was truly a show. St. Lazarus Spiritual Church pumped up ten-fold in a sanctuary Lorita could have only dreamed of having as her own ministry. She fit like a glove. In the next hour, as the hymns and singing spread out across the chamber, mingling with the incense, she spannedfor herself and those who had seen her grow up, come of age and perseverethe distance from Mother Jorden, Bishop Francis, and all those who had come before to all who would come hence. "Hup!"Archbishop Johnson, bent double at the waist, drawing his arms into his body to her preaching. "Hup!"the energy of the Spirit leaping from him into her, her in his long-traveled shoes, her own now, bearing down on sinners, reaching out to saints.
"When we was poor we didn't have no bread to eat ... but it didn't stop me from serving the Lord," she called out. "When I was a young girl I wanted to wear the short skirts ... but my

 

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minister said no ... the Lord have something in store ... and it came to pass."
And now she knew of Jesus and the Holy Way and she was standing before many who would have once scorned her and hid their children from her gaze. "Put your hands together now," she commanded from the pulpit, guttural and growling in the place between sex and god Gerard Manley Hopkins could only imagine. "We going to pray."
I took the hand of a sister in white who reached back from the pew in front of me. I lowered my eyes and listened, but I still couldn't pray in a church. That would never change for me. And yet I always felt at home in Lorita's ministry. That would never change, either. Others would refine it; others would make the nationalist break from santeria; others would clarify the relationship to bedrock Afro-American Protestantism. But in the long run, voudou in America was going to be as it was in the life and practice of Lorita Mitchell.
When the praying was finished, we sang another hymn, and then it was time for the prophecies. So many people wanted readings they had to form three linesone to Lorita, the others to her sons. Things just seemed to break loose. A dozen people whirled into trances. Several had to be helped away, calling out Jesus's name. Some sisters "cleaned" others, drawing out bad spirits. A young woman in purple jumped from the pews, bent double, thrust her arms out violently, and began hopping in a spasmodic dancecompletely gone. A man grabbed her round the shoulders and guided her to a pew. She sat there a moment, sagging forward, head in hands. Then she snapped upright and was back in the aisle, and had to be helped to a seat again.
Lorita cleaned a man in a wheelchair, kneeling before him to bathe his badly swollen feet with holy water. One day he would walk again, she told him, but he must pray to Jesus for it. "I don't care what the doctors say," she scoffed, rising up. She, too, began to spin. She came right down off the dais into the aisle

 

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with all the other possessed souls. At one point she passed by me, less than a foot away, clenching the man's slippers in her hands. She didn't even see me. And I'm not sure who I was seeing. Her eyes were glassy, her checks puffed out. She was snorting, nostrils widely flared.
It went on for a half-hour. The collection plate made the rounds, and Lorita advised those who wanted their prophecies "to work fast" to come up to get the small white candles she'd brought. They should light them at home and read Psalms and pray. But there was a cost. "Sacrifice five dollars for your candle," she said, "because God will return it to you doublefold.'' She was asking them to make ebo.
While the people came forward, I thought back to what I'd seen a moment earlier. Lorita had stepped to the center of the dais, framed by the symbols of the Lord and the Spirits in rows of burning candles and statues behind her. To either side stood her two strong and handsome sons. They joined hands and raised their interlocked arms high, beaming in a triumvirate of power and exultation. The organist rolled out a lively "Come on, Spirit," and they stepped forward as smoothly as in a Motown revue. In my notebook, I drew a crude depiction of the scene and wrote under it a single word: Triumph.

 

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APPENDIX I
VOUDOU IN THE MEDIA
A representative sample of voudou accounts in the nineteenth-century New Orleans press easily shows the establishment, repetition and reinforcement of the negative cultural stereotype that has stuck with the religion. The stories usually appeared about the time of St. John's Feast (June 24), a Catholic holiday also often said to have been used for voudou gatherings. In general the accounts involved a clandestine celebration in some swamp or backwood, about midnight, with wanton revelry, blood sacrifices, mumbo-jumbo singing and dancing, and were presided over by an eerie mammy or old man. The reporters were invariably white. Sensationalist and racist phrasings were commonplace, as was the creation of an atmosphere of murkiness and horror. It was as if the more bizarre and phantom-like the stories, the more likely was the audiencewhite, literate Orleaniansto believe them. I present here many of the accounts at length, not because of the sparkling nature of the reporting, but because each is a treasure chest of detail in the creation of what today we might call the "negative spin" on voudou mythology.

 

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One of the most interesting accounts actually appeared later in the century, but is of special interest because it claims to present one of the earliest known stories of a voudou event. An unsigned piece (the author is possibly Zoe Posey, from whose collection of original newspaper manuscripts this is taken)
1
in the June 26, 1874
New Orleans Daily Picayne
, it was presented along with news stories but it purports to the re-telling of an event from 1723, previously preserved only in oral form. It thus openly reflects what certainly must have been prevailing attitudes toward voudouthat it was witchcraft, sorcery, damnationbut also quite powerful in an evil way.
In the narrative, a French pioneer named Castillon, a decent man, falls from the state of grace after eating an apple from a tree of knowledge inhabited by an Eve-like spirit. He takes up the ways of Africans and Indians, and, no doubt as a consequence, becomes an evil man, a usurer, a conjurer, a murderer, destroyed at last as a victim to his own Faustian bargain. All amid dark and stormy nights, violence, mayhem, sex and the half-lit world of swashbuckling New Orleans, the northern tip of the Caribbean. It's a semiotician's dream, and no bad yarn either.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The Hamadryad
A Wild Story of 1723.
The Birth of Voudouism in Louisiana.
There is, on Bayou Road, an old house that has defied alike the hand of time and the humid, destructive breeze of our swamps, a breeze before which stone and iron melt away like ice. This building, a sturdy centenarian, has its story, like many a more aristocratic mansion, a story that was universally known

 

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and believed half a century ago, but which, like all the old ideas and glories of Louisiana, is fast being forgotten and unheard.
A century and a half ago there lived in the city of New Orleans an old Frenchman by [the] name [of] Jean Marie de Castillon. Jean, or "Babillard," as he was re-christened, was an ideal old Frenchman, vain, childish and garrulous, but the very best of company. His fund of anecdotes was inexhaustible; in these old Jean was always his own herovictor on the field of battle, in the cabinet or in the drawing room.
Every morning and evening, Castillon would promenade through the marsh Place d'Armes or along the fish-smelling levee, ogling the fille de la casette or voluptuous sirens from St. Domingo. Yet, even these could not allure him; and he would wander from their temptations to the company's warehouses, where he was sure to capture some new listener, a wild, half savage voyageur from St. Genevieve, or a staid Alsacian from the German coast. Then he would pour forth his stories, until a plea of "business" rescued his unhappy prisoner.
Among the many "coinages of his brain," one never failed to bring down his audience; this was his claim to a Marquisate in the aristocratic province of Berni. Some of the army officers, dangerous pegrès drafted from the prisons of Paris, would jokingly respond to this claim, that old Castillon was more than noble, that he was royal, and bore upon his shoulders, like the kings of France, a blood-red fleur-de-lys, printed there in large characters by the hangman of Arles. At this rough camp joke, Castillon would twist his moustaches, contract his busy [sic] grey eyebrows, and drop his hand upon his sword hilt. He never drew the weapon; his courage was so well established by his [s]tories that this was deemed all that was necessary in such a chevalier Bayard.
With all his nobility and his chateaux (en Espagne), Jean was distressingly poor. He had a homea rickety, uncertain

 

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cabin, provided by the Governmentbut his cupboard was as bare as that of Mrs. Hubbard, of Mother Goose fame. The neighbors never refused him a meal; for this Castillon always paid most liberally in stories and jokes. When, however, a famine came and the crops were burnt by the Indians or destroyed by the flood, old Castillon would take his pirogue, meander through the spider web of bayous and lakes that surrounded the city, in search of berries, wild fruit or anything edible he could pick up.
On October 18, 1723, when old Castillon was out on one of those predatory expeditions, occurred one of the greatest storms that ever swept the Gulf of Mexico. For five days and nights after this old Castillon was missing and given up for lost. "The storm," "Indians," "Alligators," "Carried off by the Devil," were the exclamations of his acquaintances, ready to build a two-volume romance on even less foundation than this very natural disappearance.
Just as these stories were growing stale and cold, old Castillon appeared. He had set out a stout, hearty, jovial old gentleman; he returned dirty, haggard, reduced in size and with a strange saturnine scowl upon his usually beaming face. Not a word did he say to the friends who congregated around to greet him, but marched straight to his little hovel in the rue de Condé, pulled up the plank that served as a draw-bridge to his castlefor in those days every house in the city was on an island to itselfand lay hidden from view for a whole week. The only token of his existence was the flame and smoke that curled upwards from his mud chimney, and this flame told some that he was at work in his kitchen, others that the devil was paying him a friendly visit.
When, at the end of a week, Castillon left his hut, he was thinner, more yellow and emaciated than when he had entered it. Instead of promenading on the levee with his supply of yarns for sale, Castillon now frequented a grove of trees that grew just back of the city, about equi-distant from the city walls and the

 

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Highlands of the Lepers. Old Marie, Queen of the Voudous, and Buechin, the Indian doctor, were consulted by the curious, but could only explain, what everybody knew, the Castillon was bewitchedvoudoued.
The following is Castillon's own version of the storyso at least Mimi, a nymphe, swore was confided to her by the old man himself in a tender moment:
In his wanderings on the day of his disappearance Castillon came upon a strange outré grove of trees, known to the Indians as "The Fairies' Grove." Seeing some bright golden fruit that grew luxuriantly upon these trees, Castillon determined to lay in a winter supply of these Hesperian apples, if it should be proved that they were edible. It was not at all an easy task to climb these trees: they were tall, smooth and almost limbless. Thirty feet from the ground they burst into three branches of limbs, one growing centrally upward, well covered with long wiry leaves; the other two horizontally from the side, lithe, thin and almost leafless.
It was only after superhuman efforts that Castillon reached the fork of the tree. Seating himself there, he greedily devoured one of the fruit that had first attracted his attention. No sooner had he finished it than a strange feeling came over him, the earth seemed to spin around with frightful rapidity, the trees commenced playing leap-frog, and the very sun itself seemed "dancing as on an Easter day." So dizzy did he become, that unable any longer to hold on to the branch, he let go and fell head-foremost to the ground.
When Castillon awakened from this shock it was evening; the sun, red with the glow of the coming storm, was just sinking behind the horizon. Yet even a greater change had come over the trees whence he had fallen. Slowly the mighty branches softened into arms, the leaves melted into hair, whilst the scaly bark, dropping from the trunk, exposed to view a face of the most startling beauty. Castillon was almost paralyzed at this sight; he

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