American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (2 page)

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

 

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the great voudou deities, of the rituals and prayers for celebration and sacrifice, or of Ifa, the ancient and complex art of divination that lies at the core of voudou philosophy.
Had Catholicism or Judaism disappeared on transport to the New World, we now would be overrun with studies, laments and investigations. How could such a thing happen? Why? And surely one of these studies would observe that in Boston or New York or Chicago, something of the vanished theologies remained in the lives of people even todaya kosher deli, a corner store selling pictures of the saints. And that would raise other questions. Did those religions really disappear? Did they go underground? Does anyone remember them? Are they practiced in secret?
Ironically, voudou also might be said to be all around us. Anyone who has listened to jazz (said to be from an African word for ejaculant) has perceived the legacy of voudou in the arts, and anyone who visits any of thousands of black churches can observe not just the obvious African influences, but the vestiges of voudou as well. It's like a parallel universe. Here and there the membrane tears open. At such ruptures do we sense the true zing of African-American culture. It's that zing, I think, which lends even the word "voudou" its special cachet of eeriness. Voudou doesn't give people the shivers because it celebrates the deadwhat religion doesn't? The shivers come from a deeper chill, a very bad memory: once upon a time, in America, an entire pantheon of gods was murdered. But the deicide was not final. The souls survived.
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In the 1980s, voudou enjoyed a minor resurrection, especially among artists and intellectuals, black and white. David Byrne's film,
True Stories,
featured a voudou seer in a reasonably sane context, and books such as Luisah Teish's
Jambalaya:

 

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The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals
sought to establish voudou in the context both of women's issues and the spiritual searching of the mostly white New Age movement. Ethno-botanist Wade Davis's
The Serpent and the Rainbow
, a science-adventure account of
zombi
pharmacology, was a landmark: the first serious nonacademic study of voudou as an extensive, complex system of social organization since Maya Deren's 1953
Divine Horsemen
, or the great scholar Melville J. Herskovits's on-site examinations of Haiti and Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. And art historian Robert Farris Thompson's influential
Flash of the Spirit
broke new ground in linking African-American artistic themes to the religion of West Africain other words, to voudou.
A second wave of interest in voudou, though mostly incidental, emerged in the nineties, in scholarly and ideological works examining African culture and the diaspora of slavery. These were essentially directed at the Caribbean, not the United States per se. Some, such as Paul Gilroy's
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
, or Leslie Desmangles's
The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti,
carried forward the case made by, among others, Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price in
The Birth of African American Culture
in 1973, that the New World could be better viewedbecause of the special horrors of the slave tradeas the forced incubator of a new culture rather than as a place where African values and culture could be said to have been distinctly or discretely transplanted. These views emphasize a very heterogeneous, pan-Carribbean interconnection combining many different African sources into something neither "purely" African nor American. Gilroy calls it an "inescapable hybridity." In another time, the mutated culture would have been known as
creole
or
criollo
born in the New World. Other authors, such as George Brandon in
Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories,
and Jo-

 

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seph M. Murphy, in
Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora
, have focused efforts less on consciousness and identity theory and more on expanded observation of voudou practices, primarily its Caribbean relative, santeria. The generally acknowledged best of the new wave is Suzanne Blier's remarkable 1996
African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power,
which explores, mostly in an African setting, spiritual and artistic connections in African culture.
Yet, except for Zora Neale Hurston's pioneering travels in the South in the twenties and thirties, no one had made a systematic effort to chronicle the real-life practice and extent of voudou
in the U.S
. And then it came to me: that's what I had to do. I had to find what was out there now. Only then would I begin to understand anything at all, and only then would I have anything of value to report. I outlined a path: an arbitrary crisscross route from New Orleans across the slave belt states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, dipping down to Miami, where the voudou of Cuba and the Caribbean is endemic, and up to New York, too, where priests and practioners increase in number each year. But mostly the Bible Belt, because that's where it lives.
After writing the manuscript, though, a strange, and perhaps instructive interlude occurred. My former publisher was bought by a multinational conglomerate and the book became a kind of
zombi
itselforphaned, as they say in the business when a book loses its original patron. All along, voudou priests and priestesses had warned me rather strongly about ''obstacles" in getting to print a book which didn't take a stereotypical view of voudou, or follow the predictable academic catechisms. The book would come out when it was time, I was told. I didn't believe it.
I should have. Several years of seemingly endless and often dispiriting rejections and renegotiations became a lingering exegesis of the priestly cautions. The voudou renaissance is, as I

 

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had predicted, here to stayyou can even find "voodoo" websites now on almost any internet search enginebut the prejudices about the religion are as potent as ever, even in the carrels and corner offices of the publishing cartels.
Nor has voudou's renaissance done much to quell the longstanding contentions over the efforts by African Americans to reclaim voudou worship on their own terms, rather than through heavily modified, mediatory forms such as Cuban santeria. This book's own small efforts in witnessing the revival have drawn startling vituperation, and at least two strong objections to its alleged "Afrocentrism." Responding in detail would involve a book-length discussion of its own; to avoid that I will accept the "Afrocentrist" label, insofar as it means I side with the attempts of African Americans in the United States to lay unfettered claim to their own heritage on their own terms.
This implies neither a superiority nor purity of African heritage over any other. I also fully acknowledge the danger of any people claiming cultural hegemony. I live in the South; how could I not know that? Yet, in the context of the legacy of slavery, I hardly see the search for voudou authenticitybasically a deeply spiritual quest for African rootsto represent cultural totalitarianism in any form. I do see a value in putting voudou on a par with any religious belief system from Europe. Or Cuba, in the case of the quarrel with santeria. Not that my opinion matters. The issue of what is "African" and what is a "new" culture forged on this side of the bloody Atlantic is not up to me to decide, nor to academic specialists. It is for African Americans themselves, acting in response to their own sense of the sacred.
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Approximately a year before I started this project, while ignorance and curiosity were careening inside my head, I had the opportunity to call on Wade Davis (no relation) at his home

 

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in Vancouver. His introduction to voudou in Haiti had been similar to mine in America: he had never known much about it, nor had reason to. He, too, subsequently had proceeded through a paucity of background information only to come afire through direct experience, the excitement of which came from the simple discovery of suppressed evidence. We agreed that little was known of American versions of voudou, which are more assimilated into Christianity than are Haitian models, and to my great satisfaction we also agreed on our initial reactions as Westerners.
"Have your encounters with voudou had any effect on your own religious beliefs?" I asked Wade as we sat drinking coffee in his basement study. The walls around were lined with maps, African and Haitian artifacts, well-stocked bookshelves and a basket of clothes for the baby his anthropologist wife, Gail, was carrying.
"I'm still looking for my gods," he answered. "I'm tragically secular. Those of us who don't know our gods and we first see something as raw and immediate and visceral as spirit possessionas you have, toowe have two responses. Fear, which finds its outlet in cynicism and disbelief. Or awe. My answer was always awe."
My answer is the same.
ROD DAVIS
1
For an explanation of the various spellings of voudou, see page 9.

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first to members of the African-American community throughout the South for sharing with a stranger the most sacred parts of their lives. I also thank all those mentioned in this book; each of you gave generous amounts of time and provided a fresh clue in the search for the legacy of voudou in America. I would especially thank the Reverend Lorita Honeycutt Mitchell Gamble, her son Gary Williams, and members of their extended family and her congregation for their continuing support in New Orleans. Thanks also to New Orleans dancer and priestess, Ava Kay Jones.
Much of the detail of the practice of the religion today would not have been possible without the wise counsel of the Oba, priests and people of the village of Oyotunji, South Carolina, who shall always remain close in spirit. I was also helped along the voudou trail by Sarah Albritton in Ruston, Louisiana, and Julia Mae Haskins in Demopolis, Alabama, and in Miami by Chief A. S. Ajamu and Lydia Cabrera. I further thank my friend Pamela Becker, for her early assistance and participation in the project, and also to friends Kathy and Donna Knox, and Sarah Whistler for help and ideas along the way, and to Howard Sandum for invaluable advice and support. I appreciate the assistance of the libraries and staffs of Tulane University and the University of Texas for help in research and to American Airlines for assistance in transportation, and to the Whittle Corporation for a helpful assignment in New Orleans. Finally, my appreciation to colleagues Jim Morgan and Linton Weeks, whose idea for a cover story on voudou in the late
Southern
magazine opened the door to this book, and to my editors Charlotte Wright and Fran Vick at the University of North Texas Press, for their faith in my vision and commitment to this witness.

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