American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (24 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 next day I left Mississippi and crossed eastward into Alabama. I can't say I ever felt comfortable there. It's a beautiful statelush rolling hills tapering off from the bottom of the Appalachian chain, acres of blue lakes, endless evergreen forests. It boasts important military bases like Ft. Rucker, the Army aviation school, and has attracted some of the New Plantation Economy industry, and yet it's another country, was even home to an infamous right-wing mercenary training center for awhile. I felt I had crossed not only a state line, but a psychological one. Of all the southern states, Alabama has always been the most intransigent to integration and acquiesent to racism.
My route would take me through several towns which once stretched across the front lines of the civil rights movement: Demopolis, on the western edge of the state, and then across to Selma and Montgomery. For a change, I had someone to contactJulia Mae Haskins Foster, a forty-four-year-old African-American school teacher who had settled in Demopolis. A friend of mine had had an unrequited crush on her when he, a white college student, was working on voter registration in the mid-1960s with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). She'd also been an activist, and had joined the famous fifty-mile protest march from Selma to Montgomery. Her older brother Jim Haskins, now living in New York, had made numerous contacts among local healers for
Voodoo and Hoodoo,
his thoughtful 1978 account of hexes and spell-making.
I crossed the Tombigbee River on Highway 43 and drove through the Demopolis town square, complete with its Confederate monument and quiet perimeter of family-owned retail storesthe kind malls destroy. As in many small towns, the white section lay to one side, the black, known here as the New Quarters, to the other. Which was where Julia Mae lived with her father and children.

 

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I could see why my friend had been smitten. Less obvious was why the Haskins had taken him under their roof. A movement houseone committed to providing refuge to civil rights workersit was already a twenty-four-hour-a-day target for the Klan. But the movement involved all colors, and in those days more than one white person took shelter with this remarkable African-American family. Nor was the danger ever underestimated. It was not uncommon for the Haskins place, where Dr. King, too, had once stayed, to pass the night under armed protection. In the worst times, up to twenty people had lain outside the house through the dawn to fend off terrorist bombers and snipers euphemized as "night riders."
But civil rights work wasn't the only thing in the Demopolis air. One of the most famous of the Alabama hoodoo men had lived in the block just behind the Haskins. Cars with out-of-state licenses, black and white folk, had for years lined the street late at night waiting to see Dr. Holloway and receive his cures and readings. He had since died of cancer, although at least one of his sons was said to still do work out on Highway 80.
That seemed a good place to begin, and I tried to reach him through one of Dr. Holloway's grandchildren, now living in the home behind the Haskins, but she was unable or unwilling to provide a phone number. Shifting plans, Julia and I went into the projects to search out a woman who reportedly did some hoodoo, but after making the rounds we decided it was probably just a rumor. That only left Miss Patsy.
Julia's older brother Alfred wanted to go with us and later that afternoon we drove deeper into the New Quarters, where the pavement turned to dirt and the houses hung together in disrepair. Heat had forced most people inside in front of fans or, if they could afford it, air conditioners. I saw almost no one except a few children lounging under a shade tree and heard nothing save the intermittent yelping of a hound dog. We pulled

 

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up to a brown clapboard set back amid a muddy lot, surrounded by a few big hardwoods. An iron kettle and some yard junk had accumulated to the side of a cluttered front porch. So had two huge dogsa snarling black Lab mix and a dirty yellow mongrel the size of a bear. As a replication of the prototypical little hoodoo shack on the wrong side of town, it was without peer.
Ignoring his sister's caution, Alfred got out of the car to go knock on the door. As soon as he did the Lab leapt forward to attack, tearing at his jeans until Miss Patsy came out on the porch and called the animal off. Julia yelled out an introduction through her half-cracked window but it seemed useless. Not budging, Miss Patsy said she didn't want to talk to "no white man," and went back inside, slamming the door. Alfred scrambled back inside the car unhurt but shaken by the attack. We took him back to the Haskins place. I asked Julia if we might try again.
We drove up slowly and parked in the same spot but this time made no attempt to get out. Miss Patsy came down to the car. Her dogs followed. I rolled down the window and told her what I wanted. I don't know what changed her mind, but she said it would be okay after all to come sit on the porch "if all you want is to talk." I looked at the dogs. She said they wouldn't bother me if I didn't act up. Julia, though also invited, stayed in the car. I wasn't sure why she wanted to minimize her involvement until later.
Another part-Choctaw, Miss Patsy had been doing "spiritual advising" for nearly forty years, and I judged her for about sixty. She learned much of her craft from the late Joe King, her former common law husband and a locally famous hoodoo man. As stipulated, she wouldn't let me into her house to show me the small room where she gave occasional readings, at $15 per session, but told me there wasn't much in it except a table and the Bible. "My power comes from the Lord," she said. "Hoodoo spells must come from the Devil."

 

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But spell-making was clearly part of her repertoire. As we talked further, she opened up enough to admit that her clients commonly suffered from hexes, usually about romance. And although it was true that she used the Bible, she told me she also frequently prepared potions, teas or other concoctions. Taking a chance, I asked if she performed animal sacrifices. She didn't answer. The silencewhich I took as a yeslasted so long I thought the interview might be over. Trying to direct the subject away from an area in which she obviously seemed threatenedanimal sacrifice was illegal, for whatever motiveI asked if she had ever heard anything about the African gods. I dropped a few namesElegba, Shango, Obatalabut it was obvious she'd never heard of them.
By now she'd received me for about fifteen minutes and that was at least fourteen minutes longer than she wanted to. She sat tense and tight in her chair, her pursed-up lips concealing a strained, gap-toothed smile. A teenage boy, perhaps a grandson, came out of the house, looked around, then went back in. The two dogs had settled a snarl away on the porch steps. We were done. I stood up and gave her my card. I said I'd like to come back. She said goodbye.
Julia drove me back to her house. On the way I invited her to have dinner with me, in gratitude for her assistance. Her face flushed a little. She appreciated the offer, but she didn't think it would be a good idea for her to be seen with a white man like that. I told her she must be joking. It was a small town, she said.
I went to my motel and changed into my shorts and Nikes. I tried to run a few miles at least every other day, no matter where I was, a practice which more than once made me look even stranger than merely being a traveling white man looking for hoodoo doctors. Jogging in Demopolis, Alabama, or Starkville, Mississippi, isn't exactly like going around a hike and bike trail in your local community park. I headed up the grass-filled median along the highway to Selma, past tractor sales lots, bar

 

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becue stands, convenience stores and all the familiar landmarks of retail strip ugliness. Later that night, I ate alone.
In the morning I went back to the Haskins's to say goodbye. Julia Mae was going to work but wanted to tell me something. Someone had called her and told her to ''be careful no one throw some powder on me for taking a white man 'round." I didn't say anythingno wonder she'd sat in the car. "I hope nothin' happen to you, either," Julia Mae added. We both laughed, mostly because we both knew such hexes were ridiculous, but just a little because we weren't completely sure. Then I went to the hoodoo shack again.
It was bothering me that Miss Patsy had been so secretive. It was making me mad. I found her house without much trouble and parked by the porch, but before I could get out, the hounds from hell were at my window. I had no choice but to wait for their master. When she came down from the porch she let the dogs circle and growl and told me to stay in the car.
I said okay, but that I'd come back not just to talk but to pay for a reading. She shook her head. "I'm pretty busy." I said I could come back when she was free. She shook her head again. "I don't know when I'll have time." I asked if I could pay her just to have a look at the room in which she gave readings. "That's not to show," she said.
"I'm not out to steal anything or any secrets."
"I know."
"I just want to help make of record of your work, put you in history." It sounded lame to me, too, especially delivered through a half-open window guarded by junk yard mongrels. I sighed and told her I'd leave. She and the dogs walked toward the porch but watched to make sure I really drove off. And I did, cursing that snaggle-tooth mean old lady halfway to Selma. I didn't know why it had gotten to me that much. It didn't seem to be about race or even fearor the cautions Julia Mae had exercised. Miss

 

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Patsy had shut me out cold. In my piqueat that momentI could only see two reasons for her doing so: (1) she had some heavy stuff in there and didn't want me to see it, or (2) she didn't. The more I drove, the more I dwelt on the latter. A hoodoo practioner who's any good doesn't live hand to mouthhe or she has a list of clients to fill a book, and does not shrink from contact but welcomes it. Obscurity is the ally only of those who deal in ignorance. And voudou is nothing if not knowledge, especially self-knowledge. Five and dime palmistry and shotgun shack root doctors were for the foolish and the gullible. How I had tired of spiritual shell-games! I felt myself sinking more than ever in the diminution of the voudou legacy, in despair at the endless ways it had mutated, contorted.
To be a priest of voudou one must prepare, study, sacrifice, devote oneself to the spirits. To be a hoodoo one might get away with a simple bent towards bunko. A hoodoo woman simply confused and distracted those who came to her, teaching them not the path to power, which is the path of self-revelation and devotion, but encouraging the idea of quick fixes, literally and figuratively.
The hell with hoodoo, I decided, driving through the flat farmland and pine forests. I should just leave it to its own chicanery. Hoodoo is the worst kind of lie, what the academics call a simulacrum, a contrivance substituting itself for the real thing. How useful to the old anti-voudou campaigns to have the great African religion thus reduced to snakes in your stomach and menstrual blood in your coffee. Who, black or white, could take something like that seriously?
I passed a logging truck like it was standing still, and noticed I was going about eighty-five. I slowed down; my foul mood was translating too easily into bad driving. Not once in my trip had I seen a shrine, or an altar, or heard a minor conversation about the orisha, or seen the slightest recognition of a connection between the hexing to the ancient knowledge. Maybe I would

 

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never find the missing links. For several miles I weighed that possibility. Maybe my theory was just plain wrong. What wishful thinking or arrogance had made me think I would find voudou inside the trappings of hoodoo? I was nothing more than a crazy prospector, a seeker of pyrite.
In my funk, I drifted back to a telephone conversation a couple of years earlier with Luisah Teish, whose
Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals,
recounted her own journey into the African spirit world. She, too, had encountered stonewalling, ignorance and fear. But she'd seen it more objectively than I seemed to be able to do.
"You had people having to pretend they were Christian while holding on to their African ways," she had told me from her home in San Francisco. "The next generation remembers the ways, but doesn't remember the reasons. The next generation ... keeps some of the ways but all they remember of the content is that it's dangerous to identify with the African race. They've lost the theology, but they've kept the practice." Teish had paused a moment. She herself had embraced the dangerher search for the theology had led her to initiation as a daughter of Oshun.
"They've also kept the fear. The fear is righteous in that there's no reason for people to trust the Constitution when it says there's freedom of religion. So now you'll get people who, if you say the word 'voudou' to them, they'll say they're damn good Christians and want nothing to do with it."
Recalling the conversation slowly brought my anger under control.
Ranting against hoodoo was ranting against history.
Of course hoodoo was a debasement of the real thing. Slavery was a debasement of real people.
I had become lost in my own ego.
In Selma, I stopped for coffee. The town was now clean and relatively prosperouseven had a black mayor. It seemed to be trying hard to overcome its image from the 1960s, when police

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