American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (38 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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spirit world of voudou is to know, in some terrible place in your writer's heart, that no matter how many times you taste the blood, feel the spark of a spirit, that you can never make the myth as manifest as does the reality of the act.
When I got to Fort Pierce, the beachside resort town where Hurston, fifty-nine and broken, died in a welfare home in 1960, nothing indicated her burial site. It was a pleasant enough townpalm tree avenues, a lazy pace, populated these days by a mix of snowbirds, tourists, and commercial-minded Anglos intent on putting up as many housing and shopping tracts as possible. I went to the town library, where a staffer helped me trace the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a county-funded cemetery in the poor, mostly black and hispanic side of town. On the way there I passed Sarah's Memorial Chapel, where Hurston's body had been prepared for pauper's burial. The avenues seethed with hoods in late model cars and no visible means of support.
At the northern limit of North 17th Street, about a mile in from the shoreline, I came to a crushed shell road leading to an open field full of high weeds and flat gravemarkers, except for one in the center, flanked by two evergreen shrubs. In 1973, the writer Alice Walker had come across much the same sight. Appalled, she contracted for a headstone that would at least proclaim the nature of the soul lying beneath. She wrote the epitaph herself: "Zora Neale Hurston. A Genius of the South. 19011960. Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist."
Others had been here, too. Squatting next to the grave, I counted about two dozen pennies, and one game token from a Howard Johnson's at Lake Buena Vista. I knew what they meant. I knelt a few minutes in silent thought, facing, as did the length of the grave, the Atlantic ocean. I had three dimes and placed them next to the other coins, as I had done at Marie Laveau's vault. That night, sitting on the beach, quite alone, I decided to hang back from Miami a little longer. I wanted to visit Chief Owolawo.

 

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Grave of Zora Neale Hurston, Fort Pierce, Florida. Headstone donated by the
writer Alice Walker.
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Owolawo lived outside Gainesville, in the moss-draped back country of Alachua County. In there, Florida wasn't beaches and tourists, but trees, moss, mosquitoes and snakes in jungle-like density that would reclaim anything you didn't hack back, plow under or build over. He'd been taken by surprise when I called. I had learned about him, and gotten his number from Iya Orite, his spiritual goddaughter, but I hadn't been sure if I'd have the time to stop by. Thus I appeared as a complete stranger, an intruder at a pay phone. He almost refused to let me come out. I think what persuaded him was the idea of having his story preserved. And so it is: a year after I saw him, Chief Owolawo died of cancer. He was buried at Oyotunji following a full voudou ritual.
He lived in a ramshackle shingle and wood house saved from a look of dismal rural poverty by the addition of an African-

 

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The late Chief Owolawo, priest of Obatala, outside his home near Gainesville,
Florida.
style open veranda at one end. It looked almost like a trader's outpost in the deep bush. A mailbox out front displayed a stylized rendition, in bright red, of an elegantly simple African rooster.
I pulled up slowly along the lazy dirt lane and parked next to several old cars. Owolawo came down from the porch wearing a loose white African smock, light trousers and striped purple fela. He was so thin he seemed little more than a crooked-tooth smile and a wispy goattee. ''He looks like Bill the Cat," his friend the Oba had joked, referring to a frazzled feline comic book hipster.
But I saw another cultural referent. Were he white, Owolawo, at fifty, might've been an old hippie, or some New England pilgrim from a southern Walden Pond. But he was a priest of Obatala and one of the fifteen original founders of Oyotunji. This was one of the reasons I'd come to see him. His fellow founders were

 

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Stylized rooster on sign at driveway leading to Owolawo's property.
now scattered across the country like apostles. Many had returned to the big cities, but Owolawo had gone "country."
A commercial artist by trade, Owolawo had found his calling in the early sixties, when a friend told him about the new Shango temple Serge King was running on 116th Street in Harlem. When Serge went to South Carolina, Owolawo soon followed, and when Serge became the priest, Efuntola, Owolawo became his first godchild.
He stayed more than a decade in the village, building houses, felling trees, enduring the insects and hot summers and cold winters without water or electricity. But when he reached the age of forty-two, a year of change according to the voudou cycle of life, Owolawo felt he had to move on. Northern Florida seemed a good place. In Gainesville, Owolawo and his wife, also an artist, put together a living doing odd jobs and, increasingly, taking in clients. The stalwart priest of Obatala merged back into the

 

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ranks of hoodoo. He was known locally as a "root doctor." He didn't mind the association. "They might not be technicians or technocrats of African culture," he said of the local, untutored healers, "but they have the essence. They're a viable and vital link to Africa.'' He came to think of his role in the rural woods as that of "a missionary, not an oddity."
As evening approached, two young men and a woman drove up. They introduced themselves and went into the house, where Owolawo's wife was preparing dinner. Around us, children bounded up and down the steps of the veranda. I could imagine Owolawo, among them in the long southern evenings, sitting in the wicker chair, smoking his pipe. He'd never return to the big city.
"I got my just desserts," he said. "I have enjoyed many pleasures people still are searching for. I see thingslike, everybody is never sure about the future, okaybut I'm pleased because I'm doing what I like to do." His thoughts seemed to drift, and after a silence he said something that reminded me of Uncle Clem back in Ruston. A nonsequitur, reaching right up to the stars. "Right from the start it was like the feeling of a great religious project. It perpetuated and propelled us." He was talking about the village. In his heart, he had never left.
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Others in the voudou renaissance were not so serene, and as I left Gainesville for the road south to Miami, I knew I was truly leaving the blanket of all-encompassing spirituality that still stretched down from Oyotunji. In Miami, santeria was the game, and Cubans controlled it. Sectarian disputes had become as intense as they had at the time Serge King took his band of volunteers to the South.
It had gotten fractious back in New York again, too. Clashes between African Americans and Cubans had become the stuff of newspaper polemics and even scholarly debateto become

 

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even more intense in the coming decade. And that was just part of it. I decided that my map of American voudou now had to connect the major poles of a battle which, within the voudou world, was not unlike the one in Christianity which led to the Reformation. In this case the Cuban santeros were the Church and the African-Amcrican orisha voudou advocates were the Protestants.
My journey would move to a new phase: conflict. And then, from conflict, to resolution. That would be the voudou way. In some ways the struggle was politics more than spirituality, but in the end, the arguments and divisiveness struck me as healthy, dynamic. No longer in hiding, voudou was alive and growing. In generating its own quarrels, it was flexing its new muscles.
And no one flexed his muscles more than John Mason.
In the world of voudou, Mason was considered to be point man in the struggle to separate the African-American renais-
Scholar John Mason and his son, Ade, at their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

 

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sance from Cuban dominance. A forty-one-year-old priest of Obatala, he had been initiated in New York in the early 1970s, and had many connections to former villagers, including Owolawo. But while most of them had forsaken New York for the rural South, Mason had staked out his turf in the city.
Setting up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he not only practiced the religion, but studied it voraciously, becoming a self-taught scholar. Books such as
Black GodsOrisa Studies in the New World; Onje Fun Orisa [Food for the Gods]
and
Four New World Yoruba Rituals
, published through his own company, the Yoruba Theological Archministry, earned him a reputation as an expert on Yoruba culture, but it was his harsh attacks on santeria that brought him notoriety.
I vowed to seek Mason out at my first opportunity. No less than Hurston, he was an intellectual pioneer in the investigation and defense of voudou as a part of African-American culture. I was not to meet him in person until a cold autumn weekend later in the year, but in my mind I see him as another stop that summer on the road out of Oyotunji, Fort Pierce, and Gainesville, a road that really led all around America, to all the cities and towns in which the new apostles of voudou had set up outposts.
Mason's was a four-story, semi-detached brownstone nine blocks from the subway stop at Kingston and Troop. I had called him while on a brief trip to New York and asked for a meeting. He agreed despite what I sensed was pique that a white man was writing a book about voudou. I took the "A" train out because Manhattan cabbies refused to drive into Bed-Stuy. Not a great start to the visit, and I was feeling a little anxious anyway going to a part of town I'd mostly heard bad about. Or maybe I was just on edge because Mason had been so gruff on the phone. His voice practically had a "come if you dare" tone, and people who'd heard him lecture said he could get right in your face.

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