American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (4 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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Brochure advertising Voodoo Museum, French Quarter.

 

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guistic thought-lock emanating from the "voodoo" word picture. In addition, its etymology is distinctly American, befitting the scope of this book.
Some American practitioners, especially in santeria, avoid the problem by referring to "orisha worship." But others, myself included, think it is important to retain use of the word voudou itself. As an influential priest once told me, "The word will not go away. I wouldn't want it to go away. Keep in mind it has been maligned in the Western mind and Hollywood has given it a very ugly image and so nobody wants to be called vo-du, in the same way people didn't want to be called nigger ... (but) it's perfectly legitimate and I think that you should use it and the more current that it becomes in the American mind, then people will understand it better and it will become vindicated of all the ignorance and viciousness that Hollywood has imposed upon it."
Only in Africa did vo-du (orisha) worship retain its lineage, without the intervention of Christian slave masters, to the ancient court of the Egyptians and their reverence not for the single patriarch deity developed under Judaic tribes as Jahweh, but for the entire cluster of existence, from the stars and the moon to the fecundity of the earth mother herself. What a story, what a grand chronicle could be constructed of the migration of these great mythical powers to the glories of the New World, already ablaze with the Aztecs, the Inca, the Anasazi, the Cherokee, the Navajo, Hopi, Sioux, Apache, Iroquois! But it didn't happen that way. Not for any of the indigenous religions, and especially, unsparingly, not for the "dark continent" import.
The religious history of AmericaI would say the social history, toobecame that of the Bible, and to a lesser extent, of the Torah. in the case of the Native American religions the substitution was simple. Genocide. A religion without a living people to practice it is just another footnote in a history textbook. Afri-

 

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can theology was a different matterthe slave population grew, instead of dwindled. Eliminating the slave religion, and replacing it with Christianity, required centuries of repressive laws, executions, maimings and brainwashing. But it worked. Which is why we were performing one of the most devout rituals of the voudou culture at the French Market under cover of night, instead of among throngs of well-wishers on a weekend afternoon, or on Sunday morning TV.
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At the third corner, Gary ran into difficulty with the obi. He had to throw several times, because the numbers weren't coming up right. You try not to leave with a bad sign. The worst would be four black husks, meaning oyckun, or dangerstopthe strongest warning possible. I know because I got one of those several months later in Atlanta and only by sacrifice to Elegba and Ogun, the god of metal, did I avoid a potentially dangerous accident in a pounding thunderstorm. But Lorraine wasn't getting an oyekun. She was drawing the one/three combination, okana, which is basically a strong warning to seek further consultation. So you ask again until you isolate the negative elements, and then through further yes/no dialogue with the ancestors, whose voices are revealed via the obi, you establish the proper course.
As Gary did this, he prayed to Elegba in the Yoruba language and in Spanish chants he had learned from Cuban santeros. Though now facing a separatist revolt from the African-American orisha voudou revivalists, the Cubans, whose ancestors' brutal sugar plantations absorbed huge quantities of slaves, are generally credited with preserving the rituals of orisha voudou through the long centuries of bondage. It was Cubans who re-introduced the traditional, as opposed to ersatz, practice of the religion to the U.S. black community in the late 1950s in

 

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New York, where it remained relatively cloistered until the late 1970s or early 1980s.
I looked around as Gary and Lorraine studied the obi. The truckers were checking us out, and so were the club crowd and some of the vendors. You could tell we were doing something plenty weird, and that it involved a white man and two black people in some kind of odd costumery, and we weren't drunk, and it wasn't a party, and it had a method. That was probably the part that sent off the vibeswe had a purpose. That's always been the thing about voudou.
After we finished at the last corner, it was time to walk through the market itself, to present the yaguo publicly. As we walked up the sidewalk between the stalls, Gary remembered he was supposed to pick up some vegetables for home. About a dozen people were involved in the initiation, and it is customary for the host, in this case Gary's mother, to feed them.
We passed a vegetable stand and Gary looked at a display of plump, ripe tomatoes.
"How much are these?" Gary asked.
The vendor, a short, fat man I had overheard people calling Fredo, looked at Gary and the yaguo. "We're not open."
Gary examined the tomatoes. "Oh, I thought you were."
"Well, we're not."
An electrified split-second came and went. You could barely see it in the tight smile on Gary's face. "You looked open," he said again, then shrugged and escorted the yaguo away.
Earlier, while waiting for Gary and the yaguo to arrive at the market, I had seen business done at that stand. I walked over to Fredo. "You're open," I said. "You've been open all night."
Fredo's eyes narrowed as he checked me out. "We're closed."
"What do you mean you're closed?"
"I mean, we're closed."
"That's bullshit."

 

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"Why don't you get on out of here?"
"Why don't you go fuck yourself?"
He said something equally snappy. I made a couple of quick calculations and figured this was a bad place to pick a fight. Gary and the yaguo had moved down the walkway. I joined them, Fredo's epithets still buzzing. I wanted to smash his face, but mostly I was angry with myself. I had lost my temper and nearly provoked a fight.
"Forget it," said Gary. "They're just ignorant people. They don't know anything about us."
Lorraine, who in heels towered nearly a head above Gary and me, was bound by silence. I was deeply sorry to have nearly created an incident on one of the most important evenings of her new life, and I apologized to both of them. "I just have a temper sometimes," I said.
Gary's eyes darted my way from under his white leather cap. "Yeah," he said. "I do, too."
We turned up outside the market and went back to the car. It was time to go to a Catholic church to complete the presentation. I suggested a chapel on the other side of the QuarterOur Lady of Guadalupe, named for the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aztec/Catholic patron saint of Mexico. Some tourist literature refers to Our Lady of Guadalupe as the Old Mortuary Church, because of its use during the yellow fever plague of the 1830s. It's also nicknamed "the voudou church," and in it you can sense the closeness of the two religions; at least one link is a statue of St. Expedite, "the voudou saint," who supposedly makes things happen faster. Church lore has St. Expedite, who looks like a Roman foot soldier with a halo, coming from medieval Italy, but the version around New Orleans is that he was adopted by slaves unloading crates stamped with the word "expedite." I lobbied a little for my choice, but Gary decided on St. Louis Cathedral, the big structure anchoring Jackson Square, which was much closer.

 

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Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, on Ramparts Street in New Orleans,
adjacent to the French Quarter. Also known as the Mortuary Church and
sometimes the Voodoo Church.
We got in the Datsun and parked as close as we could on Decaturit was difficult for Lorraine to walk far in those shoes.
We made our way slowly up one side of the square, which by day is filled with tourists, one-man bands, clowns, every kind of street hustle imaginable, but post-midnight is deserted except for the kinds of people you assume you don't want to run into at that hour. Just at the top of the square, before we turned toward the church, we saw a couple embracing, with considerable energy. Gary and I looked at each other and laughed, and then the female half of the pair, a tank-top blonde, looked at us, and she laughed, too. "Hope y'all are having fun," she called out. "We are."
At the steps of St. Louis Cathedral, Gary threw the obi again, and poured holy water, and spoke to Elegba, and to Olorun

 

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(known in santeria as Olofi), the creator of all things, much as the Christian God, before whose temple we were gathered. I watched the obi cast, and there was a difficulty again. "Would you mind turning your back?" Gary asked. "The coconuts aren't throwing right." I did, and I guess it worked out. We left.
Lorraine was then to go back to Reverend Mitchell's house to receive the baroque, ornate porcelain pots, or superas, used to contain the essences of the various spirits who had been summoned for her during the initiation week. Then the yaguo would return to her own house. There, before she could enter, Gary would repeat the four corners ceremony and spread covers over the mirrors. For the next year, Lorraine/yaguo would follow a rigid pattern of living in accordance with the ité, or life reading, that was the fulcrum of initiation.
Among other restrictions during her initiation year, there would be no movies, no dancing, no parties. She couldn't go out at night unless she had to work, and she must always wear white, except at work. She was very happy about all of it. As they drove away into the night and I stood along the Square and waved, it looked as if we'd gotten together for a late night drink and now we were all going back home. It wasn't anything like that at all.

 

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2
Looking for Lorita
It had taken me a few days once I got to New Orleans to track down the Reverend Mitchell and thus be a witness to the ceremonies for Lorraine that had culminated at the French Quarter. I almost hadn't found her at all. Hard times had come since I'd last seen her, two years earlier. Her old phone had been disconnected and her new number was unlisted. Nothing, either, when I drove over to her tiny ministry, the St. Lazarus Spiritual Church of Christ, a converted $125-a-month shotgun shack among the row houses and junk yards of Metropolitan Street northeast of the Quarter. I could tell by the trash and tall weeds that she wasn't there. Lorita Mitchell would never let her church fall into disrepair.
A crucifix stood amid the detritus like a sentry, but the vestibule door was locked tight. No notes, no signs, no forwarding information. Nobody around to ask. I tried to see inside the boarded windows but couldn't. Two years ago, inside that room, I'd been to an astounding service, my first encounter with the Spiritual Church, a mix of Catholicism and charismatic Protestantismand voudou, I would argue. The Spiritual Churches

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