American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (42 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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amount of days and you dig up your own bone. You know who's buried there. And that's your spirit. And you make a pact with the spirit that he will work for you.... It will do whatever you say. Whether it's good or bad. It operates by your command. It can be very dangerous in some cases. Let's say for some reason it turns out you don't really know everything about the dead person and get somebody bad, like a mass murderer. In cases like that, the spirit can turn against you.
"The problem in the U. S. is that you have to go to medical schools, or places where they sell things to the doctors or medical students. You buy a tibia and keep your receipts so it is legal when the cops come. But if you go to the place of medical supplies and you buy a bone, then you are using the spirit of
that
bone. That's when you really might be taking a chance. You have no idea what kind of person that was. That's more of a case when you could get the mass murderer or something."
I looked at her with what I assumed was blank amazement.
"I find a lot of people in this country with animals in pots," Ghandi said, her tone now sharp and bold. "That is not a genuine prenda or palo. But since it's against the law in this country to go into a cemetery and disturb a grave they use substitution of a dog or whatever." She looked at me with a shrug of contempt. "That's what they're using in New Orleans, a black dog. But you know, I've been trying to figure that out. How are you going to send a dog to do the work? We say dogs have souls, but that's hearsay."
In her own home were four palo pots, she continued. One was her own, but the other three had belonged to her late parents. She cared for them and worshipped them along with her voudou pots (superas), though they are not allowed in the same room, because the spirits might intermingle.
"Right, those are the nganga," I said, using what I had believed to be the Kongolese word for the Cuban prenda. Ghandi

 

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shook her head. A nganga was more accurately a burlap bag. I said I hadn't heard of that. She said I hadn't heard of a lot. For example, had I heard of the ndoke? I hadn't. It was like an nganga, she said, but hung from a tree. The ndoke was what you used for "especially dangerous spirits."
I said it sounded like they all might be dangerous if you couldn't have any say about the spirit inside, if you were bound to the spirit of a bone which, by her own admission, might be that of a psychopath. I told her maybe that's what had happened in Matamoros. Maybe palo was a lot scarier than I had thought.
"I told you to keep away," she said. "Look, it's not really the prenda that controls things. The prenda didn't make those drug people kill all those other people. The prenda pot just sits there. It does not bother you if you don't bother it."
I nodded, thinking I understood, that the pot was really passive after all. I could accept that a little better. But that wasn't her point.
"But when you make a command, then it can bother you. Do you understand?"
I felt my jaw tightening.
"You have to know how to control that thing so that it doesn't control you. 'Cause if you don't have any control over it, it
will
control you. I've seen it happen to me, to where the spirit in the pot was almost controlling me. I had to say, no, enough is enough. I say to the spirit, 'Look, either you do it my way or I have to go and they'll have to dismantle you and send you back where you came from and that'll be the end of that.'" She looked off, as if recalling some dark moment in her life.
"You have to be really balanced to deal with it. My problem is I've been into so many things that sometimes I don't know who is doing what. Sometimes I can treat people in a hurtful way and later I think about it and say, 'Man, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that.' And later on I wonder if it was really me or if that was my orisha or if that was my prenda, or this or that. So

 

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I don't worry about it anymore. It actually almost drove me crazy."
I could see in her eyes why villagers gave her wide berth.
"Getting a prenda pot, it's just like getting a gun. When somebody gets a gun, they say, 'I don't want to kill somebody,' and you say, 'Why you got the gun? They say, 'To protect myself.' And I say, 'How you gonna protect yourself with the gun? 'I shoot somebody,' they say. I say, 'You shooting somebody? You shooting somebody to kill them.'"
A tourist came into The Horseman, saw us talking, and started to walk up, but Iya Ghandi's sharp glance deterred him. She didn't like to be interrupted. "Whenever you buy a gun you have intentions to kill. When you get a prenda pot you have intentions of doing bad.... Like I said, it's a Kongo religion. They developed this for protection, and to attack.
"When people say to me, 'Why you got a prenda? I say, 'To keep people like you off of me.'They say, 'You gonna do negative ju-ju?' Yes, I am, if it becomes necessary to save life or limb I will do whatever it takes to protect me. Because there's nothing wrong with a gun. It's the person who has the gun in his hands."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Driving up 1-A on Miami Beach late at night, listening to "Something in the Air Tonight" by Genesis. Strange name for a band, and kind of right to the point of what was in the air in my own mind. What of all this was real? My visit to Cabrera had touched off memories of Iya Ghandi and I couldn't shake a surly reaction to the way she had gotten to me in Oyotunji that day. Was she really a woman with powers to be feared?
I zipped under the palm trees, ran the yellow lights, followed the dark asphalt, catching glimpses of cruise ships moored in Biscayne Bay. I drove without purpose, up the length of the tourist highway and back down, and nothing cleared my head. To believe Ghandi and her palo pot and the spirit in it could bring

 

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harm meant I believed in the dark side. Accepting faith had been one thing. It was not so hard to see the gods. Had I been a fool not to see devils among the gods?
But good and evil were part of the same spiritual cloth, were they not? Maybe it wasn't the potential of palo to wreak hell that had made me question my new feelings of spirituality; maybe I was bringing the whole thing up for review. I didn't know, but I was sure having a dark night of the soul, and god, what a town to have it in.
Surely, either good or evil spirits could only have power if you believed they did. And if you accepted one, you had to accept the other. It wasn't that I was afraid of evil. I was confronting the idea of power: the gods not as forms of worship, but as weapons. Surely that was the operative element in everything I had been seeing in the past months, hoodoo to palo. Power.
Was that not the entire point of the lot of themthe orisha, the saints, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Shiva, Wahkentankenthe lot of them? What did the Spiritual Church hymn beseech of Jesus? "POW-er! POW-er! POW-er!" Did his power not rest on voluntary illusion, on fear, on self-deception, the same as Iya Ghandi's palo pot? Was not the secret of the religious impulse that we manifest the gods and then we fear our manifestations, mistake them for having their own lives? Believing in spirits is a simple externalization of our powers. We kneel, pray and sacrificebut ultimately, only to ourselves. There is no grand audience. The play is us, and the play is the thing. Was this not all there was?
If not, what was there?
I'd wanted to know that more than anything from Lydia Cabrera. She had thought about the consequences of what she had seen. As I had taken her leave that afternoon, I asked her. "Is there a human soul?" She sat quietly a moment, smiling

 

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slightly. Slowly she turned her body towards my voice. "I can't give you an answer for that. We are surrounded by mystery."
1
Migene Gonzalez-Wippler,
Santeria: The Religion
, 1989, Harmony Books, New York, p. 238.

 

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20
Urban Herbs and Little Haiti
Each morning in Miami I ate a big Cuban breakfast of eggs, bacon, black beans, potatoes, hot bread and café cubana. I liked to sit on the round stools at the freshly wiped counters of the small diners that pervaded Little Havana and watch the men at their tables reading the sports pages, mother and children coming up to the take-out windows for egg and bacon tacos and fresh juices. You could get lost in aromas of roasting meat for the lunch trade, simmering kettles of rice, wafts of sweet plantains frying on the grill.
I had been in South Florida about a week and was developing a taste for Cuba that didn't stop at my palate. It had gotten into my ears and down to my feet and would have made it to my groin if I'd had the chance; not that Frances ever called back. The music, the clothes, the way the people moved, looked and talkedit was very infectious. But ultimately it was Caribbean. There's a fair trade in revisionist academia which argues a hegemonic Caribbean influence in the slave and post-slavery culture of the U. S. That influence is obvious and was often heroic. Yet the African-American experience in this country was, espe-

 

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cially before the twentieth century, profoundly and deliberately isolated from the Caribbeanexcept near port cities such as Miami, New Orleans, Charleston. The development of voudou thus took markedly different turns in the American South compared to Cuba, or Haiti or Brazil, with their much larger, denser African populations. The purpose of my journey was to see what had happened
here
. This was the unstudied terrain. This was where voudou's mark had been most tenuously held; it was also where the efforts to re-forge the links were most noticeable, for being most consciously retrieved. I did not want to lose sight of that. I needed to get back to black America. I wanted to see not only santeria in Miami, but orisha voudou. And I could; I had been in touch with Chief A. S. Ajamu.
I was to meet him at 2
P.M.
at his house on the northeast flank of the city, up Biscayne Boulevard about where it gives way to the eastern edge of a continually expanding Little Haiti. A forty-nine-year-old Chicagoan who had once studied to be a Catholic priest, then became one for Obatala, Ajamu had lived in Oyotunji in the early seventies, striking out for Miami in the eighties.
It was lonely going at first. Cliquish santeros considered him an outsider. But over the years Ajamu made inroads, and now was known not only among the Cubans, but among the Haitians, with whom he felt the most spiritual kinship. His business had thrived, and at the time I called him, he was on the eve of an extended trip to Nigeria, from which he would return as a babalawo, the only such African-American priest in the city.
He greeted me at the door smoking a cigar, wearing a green caftan and a bright red fela (a cap). His hair was dreadlocked, which he said was in honor of the orisha Shalako. His concrete block bungalow was large and airy, in the style of the city. Half the house served as living quarters for him and his wife, a priestess of Shango, but two huge rooms on the other sideenclosed

 

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patios with louvered breeze windowswere devoted to business. The front room was a kind of cottage boutique, filled with racks of African-style clothing, jewelry and sundries. Folding tables next to the racks were spread thickly with literature about African culture, and with business cards touting Ajamu's other, perhaps more active, enterprisethe Divine Guidance Psychic Clinic, described as ''Professional Practioners of African Science, Staffed by Traditional African Priests."
The boutique room led into an even larger, L-shaped space at the rear of the home. There, Ajamu or his wife conducted client readings at a long wooden table. Beyond that was another room lined with paintings of the orisha and altars to themand also, touchingly, an oil painting of Ajamu's close friend and godfather, Owolawo. It was a ceremonial chamber. Bimbés, festivals, sacrificial ritesanything that could not be conducted in the back yard or in the open could be performed inside. It was the completely equipped home of an active voudou priest.
After showing me around, he said that "of course" I knew that before we could talk further he would have to read me. How else would he know if he could trust me? I couldn't disagree. We sat at one end of the reading table and he cast the cowries into a wicker tray. I felt like I was being given a polygraph, and, so to speak, I was. But I passed.
So did he. During the reading, I asked if the shells would tell me who was my African spirit. Despite all the possible orisha Ajamu might have suggested, and the long odds of it being Ochosi, that was exactly who he named. Only then did I reveal that was also who the Oba had divined. Ajamu puffed out a big cloud of cigar smoke, the way a poker player might who has just pulled in the jackpot but you don't know if he had a royal flush or a great bluff. True, he might've called Oyotunji before I arrived to find out, but even if he had done so, he would've been bound by the cowries. To have lied would have been to have effectively renounced everything he stood for. I believed him.

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