American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (5 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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are considered to have been founded in 1925 in Chicago, though some say that New Orleans was the starting point circa 1920. Certainly today, the denomination, which consists of numerous associations around the country, is most prevalent in the South. In the course of a four-hour ceremony, I had watched Reverend Mitchell swirl in her white robes while preaching Jesus and dancing her flock into possessive trances to drum-led call and response hymns. I had seen her prophesy destinies and beseech the healing powers of Christ using a bead-wrapped palo mayombe staff.
A woman like that didn't disappear. She was still in town, still preaching the Gospel, and still practicing voudou. I would find her when it was time, and in truth that's how I wanted it. A thing you learn about voudou is that you don't rely on plans and timetables. If the search were a drawing, it would resemble the Dahomean snake-god Dambada-Wedo, which encircles the earth and creation, tail in mouth, without beginning or end, and history moves through it like a rat. To see the movement of voudou is to know what the snake knows, go where the snake goes.
I ran down several useless telephone numbers and even traced Reverend Mitchell's old eastside apartment, where I'd seen, as opposed to participated in, my first sacrifice ritual. I drove back toward downtown and picked up Esplanade to Broad Street, in the general direction of the State Fairgrounds, to the F&F Botanica, where Lorita learned her trade giving readings in an adjacent shed, kicking back to the Cuban owner Felix a healthy cut of her income, about $25 per consultation, not counting fees for sacrifices. She and Felix had been heading for a falling out, and I figured they'd had one. He said he didn't know where she was.
I decided to look for leads through other botanicasshops which sell religious supplies, herbs and iconography, and cater to both voudou and Christian (mostly Catholic) customers. Although they vary in degree of legitimacyand honestymost

 

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are true touchstones to voudou in a community offering spiritual advising and similar divination services. They aren't as plentiful in New Orleans as in say, Miami or the Bronx, where Cuban and Puerto Rican communities are filled with botanicas and the santeros (Practitioners of santeria) who patronize them, but I spotted a shop on Elysian Fields, a long boulevard east of the Quarter. The Solano Botanica looked like a 200-year-old grocery store on a Mississippi backroad.
The interior was dusty and dark, as was Solano himselfa small, sour-faced man smoking a stubby cigar and wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. Fleshy circles under his eyes made him appear vaguely malevolent, and he tried to spook me, saying if I wanted to study voudou I would have to become ''involved." I wasn't sure if he meant become initiated or merely buy something, such as an expensive plastic-wrapped supera on one of the shelves. It was the opening gambit in a head game some occultists like to run.
I told him I was just looking for Reverend Mitchell. I described her. I figured if he knew anything about voudou or santeria he would know about Lorita. He said he didn't.
I had turned to go when someone knocked on the door. Solano opened it, admitting an older, heavyset black woman in a blue flower print dress. She seemed perturbed, and I lingered to see why. Ignoring me, she told Solano she was having trouble collecting money owed her and wanted some herbs. Solano rebuked her for not coming around earlier. She said she had, and they were quibbling about it when I broke in, introduced myself to the woman, and tried my questions on her.
She reacted immediately. Yes, she'd heard of Lorita Mitchell, especially when I used the surname Honeycutt, the name of one of Lorita's four ex-husbands who himself had been a minister. "Honeycutt, she's around," the woman said. "I don't know where, but I think she's at Reverend Francis's church over in the Ninth Ward."

 

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Antioch Spiritual Church in New Orleans, near the Ninth Ward neighbor-
hood where Lorita Honeycutt Mitchell grew up.
I found the Antioch Spiritual Church of Christ where the woman said it was, and cajoled the Reverend Oscar Francis, also known as Bishop Francis, into giving me Lorita Mitchell's new phone number. I called the next morning. The heavy New Orleans drawl, thick with husky directness, was unmistakable. "Yeah, dahlin', why don't you come on over tomorrow about six," she said. "We're having another initiation. I'm sorry I can't talk to you anymore 'cause I'm up to my elbows in blood." She laughed and I could hear a din of voices in the background. "But you know about that, don't you?"
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It turned out I'd been pretty close all along. Lorita's new house wasn't far from her old apartment, though she'd obvi-

 

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ously moved up a little: these blocks boasted paved streets, three-bedroom brick ranch styles. Her next-door neighbor was a deputy sheriff.
I parked in the driveway and walked through the yard gate as dozens of white and brownish feathers swirled past me in the wind. At the front porch a blackened cow tongue, "for people with big mouths," hung from a big hook in the ceiling. Lorita's youngest daughter Juanika greeted me, leading me inside and down a short hallway. Offerings of corn, bread, yams and cooked sacrificial meat filled small wooden bowls on the floor. A bunch of okra had been tacked up just inside the door. So had a dead pigeon, hanging upside down.
Juanika. guided me into the living room. Four young women from Lorita's church sat primly on the two large sofas. One was holding Lorita's infant granddaughter, Antoinée. They were all watching a movie starring James Caan on TV, called
Hide in Plain Sight
. Gary was there; so were three Cubans I'd never seen.
I was introduced and escorted into the kitchen. Wonderful aromas of garlic, spices, onions and sizzling grease enveloped three women laboring amid steaming pots of spaghetti sauce, pasta, vegetables and piles of freshly cut goat and fowl. One of the women was her: the Reverend Lorita Honeycutt Mitchell, forty-six, minister of the Lazarus Spiritual Church, priestess of Oshun, initiate of palo mayombe, and matriarch of her clan. She stood barefoot in purple sweatsuit before a frying pan, sautéing chicken feet and chitlins. Her skin was very dark, flawlessly smooth, her eyes doe-like, luxuriant, powerful. She smiled at me with toothpaste-commercial intensity. "Glad you could make it," she said, continuing to stir.
I was quickly introduced to the other people in the house: Lorita's daughters-in-law, some members of her Spiritual Church who had come to help out but were not voudou, and the three Cubans: Rogelio, Alfredo and Doris. They were all from New

 

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Jersey and had flown down, at Lorraine's expense, to preside over the initiation. They were needed because Lorita, although a priestess, did not yet have the authority to perform the full ceremony. Voudou, like most religions, is hierarchical. An initiation requires several levels of the priesthood beyond that to which Lorita had ascended.
Rogelio was to be the padrino, or godfather, of the initiate, and thus would preside over the ceremony. He was also Lorita's personal padrino, and, like her, was a priest of the patron deity Oshun, the goddess of beauty. Alfredo was an oriaté, a specifically Cuban ranking of priest with special powers of divination important to the ceremony. Doris, a priestess of Obatala, was primarily there to assist with logistics. Rogelio took my elbow and escorted me to the back porch, which had been converted to the main initiation room and also housed the various altars to Lorita's personal spiritual guardians. The gesture was not so much to be friendly as it was to demonstrate that, although we were in Lorita's house, Rogelio considered himself to be in charge.
Lorraine, in a loose white cotton smock, sat in a corner of the porch on what was called her "throne," actually a small wooden post covered in silver wrapping paper. Around her a special canopy had been arranged with draperies of yellow, red, blue, silver and white cloth. Superas and offering bowls lined the walls. Some contained entrails; one propped up the head of a pig. Maybe a goat.
In the center of the floor, a wooden chopping block and knife lay next to a tub filled with the remnants of sacrificial fauna. The yaguo looked serene but tired. They all looked tired, for that matter. There'd been very little time for sleep since the initiation started, and most of last night they had been up making sacrifices to the spirits in order to achieve ocha, the ultimate goal of the santeria quest. Ocha means power.

 

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Each altar featured. the statues, herbs, flowers, colors and offerings pecular to its god. Lorita's Oshun shrine, for example, was maintained in a wicker cabinet filled with superas, a fan, a small black doll, and mirrors.
I ducked Rogelio, grabbed a beer and went into the living room. Lorita was taking a break from the cooking, and came in to sit next to me on the couch. We had a lot to catch up on. Someone brought her a Coke, and while the Cubans and the church members and the relatives and friends went about their business, Lorita told me the story of how, only a year earlier, she'd met Rogelio in New Jersey. A strange, contradictory, angry tale, it was really her way of telling me she was fed up with her guests and couldn't wait to be rid of them. I'd only been there an hour and understood completely.
Someone interrupted us to tell Lorita that the yaguo had to "go." Miffed, Lorita excused herself to escort the initiate, as was her duty. But Lorraine must've done something wrong, and I could hear Lorita scolding her. "She's just a rich lady with long fingernails," Lorita muttered as they passed through toward the bathroom. "She's not used to being told what to do. But the Lord is good for bringing you down to the level of everyone else."
Rogelio swirled in from another room, primped up in a long, semi-translucent yellow shirt, untucked, in the Caribbean style. He joked about borrowing one of Lorita's furs, because an unseasonable cool front had blown down from Canada. Lorita's body tensed. The Cubans had been eating her food, using her phone for long-distance calls, sleeping in her bedroom, and now, it seemed, were also wearing her clothes. "He treat me like a slave," she whispered.
Yet he was her padrino. And more. He had, in the last year, initiated four of her children: Gary, Juanika, and the twins Andrew and Anthony. It was terrible to feel she was being used by the man to whom she had entrusted so much.

 

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In a few months she would break with him forever. By then she would have enough initiates in New Orleans, all black Americans, not to need the Cubans anymore. Consciously, and with the cunning of the streets, Lorita was making her own dynasty. It was funnyLorita never liked the word voudou, feeling it had long ago been propagandized as the stuff of evil and sorcery.
"Santeria" was okay, because the Cubans had convinced her santeria was something else. But santeria is voudou as surely as Catholicism is Christianity, and in her own way, forging untutored but determined into the nearly vanished world of the orisha in America, Lorita Mitchell was as true a daughter of the African powers, the vo-du, as had ever landed on these shores.
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Next time I saw her, near the end of initiation week, she had poured herself into a form-hugging denim sheath and was in full Oshunsensual, stunning, a volcano of vanity, all hallmarks of the goddess whose mythological links include Venus, Isis and Aphrodite. It was the night before I would go to the Quarter with Gary and Lorraineand time for what in santeria is called the medio, a feast. The hard work of preparing the sacrifices for the spirits, of the nights of praying, and the haggard demeanor of those who had participated, was replaced by a partybeer, wine, singing and dancing.
The yaguo sat under her canopy on straw mats, greeting but not speaking to those who came to pay their respects. She wore a plain white dress, and, on her head, for Shango, a silver crown with red parrot feathers. Her face bore white markings feigning mutton chop sideburns and a mustache, to symbolize the old man aspect of her patron deity, Obatala. Her neck was strung with the vari-colored beads of Shango, Elegba, Obatala, Ochosi and Ogun.
Another white dress hung on the wall to her right. More formal in its detail and frills, it would be worn by the yaguo only

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