American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (7 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

 

Page 33
In her loose white short-sleeved blouse and full skirt, white kerchief tied up tight, Ava Kay-as-m'ambo had the same effect on the tour guides as she did on people on the street. Unfortunately, the thick black frames of her glasses gave her away. In the old days, under slavery, an African who had glasses probably used them for reading, and in most of the colonies or Southern states, slaves were not allowed to read. "A hundred years ago I would've been barbecued for coming here to say all this," Ava quipped, pausing at a table next to the lectern to arrange some of the herbs, charms, soaps, books and oils she'd brought. "You know what I'm saying?"
The guides chuckled, a little nervously. Probably, they didn't. White, middle-class, mostly retirees, they had signed on as explicators of the French Quarter and this was just part of the educational drill. But they listened. Some tourist was bound to ask about voudou, and this woman in white would make it clear what to say, and there was fresh French roast coffee in china cups.
She opened the lecture with a song, a traditional Yoruba chant to Elegba, for Monday was his day. It was a holy rite, but the gulf between the Africanness of what she had to say and the centuries of opposition to that race and everything it stood for made the audience react to the prayer is if it were some kind of mildly embarrassing warm-up act.
"Voudou is a way of life," she began, "not just something we do on Sunday," and went on with a brief rundown of the orisha and the cultureuncomfortably revisionist to some, judging from the crossed arms and knowing glances. "I'm a Catholic, toooh, yes," she offered, perhaps to bridge the gap. "My favorite church is Our Lady of Guadalupe, especially the novenas. But I also believe in voudou. And when people ask me what voudou believes in, I say: we serve the same God you serve. We worship the God Force." Arms remained crossed, although many took notes.

 

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"The orishas and the charms and the saintsall these are humanity's way of relating to this all-encompassing God Force. So I say to people, to receive good effects, you put out good causes. We do not seek to harm other people through sticking pins in dolls. Because it will come back to you. On the spiritual level, same as in the criminal justice system, you will be punished. In the Catholic Church, we say we are not punished
for
our sins but
by
them."
Some kept taking notes. Some didn't. Smiling graciously, Ava moved on with the show, picking up from the display table a small red flannel pouch, looped at the mouth with a black string. "Y'all have seen these," she said. "Now I'll show you how to make a gris-gris." Probably drawn both from voudou and palo traditions, the bags are popular throughout New Orleans; cops in the Quarter are said to carry them for luck.
Ava filled the pouch with a potpourri of the standard additives: High John the Conqueror, a common plant root usually prescribed for luck or power or money; jasmine flowers for Oshun and love; rose petals; various herbs, including frankincense for peace and myrrh and rosemary for warding off negativity. She added a pinch or two of her special potions, for love. "When teenagers come in for these," she smiled as she worked, "I tell them it's not just for physical love, it's not just to attract girls. They take the bags, say 'Yes ma'am,' and they're out of there."
We laughed, but she had a more serious point. Just taking a bag and thinking it will accomplish something on its own is wasting your money, she said. "It won't work without prayer and meditation. The psychology of the ritual is a very big part. You visualize what you want." She pressed the bag in her palms and invoked a blessing from the saints and the orishas. To make the bag work, she said, a person should hold it for ten minutes a day, preferably at sunrise or sunset ("the power times"), while meditating.

 

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She put the gris-gris back on the table, shuffled a few of the bottles and vials, and picked up a green cloth doll"so it will attract money." From the stir in the audience she knew she had probed a sensitive spot. But although the use of dolls with pins is the stereotypical aspect of "voodoo," it has a decidedly mixed cultural ancestry; doll-hexes are equally likely to have emanated from witchcraft brought into the South via Europeans as to have come from Africa. In the Quarter, you will see "witchcraft" stores at least half as often as the "voodoo" knock-offs.
Witchcraft and voudou are distinctly different, though frequently lumped together under the general heading of occult, a word which simply means unknown. Like voudou, witchcraftor wiccahas enjoyed a relatively recent round of defense, especially from those who interpret its poor image as the result of social and religious persecution. The difference is that voudou was considered evil because it was black. Wicca was evil because it was female.
"I'll make this one for myself," Ava laughed, "because if it does bring in money I should get it." Chairs shuffled slightly as she anointed the doll's head, hands and feet, then lit a white candle for it and, in Yoruba, invoked the help of the gods. For nine days she said, nine being a number of change, a Scorpio number, her number, she would pray to that doll and "send out vibes into the universe to come to me." After that, "the God force" would bring change, because ''you reap what you sow."
What she was doing, she said as she added a few finishing touches, was very common in New Orleans, "a city founded in mysticism," but also came out of the "hoodoo" practices she learned growing up in the southeast Louisiana Cajun town of Thibodaux, among a family of traituesses, a term for psychics or diviners. Putting an X on Marie Laveau's grave, knocking three times, and then leaving flowers and coins was a good way of asking for protection or luck. Leaving a salt cross, or a circle of salt, on your doorstep, is a way of protecting yourself; so is

 

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wearing a necklace of chicken feet, or boiling them for use in potions.
"It's a tradition more than a ritual," Ava said. "It's handed down mother to daughter to granddaughter. My grandmama still cleans her steps with red brick [dust from broken bricks] instead of Tide because it's a spiritual cleanser."
What was important, as I listened, were not the spells, but the increased attention their recitation produced in the audience. Since hexes and "black" magic were considered to be the substance of voudou, when at last Ava got to them, it was as if she'd finally reached the truth according to preconception. As if she had finally admitted that voudou was just spell-casting and pins in dolls.
A woman in a garden-club blue dress raised her hand. "How can you be a Catholic and be a voudou priestess?" There was an edge to her voice.
"Well," said Ava, "I don't agree with all the Church dogma, but if we're dealing with what Christ taught, then I'm a Christian in that sense." She let that sink in. "But if you add all the dogma, I'm not."
Another woman, who was sitting at a table next to mine and had been whispering to her friend all during Ava's lecture, raised her hand. The edge was in her voice, too, but sharper. "You've been saying that voudou is not evil. Well, how did we get that idea? That it is evil?"
Ava had heard such questions before, though perhaps with less hostility. "You got it from mis-torians," she began. "Not historians. And from movies"
"That may be so," a gray-haired man in a yellow Polo interrupted, "but what's the difference between voudou and magic?"
Ava, nearsighted, searched out the voice. "Every religion uses or has used magic," she said, turning toward her flank. "In voudou, we have retained it. Voudou has not taken the magic, or the ritual, out of religion." Which naturally invited a compari-

 

Page 37
son to the Church, and she went for it. "The Catholic Church also seeks to put ritual in the religion, so the people can relate to it."
The man crossed his arms over his chest. His face was slightly flushed. His voice rose. "Then what is the symbol of evil in voudou?"
Ava held back a moment. I could feel, it, too.
"I don't know," she said, green doll poised lightly in one hand. "I don't know if there is a symbol. Good and evil have always existed in the world. There is a criminal element who violate natural laws in voudou as well. But that part is not to be confused with the whole."
She thought for a moment, adjusting her glasses, like a college professor privately intrigued by the mystery in her students all over again. "Why is there evil? It could be a psychological malfunction. Or that there's a day and there has to be a night"
She put the doll down. "I really can't think of a symbol, in that way. I don't really think there is one."
The man in the Polo exhaled in disgust. Many of his companions frowned, pursed their lips, shook their heads. All along, they had been trying to pry out from her the depiction of the snake, which in Christianity has come to be the symbol of the Devil. It would seem logical that if the snake is evil, and if the snake is worshipped in voudou, then voudou is really worship of the Devil.
In voudou, though, Dambada Wedo is not a metaphor for Evil but for the eternity of life. In the ancient matriarchal cultures of Asia and Northern Africa from which voudou emerged, the snake was a mighty and honored figurethe guardian-child of the earth-mother. Only in patriarchal Christianity did the serpent became the evil tempter of the Garden of Eden.
A good Catholic, of course, wouldn't have let the Christian inversion of pagan symbolism permit her to evade her intellectual and moral obligation to come up with a figure for evil in

 

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voudou, to damn the snake. But a "good" Catholic wouldn't have known anything about voudou in the first place. The problem that faced Ava Kay, in the eyes of her own Catholicism, and the minds of the tour guides, was that she had lost her ignorance.

 

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4
Countertop Voudou
Lorita lived such a cash-and-carry life it was difficult for me to see how she'd managed to lease two-thirds of a brick triplex at the corner of Iberville and Dorgenois, just off Canal Street about a mile from the Quarter, as the new home for her church and the first home for her own botanica. But she'd been in business there about a year, St. Lazarus Church Supply facing one street, St. Lazarus Spiritual Church the other, her own private spiritual reading room squeezed in a narrow interior office space exactly in between.
1
The surrounding neighborhood was better than the one on Metropolitan Street, but also no stranger to gunshots, sirens, and mayhem. Still, it was lively like a Covarrubias painting, and with a fish market next door, a down-home waffle shop up the block, and a Cuban clothing boutique across the intersection, Lorita's alternative to the high-priced F&F Botanica that had weaned her seemed for all the world like a corner grocery store.
Kids, in particular, filtered in and out of the botanica, seeking not the services of a santeria priestess, or the Friday night preaching of a minister, but things on which to spend nickels

 

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The Reverend Lorita Mitchell posing playfully in front of her former botanica
and church, next to her Cadillac.
and pennies. Accordingly, Lorita had expanded her line of goods to include soft drinks, candy bars, potato chips, cookies, sour pickles, and pig's feet. The postman, too, generally picked up a daily soft drink, as did one or two of the local men, whose thirst was often as not an excuse to flirt, almost shyly, with the woman who had definitely juiced up the neighborhood. In the last couple of weeks I'd joined the regulars, going down to the "shop," as Lorita called it, almost every day; my adopted home, a place to while away the Big Easy, an invisible hole in the universe for all its contiguity to the real world. Also, she kept the thermostat on sub-Arctic. I don't know if she was amused by me or merely tolerant, but I could come and go as I wished, and could hang for hours if I didn't touch the gospel radio she kept blaring.
Some days, though, the real world closed in. I'd been reading in a corner chair up front, next to the St. Lazarus shrine. Juanika

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