American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (9 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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attributes, Ochosi is also considered the owner of all jails and traps. Lorita had set up an altar to him (the plate on which it was held also contained a pair of handcuffs) because one of her clients had a son in prison. It was a tough case, she said, and would require much sacrifice. From the fresh blood drippings on the Ochosi figure, I knew Lorita had already sacrificed several chicks, one of the god's favorite meals. I could tell by the cheeping from a perforated cardboard box that more would be required.
Not far from Ochosi was a miniature black cast iron cauldron (different from the palo pot) set up for his spiritual mate, Ogun. Santeros call the pair Los Guerreros, the Warriors. Their beads, and those of Elegba, are the first that a prospective initiate receives. Another Elegba sat nearby, also on a plate, and surrounded by sacrificial crabs, doubtless from the crate out front. Gary had set up the offering, one of Elegba's favorite snacks, for a woman who wanted to get away from an abusive husband and was asking the spirits to get her a contract for a small house of her ownher ticket to freedom.
I remembered having seen the woman come in a day or two earlier. She had been euphoric, bursting in to tell Lorita the house contract had come through, slamming down a $100 bill in tribute to the power of the priestess and the gods. Lorita had whooped with delight, picking up the money and cleaning herself with it on the spot, wiping first her ''cat," as she calls it, then her legs, arms and neck, and turning to me triumphant, as if to say, "See! They believe in me. This is proof!"
But now the woman's altar was several days old, and the crab Gary had placed on it was funky and covered with black flies. You never clean an altar in any way, but you may dispose of it when it has completed its use. Lorita decided the Elegba with the crabs had fulfilled its functionor at least she rationalized doing so because of the stench. Perhaps to get me to

 

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leave her in peace, she asked me to get a small trash bag. She put the crabs inside, opened the exterior doorfor clients who wished anonymous exitand walked the bag out to a garbage can at the curb. She drew a fresh breath, chuckled a little, and came back in, leaving the door propped open. I went back to the counter.
About nine, the "urgent" clients started showing up.
A young boy was the first, bringing with him a box of chirping, yellow-fuzz chicks. Ochosi must really be hungry, I figured, and had him wait in a folding chair under the radio, mercifully not turned on yet. Right after that came a young woman and her daughter. The mother looked like Dionne Warwicka lot, and I told her so. She was very shy, at least to a white man, but when I explained I was the temporary receptionist, she told me she'd come in about the girl, who had taken a chair in the corner, watching the boy with the chicks. Only eleven, the child was big and busty. She had started hanging around shopping malls and boys.
Before mom got much further with her story, Lorita banged open the door from her reading room. "Come over here, girl, 'case I need to hit you on the head!" she barked, striding up to the counter like she'd just been wired in to the main galactic transformer. The mother, who had been leaning languidly against the counter top, stiffened like she'd just been plugged in too.
"You run around and have different men over," Lorita snarled, "how you expect your daughter to respect you? Look at that child. She got titties big as mine. Why you let her go out alone? Juanika. thirteen and I don't let her go
nowhere
alone."
The mother mumbled something about having to work and not having enough time, but Lorita shooed the pair of them into her office. Before she followed them in she whispered to me. "The kid's problem is the momma's problem. I told her she got

 

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to take care of
her
business first. But she don't want to hear that."
She shook her head in exasperation and closed the door. I could hear yelling inside. Before there were any readings that day, there was going to be plenty of "bitching out," as they call it in New Orleans, and some praying. Nobody went in to see Lorita and came out with any ambiguity. The mother and daughter emerged looking like they'd survived a hurricane, but thought that things might now be better for them. They were to return the next day, when Lorita would clean the girl and wash her hair and feet with special herbs. She was not to bathe herself before then. And there was more: while reaching across her open Bible to hold the girl's hands, Lorita had seen the spirit of the girl's dead father. Killed in a drug deal, his hovering soul was
Reading desk (with Bible) inside Lorita's reading
room at St. Lazarus botanica.

 

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filled with unrest. Lorita saw that he had been calling out to his daughter, which would account for her change of behavior.
Lorita instructed the girl and her mother to prepare a gift for the egun, and also for the father, who must be placated so he could leave the girl alone and return to his own journey through the spirit world. Until then, the girl would remain in danger. The mother said okay, but it had to be secret, because her own father knew of Lorita and feared her as the "bu-du"a pronunciation common in New Orleanswoman. And the mother went through with her duties. Did it work? Who can say? When I saw the mother several weeks later, she said she and her daughter were getting along better, and both were attending Spiritual Church.
Altar table in St. Lazarus reading room. Pumpkin
for Oshun and various other gifts and candles 
for saints and orisha. Palo stick against the wall.

 

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Four or five more clients meanwhile had shown up, and the boy with the chicks leftapparently he was just delivering. I don't know which were truly "urgent," but all of them that daymost dayswere at least desperate.
The next appointment was distraught because her husband was being seduced by an "outside woman." Half-sitting on her desk, listening to the story, Lorita decided the husband had been "fixed," probably with a "binding poison" of urine, underarm sweat and moisture from the paramour's "cat" mixed into coffee. The wife made a face at the thought of such a beverage. Lorita laughed and said if you mixed it right, it wouldn't taste funny. She said every time the man drank the coffee he became his lover's slave.
"It's definitely hoodoo," Lorita said, "but the greatest hoodoo is God's hoodoo, and now your man be sick in his stomach because God don't like what he do. You tell him to get rid of that woman. But to get rid of her he got to get her blood on him."
"How he do that?"
"Bust her in the mouth, or any kind of cutbut don't be cutting her with a knife or anythingand that break the spell. Any spell she got on him."
Then Lorita took the woman into her office. She gave her a scrap of brown paper on which to write the husband-stealer's name, and told her to bury the paper in a secret place. She also gave her beads and a black candle with a snake insigniaa "ward-off" votive that when burned sends the bad intentions of a perpetrator right back at her. The woman left, armed with great confidence, ready to reclaim her man. She paid $125, cash.
The workplace, too, was a frequent a combat zone, and toward the end of the long day, I met one of Lorita's greatest successes, a strong, matronly-looking, middle-aged client I'll call Dora, who was convinced that Lorita had saved her life and career. While working as a supply supervisor at the Tulane Medical Center, a huge downtown facility whose rooms are filled

 

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with the poor and uninsured, Dora had noticed strange blisters on her hands and feet. "They burst open and was black as tar," she said. "It was so bad I had to wear slippers to work."
Dora couldn't think of a medical reason for the painful sores, and therefore didn't want to waste money on a doctor. After a failed effort with a Cuban "spiritual adviser," Dora turned to Lorita, who promptly told her she'd been poisoned, probably by the young black Mississippi woman who was a rival for her hospital job. The purpose of the poison, Lorita told Dora, was to "cut off the hands and the feet so you can't work and she get your job."
Lorita bathed Dora completely, then rubbed two white pigeons over her body to draw away the spell. So strong was the hoodoo, the pigeons wouldn't fly afterwards. Even Lorita had been scared. She gave Dora a salve and said she should be okay in a few weeks. She was. She told people at work the boils and sores were the result of an accident frying chicken, and, on Lorita's instruction" God says you don't confront hoodoo. Whoever does it, they'll get it back"never let on to the Mississippi woman. Subsequently, the schemer lost her job, but Dora stayed on, unshakably convinced of Lorita's powers.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I only went through one full day's drill as Lorita's assistant, and was happy to retire. I wondered that it never got to her, that sometimes she didn't get exasperated with people's problems, with the hexing and fixing and poisons and spell-making. It was hoodoo, anyway, not even the real thing. She wasn't counseling people, she was counseling an invisible web of forces and theories and suppositions and accusations and myths in which the people were all but bit players. But it was her calling. It was her legacy, and it gave her strength.
I had been in the shop one afternoon when two young black musicians" in flash clothes dropped by, wearing Elegba beads.

 

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They'd heard of her through some Cuban friends and wanted a reading. There had been more and more of these types coming around, especially since word had gotten out in Miami drug circles that santeria was protection against cops and rival cartels. It was a bad association for santeria, and one that would get worse in coming years, ultimately even affecting Lorita and her family, though they would survive it. She sized up the two slicks instantly. She told them they were phoneys, looking for a quick fix, not the path to heaven. They laughed and asked for their readings anyway. Afterwards, they bought some candles, smart-assing to her"you too fine to be worrying about us, sugar" all the way out the door.
Lorita slumped into her chair, her face a mask of anger. "We normal people," she said, to no one in particular. "We breathe the same air as everyone else and we got the same red blood." She exhaled heavily. "Jesus!" They had made her feel like a freak. They had debased her with their attitude and she hated them for it.
1
The church and botanica are now closed, replaced by Lorita's cafe, Mama Gamble's. Lorita, now remarried, offers readings from her home nearby. Though she has taken her new husband's surname, Gamble, she is still known in the community by the names Mitchell and Honeycutt. She has moved her church to nearby Eads Street, and renamed it Blessed Mother of Charity Spiritual Church. The Virgin of Charity, not coincidentally, is often syncretized with the voudou diety Oshun, Lorita Gamble's personal orisha.

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