American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (6 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
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twicethat night for dinner and again in her grave. It had been hand-sewn by members of Lorita's churchfor a fee. An initiation ceremony, in santeria, can cost $5000 or more, maybe double that in some instances, and Lorita had in mind putting as much of the money into the hands of her own people as possible. Even the fees for the carpetbagging priests, ranging from $700 to $1500, would mostly be spent in town.
Lorita greeted her yaguo in the royal manner, throwing herself forward full-length before the throne, arms stretched above her head, beseeching her spirits to join in the homage. The yaguo reciprocated to show respect. The Cubans followed suit, as did the other visitors, except a couple of church women to whom all this still seemed bizarre, even sacrilegious.
Alfredo, on congas, and Louis, on shakereea large, hollowed gourd around which has been draped a loose netting of beadshad taken up spots to one side of the porch and began "looking for the voice in their drums." They found it, and within minutes the fifteen or so guests in the hot, crowded room were singing and whirling to the beat. Lorita and Gary spun across the middle of the floor. Rogelio, now in white trousers and red shoes, head covered with white lace, was a technicolor cyclone. Alfredo paused sometimes to pass around a bottle of rum, or to mop sweat from his face. I stepped outside for some air, nearly tripping over a crate of guinea fowl.
A few small children darted in and out. I swatted away mosquitoes, which, like the flies, were drawn in by the livestock and I guess by the sweaty humans, too. The back yard needed mowing, but was not unkempt. In it lay a hula hoop, an old truck axle and a sagging clothes line. Over in the far corner, I could see a worn circular patch in which Lorita several months ago had set up candles and glass jars and buried a goat. She told me she had needed a special cleansing ceremony to remove a vicious curse from herself. She believed it had been placed on

 

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her by friends of her first padrino, a Cuban priest named Ricky Cortez, with whom she had quarreled violently and had sought to replace with Rogelio.
The serenading of the yaguo continued. Dollar bills and other presents piled up on the mat in front of the throne. It was like being at a crowded weekend party in a small off-campus apartment. I squeezed back in near the doorway next to a woman from Lorita's church holding Antoinée. The woman swayed and smiled, and the baby closed her eyes to sleep. After a while everyone got tired, and the drummers stopped, and it seemed that the spirits had left the room. Nothing formal ended the dancing; we just filtered out to eat.
Someone handed me a plate of goat ribs, sausage, guinea fowl, red beans and rice. Someone else took seven plates of food into the throne room to set before the yaguo, for her spirits. I asked the Cuban santera, Doris, if you could be a vegetarian santero, if there might not be any vegetarian saints or orishas who preferred meatless offerings. She laughed.
I ate all my beans and rice and, hoping not to offend anyone, scraped everything else into the trash bin. I filled up on cake and talked to James, a big, quiet man who ran a private security business which employed Lorita's son Andrew. Like many people in New Orleans, James wasn't voudou, but that didn't mean he didn't put stock in it. He had come to Lorita after a former girlfriend hexed him by killing a cat. His business went bad, he said, until Lorita. cleaned him with chickens, passing them over his body to draw the spell from him, and then killed them to keep the spell from spreading. Now James was okay and had begun going to Lorita's church and did some repair work for her.
Everyone I would meet had a story like that, proto-Biblicalfall from grace after contamination with evil, wandering through the wilderness of despair, then salvation at the hands of a true prophet of Jesus. It was no accident that, in black American cul-

 

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ture, the prophet of Jesus was, often as not, also a party to a world of spirits and spells emanating straight from a half-forgotten African past.
It got late and I was tired. I said goodbye to Lorita and set up a time to meet Gary and the yaguo Saturday night for our impending trip to the French market. I went out into the night. The cool front had opened up the clouds, and as I drove back downtown, the stars came out. They were brilliantglittering outposts in the heavens.

 

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3
The Gods and Their Ways
One sultry morning a couple of weeks after the initiation at Lorita's home, I drove down to the lower end of the Quarter to meet Ava Kay Jones at the Old U.S. Mint, a refurbished brick office building now used as a museum, library and public meeting place. I had met Ava about the time I met Lorita, when Ava was working as lead dancer for her Voodoo Macumba Dance Troupe. Since then, she had not only taken further steps towards becoming an orisha voudou priestesssteps that would lead me in a circle back to her many months down the roadbut had also opened a botanica, Jambalaya. Until it closed, another victim of the New Orleans economy, it was the only voudou establishment in the Quarter with any claim to authenticity. Lorita's Lazarus Spiritual Church Supply, and the other authentic ones, were all elsewhere in the city.
A small, voluptuous, articulate purveyor of both her faith and her talent, Ava became the center of attention whenever she walked through the Quarter in her white dress, big earrings and white kerchief, as striking a picture of a m'ambo, a Haitian priestess, as even the long-time residents were likely to encoun-

 

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ter. Some people didn't know what to make of hershe didn't fit known stereotypes. Others treated her almost like a celebrity. More than once, whether we were snacking on coffee and croissants or splitting po'boys at an oyster bar, I watched black wait staff scrutinize her minutely, as though something inside, half-forgotten, were registering. Ava sensed it, too. It was one of the reasons she had made her choice, to give up a career as an attorney to devote her life to the orisha.
She and her troupe, a half-dozen dancers and musicians, turned devotion to the gods into a delicious tornado of snakes and drums, scarves and machetes, athleticism and grace. One night I walked down to Congo Square, where drum-playing and dancing had once been outlawed, to see Voodoo Macumba's open air performance for delegates from a book publisher's convention. The guests had arrived in horse-drawn carriages and taken their places under a striped lawn tent, with no idea what was about to hit them. When it was over, the images of the virile,
Ava Kay Jones, center, dancing with python in public performance of her
Voodoo Macumba Dance Troupe, at Congo Square, New Orleans.

 

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muscled male dancers, Ava writhing with her pet python, the strange black kettles, the drumming, the heathad reduced the evening to a kind of awkward quiet. Polite applause, very little talking as the delegates went back to the cloppity-clop of the carriages, the normalcy of their hotels.
She saw that as evidence of her usefulness, too. Voudou was not something that settled in easily. Even defensiveness meant someone was paying attention, and there was much to which she wanted to attend. In her appearances and performances, the flamboyance of her very demeanor, she tried to set the record straight in her own way. Having made a ''name" in town as a voudou savant, she was sometimes interviewed in local media, and occasionally invited to lecture on her beliefs. That was what I was doing at the Old Mint. The State of Louisiana had hired her to explain voudou to a new crop of state tour guide volunteers whose jobs would be to escort groups through the French Quarter. I wanted to hear it.
I was early, and ducked over to Ursulines Avenue to a coffee house to read the paper and pass the time, musing about when I had first met Ava in this very place. She had been with a musician friend who called himself "Sidiki," who told me the word jazz was from an African word "jass," meaning jism. Ava didn't fluster at direct talk about sex. Lorita never did, either. It had nothing to do with black or white; it was all about ideas of sexuality. In voudou, sex was not a sin. It was part of life.
I finished my coffee and walked back to the Mint. I was spending a great deal of my time with these two womenpriestesses, daughters of gods, people I could never have imagined on my own. I was not fully aware of the complexities at the time, but later, I would look back in wonder at the paths each had taken to her African spirit, how the oracle of fate, known in voudou as Ifa, had aligned each in precisely the right way, had imagined them completely.

 

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Lorita as Oshun and Ava as Oya, ancient and eternal rivalsmore appropriate earthly manifestations could not have been chosen. In their distant world, an amalgram. of history and mythology, Oya and Oshun shared one traitboth were river goddesses, powerful symbolism in all religions; on all other matters they quarreled, starting with men. Shango was Oya's husband and Oshun's lover. Their personalities, too, were oil to water. Fiery, temperamental, outrageous Oshun and serious, controlling, earthy Oya, the former the embodiment of beauty, the latter of the strange, compelling world of death, of fundamental knowledge, of eternal change.
Here below, the distinctions between the two orisha in their human guises took the form of sociology. The backgrounds of Lorita, a ghetto-reared survivor of the mean streets, and Ava, a middle-class infiltrator in the white worlds of dance, law and university degrees, had kept the two voudou priestesses, among the first authentic initiates in the New Orleans voudou renaissance that began in the 1980s, in completely different social worlds. Except for the link of Ricky Cortez, the enigmatic santero who had separately introduced each of them to santeria voudou, neither would have been aware of the other's existence. Yet even after entering the religion, and thus hearing of each other through the grapevine of botanicas, clients and practitioners, the two women remained mutually aloof. Lorita sizzled with jealousy at the mention of Ava Kay, and Ava felt that she would be unwelcome if she called on Lorita. Exactly as Oshun and Oya would have behaved.
Thinking of Ava or Lorita in their god-like states became a fascinating kind of game for me, a way of converting the vagueness of the spirits into flesh and blood. In the voudou world, not unlike the realms of the ancient pagan religions, avatars of thousands of human spirits are coalesced into what Jung might call archetypal personalitieshundreds, perhaps thousands of dei-

 

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ties. Their cosmos was filled with combat, intrigue, treachery, heroism, lust, tragedysagas much like those of the gods of the Vikings, the Romans, the Greeks, the American Indians, the Hindus.
Sometime in the mists of memory, the vo-du were converted from living matterusually through violent death caused by hubrisinto immortal prototypes which pretty much cover the range of human character. A dozen or so have become the most prevalent in the New World. Besides Elegba, or Esu (Eleggua in santeria), Ifa, Oshun, Oya, Obatala, Shango and Babalu Aye, there are Ogun, the god of metal and war; Ochosi, the hunter, especially popular in Brazil; Osanyin, the herbalist; Yemonja, the goddess of the sea and fertility and queen of the witches; Olokun, also an ocean deity, generally considered male, and considered by some to be the patron of the African races, as Ogun is for Europeans; and Dambada Wedo (Damballah-Hwedo in Haiti), the serpent ruler, entwining the earth and the past.
The all-powerful Olorun, or Olodumare, or Odudua among the Yoruba, presides over all. As abstract as sacred, Olorun is genderless, neither anthropomorphized nor prayed to directly. The orisha, not unlike the Christian saints, are the intermediaries. They, in turn, can only be reached through the gatekeeper, Esu/Elegba. Some voudous jokingly call this formalized, almost corporate pantheon the "bureaucracy," but it is to this hierarchy that the worshiper turns, throughout life, for guidance, help, retribution and comfort, adopting a single orisha as one's personal "father" or "mother." The corporeal essence of a worshiper is but the vessel of that spirit, reincarnated through generations unending. Haitians, in a particularly descriptive phrase, refer to the experience of becoming a vessel for the spirits, the loa (or lwa), as being "mounted," thus the title of Maya Deren's lyrical study of Haitian voudou
The Divine Horsemen
. Ava had been mounted by Oya and was changed forever by it. That was what she wanted to tell the guides, or anyone who would listen.

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