The Noble Pagan Forums - New Orleans Has Voodoo in its Bones-- Roger Pinckney

STAR TRIBUNE
(Minneapolis, MN)
Oct. 18, 1998, pp. G1+

(c) Roger Pinckney, 1998

NEW ORLEANS HAS VOODOO IN ITS BONES
by Roger Pinckney
Special to the Star Tribune

Just a half block off rowdy Bourbon Street, in the cool and quiet leafy green of a hidden courtyard, Priestess Mel is reading the bones. Cat bones. They rattle in an earthen pot, spill out onto the flagstone pavement.

Thigh bones come to rest diagonally across a tiny jumble of vertebrae. A young girl from Kansas City breathlessly awaits the prediction. Love? Money? Or a sudden and untimely death?

In a flickery back room, Miss Margaret is asking questions of a key that dangles from a long strand of hemp. It swings noncommittally, then begins a long counter-clockwise rotation. Yes? No?

On Rue Dumaine, ebony and wizened Chaino Sababa, a native of Tanzania, seeks to summon up ancestral spirits with the BOOM BOOM BOOM of the talking drums.

Voodoo, long considered the dark denizen of bayou, swamp and southern ghetto, is not hard to find on the streets of the Big Easy.

Voodoo--or "voudoun" as the faithful call it--is a living religion, practiced in the United States (especially the South), in the Caribbean and Latin America and in its place of origin, West Africa. Some adherents estimate as many as 30 million people share voodoo beliefs.

And nowhere is the practice of voodoo more obvious than in New Orleans, Voodoo City, USA.

SCARY STUFF

Voodoo may have been rehabilitated. But it's still spooky. Its snakes, skulls, candles and incense cast shadows in the corners of the heart and brain where ancient mysteries crouch.

Slave ships brought over the beginnings of voodoo, a West African word for spirit.

In Africa, the religion was called "Ife," a monotheistic faith with an array of interceding lesser deities and legions of guardian ancestral spirits.

Evangelized by Roman Catholic priests, slaves took the truth they knew and trusted, replaced the old gods with the saints, and voodoo was born. Tolerated by the church, nurtured by a long lineage of queens and conjure-doctors, voodoo grew and prospered.

Little wonder. Voodoo offered solace to the disenfranchised, power to the powerless, sometime instant and astounding results. Its believers say it has controlled the courts, the cut of cards, the roll of dice, made and unmade economic empires, catapulted politicians into high office--and precipitously flung them down again.

AN ACCIDENTAL SAINT

A recent visit to New Orleans provided evidence that voodoo is alive and well.

Folk historian and tour guide Bloody Mary Millan shows tourists New Orleans' voodoo highlights. She says 15 percent of the population of the city still "carries a rosary in one pocket, and a chicken foot in the other."

For an example of the faith, consider the apocryphal story of Saint Expedite, as told by Millan.

A 19th-Century voodoo man went to the river troubled with grief. On the levee he lit candles, prayed, offered the river gifts of fruit, honey and rum. Unbeknownst to that nameless voodooist, a steamboat had just suffered a mishap up river and much of its cargo had fallen overboard. A wooden box washed ashore at the petitioner's feet. Upon it were the words, "St. Anthony's Church, New Orleans. Expedite." The man pried open the box to find a statue of a saint.

The man took it as a sign from God. He summoned his friends and the statue was borne through the streets with great pomp and fanfare and enshrined at St. Anthony's Church in the French Quarter. Church fathers, denying St. Expedite's canonization, have not persuaded believers.

A century later, the statue of Saint Expedite remains by the sanctuary door. The faithful still light candles and leave offerings of money, fruit, and flowers at its feet. Need something done in a hurry? Go pray to St. Expedite. Today, many in New Orleans swear it works, Millan says.

GOOD LUCK CHARMS

Science writer David Cohen, in his book "Voodoo Devils and a New Invisible World," pegs the phenomenon perfectly: "In a society that believes in witchcraft, witchcraft works."

Millan, blonde and poised, doesn't carry a chicken foot. But to a certain extent, she practices what she preaches by carrying a "Saint John the Conqueror Gris-Gris" in her purse. The gris-gris is a little red sack filled with "magic" ingredients. Herbs, roots, holy candle wax, other stuff she isn't sure of. It's for luck, power, protection against sickness and bad ju-ju.

Millan was born in New Orleans, went off to a 14-year business career in New York City. She says the spirit of Marie Laveau brought her back.

A VOODOO LEGEND

Laveau was a real woman, but also a legend. She was magician, blackmailer, sinner, saint and perpetual cipher. A free woman of color and voodoo queen, her day job as a society hairdresser gave her access to the finest homes in the city--and to family secrets fine ladies would not dare tell anybody else.

Laveau parleyed this inside information into a career spanning six decades.

No one knows the date of Laveau's birth. Some say 1794. But it is reasonably sure she sprung from the union of Baton Rouge planter Charles Laveau and Creole beauty Marguerite Henry. Marie married carpenter Jacques Paris in 1819, and after his mysterious disappearance, took up with John Bayou Montellet, heavily tattooed native of West Africa who plied a voodoo trade in the French Quarter. Laveau learned from her new man and by the age of 35, became the most famous--and feared--of New Orleans' many voodoo queens.

Laveau left Montellet after he was swindled out of his fortune. Supposedly, it happened like this: Montellet was illiterate, but took great pride in being able to sign his name. Plied with liquor and challenged to prove his penmanship, Montellet unwittingly put his name to a deed signing away all he owned.

GOOD WORKS, TOO

Laveau's romantic biography is as colorful as the rest of her story. She had trysts and relationships with a long list of men, eventually bearing 15 children. Folklore says clients included mayors, U.S. representatives, the marquis de Lafayette, and even a Chinese emperor, who presented her a purse of gold and a fine silk shawl in gratitude. Marie was said to wear that shawl as a badge of office in orgiastic rites performed in New Orleans' Congo Square.

There is a great voodoo proverb about the dangers of working evil: Point a finger at another, and there are four more pointed back at you. Accordingly, there was much more to Laveau than hexes and spells. There are accounts of her comforting condemned prisoners, working a spell to stop New Orleans' last public execution, nursing victims of the city's many epidemics, even smuggling slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Laveau died June 16, 1881, and since she was adjudged true to the Catholic faith, she was given the last rites of the church. Today, many in New Orleans believe her to be America's first great feminist.

HOPE FOR A CURE

Voodoo traditions are kept alive by the New Orleans Historical Voodoo Museum at 724 Rue Dumaine, in the heart of the French Quarter. Founded by Charles Gandolfo in 1972, it is visited by more than 200,000 people each year. Many are curious tourists, but increasingly, more and more believers come for mojos, incense, herbs, candles, readings, advice and a menagerie of dolls reputed to fix everything from tax liens to impotence.

New Orleans residents remain heavily Roman Catholic. And what does the Church think of voodoo? Officially it's called "incompatible with the Holy Faith."

Many in the city differ, including Father Jerome Ladoux of St. Anthony's Parish. "With all due respect to the Church fathers," Ladoux has said, "It's like a jealous husband with a beautiful wife. He doesn't want her to talk to other men. But he should be proud that other men want to talk to her."

And what about you? Still think it's all a bunch of mumbo jumbo? You may be entirely right. Mumbo jumbo is an African expression. One definition is: "The magic of a magician that makes the spirits of the ancestors go away."

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Roger Pinckney is a freelance writer in Pelican Rapids, Minn. He is the author of "Blue Roots--The African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People," by Llewellyn Publications.

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