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

American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (10 page)

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
4.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

Page 53
5
Preacher to Priestess
Consistently, effortlessly, she strode the line between voudou and Christianitya path so strange and precipitous I could only watch in amazement. In the end, I could barely distinguish the two modes of Lorita's spirituality, for they were as close to each other as the two sides of a zipper.
From childhood, she studied the Bible every Sunday, modeling herself on neighborhood preachers like the late Mother Fannie Bee Jorden (JUR-den) who ran the Holy Family Spiritual Church out of her own home, and took Lorita under wing, maybe saving her life. Even now Lorita refers to her own home back in the Ninth Ward as "Amityville": a stepfather who beat her, a mother who called her crazy. Brothers killed. A nephew murdered. One of her sisters killed her man for beating her and cheating on her with her own daughter.
The church gave Lorita the family she needed. Before the santeria, before the palo, before all the movement into that strange terrain that would mark her as an avatar of that which had been lost from Africabefore all that came the Spiritual Church.

 

Page 54
Numbers are imprecise, but I was told there are as many as 3000 members in the city, belonging to a dozen or so small congregations grouped around two umbrella factions, the Israelite Universal Divine Spiritual Churches of Christ and the Metropolitan Spiritual Churches of Christ. Lorita now belongs to the former, although she was raised in the Metropolitan. Since some of the congregations are so tiny and impoverished, with no chapels of their own in which to worship, the two umbrella groups serve as guest sanctuaries, with many "churches" scheduling services in the Israelite or Metropolitian facilities throughout the week.
The Spiritual Churches grew independently of Protestant mainstays such as Baptists and Methodists, but scholars such as Claude F. Jacobs (
The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans
), point out some influences from the mostly white Spiritualist Church, a separate denomination, which developed in the nineteenth century. The names themselves have a linkage: the early Spiritual Churches of New Orleans were called "Spiritualist," changing their names to "Spiritual" in the 1940s. Both churches use the term "seance." Jacobs also believes that the doctrine of the Spiritual Church that the souls of the dead may be "materialized"brought into tangible formis closely linked to Spiritualist beliefs in the continuation of individual essence after death.
A Catholic connection is equally traceable. According to Spiritual Church by-laws, "communication with departed souls" through prayer or possession, as well as the use of altars and pictures to represent the deadin voudou, the egunis necessary "because they enliven our devotion by exciting pious affection and desires." The phrase, Jacobs has noted, is virtually identical to an answer and response sequence in the Catholic Church's well-known "Baltimore Catechism."
Yet the borrowings from Spiritualist or Catholic systems are of interest not so much because they influenced the Spiritual Church, but because they are so compatible with ancestor and

 

Page 55
spirit world tenets of voudou. The Spiritual ministers who adapted the beliefs of the white churches might well have been simply choosing those doctrines which found easy resonance with a deeply held African religious value system.
I never saw a sanctuary in which, not far from framed portraits of the Catholic saints, were photos or depictions of tigers, lions or other wild animals. Table-top altars for the dead or ill were frequently draped with animal skins and "luck" candles. Other altars displayed rows of candles and mounds of burning incense, and, especially voudou-like, offerings of food to the spirits. Almost all had busts of ancestor figures such as the Whitehawk or Blackhawk.
Often, I would observe church elders in their scarlet or purple robes and think I was watching a group of Catholic monsignors or even cardinals. Or I would notice the female "missionaries" or "ministers" dressed in white, with white kerchiefs atop their heads, and feel I was in a fundamentalist or charismatic Protestant service. Then, as the service progressed and the worshipers "fell" into possessive trances, danced in extended gospel jams, and lined up for the dispensation of prophecies, holy candles, oils or cakeson one occasion, cornbread squares with a dime inserted inside for luckI knew I was among true believers in a faith that had recombined its spiritual DNA into something of stunning symbolic portent.
In few other churches could a young woman bound for voudou have formed a stronger evolutionary link with the slave-assimilated Christianity of the Deep South. As Lorita became conversant and masterful in this relentlessly inventive mode of worship, she moved ever closer to what was waiting for her behind the veil of Christianity. The elements of the Spiritual Church were so compatible with those of voudou that she was able to move comfortably into the African practice without feeling she had compromised her Christianity. It took little imagination to see how such syncretization might have rooted itself,

 

Page 56
Pulpit, center-right, in St. Lazarus Spiritual Church. St. Lazarus, left, in cor-
ner. Fan on wall is an attribute of Oshun, Lorita Mitchell's orisha.
powerfully and perhaps revolutionarily, in the generations of tens of thousands of African Americansbut, as history unfolded, did not.
Even Lorita's pivotal encounter with voudou spirits, which ultimately led to her full initiation as a priestess and recognition of her African spiritual heritage, came cloaked in Christian imagery. Worn down by efforts to find a cure for Andrew's cancer, she had sat next to his bed in the hospital ''mad at God and at the church." The stricken twin was thin, with black circles around his eyes, and in pain. Nothing was helping. But one morning the boy awoke with news that would change all their lives. In a fevered dream he had seen St. Lazarus presiding over a feast. Lorita didn't know what the dream meant, but sensed it was important and decided to set up a feast in the saint's honor.
She wasn't sure exactly what she needed, so she went to the F&F, at that time still owned by Ricky Cortez. Though he was a stranger, Lorita told him of the dream. He seemed to understand, but Lorita was a skeptical woman in matters of the Spirit. What

 

Page 57
did some Cuban in a weird store know about St. Lazarus anyway? Cortez responded by unbuttoning his shirt. On his chest was a tattoo of the saint from the dream.
Lorita was hooked.
Cortez told her to burn a candle for St. Lazarus at her feast, and to set the candle at the rear door, along with a plate of beans and rice. Later, she used handfuls of the beans and rice to "clean" all her children of bad spirits. She saved herself and Andrew for last. But she said that when she tried to pick up the beans and rice for herself she couldn't open her hands. They were clutched tight as claws.
Disturbed, awed, she went back to Cortez and gave him $50 for a reading. He asked her if anyone had "passed the Spirit" at the services. She said she didn't knowshe didn't know what that meant. He asked her to describe what had happened. When she told him of her tightened hands he said someone had. She had. She had passed the spirit of St. Lazarus. She had been possessed by a saint. Or by his voudou counterpart, Babalu Aye.
Not long after the feast, Andrew's cancer went into remission. Today he is a healthy father, a Spiritual Church prophet and a priest of Oshun. There's no satisfactory rational or scientific explanation. But Lorita wasn't looking for one. She gave thanks to the Lord, and couldn't forget Ricky Cortez. He was filled with a power, and she had to know more of it.
I understood the obsession. I, too, had met Cortezin the days before he disappeared. By then, as an oriaté, he had initiated Lorita, very likely the first such conversion of an African American to santeria voudou in New Orleans, but he had left the city for Miami. I saw him because he had returned to New Orleans briefly to preside over initiation rites for two women from Lorita's Spiritual Church when it was still on Metropolitan.
When I arrived at Lorita's old apartment for the ceremony that evening, Cortez, who had in a brief initial meeting struck

 

Page 58
me as a middle-aged gigolo, was transformed. His gold neck chains, loud tropical shirt and cranberry slacks had given way to faded jeans, blood-stained T-shirt and sandals. He carried a sacred white-handled killing knife, the cuchillo, already used many times. Crates of chickens, pigeons, and guinea fowl were stacked nearly to the ceiling. He had just cut the throat of a young goat, and as I arrived was eviscerating the carcass for the portions vital to the spirit of Elegba, being fed on a bloody altar in the next room, which was forbidden for me to enter. He walked up to me at once, but couldn't shake hands. In one palm was the blade, and in the other a pink-gray stretch of intestine.
He gripped the knife in his fist, then pinched the membrane with his thumbs and forefingers and stretched it before his eyes, then mine. It became almost transparent. Through it, he said, you could see into the future. He said, "This, what you will see here tonight, is for the health of the people. Not for anything bad. You understand?"
What later happened between Lorita and Ricky is murky. But eventually there was a terrible falling out. Lorita's greatest fear was that one day Cortez would reappearhis last known whereabouts was said to be Venezuelato use what is literally a secret weapon against her, the itá, the book of life readings given at the initiation ceremony over which Ricky, her original padrino, had presided.
I argued with Lorita that Ricky could have no power over her. I reminded her she had said as much to her own spiritual clients. "Don't nobody own you," she frequently told people complaining that their boyfriends or girlfriends were controlling their souls. But Lorita has never lost her fear of Ricky. Once, when I brought up the subject, she lowered her eyelids in that cold and distant gaze I had seen sometimes after sacrifices for her clients and looked at me as though I were the biggest fool on the planet.

 

Page 59
"You don't have any idea what power people can have," she said. "They's people
can
kill you. I know you don't believe it, but it's true. You think if your spirit strong nothing can hurt you. But it can." She leaned close to me. ''They people out there that can hurt you."
She was right, of course. But so was I.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
In my room at the Warwick, a funky but friendly downtown hotel, I began to assemble an altar on a dressing table: statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe; laminated photo cards of St. Expedite; a couple of votive candles; a square of that blessed cornbread with a lucky dime inside and other odds and ends from botanicas and churches.
Somewhere in each of our souls lies a huge bed of energy which moves and shifts like the templates of the earth. The energy may lie dormant throughout life. Or it may find a fissure. I knew that I would sooner or later have to confront those feelings, and that I would have to do so through Lorita. I had watched her as priestess but had avoided becoming one of her clients. My hesitation wasn't caused by doubt. I wasn't worried about finding out if she really knew her stuff. I was worried about what stuff of mine she would find out. Not until I was about to leave town did I ask for an appointment. "I was wondering why you didn't want a reading," she smiled, almost as though I'd been a lover too shy to offer a kiss.
So, for the first time, I sat in the client chair in her office, on the other side of her reading table and Bible, facing her directly. She looked at me in a way that almost seemed objective, cold as a doctor's eye in an examining room. And me as vulnerable. Then she unscrewed the cap on a vial of healing oil and told me to hold out my palms. I did, and she rubbed them tenderly. I calmed. Then she gripped my oiled hands hard, looked in my
BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
4.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Last Testament: A Memoir by God, David Javerbaum
Winter Longing by Tricia Mills
Damage by Robin Stevenson
A Dangerous Love by Sabrina Jeffries
Ten Little Bloodhounds by Virginia Lanier
The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey
The Liddy Scenario by Jerry D. Young
The Stranger by Harlan Coben