Read American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World Online

Authors: Rod Davis

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American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (11 page)

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World

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Page 60

eyes and recited the Lord's Prayer, a Hail Mary, and a prayer asking the spirit for success. She pushed the Bible across the desk and said to open it anywhere.

I chose a passage in the middle, somewhere between Chronicles and Psalms in the Old Testament. She instructed me to write my name on a piece of paper, which she inserted in the place I had chosen. She shut the Bible and shifted back in her chair, eyes closed behind her bifocals. When the eyes re-opened, she cracked the Bible exactly to my spot. She picked up a pencil and used the point of it to skim the page, stopping occasionally on a single letter. Each seemed to be a key to a spiritual insight, which she would tell me as though from a trance. When she felt each onset she would jolt rigid, head tilted back and eyes shut, sometimes sharply crying out "Jesus!" and always prefacing the subsequent observations with "Spirit say ...."

One of the things the Spirit said was that I should be careful on my trip. In and out of trance, she told me I should pay attention to my father's spirit and light candles for him in Catholic churches. I should read the twenty-third Psalm, the part about "the valley of the shadow." I should never stay in "a log cabin or something like that in a wooded areayou might get robbed." I shouldn't drive late at night. I should beware of hoodoo people, root doctors, prophets, witchesall of whom she saw as elements in a spiritual evil empire out there waiting for naive fools like me. I should refuse all offerings of food and never let myself be cleaned by any kind of meat, nor leave anything behind. I should participate in no ceremonies, especially those involving sacrifices. I would manage to violate many of her injunctions, and yet they never left me completely.

When she had finished, Lorita put down her pencil and started to close the Bible. She wondered, almost as an afterthought, if there were anything I wanted to ask about. She looked at me, fingers poised on the worn margins of her holy book.

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There was, but I hadn't wanted to bring it up. Maybe it seemed too much like what I'd heard from other clients. Maybe I thought it too revealing. Maybe I didn't want to know. But I did. I wanted to know about a woman.

"That good, baby," she said at once, and told me to write her name on a piece of paper and insert it in the Bible, as we'd done before. It went the same until she looked at what I'd put down. She shut her eyes tightly. When she opened them, she asked, "Is that her real name?"

I laughed. "Yes, of course it is."

"You sure?"

I double-checked. "Yeah. That's her name."

Lorita shook her head. She closed her eyes and tried again. She looked me. "Spirit say: 'No report.'"

I smiled uneasily. Swords of skepticism unsheathed. After all this, I thought, Lorita has let me down.

"How can that be? I mean, I know her. That's her name."

Lorita didn't budge. Just sat back in her chair and looked at me over the tops of her glasses, Bible in her lap. "I don't know. Spirit say no report." I didn't know how to respond. Lorita closed her eyes again. "Nope. I just see a blank. She a shell. Nothing inside."

It got a little awkward, at least for me. A person's name was pretty verifiable. Maybe Lorita was afraid of "reading" somebody she didn't know and thus couldn't base her analysis on tricks of the tradecrafty observation and educated guesses. I couldn't believe it. She was faking it.

In the midst of this de-bunking epiphany, I had another. In fact, I slowly recalled, my friend's name was
not
her name.

I knew her as Danica, but she had been born otherwise. When her father returned from Vietnam he had forced her mother to legally rename her, so all the children would carry his initials, which began with D. I had forgotten all about it. I told Lorita.

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She nodded her head and rocked slightly in her chair, but otherwise did nothing to rub it in. "Write down the name she born with," she said. "That the one the Spirit see."

I wrote "Lisa Marie" on the paper and put it in the Bible.

Lorita began to tell me about her.

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6
Jesus out of Africa

By now, it was late spring in New Orleans. Evenings had become thick and sluggish, precursors to the long, hot summer of Southern fame. Sticky shirts and frizzy hair were the couture of circumstance. The city was a huge, inescapable greenhouse. And I was ready to move on. At the weekend I would tell my friends goodbye, take down my altar, pack my things, load up my car. I would drive off into a world without directions, without maps, without guides, and perhaps without welcome. It seemed like a good idea to go to church.

St. Lazarus offered traditional services on Sunday, but the best sessions were on Friday nights. By 7:30
P.M.
I was sitting in a middle pew with a Gideon's Bible in my lap feeling like I'd wasted time in the shower. The triplex sanctuary was air-conditioned, but the Iberville-side door had to be propped open against the sweltering night because Gary had lit too much incense and the room was choking with smoke. The cool drifted out with the sweet, thick vapors.

It was a little early, and hardly anyone had shown up, except for the regulars, maybe a dozen of us altogether. Perhaps that's

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Inside the sanctuary, Lazarus Spiritual Church, New Orleans. Gary Mitchell,
Lorita's son, in white cap. His wife and infant daughter, seated.

what was bothering Lorita, sitting like the wrath of who knew what in black robe and white dust cap on the pulpit dais, staring at her open Bible through her bifocals. Whatever it was that pulled her visage into a hard mask, whatever was clouding the reception of the Spirit, it was going to come out before the night was over. Nobody spoke to her at all.

A woman and her pre-teen daughter came in talking, fell silent at once, and came up the middle aisle to sit in the pew just to my right. I had never seen her and hoped she was a potential new member. She had her own Bible and gave it to her daughter to hold. Gary turned on the keyboard and started a quiet background hymn. The mother and daughter bowed their heads to pray silently, though I could see the girl's eyes peek open. Everyone was black except for myself, a young white couple who came to Lorita for readings, and Pam, who had come back to New Orleans to visit her family and had wanted to attend a service. She had been to Lorita for a reading, and had been impressedfully willing to follow Lorita's suggestions to prepare a soothing

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"dressing" of fruits to place on her head, eat certain foods and, because Lorita thought Pam had a gypsy spirit, to wear a seven-pointed skirt with bells on the hem.

At a quarter to, after a few more stragglers showed up, Lorita rose and called out to a half-dozen women near the front to join her and Gary, who had stopped playing, at the small open space between the front pews and the dais. They knelt in a circle around their pastor. She brought her chair because her neck and back still hurt too much from the wreck to sit on the tile floor.

Doris, a young schoolteacher, started the praying, calling to Jesus to open her heart, help her, to help the church, to give blessings, to bring prosperity. She asked that Lorita's neck be healed, and that her own failings be forgiven, that she become a better person, that she learn to love Jesus even more. I could hear faint "Amens" to some of Doris's petitions, but no lightning was being sparked. The opening prayer, which in voudou is directed at Elegba to open the path to the orisha and in Spiritual churches is often a device to jump-start the congregation's spiritual passion, even send a member into possession, had become an aimless monologue. It occurred to me Doris may have been afraid to stop.

Lorita cut in almost cruelly, talking right over the floundering schoolteacheror in a kinder interpretation, picking up the lead line of the straying improvisationby launching the church's mantra-like prayer chant: "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.... Hail Mary, full of Grace.... The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.... Hail Mary, full of Grace...."

One supplication followed the other, increasing in speed until the rhythm became a hypnotic litany, at which point Lorita broke in with the fast clapping characteristic of the Spiritual Churches. It's almost as rapid as applause, except that it has a beat, and every eighth beat is accented with a cry of "Jesus ... (clapping) ... Jesus."

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"Harder," she demanded. "Call him to come down.... Clear your mind and call him."

After a few minutes I was clapping, too. Gary had returned to the keyboard to lay in some rhythm and bass, but the clapping took its own direction, and he strolled outside for a break, like a jazz musician waiting out a solo. It might've been ten minutes before he returned, and we were still going strong.

"Call him," Lorita interjected, "Call Jesus. Beg him to come."

They did, voices reaching up in twining, breakaway harmonies.

She changed the chant line from "Je-sus" to "Pow-er."

"POW-er," they refrained.

"Come down with the POW-er," she led.

"POW-er."

"Money power."

"POW-er."

"Do right power."

"POW-er."

"Loving power ... Fixing power ... Political POW-er."

When we all were bathed in sweat, swept away in the ring-shout, when Lorita felt that all were lost in the Spirit, when the lethargy and inhibition had been smashed by her demands, by the demands of the Lord, she let us go.

"Say Amen," she commanded, and we did. "Say thank you Jesus," and we did.

We clapped fast again: "Amen" and "Thank you Jesus" spontaneous and multi-voiced, and then the prayer circle dispelled, the worshipers returned to their seats. Gary tendered a soothing gospel standard, "What a friend we have in Jesus...."

Still more people had trickled in, and the pews now held maybe thirty souls. One of the late arrivals, Clarence, sat in the back, a quiet man in a conservative blue suit, an electrician by trade, distinguished and Bible-toting, who had come for the Lord, but for the minister, too. Lorita liked him, I could tell; I knew in

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time he would be one of the helpers and handymen she bound to her church.

As we sang softly, unwinding, resting, Lorita carried her chair back to its place behind the pulpit. But she sat in it rigid again. The mask was back; the grimace returned. The thing she had seen earlier was still there. Gary played on, filling in the dreadful silence from his mother's tight lips.

Children began to squirm and mothers hushed them. I touched Pam's hand but wasn't sure what to say. It felt like being hunted; more accurately, assessed. Finally, Lorita stood, arching her back. The pain, at least, must've been beaten down, because she moved toward us like an out-of-sorts Mick Jagger.

"God is no respecter of persons!" she cried. "Have anyone here ever been in real hard times? Times when there was no food and you didn't know where food was coming from?" No one knew where she was heading or why. "Oh, just
my
family, huh?" She walked back up the dais, and put on her bifocals, scanning her open Bible as if no one else were in the room.

"That's when you really find God. When you be praying and asking God from your heart, a time when you have no money and no bread to eat.... If you ain't never had times like that how you know what it's like? I was brought up eating out of tin cans and on pie plates. I know what it's like." Nearly all her congregation did, too, but that wasn't the issue. "God is no respecter of persons!" she yelled out again. "He don't care what you have or what you don't have."

She marched down to the pews to my right, where sat Doris and Lorraine and the most devoted. They seemed frozen, like quail at the approach of the dogs. Lorita searched out each face in front of her. "Do anyone here have the Holy Ghost in them?"

I could feel the entire congregation stiffen. They, if not I, knew what was coming. Doris broke first.

"Yes," she said, tremelo, standing, "because Jesus answers my prayers."

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World

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