medicine, folk culture, even Christianity. In outlawing voudou and forcing it into new forms, America had nonetheless absorbed many of its ways. It was as though the African religion, in disappearing, had actually infiltrated the body of its frightened and hostile host.
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In wars, it is axiomatic that each foe slowly takes on the characteristics of the other. The internal American assault on voudou was nothing less than a war. And though voudou, as the religion of slaves, never had a chance on the battlefield against Christianity, the religion of the masters, it hung on in a long, covert resistance. It was my feeling that over the centuries, voudou had exerted such a remarkable staying power that most Americans, black or white, were still reluctant to deal directly with its legacies. But that didn't mean voudou wasn't endemic. Indeed, its presence was, like that of a black hole in space, all the more powerful for the inability to account for its seeming absence in the midst of highly altered activity all around. So in one sense, it didn't matter where I went or who I saw. Voudou was everywhere.
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My plan, after leaving New Orleans, was to move randomly across Louisiana and then the South, on to Miami, eventually, on even into the South Bronx. Not a plan so much as a confession of ignorance. I can take a road map of the southeastern U.S. and say that through a hot, rainy summer I was on this highway or that road, in this small village or that big city, talking to this woman and not that man; in truth I was traveling a territory without cartography.
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I figured to trace the old bayou routes westering out of New Orleans and so followed along the Plantation Road abutting the Mississippi River into Cajun country. It was as goodor bada place to start as any. On the one hand, Cajuns (Acadians, driven
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