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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 (54 page)

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
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Page 339
That worship was as dark and horrid as bestialized savagery could make the adoration of serpents. So revolting was it, and so morally hideous, that even in the West Indian French possessions a hundred years ago, with the slave-trade in full blast and the West Indian planter and slave what they were, the orgies of the Voodoos were prohibited.
This of course completely inverted the history of the Code Noir and forced baptism of slaves, for a start. The remainder of the piece was approximately as accurate. Its lone example of a voudou ceremony described familiar scenery: a midnight orgy in a darkened swamp along Lake Pontchartrain.
Harper's Weekly
got on the voudou beat June 25, 1887 with a long piece signed by Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the article was taken up with a first-person account with an unusual twist that may actually have been based on true observationthe scene was in a house in New Orleans. Warner's knowledge of voudou was not much advanced on those of the New Orleans newspaper reporters, however, though it may have seemed so to an audience utterly unfamiliar with the religion of the slaves it so recently had seemed so earnest to ''free." According to Warner:
... the barbaric rites of Voudooisim originated with the Congo and Guinea negroes, were brought to San Domingo, and thence to Louisiana. In Hayti the sect is in full vigor, and its midnight orgies have reverted more and more to the barbaric original in the last twenty-five years. The wild dance and incantations are accompanied by sacrifice of animals and occasionally of infants, and with cannibalism, and scenes of most indecent license. In its origin it is serpent worship....

 

Page 340
Some years ago Congo Square was the scene of the weird midnight rites of this sect, as unrestrained and barbarous as ever took place in the Congo country. All these semi-public performances have been suppressed, and all private assemblies for this worship are illegal, and broken up by the police when they are discovered.
Warner was able, he said, to find someone who knew of a voudou ceremony anyway, and he thus attended. The ceremony was sans sacrifice, though it did have dancing, invocation of the Apostles Creed, and singing and use of fruit-laden altarsall of which would have fit at a voudou ceremony, depending on what kind of ceremony it was. Warner could not conceal his consternation, however, at the discovery of a twenty-year-old female seated next to him:
[Her] complexion and features gave evidence that she was white. Still, finding her in that company, and there as a participant in the Voudoo rites, I concluded that I must be mistaken, and that she must have colored blood in her veins. Assuming the privilege of an inquirer, I asked her questions about the coming performance, and in doing so carried the impression that she was kin to the colored race. But I was soon convinced, from her manner and her replies, that she was pure white. She was a pretty, modest girl, very reticent, well-bred, polite, and civil....She told me, in the course of the conversation, the name of the street where she lived (in the American part of town), the private school at which she had been educated (one of the best in the city), and that she and her parents were Episcopalians. Whatever her trouble

 

Page 341
was, mental or physical, she was evidently infatuated with the notion that this Voudoo doctor could conjure it away, and said that she thought he had already been of service to her.... In coming to this place she had gone a step beyond the young ladies of her class who make a novena at St. Roch.
The ceremony proceeded. From the account it sounded very like the kind of services I observed at Spiritual Churches in New Orleans in the 1980s. Warner was clearly uncomfortable:
Toward the close of the seance, when the spells were all woven and the flames had subsided, the tall, good-natured negress motioned to me that it was my turn to advance into the circle and kneel. I excused myself. But the young [white] girl was unable to resist longer. She went forward and knelt, with a candle in her hand. The conjurer was either touched by her youth and race, or he had spent his force. He gently lifted her by one hand, and gave her one turn around, and she came back to her seat.
.... In the breakup I had no opportunity to speak further to the interesting young white neophyte; but as I saw her resuming her hat and cloak in the adjoining room there was a strange excitement in her face, and in her eyes a light of triumph and faith. We came out by the back way, and through an alley made our escape into the sunny street and the air of the nineteenth century.
Interspersed over the years were stories not about ceremonies or crimes but the other thing that fascinated people about
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