High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [79]
My entourage and I left the forest and walked through the outskirts of town. I heard a deep boom like a foghorn, then saw, emerging from a doorway, a six-foot, writhing haystack. The children screamed, “Feticheur!” and we followed him as he boomed and danced through Ouidah’s narrow back streets. In the plaza our fetish joined other dancing haystacks, one of whom had a devil’s head. The dancing would go on into the night.
I wandered behind the fort and by pure dumb accident stumbled onto the vodoun market. Dozens of fetishers had laid out their wares on the ground: rows of animal skins and bird bodies, turtle skulls, dried chameleons, dark monkey hands lined up in a beseeching row, palms up. I was horrified by this trade in literal flesh and bone (wondering how much of the pharmacopeia was rare or endangered), but also enthralled by the sense of secret business. For nearly an hour I eavesdropped on customers as they recited their maladies and received their prescriptions.
Eventually I collected my nerve and approached the young apprentice of a fetisher. “Something for my love life,” I told him. “Ah oui, mademoiselle” he said, nodding, with the precise demeanor of a young physician. He introduced himself, asked some diagnostic questions, then led me into a small tent. My heart began to pound. Inside, lined up museumlike, were hundreds of gris-gris. There are different types, he explained clinically, for success in business, for improving the memory, for safe travel. He briefly assessed his inventory and produced my love charm: two small sticks bound to a piece of bone, stained dark with blood. This is a powerful one, he said, blessed in a fire ceremony at the temple in Abomey. It has la force Africaine. He provided me with extremely complex instructions, promising that if correctly used my gris-gris would repel all the wrong sorts of men, attract the right one, and keep him interested. Then he produced a bell from some hidden place, rang it forcefully in my ears, and sang an elaborate chant from which I could pick out only my name, repeated three times. He touched the charm to my collarbone, and then it was mine. For approximately three dollars I walked away with a guarantee of future bliss.
Back at the street fair, in the smoky heat among vendors of souvenirs and street food, a flock of kids danced around a boom box playing Lionel Richie. In the shadow of the Portuguese fort, the history of slavery, and the dark thunderclouds attracted by too many fetishers in one place, this carnival atmosphere struck me as bizarre, if not outright glib. I had a beer at a makeshift café and met a university student, Soulemaine Moreira, whose last name came from the Brazilian family that owned his grandparents. I asked him, “Don’t you think about the people who got sent out from this port?”
“We think of them, of course,” he replied. “We couldn’t forget. Slavery was a terrible tragedy. But look at how it contributed to the cultural development of the New World.”
Lionel Richie picked up a new beat, and a woman grilling meat nearby began to dance, elbows out, her fork in the air. Like the Moreira family, this music had made a long, circular trip home. I tried to imagine an America without Michael Jackson or Magic Johnson, without jazz, Motown, break dancing, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Taj Mahal, George Washington Carver, James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou. I couldn’t picture it—anymore, I’m sure, than Soulemaine Moreira could imagine a Benin without Peugeot taxis. The legacy of colonialism is a world of hurt and cross-pollinated beauty, and we take it from there.
In the gathering dusk I walked through town watching drummers work in tight knots beneath overarching trees, driving their rhythms through crowds who swept with bare feet the dirt floors of these secret amphitheaters. Women moved with babies