• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 737 0

throughout the slave states, but they were practiced surreptitiously; while every plantation had its witches and conjure men, and the plantation owners routinely used their slaves’ medicines, it was all done out of sight. In New Orleans there were voodoo shops openly advertising for business. The most celebrated was on the old Bayou Road on the outskirts of town. It was run by a black African who called himself Dr. John. He was an imposing figure: invariably dressed in formal suits with frilled shirts, and his face fantastically tattooed. His shop was stocked with glass jars and phials filled with odd swamp weeds, wildflowers, dried lizards, insect eggs, bird feathers, and an assortment of carved bones and amulets. Dr. John practiced astrology and cartomancy; he was a healer and a skilled mind reader; he performed divination with pastel-colored pebbles and curious seashells. “One would stand aghast,” one observer wrote, “were he to be told the names of the high city dames who were wont to drive in their own carriages, with thickly veiled faces, to this sooty black Cagliostro’s abode, to consult him upon domestic affairs.”

By the 1850s, Dr. John had been eclipsed by Marie Laveau, who became known as the Voodoo Queen. She, too, dealt in herbs and medicines, and she sold charms to guard against curses, spells, and maleficences. She discreetly consulted with her wealthiest clients by paying them house calls as their hairdresser—and she was reportedly an excellent hairdresser. She was also, according to some, an excellent procuress. After a long career, she hit upon a kind of early version of the franchised brand: she secretly retired and set her daughter up in her place. Many people late in the century assumed that the woman they knew as Marie Laveau was the same preternaturally young Voodoo Queen who had been practicing her craft since before the Civil War.

Marie Laveau was usually cited as the one who did the most to popularize (vulgarize, some said) voodoo among New Orleans’s white society. Local politicians bought Laveau’s charms before elections, and gamblers would carry them on their watch chains when they went out to the racetrack. But in fact there was a large trade in magical tokens throughout the city. People everywhere left poisoned crosses under pillows and trickled the dirt from graveyards around doorways. They bought, or concocted themselves, powders and poisons, which were known as gris-gris: combinations of black and white pepper, arrangements of carved bones stolen from mausoleums, cursed chicken feathers. They attended midnight ceremonies on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain that often ended up as orgies. These were supposed to be secret, but Marie Laveau would invite policemen, reporters, politicians, and the ladies of high society to ensure that the forces of law and morality left her unmolested.

There was a well-attended public event on Sundays in a park known as Congo Square. During the afternoons the atmosphere was gaudy and festive. Slaves, free people of color, and whites mingled in the shade of towering old sycamores while in the central square hundreds of dancers exuberantly performed the Calinda and the Bamboula. The spectators bought ginger beer and wine, lemonade and lime soda water, vinegar pies and ginger cakes, at tables set below long awnings draped with streamers. But then at dusk, the tourists drifted off to the restaurants and the opera houses; the staid citizens went back to their homes; the students from the local university, already tipsy, would usually depart singing old Creole lullabies and calling out “Soleil, couche.” The remaining revelers, both blacks and whites, now unobserved, would take “the oath to the serpent.” The oath was, according to one observer, nothing but “a string of barbarous epithets and penalties.” What followed was something like a camp meeting, except that the eroticism was wholly overt. The king and queen of the ceremony would caress a large snake representing the god and begin to tremble; the other celebrants would touch them and begin to tremble as well. Gradually