Marie Laveau
It was one, two, three in the morning, sometime in the 1860s. The St. John’s Eve ceremony had just ended, a ceremony that Marie Laveau had been presiding over for some thirty years. Tar barrels burned along the lakeshore, lit up like Christmas, though it was a warm wet night just after the summer solstice. Laveau’s followers had come to wash their hands in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, present offerings, sing, dance, let the spirits take over their bodies to gorge on cake and liquor, and in turn provide them with refreshment and healing for the new year. The ceremony had lasted for hours, and now Laveau looked out at her tired crowd—free women of color, slave men, white women, white slaveholding men—gathering their things to head back to the Marigny. The wind was kicking up offshore, and she thought that this was as good as any ceremony to be her last. This was the night she would give herself over to the hurricane.
It’s a good story, and one version of many. In Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston writes that as the wind and rain started to rage, Laveau “resisted rescue, saying that she wished to die at the lake . . . she perhaps felt that, being old, her end was near. She preferred to exit with nature itself playing its most magnificent music, rather than die rotting in bed.”
Herbert Asbury, too, wrote of that night around the same time as Hurston, reporting that it was Laveau’s cabin, not her body, that sunk into that great, huge lake, and that “she protested that the Voudou gods wanted her to die in the lake, and was only pulled from the water against her will.”
In Carolyn Morrow Long’s biography of Laveau, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess, she assembles a bunch of these stories. Another source claims that a few of Laveau’s followers found her washed ashore the next day, after which she spent seven years wasting away in bed. Yet another claims that she found Laveau floating creekside, days later, and nursed her back to health with coffee and herbs, after which Laveau returned to her duties as priestess. Still others insist that Laveau did in fact die the night of the storm, and that any account of Marie Laveau after the 1860s was actually her daughter acting as priestess in her name. The newspapers, both local ones and The New York Times, report that she died in her bed in 1881, having returned to the church, surrounded by saints pinned to the walls.
Some of these stories are from the press, and some are based on interviews from the Louisiana Writers’ Project, conducted in the 1930s by writers like Zora Neale Hurston, and some are later semi-novelized in Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans, then re-novelized in Francine Prose’s Marie Laveau, and then later televisionized in American Horror Story, and even at this very moment are being reinvented and retold in front of Laveau’s tomb (where she may or may not be buried) in one of three simultaneous tours of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—until the story of Marie Laveau’s life has become a perpetual feedback loop.
Marie Laveau was a “Voodoo Queen,” a Voudou priestess, a conjurer, a mambo, and according to biographer Martha Ward, the ostensible founder of American Voudou. She was born sometime around 1794 to a free mother of color and a mixed-race Haitian father. She had seven children, though that number sometimes shifts to fifteen—like Sojourner Truth’s fictional thirteen—and of the seven, only two survived to adulthood, one of whom was her daughter, Marie II, who certainly operated later under her mother’s name, though to what extent we have little way of knowing.
As Long says, by the end of the nineteenth century,
most of the elements of the Laveau Legend were firmly established: the extraordinary beauty of the Voudou queen, her wealthy white planter father and her lovely mulatto mother, her profession as a hairdresser, her marriage to the carpenter Jacques Paris and his subsequent disappearance, her second marriage to Christophe Glapion, their fifteen children, her special friendship with Pere Antoine, her repudiation of Voudou and return to the church, and the idea that she was nearly 100 years old at the time of her death.
But her entire thesis is that barely any of this is verifiable, and in many cases it’s downright wrong.
What do you do when the record is so thin? When all you have are civic records, financial transactions, marriage licenses, baptisms, interviews with very old people? During Laveau’s lifetime, there are only three direct mentions in the press (or thereabouts) of her being a Voudou priestess or related to Voudou at all. She herself, like many nineteenth-century American women of color who were descended from slaves, left no written record and is presumed to have been illiterate.
Then there’s the fact that black American women were—are—the object of so many corrosive rhetorics, perpetually caught in the damning, flattening, racist binary paradox of the white gaze: magical or evil, simple or calculated, hypermasculine or sexualized feminine. So much of what we know about Laveau has been filtered through that shitty cheesecloth, too.
What do you do when there’s no record?
Slavery, suppression, erasure of culture, religion, relatives, entire family lines. You no longer work in linear narratives. Or you do, but only by imagining unbroken lines of connection wherever they’ve never explicitly been debunked. You have to.
Voudou has always been a religion of the erased and undocumented. The information comes in other forms: through the spirits, through the ceremonies.
In 1999 the contemporary New Orleans Voudou priestess Sallie Ann Glassman oversaw the St. John’s Eve ceremony, Marie’s ceremony, and she announced in an interview with the Times-Picayune that the spirit of Marie Laveau had come to her the evening before, presenting herself anew, mother and daughter merged into one. When the reporter asked Glassman what Marie was like, she said, “Marie doesn’t like people who stand back at a distance and are judgmental,” adding that she “does not like newspaper reporters much either.” In Glassman’s book, Laveau is acknowledged as “the historical Iwa of New Orleans”: the deity, the patron saint.
I thought I was never going to make it to New Orleans. My summer had been sunk in work and caretaking. My grandmother died. Sweeney’s grandmother found out she was dying the week I flew to Seattle to sit with mine for the last time. My father-in-law was sick, had almost died, was administered last rites three times, but had lived. I was at my stepbrother Noel’s house in Portland after a long visit to home. His grandmother had died just a few months before. I had just enough money in the bank for a train ticket, and I walked into Noel’s guest bedroom and saw Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans on the shelf.
“You want it?” he said. “Take it.”
And I did take it: as a sign, or permission, to go.
Noel made us breakfast on a skillet—eggs, sausage, home fries—and while he cooked we talked about our family. He had been estranged from my stepfather, his father, since the day after my wedding four years earlier. Noel was twenty when our parents married. Noel is black, with two white parents, a white stepmother, white stepsiblings, in the whitest city in America. We grew up together in one way or another, during profoundly different life stages, though he had always occupied the position of protector. The night my brother torched his house, Noel sat on our porch till dawn, and I had listened from my bedroom, which was right next to the front door, to the fumble, to Aaron’s strange, crooked laughter, as Noel caught him in his arms. I walked outside and found Aaron, immobilized in his army fatigues. “I burnt the motherfucker down and now I’m going to shoot the mayor!” he shouted. Noel held him there until the cops had formed a circle around our house.
As a child, when I or anyone in our family drove in a car with Noel, we were often pulled over. The first time a cop pushed him to the sidewalk and frisked him, Noel was fifteen years old and walking home. When he and my stepdad Leo escaped from a gang of skinheads who had surrounded their car at a gas station, the cops they finally flagged down said there was nothing they could do. And during times when Leo couldn’t stop yelling, at me or my mom or God, Noel would come and take him away for an hour, a day, a week, till he cooled down. And now it had been four years since they had spoken.
So I stood there in the doorway while he fried things on the skillet, talking about all the missed opportunities in our family, all the gaps, and by the time I was trying to swallow my first bite of breakfast, I was crying. Noel looking at me, his face softened by pain for my pain, tolerant with the question, for the hundredth time: When are you going to accept things as they are? That terrible sensation of hot eggs and a stuffed nose and trying to swallow. “I will never not be sad,” I kept saying, and later he hugged me goodbye and said, “Stay sane, sista.”
And then, just like that, I was heading toward a train they call The City of New Orleans.
Marie’s great-grandmother might have been born in Senegal, a Wolof trafficked to the American South in the mid-eighteenth century. She was separated from her children, who also bore children into slavery, some to white men, to slaveholders, some to Creole or mixed or slaves or freed slaves, though one by one, over many decades, each had purchased their freedom. By the time Laveau’s mother was born, her great-grandmother was a property owner, and Marie herself was born free. She might have learned rootwork and conjure from her mother or her grandmother. Biographer Martha Ward speculates in Voodoo Queen that, like most New Orleanian children of color, Marie learned Christian theology from the Ursuline nuns—an order of well-to-do French sisters who operated in relative independence from the church and “built a community of Catholic mothers and a convent where women of every race, class, and nationality could find refuge and support.”
Twenty years went by, maybe more. Marie became a Voudou priestess. People traveled to her, from far and wide. She was pregnant, gave birth, raised children—amazing on its own, all of it. She sat on her porch, filed her nails, gave haircuts, cast out demons, thwarted domestic violence, repaired relationships, healed the fissures of slavery. She sat vigil in prisons with inmates on death row, helping them build altars, helping them get free in some cases—in this life or the next. She cured countless people of yellow fever. There she is, dabbing the forehead of some wan-faced patient, or sitting in the parlor of a rich white woman, casting spells, resolving infirmities, her clients sitting pretty, pawing at her lap as she braided their hair. Then she’d host ceremonies in Congo Square, around the corner from her house.
Ward says that Laveau “bore witness to her relationship to God and the spirit world each time she recited the Apostles’ Creed, at each Mass she attended, every time she danced in Congo Square—I believe in one God. . . and in all things seen and unseen . . . and in all things visible and invisible,” a hybrid that seemed a natural extension of her Catholic education, all that tongue-speaking on Pentecost and resurrecting and Holy Spirit possession. At some point, it was Marie and her daughter, both, interchangeable, leading the Congo Square ceremonies. Ward paints a picture:
When the two priestesses danced in Congo Square and at other places in New Orleans, they shouted—Voudou, Voudou. Through the sacred word, a widespread African name for spirit or deity, they invited or invoked the spirits to enter their bodies, to be incarnated in them. After 1820 local newspapers used the word to describe the social group—a cult of primitive superstition, idolatrous rites, and snake worship, they insisted. Regardless of the low value placed on the religion by members of the press, practitioners, then as now, tell us that the word Voudou in all its spellings translates best as “those who serve the spirits.”
Some of her family hailed from the most brutal factions of the Atlantic slave trade in the Caribbean, and had survived. But then to be out of that by one generation, somewhat safely integrated into New Orleans public life, a black businesswoman with white clients—how did she reconcile that? Then there’s the evidence of her and her husband’s own slave ownership, which Ward speculates in Voodoo Queen were transactions based on the slaves’ eventual freedom. There is evidence that some of the purchases came with a permanent condition of the slaves’ eventual enfranchisement, even in the event of another sale. Marie “did what she had to do,” Ward says, “what she knew how to do, to fulfill Voodoo’s obligation, to earn Voodoo’s greatest gift. When the Great Serpent sang to Marie Laveau in Congo Square and insinuated himself into shapes that only conjure and poetry can, she submitted to the drums, and her songs echoed his voice—There is life after slavery. There is freedom before death.”
But Long, in A New Orleans Voudou Priestess, contests this certainty. She looked closely at all those financial records, too. She found no hard evidence that Laveau and her husband ever freed their slaves, or purchased slaves expressly for liberation purposes. In fact, there is only hard evidence, only records, that they profited.
I have been on the train now for two full days—the Empire Builder. They’d advertised Wi-Fi but did not actually provide it. I am, to my surprise, able to sleep at night. I have my own row with those wide footrests. I am wearing my grandmother’s shirt, a green crinkled rayon thing, giant on me, held together by only three buttons so it’s basically see-through at most angles, but I don’t care. I am also wearing three of her necklaces—two with amber beads and one of blue clay—which I have barely taken off since her memorial party in Seattle a couple of weeks back. We’d thrown a huge party in her honor and cleaned out their house for the first time in twenty years. Entire rooms came alive under those layers of boxes and dust and old bicycle parts, and my brother had scrubbed outdoor furniture to be placed under the plum tree in the backyard, and my cousin and I set up a TV in the living room playing old camping home movies from the 1960s on a loop, showing, at times, my grandma in long braids stooped over a Coleman stove, frying up flapjacks or fish. It was a perfect beautiful May day, clear as a bell, and I cling to that beautiful afternoon, full of family members and old friends, sitting in the tower with my brother watching the sunset over Mt. Rainer, smoking cigarettes, talking about the game he’s designing. The rest of the trip, down in Portland, had been hard, strained, stretched: a grief that would not lift, a family dynamic that would not change, Sweeney’s mind off with his father recovering from a horrible stroke, and me, walking through a city I no longer recognized.
While we were there, the famous television psychic Miss Cleo died. I woke up on the second floor of the Victorian brick we were rooming in and saw the news on my phone. She was young, early fifties, heart disease. I remembered her commercials in the 1990s: a blue background and her orange tignon, her laughing Caribbean patois, saying, “Call me now for your free readin’,” to have your future divined. There were fade-out clips of her talking on the phone, pulling cards, the disembodied voice of a soft-spoken woman on the other line getting news about her love life.
Within a few years, the company she worked for was sued for fraud several different times. Miss Cleo, whose real name was Youree Dell Harris, was the poster child for the company, and so for the scandal, too, although she was never fined or imprisoned, contrary to popular belief. She retreated from the public eye, down to South Florida, and she continued to have clients and to be a spiritual counselor. Four years later, she came out as a lesbian in an interview. She’d waited so long because being a lesbian had been taboo in her Jamaican household growing up (and beyond that household too, of course, of course). She even started her own podcast, and she still identified as an Obeah—a West Indies shaman. She remained a spiritual counselor all those years, someone who lived quietly and advised.
I think about Miss Cleo as I head down south. I am worn out. I sit in the observation car at night and look out at the darkness and try to read, try to write. I meet a guy who makes his own jerky, has three kids, is on his way to Montana to help his brother drive all of his adopted kids back to Oregon for a family reunion. My passenger car smells like a toilet, so I steer clear for as long as possible. I subsist off of instant oatmeal and instant coffee and baby carrots and Jif peanut butter. I feel hopelessly distant from my family, or like I am without hope for change. What a strange conclusion to draw, considering that my brother, against all odds, has his own apartment, a fine arts degree, a workout regimen, and my sister has her whole life ahead of her. And Noel, Noel is making a good life, full of hope.
I get off in Chicago and eat a weird hot dog, drink some coffee, smoke, cry on the phone to Sweeney.
On the next leg of the trip, on the City of New Orleans, my seatmate, a young man, asks what I’m going to New Orleans for. I assume he’s from there so am cagey in my response. But it turns out he’s on his way there for the first time too, to tend an urban garden in the Ninth Ward and to learn how to become a beekeeper. When he gets up from his seat I notice an envelope with his name on it, stamped with a return address for Church of the Brethren, so when he comes back, I start asking all these questions, trying to get to the bottom of this religious beekeeping thing. Now he’s the one who’s cagey, trying to read me, but I finally get him to say that he’s connected to this urban gardening organization via Church of the Brethren, and they, well, they come from Germany, out of the reformation. (I often ask people impossibly nuanced questions about the religions they grew up in and don’t think about in nuanced ways, like, “Well, so do they have a call to confession during service? How often do they serve the Eucharist?”)
“Anabaptists!” I say. “Like the Mennonites,” those people who baptized adults and got burned for it. They went to Switzerland, then to America, and now there’s none in Germany.
The Brethren, he tells me, started the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, other benevolent organizations. The boy had just completed a training for this service work where they’d taught him about “warm climate culture” and “cold climate culture.” Had I heard of this?
His parents run a mission on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico—“I am the classic preacher’s son,” he says—and run a church, yes, where his mother and stepfather serve as co-pastors, and they also run a literacy center, a computer lab, a thrift store, a fresh-water well. He is telling me how the Navajo cosmology moves in a spiral, representing both individual lives and the life the world. Their houses are built in this spiral, he says, and the spiral functions so that the old and the new are constantly made to intermingle, must be subjected to constant change though always in proximity to the center, the origin. I am not explaining it well. He explained it much better, and he was only eighteen. But Leslie Marmon Silko talks about this in her novel Ceremony, I remember.
I write in my notebook: “Look up the earmarked pages in Ceremony.”
That night I sleep in the observation car—or I try to. And the next thing I know it is gray dawn, and glowing before me are hot pink neon letters: MEMPHIS.
When I return to my seat, we are speeding through Mississippi. The train is emptying. Then, after Hammond, we sail over a long causeway, across the wide endless bayou, which reminds me a lot of the Wyoming prairie. The sky is gray-blue and so is the water, and every once in a while we pass through these scraggly ravaged swamp forests, by a houseboat, a floating shack.
The first miles into New Orleans are all warehouses and semi-trucks and freeway, and a shadow crosses the New Mexico boy’s face. “So far, this just looks like any other city,” he says.
When we arrive, he slings his guitar over his shoulder and I wish him good luck.
My taxi driver at the train station is Egyptian American, born and raised in New Orleans, and he talks darkly about Katrina like it was yesterday. I can see out the window, through cracks in the side streets, the old architecture, the short houses, Creole houses, some beautiful latticed balconies. My heart is pounding. I am not sure why I’m here. He drops me off at a small shotgun house across from a gutted car wash that is now just a cement slab full of middle-aged dudes drinking malt liquor and blasting music.
I check into my Airbnb and close the shades and get under the covers and sleep.
When I wake up, it’s getting dark, and I set off into the Marigny—the hub of public life for free people of color in the nineteenth century. I buy a pint of Abita Brewing Company’s Purple Haze at a bar and listen to a jug band. I walk to the address of Marie Laveau’s old house on St. Anne and find a pretty mint-colored single-story building with gingerbread eves—it looks Victorian, which should have been my first clue. In the dark, I read a plaque stating that this building was constructed in 1909, after Laveau’s death. I notice, then, the Marie Laveau Apartments next door, with a sign bearing snakes blooming from a witchy cauldron.
The lamps are flickering, and I walk to the Louis Armstrong arch, lit up like Broadway, back and forth along streets named Love and Hope and, yes, Desire. The neighborhood is quiet and oddly empty. I buy a fried oyster sandwich, another Abita. I continue walking for two, three miles, until it is very dark, my heart pounding, hurting. I can barely speak, on the phone, to the waiters. When I do speak, it is as though I am miles away from myself.
New Orleans did not develop in parallel with the rest of the United States. When the Louisiana Purchase took place in 1803, things had already changed a lot during the years of French and Spanish rule: According to Long, in 1769, 7.1 percent of the New Orleans population were free people of African descent, and by 1805, 33.5 percent were free people of color.
New Orleans was frightening to Anglo-Americans when they started to arrive around then. Here was this place that had a complex caste system: white people, mixed-race people, free people of color, slaves, slaves with light skin, slaves in the city, slaves who lived in their own homes and ran their own businesses. Caught in the competing colonial forces of French and Spanish rule, this place had at one time abolished ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and then, later, reinstated their part in it. Then, of course, there was religious mixing—Yoruba and Haitian Voudou and Catholicism and more—and none of it was kept separate, nor secret. Free people of color married white people, white men had public partnerships and common-law marriages with free women of color, not to mention white men, married men, rapists, who openly fathered slaves, sometimes purchasing their freedom and their homes and the livelihoods of their children. New Orleans had a complicated system of laws by which wealth and property could be protected and kept by women of color and their children, and of course a slew of laws that undermined those laws, and so on. White men married black women, brown women married brown men, black women owned slaves, and all of the children of New Orleans were mixed—were, after 1803, Americans. And all of this religious, cultural, and moral ambiguity showing Americans what America had always been like, would always be like.
The New Orleans Voudou gatherings and ceremonies reflected this: You could find white men, free women of color, white women, slaves both men and women of all colors, and they were all there together in the rooms and temples and lakeshores, though some services required higher fees, and Marie Laveau presided over all kinds—and as Anglo anxiety encroached, these ceremonies would more and more frequently get busted by the cops, and the newspaper men would write shrieking reports, horrified because they were bewildered, though less by the content of the ceremony and more that all of these people were together.
At St. Louis Cathedral, Marie Laveau’s church, which is still there today and under construction, Pere Antoine was the priest. He was cool because he gave communion to everyone, he totally understood the ambiguity: those free women of color in common-law marriages with already married men and their complex families and the bigamy and sex out of wedlock and slavery and Voudou and the Caribbean and Africa, and how tradition must evolve, must not be erased.
But, God, do not get me wrong—this was all pretty fucked up. In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Code Noir was used to police, not unlike Jim Crow, the limits of participation for people of color in public life, especially about marriages and transference of wealth. But people found ways, partly because of the common laws. Long says that most of the free people of color owned their own homes and made modest livings from carpentry, masonry, ironworking, as shopkeepers, barbers, tailors, hairdressers, etc. And so lots of people of color, lots of women, became property and business owners.
The Anglos were horrified because they were confused, threatened, supremacist—the usual. All this ambiguity was disturbing to the white ruling class who, as Long puts it, “were accustomed to the concept of slavery as a permanent condition appropriate to an inferior race and who considered free people of African descent an anomaly that threatened the stability of society.” What complicates this from both ends is the question of slavery—for Anglos, it had to be either absolutely wrong or absolutely right. To find this society that wasn’t fretting over these questions was an inconceivable horror.
Culture is not fixed. Everyone knows that now, I suppose. But American culture, in all of its newness, likes to prey on this myth of fixity. It’s been the same for a seemingly endless number of years—generations, centuries—and it won’t change now. It can’t. This is what’s normal. This is what’s right. This is who belongs and who does not, and these are our values. This desperate attempt, this elaborate fantasy, of purity and continuity.
A few years ago I became interested in how American religion, especially American Christianity, had existed in so many thousands of iterations over time, despite its attempt to frame itself as forever fixed, full of continuity, with constant values and expression. But then, where I found women making religion—queering religion, if you will—I also found the ways or the moments when other big changes were afoot, or were forced to be.
Yes, it has just as often been the case that where women and queer people are worshipping, you will find a complete and actual vision of the afterlife: Case in point, the funeral of the drag queen in the movie version of Angels in America, the close-up on the drag queen gospel singer at the pulpit in the steepled church, then panning to old women, bitter parents, supportive siblings, queens, dykes, trans, black, white, and they’re all singing and dancing. It’s amazing! It’s a vision of the worshipping world as God intended (or as Christ was talking about) in all its misfit paradox! That scene at the funeral—it’s everyone, like how Belize describes it to Roy Cohn later on in the film. Cohn is dying, wandering around the hospital halls attached to an IV, haunted by the specter of Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn asks Belize, in a morphine daze, “What’s it like, afta’?” Belize lights a cigarette, says, “Heaven or Hell?” But when Cohn doesn’t specify, Belize says:
“San Francisco . . . mmm, a big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds, and on every corner, a wrecking crew, and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens . . . Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary, with rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga ball gowns with red corsages, big dance palaces full of music and lights, and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are Creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste, and history are finally overcome. And you ain’t there.”
“And Heaven?”
Belize takes a drag of his cigarette. “That was Heaven, Roy.”
I go to the Voodoo Museum of New Orleans, just around the corner from Bourbon Street. The door is narrow and sticks when I open it, so I plunge into the small front room, squashed behind a small family of tourists who have also just arrived.
“Well, hi,” says a woman in a bright yellow kaftan, smiling at me from a loveseat. “I’m so-and-so, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.” Another woman sits bored at the messy ticket counter. She says nothing to me when I approach except the price of admission. Her counter, a schoolteacher’s desk, really, is crowded with bits of things: candles, paper, a credit card machine. I fumble for my wallet, and she warns me that I should be prepared to leave cash for the spirits inside because they, unlike her, do not accept credit cards. I laugh as I hand her my credit card, but she does not. Then a white couple stumbles out from the museum exit, a curtained doorway just a few feet away. She turns to them. “That wasn’t so scary, now was it? You have any scratches, any bleeding?” She cackles. “No? Well, all right then.” And the Voudou priestess on the loveseat laughs loudly, nervously—“That’s right, that’s how it’s supposed to be. ’Course there’s no bleedin’.”
“Voudou” becomes “voodoo” during Jim Crow. An old move—delegitimizing as response to threat of destabilization. And just like the religion, around this time, which is also around the time most of the Louisiana Writers’ Project interviews are conducted, Marie Laveau herself becomes less a proper noun and more of a feeling, a memory, a legend, a spirit.
There are shelves holding a variety of things for sale: Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans, gris-gris, Marie Laveau paper dolls by Tom Tierney where she looks like Natalie Wood in West Side Story, like a white person trying to look Puerto Rican. It’s ridiculous.
And then I go through the curtained doorway.
I’m in a hot, narrow, windowless hallway covered in old wallpaper, and in true nineteenth-century fashion, not one inch of the wall is left uncovered. There are two oil paintings exposed to the elements—one of Marie Laveau as an adult and one of Marie Laveau, or Marie II, as an adolescent. There are images of Dr. John, framed articles, biographies of all the famous New Orleans Voudou mambos alive and dead. Lining the floor is Marie Laveau’s original kneeler, bits of bracelets, gris-gris, piles of cigarettes, dollar bills, and plastic jewelry around its base. Connected to the hallway are two small rooms, both stuffed with ephemera: dusty bookshelves, altars, effigies, statues in the form of specific Iwa studded with more offerings—coins, cigars, candy, empty liquor bottles. The spirits, Iwa and ancestors alike, are capable of many earthly interventions and actions, with a few exceptions: They cannot eat, drink, smoke, dance, or have sex—they need humans to help facilitate that for them—and these offerings, and sometimes these activities, are the content of ceremonies, those by Lake Pontchartrain and others that I’ve been reading about.
I can barely explain how strange of a space it is—spatially, not the contents. Even though it’s right off of Bourbon Street, the museum is refreshingly janky, a series of real shrines cast in a patina of devotional offerings, not any kind of sleek tourist shit.
In another room is a painting of a nude woman holding a writhing python high above a roaring fire: the Grand Zombi dance. There’s an empty terrarium where the “spiritual python” once lived (a curled piece of paper taped to the glass says it died in 2004). Where I expect museum-style monographs, there are instead bits of paper stapled to the walls or tacked to the table, describing the Iwa’s particular domain. Hokey music is piped in from all corners: “Love Potion No. 9” and cutesy songs about Marie Laveau.
There is a framed newspaper clipping about how Pope John Paul II said that African religions needed to be recognized as “in legitimate dialogue” with Catholicism. There is a pamphlet saying that in Voudou, “the only consistency is inconsistency.” There’s a biographical plaque of one of the contemporary local Voudou priestesses, and the copy ends by noting that she “is a practicing Catholic.” Catholicism and Voudou were both seen as misfits by the Protestant Anglo ruling class, so it was easier to band together.
I leave a written prayer and some money and a few cigarettes with spirits I cannot even recall the names of.
When I get back to my rented room, I finally dig out my copy of Silko’s Ceremony and find the passage I thought of when I was talking to the New Mexico boy on the train. It’s a scene where the medicine man is speaking to the young Navajo protagonist, a WWII vet suffering from PTSD:
“The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.” He was quiet for a while looking up at the sky through the smoke hole. “That much can be true also. But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants. You see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing . . .
At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.
She taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive. That’s what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.
What rarely gets foregrounded is that Voudou is a religion of healing and a religion of resistance. It started in places like Haiti and New Orleans, where the religions of West Africa were coming in from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and ran up against the strictures of Catholicism. Yoruba deities find their double in saints—in the 1850s, there began to be Catholic stand-ins for Haitian Iwa, La Bas becomes St. Peter, Gran Bwa becomes St. Francis. Elements of ceremony start to look liturgical.
Voudou is a religion that emerged out of slavery, oppression, threat of erasure, and so it is, of necessity, a syncretic religion, incorporating elements from others, so that it no longer resembles from whence it came. New Orleans Voudou, says Long, is a mix of “Senegambian, Fon, Yoruba, and Kongo slaves with Haitian Voudou, Euro folk magic, and folk Catholicism,” and it absorbs “the beliefs of blacks imported from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas during the slave trade . . . [who] were English-speaking, at least nominally Protestant, and practiced a heavily Kongo-influenced kind of hoodoo, conjure, or rootwork.” The ceremonies are passed down from person to person; sometimes they’re used to rectify a troubled love affair, and sometimes they’re used to heal the sins and scars of a landscape or a people.
We don’t even know for sure that Marie Laveau was a hairdresser, though lots of Louisiana Writers’ Project interviews account for it, and Tallant makes a compelling case for all the dirt it must have given her to work with:
Marie must have learned some amazing things. She probably discovered that many Creole marriages were pure business arrangements. She undoubtedly learned that Creole gentlemen almost invariably kept beautiful quadroon mistresses in cozy little cottages not far from Congo Square. She must have met grand ladies, who though they presided in their French opera boxes like duchesses and appeared with their husbands at great balls and certain soirees, spent much of their time weeping in their boudoir, or in giving way to secret alcoholism. All the family skeletons must have come out to dance for Marie: the family with a strain of insanity and the strange aunt kept locked in a room upstairs . . . The ladies talked and Marie listened.
Now that I am in New Orleans, I really begin to understand what Long means by the Laveau Legend.
I go to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on a rainy day, and I notice that the guide’s story about Marie Laveau is full of certainty. So many of the stories I will hear are full of that same certainty, yet each is different. This guide says that Laveau’s first marriage to Jacques Paris was arranged and that her family was “trying to make their way” in New Orleans after leaving Haiti—but as far as I know, she was something like a third-generation New Orleanian, her father was Haitian but white or white-ish, and she was born free, though her great-grandmother was an American slave. The guide continues, describing how Laveau was trained in Voudou ritual by her grandmother, how she offed her first husband, rose to power, and conducted ceremonies for rich scorned lovers, and how there were possibly four different people over the course of the nineteenth century posing as Marie Laveau.
He gestures for the group to follow him to the next tomb. One other girl and I, the only loners on the tour, wait until they’ve all gone ahead and then, one after the other, never making eye contact, we whisper prayers to the tomb, according to tradition.
In New Orleans the cemeteries look like cities of the dead, with tombs built aboveground because otherwise, when the rains came, the dead would float up all over the city, and you might find someone familiar, though all gaseous and dissolved. It has happened before. So now the tombs are like little houses, and they are often decorated to look like the dead people’s former homes, complete with matching gardens and gates.
As the tour goes on, we stop briefly at the “heretic section,” which basically means the Protestant section.
I walk into the New Orleans Healing Center with my heart pounding against my ribs, and then suddenly, finally—stillness. There are Persian-style rugs laid out across the polished concrete floor. Faux–Spanish moss hangs from all the old-timey sconces in the lobby. There are four young men inside the large foyer, each sitting on the floor against the wall, reading or writing. They look like crust-punks; two have dogs, one has a skateboard. They are white and black. I see the Marie Laveau shrine immediately to my right—it was constructed a couple of years ago for one of Sallie Ann Glassman’s St. John’s Eve ceremonies and placed here afterward with no particular intent, though almost immediately people began making pilgrimages, leaving things at her feet, paying respects.
I don’t approach her yet. I don’t even look at her straight on.
I walk around the center, a cooperative mixed-use galleria. I find it all oddly soothing. There’s a barber, a church plant, a gym, an affordable wellness clinic, a clothing store, a food co-op. Two men breeze past me, and I turn to see their backs: one T-shirt says I AM PRESENT FOR PEACE and the other says CHANGING PLACES, CHANGING LIVES.
I’m still not sure how to approach the shrine—I’m self-conscious—so I find a spot against the wall in the room with the punks. Two women walk in, one after the other, and approach the shrine. They’re both dressed in white. They sit nearby and write, they use the kneeler; one carries a plastic bottle of Mug root beer, which at first I think she is going to leave at the altar, but which she drinks from instead. I wait until they leave, then walk to her.
She’s five or six feet tall, papier-mâché, swaddled in a pale blue shawl covered in stars, seeming both stiff and supple. Her red seven-pointed scarf is tied around her head, and she holds a bundle of magic objects in her arms: a skull, a plant, a vase. The X is everywhere, her signature. It is the X that devotees are compelled to etch onto her tomb, the X that marks her existence, the X, like G.K. Chesterton’s description of the cross, which is the “signpost for free travelers,” the X that comes up later during the civil rights movement: Malcom’s X and others. It is also, plausibly, an X in the absence of her literateness.
I sit at the kneeler. Around the shrine are all kinds of things: saints, figurines, Jesus carrying a little boy, a St. Francis candle, a black serpent candle that says “separar,” faux flowers, peace flags, bottles of brightly colored nail polish, brooches, prescription bottles, rocks, wine, toys, a horseshoe, playing cards, an empty Jameson bottle, a homemade Mother Mary shrine, paper notes, single beads, lots of blue. I unhook my grandmother’s blue clay necklace and place it on the shrine. There’s a note in a frame, beseeching a prayer of thanks for Marie Laveau’s intercession on a miracle that took place April 29, 2016, when a Louisiana judge ruled that continuous glucose monitors must be covered by Medicare. So I pray for that too. I pray for intercession, healing, sleep, wisdom, restoration, hope. I race through the Apostles’ Creed, say a few words of Creole French, but then my mind has wandered to some other place, some other commercial complex in some other city. When I open my eyes, I noticed that there are papier-mâché dragonflies everywhere, big and glittering.
I think of the giant dragonfly that threw itself against my window screen one night earlier this summer. It was the night before my grandmother died. I was up late in my studio, which has a panel of huge screened windows I can roll open. Outside it was silent and pitch dark. As always, there was a circus of insects bashing themselves against the screens, flitting their wings in panic and ecstasy. Then, all of a sudden, there was a series of heavy thuds against the screen: Thud. Thud. Thud. Almost no buzz. And there was a huge dragonfly—the biggest I have ever seen—throwing itself over and over against my screen, at one or two in the morning.
That same night I dreamed of dragonflies, tons of the small skinny blue kind. In the morning I looked up “dragonfly symbolism” and read about change, paradigm shift of the self, mental and emotional maturity, death making room for life. Later that day, I got a call from my sister that my grandmother had one hour left to live.
At the Island of Salvation Botanica, I thumb through clay tiles marked with Marie Laveau’s X and saints’ pendants and bottles of oil that have been blessed for particular spells. I find a sleeve of greeting cards printed with a white woman in a bowler hat sitting at a tea table with Marie Laveau. Then I notice the signature: Carolyn Morrow Long, the biographer. She’s the white woman at the table. I buy the card, a bracelet, a St. Anthony pendant, a tile. The woman who rings me up is Sallie Ann Glassman, one of the city’s best-known mambos. “What brought you to New Orleans?” she asks. I can feel my heart pounding again.
Yeah, what am I doing here? Did I say that out loud?
Other than orders placed with bartenders and waiters, and phone calls to Sweeney and Amber and my friend Lina, Sallie is the first person I’ve spoken to in days. “I took a train,” I answer strangely. “From Portland, Oregon. It took three days.” I swallow. “Um, do you know if this is the same Carolyn Morrow Long who writes about Marie Laveau?”
“Yes,” Sallie says. “You would never guess, though, if you met her, that she’s into this stuff.”
She starts to place my purchases in a small paper bag, and I rush to explain.
“Well, I’m working on a book—about American women prophets, or some women prophets, or just spiritual celebrities, I guess. And of course Marie Laveau is one of them, so I’m doing some research. Or—just walking around.”
“If you’re still here in a couple of days,” she says, handing me her business card, “you should come to my temple for a ceremony.”
It isn’t until I’m back in my rented room that I realize I don’t have an address for the temple, don’t know when the ceremony starts or what it is, or anything about the protocol. I email her, saying all of this, and she tells me to call the shop. I do, and she tells me that the ceremony will be for Gran Bwa, a tree spirit, the Iwa of the forest under the ocean, and that I should bring an offering that feels related to that. Some people bring plants, shells, food. She says I should arrive in either all red or all white, with a red headscarf.
Lina flies in for a night at the last minute. We go out walking and drinking all night long, eating fried oysters and grilled tuna and summer squash and succotash and gumbo. We walk into a tobacco shop just off of Frenchman Street where the guy looks genuinely surprised, even dismayed, to see customers. New Orleans continues to be strange that way: seemingly designed for tourism and yet averse to outsiders. We sit on a bench above the Mississippi and watch the Natchez roll back and forth. Bourbon Street is mayhem, crowded with teenagers and proselytizers and performers and mud and neon lights. A young man joins us on a stoop. He is from the Ninth Ward, had to leave after Katrina, moved to Mississippi, and has just come home again. We listen to him, sipping our neon-hued Green Grenades.
And then we keep drinking, deeper into the night, planning possible joint futures for ourselves—a residency in the Hudson Valley, a piece of land where all our friends and partners could live. As we talk, we pass by the old Ursuline Convent where a statue of Christ is backlit, casting a shadow thirty times his size onto a far wall. And then it’s four o’clock in the morning, then a Pabst and a paper bowl of red beans and rice in a diner, and then we go home.
Though we are terribly hungover the next morning (Was it the Green Grenades? The shots of Fireball we made off with after three bros bought them for us at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club?), I insist we bike to Lake Pontchartrain. It looks close on Google Maps, but it takes us two or three hours to get there, and we have to walk our bicycles over the crumbling I-10 overpass. The minute we come up over a short hill, there are fireflies everywhere.
It is only upon arrival that I realize how big the lake is. I cannot see across. A causeway disappears into silvery infinity. And for such a big lake, it is very still. I realize that we should’ve gone straight to Bayou St. John where the Voudou ceremonies were traditionally held, but it’s too late now. We’re exhausted. The air is heavy and gray and so bright it hurts the eyes.
Later, on our way to Sallie Ann Glassman’s temple, dressed all in red and sweaty, I realize we’ve forgotten an offering. We gather chinaberry branches that have fallen in someone’s yard. Down a dead-end alleyway, there are murals mounting in intensity, and then a one-room wooden building. We walk in.
A few people have gathered already. There are elaborate altars on either side of the room, layered with offerings. In the middle of the room, a sanded-smooth tree trunk. A woman comes in holding a shopping bag full of corn, eggs, cake. Others have brought potted plants, saplings. They talk about the storm that’s coming and the flooding already happening in the lower wards, though there is no trace of alarm in their voices. As more people gather and we wait for Sallie, two women smoke cigarettes out the back door. Lina and I sit on folding chairs and wait silently.
Then Sallie arrives, and the lights go out, and we begin.
The lead drummer is a white guy—he beats in a loud thumping rhythm. We stand in a circle, dancing, swaying from foot to foot. The drummer leads us in a call-and-response. We are moving clockwise, then we are moving toward each of the four directions. Between songs, Sallie says prayers in Haitian French. Each song marks a different round: inviting in Gran Bwa, and maybe other spirits, too; making space and setting intentions; extending our offerings. Sallie prays and very slowly draws four symbols on the ground in sand, in the four directions. We get on our knees, foreheads to the concrete. The spirit is in the house.
We continue dancing, singing. We offer ourselves for possession.
Sallie and a helper come around, smudging us with a rattle. We dance in a circle around the sanded-smooth tree. The possessions start to happen: a man tenses up his arms, a leg, cocks it back kind of like a flamingo then strikes it straight like a stick, his neck suddenly stiff, his eyes glazing over—he walks around, extends his arms like a toddler learning to balance, he laughs and laughs and falls over. Another woman, stricken too, starts to move quickly, collecting bits of things from the altar—palm leaves, a bit of rum, flowers, peanuts—and bundles them together, then gives the little packet, with an impish expression, sincere and mischievous, to another woman, who is crying because Gran Bwa embraced her.
These kinds of things, again and again, and everyone laughing, laughing, hysterical, laughing so hard they can’t breathe, and then falling back into someone else’s arms.
Sallie looks around and begins to slow things down, to find a resting place, but there is still one woman possessed. Her laugh is low and loud, and it is slowing, too. “I’m back,” she pants.
I am hot and tired; we’ve been going for hours, I don’t know how long. Then—I know this. I recognize this. I am sixteen, in a Lakota ceremony, a sweat lodge, a Sun Dance, a yuwipi: the rounds, the dancing, the water, the offering; instead of the rattle, sage; instead of possession, dialogue. The timbre of the lead drummer’s voice, the blue-eyed blond young man, this ancient music, this ancient sound rising out of him.
It’s my father.
When I wake up the next morning, I am back at the beginning.