{"collection":"African","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/afr/vno/vno02.htm","path":"afr/vno/vno02.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/afr/vno/vno02.htm","text":"{p. 12}\nSOMETIMES A WHITE MAN in New Orleans takes a walk along South Rampart Street, one of the famous Negro thoroughfares of America. He turns at Canal Street, the city's most important business street, and immediately he finds himself in a new world, with its own particular sights and sounds and smells.\nCanal Street is a great wide boulevard, filled with department stores and shops and moving picture theaters. There is the usual crowd of city people, most of them white. South Rampart Street is also lined with places of business and entertainment, but the faces of its people are much darker. Here the white man will seldom see another white face, except for the proprietors and clerks of some of the stores and shops and the other establishments typical of such Negro districts. There are pawnshops, barber shops and beauty parlors, poolrooms and barrooms, night clubs and restaurants, shoeshine: stands, small hotels and movies.\nJazz is the sound of South Rampart Street. It comes from every doorway, from every direction-from juke boxes, from. the phonographs in the music stores, wherein the customers seem always to be playing recordings made by Negro bands, and artists, from radios in shoeshine stands and barber shops,\n{p. 14}\nsometimes from an old-time \"inner player\" piano beyond an upstairs window.\nThe white man will never forget the smells of South Rampart Street: stale beer and whiskey, oyster barrels too long in the hot sun, hamburgers-with-onions frying on griddles at open windows, a musky mingling of perspiration and cheap perfume, and the curious odor of incense that lingers at some doorways.\nThe white man walking on South Rampart Street is a foreigner. Unless he has some business errand here he is soon conscious of this fact. He may even begin to wonder if a Negro ever feels as strange when he walks on a white man's street, though he knows Negroes understand white men much better than white men understand Negroes. It seems to the white man that on South Rampart Street the Negro has in his mysterious way built a world for himself, and an amazing and colorful one at that. There is much that duplicates all the streets in which white men conduct and patronize their own business, and much that is very similar to the white men's way of finding recreation and pleasure. Yet there is something else here that is different and of another race.\nThe white man may feel he is an intruder here, but when he comes to a group of Negroes on the banquette--the New Orleans word for what is called a \"sidewalk\" elsewhere in the country--the Negroes step aside to let him pass. Generations of stepping aside for white men bring about automatic reactions. There is no indication of any resentment toward him. There is no hatred in their faces. Neither is there any humility. There is perhaps a little curiosity as to where he is going and what he is doing in the section.\nAnother thing the white man walking on this street soon observes is that these people have fun. If he is at all intelligent and has had many contacts with Negroes he does not believe them to be \"the happiest people on earth.\" He does not think of them as being \"funny.\" He knows their world is not a minstrel show. He knows they suffer a great deal, that many of them are poor and that they like being poor no\n{p. 15}\nmore than do persons of his own race. He knows that they are ridden with many superstitions and with many fears. Yet here on their own \"main street\" they have fun, at least as much fun as do white people on any street with which he is familiar. The stores and windows are filled with things to buy: clothing, usually more extreme in style and color than on Canal Street, but lower priced and certainly more festive; small jewelry shops are in every block; food stores and markets offer good things to eat, and these people love to eat. Restaurants, caf\u00e9s and bars seem crowded day and night with people having a good time.\nBut the white man will soon notice other things, and among these will be the street vendors. They are on every comer and often are sprinkled here and there in the middle of the blocks in a careless fashion, as if they are all working together anyway; perhaps they are. They sell toilet articles and beauty aids, products \"guaranteed\" to straighten kinky hair and make dark skin light, and patented medicines supposed to cure any and all human ailments. They also sell notions and what they call \"novelties.\" If the white man inspects these he will see candles of various sizes and colors, incense and strange-looking roots and herbs, usually reduced to white or brown powders. He will see the empty vials and small bottles these vendors sell, and he will wonder at the sight of the queer old women who stop to buy them. He may even speculate on whether or not these people are Voodoos. He will get no satisfaction asking questions. Here he has reached a barrier. He cannot cross the line beyond which lies the occultism of this South Rampart Street world. Everyone will be polite, but they will tell him nothing--unless he is known to be a white Voodoo.\nThis is of course based on fear. The white man may be connected with the police--and they know Voodoo is not popular with the authorities. The white man may walk along South Rampart Street as long as he pleases. The people will even step aside to let him pass, but he must ask no questions about its mysteries.\n{p. 16}\nLet the white man linger for a moment before a certain novelty shop only a few blocks above Canal Street. In the window are vials of oils and other liquids, powders of different colors in chipped white saucers, jars of colored sand, packages of incense, and candles of all sorts. On a small dish at the very front is a small gnarled and twisted root with a card before it which states, cautiously, \"Johnny the Conqueror, 25--sold only as a novelty.\" The white man won't linger long, Behind him a masculine voice will ask, \"Do you want to buy something, Mister?\" When the white man turns he will look into the face of a young man who has light brown skin and the smoke-gray eyes quadroons sometimes have. And the white man will mumble some negative words and find himself walking away, without looking back, almost always until he is away from this street and is back in his own white world. It is almost as if some metaphysical force had driven him out of a place in which he did not belong.\nThat is all the average white man in New Orleans will ever learn about Voodoo. That is all the Voodoos want him to know, unless he is one of them himself. It is so little that he will forget it quickly and will never realize what it is of which he has caught just the merest glimpse.\nTime moves swiftly in America. We are young and our ideas of age are somewhat distorted. Fifty years seems very long to us, and a century is almost an eon. We point with great pride to a house or a piece of furniture that is two hundred years old. The coming of the black people and slavery is regarded as being very remote. But there are living persons who were born slaves. All this was yesterday. . . .\nDeep in a hidden place just outside New Orleans the black people gathered. Fires blazed along the water's edge, and the beat of huge bones on a skin-covered cask was bass and steady. They stripped themselves of all their clothing and knotted red handkerchiefs together and bound their loins with these, They tied ribbons strung with tiny bells around their ankles. The king wrapped his head in crimson stuff and looped a blue\n{p. 17}\ncord about his waist. The queen wore a costume made of fifty red handkerchiefs sewed together, a blue cord like the king's and a red scarf with a deep fringe.\nOn an altar was the ornamented box containing Vodu, the,Zombi, the holy serpent, and one by one the black people approached the bars set into one side of the box, swearing devotion, pledging secrecy, requesting favors. They took oaths to die or to kill, if necessary, for their god.\nThis over, the king touched the box with his hand, then seized the hand of the queen with his other hand. Both of them--Mamma and Papa--began shaking and writhing. Papa picked Mamma up and stood her on top of the box containing the snake. Her jerking became more violent. She flung her arms toward the black night sky, and her head rolled on her shoulders as if her neck were broken. A scream ripped from her throat.\nNow invocations, curses and sacred words poured from her lips. She was possessed. The god had accepted her as an oracle, and the words she spoke came not from herself but from the snake within the box upon which she stood trembling and jerking.\nPapa began the chant: \"Eh! Eh! Bomba hen hen!\"\nThe people became infected with the power. In a moment they were all possessed. Papa took the hand of the nearest devotee, who in turn took the hand of the person nearest him, and the current of power spread like electricity. The chant rose and fell in great crashing waves of sound, as steady and as rhythmic as the tom-toms:\nEh! Eh! Bomba hen\u00a0hen!\nCanga bafie te\nDanga moune de te\nCanga do ki li!\nCanga li!\nPapa presented Mamma with the bowl of warm blood from the sacrificed kid. She drank and handed it to each of the\n{p. 18}\npeople as they whirled past. Her own lips drank the last drops. The dance grew faster now. They spun and gyrated and leaped high into the air. They fell to their hands and knees, imitating the postures of animals, some chewing at the grass, shaking their posteriors violently. They bit and clawed at each other. Their scanty garments were ripped away. The clouds broke and the moon came out and glowed upon naked black flesh. In pairs they fell upon the hot earth, still panting and gyrating. Some fell unconscious and were dragged away, into the deep darkness of the trees that edged the clearing.\nThat is the way it was. At least that is the way we are told it was. . . .\n{p. 19}","title":"1. Evolution","type":"page"}