{"collection":"African","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/afr/vno/vno04.htm","path":"afr/vno/vno04.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/afr/vno/vno04.htm","text":"SACRIFICE AND THE drinking of blood were integral parts of all the Voodoo ceremonies. Usually it was the blood of a kid that was used, but often it was that of a black cat.\nThere is little proof of human sacrifice ever having been used in Louisiana. However, the occasional reference to the \"goat without horns,\" an expression common in Haiti and meaning the sacrifice of a young white child, was sometimes heard. For many years Orleanians believed that every small child that vanished had become a Voodoo sacrifice. Add to this the small coffin carried by the Zombi dancer and there gathers a little smoke behind which there may or may not ever have been fire.\nThere were other scraps of evidence.\nThe queens were always being accused of kidnapping and murdering children. As late as 1881 there was excitement in New Orleans when a pair of colored parents, both Voodoos, were arrested for suspending their small son over an open fire and beating him to death with a stick. This may have been merely sadism, yet the resemblance to an old Voodoo ceremony of tossing a flayed cock alive into a boiling caldron cannot be ignored.\n{p. 26}\nIn October of 1863 there was almost a riot when half of a human torso was discovered in the home of a known Voodooienne. Whispers of the \"goat without horns\" spread until the newspapers exploded the sacrifice theory with the truth, telling in semihumorous fashion how the anatomical specimen had been purchased by the old Voodoo from a boy employee in a doctor's office.\nThose very old Negroes who remember Voodoo rites of other years and remember tales that have come down to them from older relatives nearly always discount the idea. Joe Goodness, very old and black, learned a great deal about Voodoo from his uncle, who was also named Joe Goodness.\n\"I never saw anything like that and neither did my uncle,\" he said. \"In my day they didn't even drink blood that I know of, but only ate things like gumbo and chicken and drank a lot of liquor. In my uncle's day they did worse things. They used to tear chickens to pieces and eat 'em while they was still alive. They wore all kinds of gris-gris tied on their bodies--dolls made out of feathers and hair, skins of snakes and pieces of human bone. I heard people say hoodoos was cannibals and used to cat babies, but I don't believe that unless it was 'way back even before my uncle was alive. I guess it changed a lot, just like it's different now from the way it was when I was a little boy.\"\nVoodoos have always been extremely secretive, especially when white people are concerned. Yet it is said with fair authority that today a third of their members are white, and that, despite all precautions, white people joined the cult almost from its New Orleans beginnings.\nThe first revelation of this fact took place in 1806. On St. John's Eve {June 23rd--jbh} of that year a worried white man traced his missing daughter to a Voodoo meeting in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Here he found her, clad only in a thin nightgown, her hair streaming over her shoulders, waving a wand, while around her danced a hundred half-naked blacks. In the room was a bubbling caldron containing\n{p. 27}\nserpents and frogs. The girl confessed she had sought the power to regain the affection of a man she loved.\nP. Larousse, in his Dictionnaire Universal du XIXe Si\u00e8cle, described a raid by the police on a Voodoo gathering in New Orleans, at which were found fifty nude women, two of them white and prominent socially. The newspapers of the period frequently told of such incidents, and each St. John's Eve the reporters seem to have discovered such mixed groups.\nSt. John's Eve is the most important date on the Voodoo calendar. On this night, which has had religious significance since those ancient times when the sun worshippers rolled their blazing wheel down a hill to celebrate the sun's descent, the Voodoos always gathered for a great conclave. Joe Goodness told of the St. John's Eyes he remembered.\n\"They sure did carry on,\" he said. \"There was always a crowd of 'em out by the lake. They had a big altar on the ground and the snake and lots of food. The queen would get up there wit' nothin' on but a few handkerchiefs and a blue cord around her waist and do her number, and it was sure somethin'. Now they tell me you see all that stuff in shows, but then it was a religion. They'd have chickens and cake and they drank rum and anisette. The queen would put a picture of St. John on the ground and that really started the meetin'. Everybody would kneel down and knock on the ground three times. That was for Faith, Hope and Charity. Then they'd get up and start doin' the Creole dance.\n\"In the Creole dance each man had two women, one on each side of him, and they'd all have rings on their knees that would make noise when they'd move around. The man would turn one woman first, then the other one. That was the Creole dance. After a while, when it was gettin' late, the queen would give the signal and they'd strip off their handkerchiefs and run out into the Lake. Man, then it was everybody for hisself. They sure did cut up! Sometimes people was so drunk and excited they got drowned. The water was just about up to their shoulders, but they'd fall down and get stepped on.\"\n{p. 28}\nAsked about the attendance of white people at these affairs, Joe Goodness admitted that they had participated on some occasions.\n\"There was a Voodoo queen named Helen Thomas who always had a couple of white women at her dances,\" he said. \"They'd carry on and shake worse than the colored ones. I don't know if they believed in it or just came for a good time, but I've seen 'em dancin' the Creole dance wit' coal-black men. That wasn't no more than sixty years ago.\n\"I can remember the Congo Square dances on Sunday afternoons, too,\" he said. \"People thought they was Voodoo dances and it's true that a lot of the people who danced there was Voodoos, but they really wasn't the real thing. The regular dances wasn't ever held in public.\"\nThe dances in Congo Square were the direct result of the attempts of the city authorities to combat Voodooism after the coming of the Santo Domingo Negroes.\nNew Orleans had been an American city perhaps a decade when the dangerous aspects of Voodoo congregations began to impress the public officials. The idea of a racial uprising became again important. It was known that the Voodoos were stirring up hatred against their white masters and that some of their meetings were held for the purpose of working black magic against the whites, if not to plot actual revolution. In 1817 the Municipal Council issued an ordinance forbidding slaves to gather for dancing or any other purpose except on Sundays and only in places designated by the Mayor. Congo Square was established as the recognized place for such dances and, under police supervision, it was here that the Negroes met each Sunday afternoon for more than twenty years. The Voodoo gatherings along the lake continued as always, but in Congo Square they held their \"legal\" dances.\nCongo Square was in the very heart of the city, situated on North Rampart Street where had stood the ramparts of the old city. Today, renamed Beauregard Square, it holds the Municipal Auditorium, but once it was occupied by Fort St. Ferdinand, one of the settlement's principal defenses. However,\n{p. 29}\nthe fort was gone when it was turned over to the slaves. At that time it comprised two city squares and was a green plain containing only a few large sycamore trees. Surrounded by a picket fence which held four gates, in the very center was a cannon that was fired at nine o'clock each night as a curfew for all slaves. Any slave caught on the streets after that hour was arrested unless accompanied by his master or bearing a written permit. All this, of course, was a further precaution against rebellion.\nBut the slaves made the most of the time allowed them, and each Sunday they crowded the small park. The actual dances were held not in the square now known as Beauregard Square, but in the one beyond it, now occupied by houses. Here, while the white people gaped through the picket fence, they performed the Calinda and the Bamboula and other dances of a relatively mild character, omitting the more grotesque and sensual features of the lakefront gatherings, and they wore not their red loincloths, ankle bells and knee rings, but all the castoff finery they had been able to coax from their masters and mistresses. Sometimes they did attach metal rattlers to their legs, and this and the Congo drums always in use were the only music needed. The current Voodoo queen was always present, of course, the most elaborately dressed woman, the haughtiest and the most carefree. For the Voodoo queen was never a slave, but always a free woman of color who need fear neither the curfew nor any of the laws applied to slaves.\nThey did sing the Voodoo songs, but most of these the white public could not understand--even when they were mocking the whites--and it considered them as harmless as the popular half-Congo, half-Creole: \"Dansez Calinda! Badoum! Badoum!\"\nThe songs and chants used in old Voodoo rites are almost forgotten now. George W. Cable wrote of a chant which was shouted at the climax of the ceremonies: \"Aie Aie! Voodoo Maignan!\" Cable also recorded the following chant, given him by Lafcadio Hearn, and which he offered in phonetic French, there being no other spelling:\n{p. 30}\nHe-ron mand\u00e9\nHe-ron mand\u00e9\nTigui li papa,\nHe-ron mand\u00e9,\nTigui li papa,\nHe-ron mand\u00e9,\nHe-ron mand\u00e9,\nDo se dan do-go.\nGottschalk, famed New Orleans composer, compiled much Voodoo music and it is said to have pleased Chopin. In its queer strains may perhaps be found the rudiments of jazz, for New Orleans is the home of Jazz as it is of Voodoo and they may easily have a common origin. Most Voodoo chants and songs were hummed or whined sotto voce with an effect that was barbaric and exotic and added to the hypnotic design of all the ceremonies, despite absurd and childish words.\nA song given to a reporter of the New Orleans Times-Picayune was printed in that newspaper on March 16, 1924. Probably a very old one, it reflects the dominance of the queens in New Orleans Voodoo and boasts of their tremendous power. Originally sung in the patois known as Creole, it is given here in English:\nThey think they frighten me,\nThose people must be crazy.\nThey don't see their misfortune\nOr else they must be drunk.\nI--the Voodoo Queen,\nWith my lovely headkerchief\nAm not afraid of tomcat shrieks,\nI drink serpent venom!\nI walk on pins\nI walk on needles,\n{p. 31} I walk on gilded splinters,\nI want to see what they can do!\nThey think they have pride\nWith their big malice,\nBut when they see a coffin\nThey're as frightened as prairie birds.\nI'm going to put gris-gris\nAll over their front steps\nAnd make them shake\nUntil they stutter!\nVoodooism seems to have been a matriarchy almost from its first days in Louisiana. The king was always a minor figure. Papa didn't count. Mamma was the entire show. The only men of importance were the witch doctors. The king was probably changed from year to year and was actually the current lover of the queen. Women seem, too, to have made up at least eighty per cent of the cultists, and it was always the female of the white race who entered the sect. When white men were present it was usually because they sought handsome yellow girls rather than for reason of any belief in the Zombi. Nearly all the songs were about the queens. The following, in Creole, told of the greatest of all Voodoo rulers, Marie Laveau, of whom much will be told later, and boasted of how she had gone to school with the crocodiles and of how much power she possessed:\nEh, Y\u00e9, Y\u00e9 Mamzelle,\nYa, y\u00e9, y\u00e9, li konin tou, gris-gris\nLi, ti, kowri, avec vieux kikordi;\noh, ouai, y\u00e9 Mamzelle Marie\nLe konin bien li Grand Zombi!\nKan s\u00f4l\u00e9id te kashe,\nLi ti sorti Bayou,\nPou, apprened le Voudou,\n{p. 32} Oh, tingouar, y\u00e9 h\u00e9n\u00a0h\u00e9n,\nOh, tingouar, y\u00e9 \u00e9h\u00a0\u00e9h,\nLi app\u00e9 vini, li Grand Zombi,\nLi app\u00e9 vini, pol f\u00e9 mouri!\nThese were the songs the white people heard when they came to Congo Square on Sunday afternoons; gay, childish, absurdly boastful words sung to savage rhythms. The white people watched and often laughed indulgently at the pleasure their slaves were having. All they saw and heard looked innocent enough. They heard rumors of the other affairs out by the lake, but they only half believed them. This was all nothing but Negro foolishness.\nYet sometimes they were given cause to wonder. An early morning stroller in Congo Square would come upon a rooster tied to a tree. The tortured creature would be alive, but it would be plucked of every feather and sticking in its breast would be nine silver pins. On other occasions someone would find a rooster dressed in a coat, trousers and a hat. Occasionally a plate of congris--black-eyed peas and rice cooked with sugar--would rest on the dewy grass under one of the sycamores, surrounded by a ring of silver coins.\nEven now, in modern Beauregard Square, such things are found once in a while. In 1943 a white boy of fifteen was passing the Auditorium and, happening to look down, saw something beneath the evergreens in front of the building. When he investigated he found a plate containing roast chicken, rice, green peas and turnip greens. At one side was a saucer of tomato salad, at the other a plate of French bread and butter. Around the dishes silver coins had been arranged in a neat circle. Having no fear of Voodoo, he pocketed the coins and went on his way. At the comer he! stopped in the grocery store of Mrs. Sam Gramer to buy some candy. Mrs. Gramer has never forgotten that.\n\"Oh, my God!\" she will tell you, always making the sign of the Cross. \"I still think about that child. I begged him to take that money back and leave it where he found it, but\n{p. 33}\nhe just laughed at me. I know something terrible is going to happen to him because those hoodoo people left it there. I feel it in my bones. I never did believe in all that, but, say what you like, it's something to leave alone. That poor little boy. He was as pretty as a picture on a wall, too. It's such a shame!\"\n{p. 34}","title":"3. The Goat without Horns","type":"page"}