{"collection":"African","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/afr/vno/vno07.htm","path":"afr/vno/vno07.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/afr/vno/vno07.htm","text":"DOCTOR YAH YAH operated in New Orleans during the same period as Doctor John, and though he was less well known he seems to have had a clientele of considerable proportions. He violated the tradition that all Voodoo leaders were free, for he was a slave, whose real name was George Washington. From the little that is known of him it is evident that he imitated Doctor John and added little to the practices. He was present at many of the meetings held near Lake Pontchartrain. His talents included fortune-telling and \"healing.\" His career came to a sudden end in 1861 when he was jailed for selling poison to an Italian fruit dealer, who, fortunately for him, had taken the potion to a chemist before accepting it as a cure for his rheumatism. Doctor Yah Yah's master paid a fine, obtained his release and shipped him off to end his days toiling in the undignified role of a field hand on a plantation.\nDoctor Jack, also operating during that period, is the only Voodoo on record who ever scared himself to death. This magician, who was especially noted for his love charms and was well attended by seekers after that most popular of diversions, offered for sale beef hearts, perfumed and decorated with toads' feet, spider claws and satin ribbons like valentines,\n{p. 52}\nwhich were supposed to be particularly efficacious in matters involving the affections. Whether because he had faith in them himself or because he liked to sleep among his own creations is not known, but Doctor Jack always slept with one of these hanging over his bed. One night it fell on his face and he woke with such a shock that he completely lost his senses and died three days later.\nDoctor Beauregard arrived in New Orleans from Kentucky in 1869 and was one of the few \"foreign\" Voodoos to succeed in the city. He was probably the most amazing of all the witch doctors in appearance, having long hair that reached nearly to his knees, but which he usually wore done up into a number of strange knots. In these he carried all his gris-gris, bottles and packages of oils and powders, dried reptiles, tiny bones and a hoot owl's head. Once, after scaring some ladies on the street, he was arrested and he tried to frighten the police by throwing the hoot owl's head at them and screaming curses upon them and their offspring to the fourth generation. Evidently their gris-gris was stronger than his. He went to jail. When he was released he disappeared. Evidently he had returned with his talents to Kentucky or had sought new fields.\nDon Pedro is usually named as the successor to Doctor John, but not much is known of him, except that he was constantly embroiled with the police because his home was so often the scene of sexual orgies in which white as well as colored women took part. On at least one occasion a police raid led to much scandal and subsequent tragedy. Castellanos wrote of this event in 1895:\nThe organization of the Voudou, as an organization, has been suppressed in great measure by the efforts of our municipal authorities. . . . Many of the old residents remember the \"Racket Green,\" along the St. Bernard Canal, where thousands were in the habit of congregating to witness\n{p. 53}\nthe battles of the \"Bayous\" with the \"LaVilles,\" in the games of Raquettes. The field was an immense one, extending from Claiborne as far back as Broad. In the center stood an old pottery, apparently untenanted. While the game was progressing, the Captain, aided by a strong corps, advanced unobserved upon the dilapidated tenement and arrested the whole concern--Voudous and paraphernalia--while engaged in one of the wildest orgies that most prurient imagination can conceive. The women, having cast off their everyday apparel, had put on white camisoles called today \"Mother Hubbards\"--and were all found clad in this uniform attire. Blacks and whites were circling around promiscuously, writhing in muscular contraction, panting, raving and frothing at the mouth. But the most degrading and infamous feature of this scene was the presence of a very large number of ladies (?), moving in the highest walks of society, rich and hitherto supposed respectable, that were caught in the dragnet. Two of them, through consideration for the feelings of their relatives and connections, so unexpectedly brought to shame, were permitted to escape, while the husband of a third, unable to survive the disgrace of his wife, deliberately took his life on the following day. These facts were the subject of town gossip for many a year.\nThe Raquette Green, now long vanished, was for some Years a favorite meeting place for the Voodoos of New Orleans.\nJoseph Melon was a witch doctor who was, despite all his magic, unlucky in love. Not all the gris-gris he possessed could make the woman he wanted reciprocate his desire. Lily Lamrest told this story. The girl Joseph Melon courted was her aunt.\n\"He was a big Voodoo around town,\" she said. \"It was before I was born, way back when Marie Laveau was living, but my ma. told me about it. He used to always pass her\n{p. 54}\nhouse and she would meddle him; you know what I mean she would laugh at him and make fun. One thing I gotta give my ma is that she wasn't never afraid of no hoodoo.\n\"He was a funny kind of fellow, my ma said. He always carried a book and a walking cane, and he would holler at my ma in Creole, 'Hey, Cecile! I'm going out and jump in the lake,' and my ma would scream and whoop at him. One day he pass and he saw my aunt after she had come to live with my ma, and she was young and kind of good-looking, and he fell for her right away. He would bring her a big red apple every day like, but my ma wouldn't let her eat any because she was afraid they was fixed. She say she didn't want no hoodoos in our family. Anyhow, my aunt already had a fellow.\n\"Well, after a while my aunt would run inside every time she seen Joseph Melon coming, and he knew that she wasn't ever gonna love him. Then he got mad and he fixed her in a different kind of way. She and her fellow broke up and she never did get another one. She died an old maid, and it was Joseph Melon who done that to her. She wouldn't love him, so he wouldn't let nobody else love her.\n\"He bad lots of mean tricks. When somebody done him something or he wanted to cross them, he would cook a big pot of congris and at night he would go to where they lived and throw some of it in front of their door and the rest on the four corners of the block they lived in. Then he would go to Congo Square, to a big tree, and throw three nickels in a hollow in that tree with the person's name written on a piece of paper nine times. Then he would dance around the tree all night long. People came from all over to watch Joseph Melon doing a sangre. He was terrible. But my ma said he was kind of nice-looking, too.\"\nBut, for all their influence, the witch doctors were secondary to the queens. For some reason the women always ruled. The witch doctor often assisted at the larger ceremonies, but the queens ruled the meetings.\n{p. 55}\nDespite this, there are few authentic records of the early queens. There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that a single name, that of Marie Laveau, reigned over the Voodoo world nearly seventy-five years. The other is that prior to that the sect had been subject to many schisms and changed rapidly from year to year. There is also the fact, of course, that in the early years there was so much secrecy and perhaps the Voodoos themselves did not always know the true identity of their queen.\nSanit\u00e9 D\u00e9d\u00e9 is the first queen of whom there is anything known. One of the Negresses brought from Santo Domingo, she is said to have purchased her freedom through secret Voodoo practices, probably by earning sufficient money in that way. However, for years after that she sold sweetmeats in front of the Cabildo in order to support herself, so she could not have been so successful financially. It was she who presided at the brickyard in Dumaine Street and she was probably the first to lead a band of cultists into the habit of holding their gatherings on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Her power was at its zenith in 1825, and that year a fifteen-year-old boy viewed one of her ceremonies. Years later, when he was grown, J. W. Duel described the scene in his Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or the Mysteries and Miseries of America's Great Cities, recalling that:\nAn entrance door was opened at the call of D\u00e9d\u00e9, and I witnessed a scene which, old as I am, no passage of time can ever dim. . . . Each man and woman had a white handkerchief tied around the forehead, though the heads of the latter were covered by the traditional Madras handkerchief, with its five, nay, its seven points, upturned to heaven. There were males and females, old and young, Negroes and Negresses-handsome mulatresses and quadroons. With them half a dozen white men and two white women. . . .\nNear where I stood was an oblong table about eight feet in length and four in width. On its right end stood a black\n{p. 56}\ncat, and on its left a white one. I thought them alive, and having a certain fondness for cats, stretched out my hand to stroke the nearest . . . they were fine specimens of negro taxidermy. . . . In the center of the table there was a cypress sapling, some four feet in height, planted in the center of a firkin or keg. Immediately behind the cypress, and towering above it, was a black doll with a dress variegated by cabalistic signs and emblems, and a necklace of the vertebrae of snakes around her neck, from which depended an alligator's fang encased in silver.\nAt the side of this table I recognized an old Negro by the name of Zozo, well known in New Orleans as a vendor of palmetto and sassafras roots; in fact, he had a whole pharmacopoeia of simples. and herbs, some salutary, but others said to be fatal. He seemed to be the corypheus of these unhallowed rites, for the signal of the beginning of the work came from him. He was astride of a cylinder made of thin cypress staves hooped with brass and headed by a sheepskin. With two sticks he droned away a monotonous ra-ta-ta, ra-ta-ta-ta, while on his left sat a Negro on a low stool, who with two sheep shank bones, and a negress with the leg bones of a buzzard or turkey, beat an accompaniment on the sides of the cylinder. It was a queer second to this satanic discord. Some two feet from these arch-musicians squatted a young Negro vigorously twirling a long calabash. It was made of one of our Louisiana gourds a foot and a half long, and filled with pebbles.\nAt a given signal the four initiates formed a crescent before D\u00e9d\u00e9, who was evidently the high priestess or Voudou queen. She made cabalistic signs over them and sprinkled them vigorously with some liquid from a calabash in her hand, muttering under her breath. She raised her hand and Zozo dismounted from his cylinder, and from some hidden receptacle in or behind the great black doll, drew an immense snake, which he brandished wildly aloft. . . . He talked and whispered to it. At every word the reptile, with undulating body and lambent tongue, seemed to acknowledge\n{p. 57}\nthe dominion asserted over it. In the meantime, with arms crossed and reverent eyes, the initiates had now formed a crescent around Zozo. He now compelled the snake to stand upright for about ten inches of its body. . . . Zozo passed the snake over the heads and around the necks of the initiates, repeating at each pass the words which constitute the name of this African sect, \"Voudou Magnian.\"\nHardly was this last ceremony over when a long, deep howl of exultation broke from every part of the shed. Zozo went back to his tam-tam, his accompaniers right and left, and the gourd musician with his rattle. A banjo player, too, sprang up, and pandemonium was unloosed . . . . Zozo, leaving his tam-tam, went up to the altar . . . and again drew forth the snake. He forced it to wriggle and writhe over and around the company, uttering the words which were repeated by sixty voices, \"Voudou! Voudou Magnian!\" He then twirled the snake around his head and dexterously cast it into the blazing pile. Such a yell as arose no words can describe. The rude instruments took up their discords, mixed with yells. The chorus of Dante's hell had entered into the mad shouts of Africa.... Up sprang a magnificent specimen of human flesh--Ajona, a lithe, tall, black woman, with a body waving and undulating like Zozo's snake--a perfect Semiramis from the jungles of Africa. Confining herself to a spot not more than two feet in space, she began to sway on one and the other side. Gradually the undulating motion was imparted to her body from the ankles to the hips. Then she tore the white handkerchief from her forehead. This was a signal, for the whole assembly sprang forward and entered the dance. . . . Under the passion of the hour, the women tore off their garments, and entirely nude, went on dancing, but wriggling like snakes. . . .\nThe orgies became frightful. Suddenly the candles flared up and went out, leaving nothing but a faint glow from the dying pyres. I had grown sick from heat, from an indescribable\n{p. 58}\nhorror that took possession of me. With one bound I was out of the shed, and with all speed traversed the yard. I found the gate open, and I was in the street and near home sooner than I can tell. If ever I have realized a sense of the real visible presence of his majesty, the devil, it was that night among his Voudou worshippers.\nThat is the only picture we have of the cult under the rule of D\u00e9d\u00e9. It is almost the only description we have of any of the pre-Laveau queens.\nLittle is known, for instance, even of the rather important Marie Salopp\u00e9, who immediately preceded Marie Laveau. It was from her that the great Laveau received her training, and it is believed that for a time the two ruled jointly over the St. John's Eve ceremonies.\nThere are those who say Marie Salopp\u00e9 became Zozo LaBrique, a well known New Orleans street character, an apparently half-demented creature, who peddled buckets of brick dust. She was fixed, they say, by Marie Laveau because the latter wanted to rule the Voodoos alone. It has long been a custom among some New Orleans housewives to scrub their front steps with brick dust, a tradition having a definite connection with Voodoo--the washing away of an evil omen placed on the house by an enemy. It is true that now many people will tell you that they do this only for reasons of cleanliness, yet that was its original meaning, and many stoops in the poorer section of the city have a well scrubbed, whitish appearance, showing that brick dust has been used. Zozo LaBrique sold her dust for a nickel a bucket, and when she died a small fortune in those coins is said to have been found in her disreputable quarters.\nBut, whatever happened to her, it can be understood that Marie Salopp\u00e9 had to go. Marie Laveau was coming!\n\"Marie Laveau?\" said an ancient Negress, still cooking for a family in the French Quarter. \"Sure I heard of her. I don't know if she was good or bad; folks says both ways. But I know this: she was a powerful woman.\"","title":"6. Some Were Evil","type":"page"}