{"collection":"African","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/afr/vno/vno09.htm","path":"afr/vno/vno09.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/afr/vno/vno09.htm","text":"THERE WERE frequent meetings at night in the back yard of the St. Ann Street house, and white people did not often see these. Gerald July, a mulatto porter in a New Orleans office building, recalled stories of them that his grandfather had told him.\n\"They used to meet there every Friday night,\" he said. \"My grandpa would crawl up on the back fence to watch 'em. He was a little kid and they didn't do him nothin'. A white sheet was spread out on the ground, and lighted candles was stuck up all around the edge of it, and in the middle was about five empty bottles. All the dancers, men and women, was naked. The first thing they did was to dance around on the sheet wit' bottles of whiskey and rum in their hands, sprinklin' the sheet wit' liquor and throwin' it on each other. Then they would begin to do another kind of dance, crossin' hands from one side to the other, and all the time singin' them Creole songs. Marie Laveau used to stand in the middle, and she was the only one wit' clothes on. She always wore a long blue dress wit' a full skirt that reached to her ankles. Sometimes she had her hair loose and hangin' down her back, and sometimes she wore a kerchief tied wit' seven knots and the\n{p. 72}\npoints stickin' straight up. It was what they used to call a tignon. She always wore gold hoop earrings, and big gold bracelets on her arms.\n\"She would call the numbers--you know what I mean? She would tell the dancers what to do and holler all kinds of funny things. Sometimes she'd take a mouthful of whiskey and blow it in somebody's face. My grandpa said that she would call her snake and make it crawl all over the dancers' legs. That snake lived in her yard and it was twenty feet long. I know that's true, because he saw it lots of times. She had a watermelon vine, and she fed the snake on watermelons.\n\"When the dance got faster the people would holler all kinds of things. They'd go 'Whew! Whew!' and blow more whiskey on each other. They'd keep bobbing up and down and throwing their legs over the candles and the bottles. They would turn around so fast that they'd get dizzy and fall down. Somebody'd throw some whiskey on 'em and they'd be up again. Marie Laveau had a dance she did all by herself. She would wrap that snake around her shoulders and she'd shake and twist herself like she was a snake. Her feet would never move. She had another dance she did wit' a fish. She'd hold a big red fish behind her head and do her snake dance. My grandpa said that was something to see.\"\nGerald July was certain there were two women called Marie Laveau. \"My grandpa said the one he knew best was named Glapion and she was around after he grew up. The one that did them dances in the back yard of her house was her mother. The mother had about fifteen children and one of them, named Marie, took her place as a hoodoo queen. She was a terrible woman--worse than the first. My grandpa went to the funeral when the first Marie Laveau died. He said the newspapers called her the Widow Paris, but she had married Glapion. She had a grown son she called Paris Glapion. Some of the other children died, but some lived a long time and they have children and gran'children livin' right here in New Orleans today.\"\nA white woman living in what is called \"downtown\" New\n{p. 73}\nOrleans also had heard stories from her forebears about what went on in and about the St. Ann Street cottage.\n\"My mother lived near there when she was small,\" she said, \"and, child, let me tell you she was never allowed to even pass that place. That Voodoo woman kept snakes and black cats, spiders and trained roosters and all sorts of other awful living creatures in that house. She did horrible things. She used to charm people and make 'em die. I know people don't believe that now, but it happened, and everybody in New Orleans knew it at the time. Pregnant women used to go see her and she'd get 'em out of trouble just by burning some candles and saying certain prayers.\n\"She had a snake she called 'Zombi.' It was her god, and it could do things that brought sickness or health, good luck or bad luck, life or death. There was one rich family my mother knew who had a daughter who wanted to marry a man they didn't like. They went to Marie Laveau and paid her a lot of money and she promised to break up the affair. She took four pigeons and got 'em drunk and she wrote four letters and put one in each of the poor drunk pigeons' mouths. They flew away God knows where, and that boy and girl never did get married. Oh, she was an evil woman!\n\"My grandmother and grandfather had a two-story house and sometimes after they were asleep my mother would sneak up in the back room. She could look right down into Marie Laveau's back yard. She saw terrible things. They weren't decent, so she would never tell me what they were. She went to her grave with that knowledge. Right now when I go to my hubsand's tomb I won't pass where Marie Laveau is buried. No, sir!\n\"I don't know anything about there being two of them. This was nearly a hundred years ago when my mother saw those things; I know that. I'm nearly eighty, so you can figure it out. I lost my husband last spring and when I buried him that was the first time I had thought of that Marie Laveau in years.\"\nBy the 1850's Voodoo was at its height in the city, and\n{p. 74}\nMarie Laveau was its essence. It is probable that nearly all Negro servants had some connection with the cult. No event in any household in New Orleans was a secret from Marie Laveau. In Fabulous New Orleans Lyle Saxon described the grapevine that existed between them:\nA message could be conveyed from one end of the city to another in a single day without one white person's being aware of it. It is said that a Negro cook in a kitchen would sing some Creole song while she rattled her pots and pans, a song which sounded innocuous enough to any white listener, but at the end of the verse she would sing a few words intended as a message. Another Negro working near-by would listen intently and at the end of the second verse would hear the message repeated. This second servant would then go outside to attend to her duties. She would sing the same song and her voice would be heard by servants in the house next door. In this way, by means of a song, news of the meeting of a Voodoo society would be carried from one end of the city to another and upon the appointed night Negro men and women would slip from their beds before midnight and would assemble for their ceremonies.\nAlthough the St. John's Eve gatherings near the lake and Bayou St. John became, under Marie's direction, a little like \"shows\" staged for the benefit of the curious whites, particularly the police and the newspaper reporters, they were by no means anemic affairs. Indeed, the visitors were usually shocked at what took place. The snake in the box was always present, the great caldron steamed upon a roaring bonfire and the Voodoos, the men stripped to loin cloths, the women clad in the loose one-piece garments known as \"Mother Hubbards,\" imbibed quantities of tafia, a crude alcoholic drink distilled from molasses. Intoxicated with both the rum and the fanaticism of snake worship, they would form a ring and begin their traditional dances at a signal from their queen, who sometimes stood upon the box containing the snake, sometimes\n{p. 75}\noccupied a thronelike chair in the middle of the circle. Music was provided by an aged Negro who scraped a fiddle, said to have been covered with snakeskin, and by drums made of gourds and wine casks over which cowhide had been stretched. As the music grew wilder and the effects of the tafia became intensified the dancers were overcome with spasmodic jerking and trembling. Some would whirl in circles until they fell to the ground unconscious; others, with wild screams of frenzy, would run out into the water. The white visitors would usually depart as the climax of sexual orgy began.\nBut there were still other affairs arranged and conducted by Marie Laveau. She built a house near Milneburg and this she used for several purposes. There, for a fee, she would arrange appointments for white men with mulatto or quadroon girls. This was really carried to its epitome of notoriety by Marie II, but certainly Marie I started it.\nThe house is variously described as having been a six-room affair, with a hall dividing three rooms on each side, and as a simple one-room shack. It was whitewashed on the outside and was known as the \"Maison Blanche.\" Besides its role as a house of assignation, the Maison Blanche was undoubtedly the scene of some of the Voodoo rites from which nonmembers were excluded.\nCastellanos, after terming the more public rites \"a mere device to hoodwink the unwary,\" writes of the Maison Blanche: \"Here secret conclaves were held in a retired spot upon the lake shore known as the figuiers--once a big orchard--beyond which she had constructed a frame cabin, that she used as a summer resort.\"\nAlexander Augustin remembered some of the tales of old people which dated to the era of the Widow Paris.\n\"They would thank St. John for not meddlin' wit' the powers the devil gave 'em,\" he said. \"They had one funny way of doin' this when they a stood up to their knees in the water and threw food in the middle of 'em. You see, they always stood in a big circle. Then they would hold hands\n{p. 76}\nand sing. The food was for Papa La Bas, who was the devil. Oldtime Voodoos always talked about Papa La Bas. I heard lots about the Maison Blanche. It was painted white and was built right near the water wit' bushes all around it so nobody couldn't see it from the road. It was a kind of hoodoo headquarters.\"\nIt seems to have been only in the Maison Blanche that Marie Laveau would depart from her modernization of the ceremonies and allow the devotees to return to the ways of the immigrants from Santo Domingo. Here, lips smeared with the blood of freshly slaughtered animals and fowl, they took their terrible oaths. Here was the snake, and here the breast was torn from a living chicken and presented to the queen. Here they sang:\nEh, y\u00e9, y\u00e9 Mamzelle Marie,\nYa, y\u00e9, y\u00e9, li konin. tou, gris-gris;\nLi t\u00e9 kouri lekal, aver vieux kokodril;\nOh, ouai, y\u00e9 Mamzelle Marie. . . .\nThis was the Marie Laveau who consorted with the crocodiles, the Marie Laveau who talked with Lucifer.\nAn old man named Pedro, who said he was half Negro, half Mexican, told of having heard of these ceremonies all his life. The participants, he said, would \"hiss and crawl on the ground like snakes, hop around croakin' like frogs, creep along, twistin' and shakin' like alligators, screech like hoot owls. I been told they would ran around on all-fours, bitin' each other on the legs like they was mad dogs. Some of 'em would dance wit' torches in their hands and there was big bonfires all around the house and up and down the edge of the water. The beach was red like blood all night long.\"\n{p. 77}","title":"8. Sometimes She Danced with a Fish","type":"page"}