VOODOO CAME to the Americas a little over two hundred years ago. The raids on the African Slave Coast began about 1724, and thousands of these snake worshippers were sold into the West Indies. With them they carried a word, which was the name of their god. The word was "Vodu," and soon, corrupted to Voodoo, Voudou, Vaudau, Voudoux or Vaudaux, it was an all-embracing term which included not only the god and the sect, but all its rites and practices, its priests and Priestesses, and the people who obeyed its teachings. The form "Voodoo" is most commonly used now in the United States. Many Negroes, however, have further corrupted it, and refer to it as "Hoodoo."
Yet it is curious that some etymologists give an entirely different origin of the word. They tell us it can be traced to those followers of Peter Valdo--the Waldenses or Vaudois of France--reputed to have used witchcraft and to have practiced human sacrifice, and that it was carried to the French West Indies by early settlers.
The sect spread rapidly. As early as 1782 Governor Gálvez of Louisiana prohibited the importation of Negroes from Martinique because he believed them to be steeped in Voodooism
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and that they "would make the lives of the citizens unsafe." A decade later Negroes from Santo Domingo were likewise banned.
Life for Negroes in Louisiana under French and Spanish rule was one of concentrated and consistent misery and pain. Their only escape was in death. On the plantations they were worked in chains, guarded by armed overseers; and the whip was applied freely and often. In New Orleans they were worked from dawn until dusk and then were locked in heavily guarded quarters for the night. They were forbidden by law to assemble for any purpose whatsoever and were severely punished, sometimes by death, for the slightest infraction of this law.
Much of this treatment was based upon constant fear of an uprising. These first generations of slaves were savages, brooding and sullen and filled with hatred for their captors. On the other hand, the whites scarcely considered them human. For instance, soon after the founding of New Orleans a slave camp was established in nearby swamps where the Negroes were "broken." Here they were worked and beaten until those who survived were considered tame enough to be sold in the slave markets to plantation masters, This was even carried so far as the selecting of fine male specimens who were used as studs and bred with chosen females so that they might produce children who would bring high prices.
Not only were the slaves punished if caught gathering for dances or f or any other reason, but sometimes their owners would also suffer. In 1751 the Marquis de Vaudreuil ruled that any slave owner allowing his Negroes to assemble for any purpose at all with any other Negroes upon his property would be forced to "pay one hundred crowns to the treasury of the Church, and for the next offense of this kind, be sentenced to work for life on the King's galleys." De Bienville's Black Code had previously provided that the Negroes should be branded with the fleur-de-lis, whipped, or put to death if they were caught meeting together.
So gathering for Voodoo or any other rites was impossible
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in those days. Except for a superficial conversion to Catholicism by some masters the Negroes were not allowed to practice any religion at all. It was not generally considered that they had souls.
It was only with the arrival of the American authorities after the Purchase in 1803 that some of these restrictions began to be lifted. Too, by now a second and third generation of Africans had grown up, a generation who spoke the language of their owners and were now more docile, with no memory of savage freedom, and who for the most part accepted without question their status as slaves. With them had also arisen a new generation of owners with a somewhat different attitude toward them. If despotic still, it was less so than during former years and it was in many cases becoming increasingly paternal in its attitude toward the Negroes. Most of the fear of uprisings had dwindled and much of the cruelty had abated. Discipline and punishment were less severe, and the relationship between the two races was growing warmer. Children reared by Negro nurses loved them as they did their own parents and they were served by their Mammies and other household servants with a fierce devotion. Too, slave owners had come to realize that slaves were valuable property and that it was foolish not to take care of their property or to abuse it.
It was at last recognized that the Negroes required recreation, and slaves were allowed to gather on the plantations for dances, weddings and religious celebrations of various sorts, events which the white household often attended, viewed with amusement and provided with some refreshment and encouragement. Sunday became a day of rest for them, as well as the white folk, and religious services were held for their benefit. This, not the Civil War, was the real beginning of the end of slavery.
In 1803 the prohibition against Negroes from the West Indies was lifted and a few years later, when revolution swept the islands and the planters began arriving in New Orleans,
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West Indian Negroes came in great numbers. This was to be the beginning of organized Voodoo in Louisiana.
For until now Voodoo had scarcely been a living force, It had appeared again and again, but only to be suppressed with the utmost violence and determination each time it dared to show its face. Plantations were widely separated, and the slaves of various estates did not often meet. Old Negroes passed on a few of the superstitions, remembered a few of the types of gris-gris known to their Congo ancestors, but, for the most part, the Zombi was being forgotten. So far as is known there was only an occasional Voodoo gathering in New Orleans until the arrival of these Santo Domingo Negroes. How or why is not very clear, but somehow Voodoo had remained much stronger in the West Indies than in Louisiana, The Santo Domingo blacks had retained their ancient worship almost completely. Their masters, a sophisticated and worldly lot, found New Orleans much to their liking and many of them settled in or near it, instead of in the plantation areas, where their Voodoo slaves would probably have had difficulty in organizing for their ceremonies.
In the city and with the new and more liberal laws they were soon well organized and had converted many New Orleans Negroes, who from then on retained only a veneer of the Christianity in which their owners had reared them.
It is said that the first gathering place of the Voodoos in New Orleans was an abandoned brickyard in Dumaine Street, where they met late at night for their dances and orgies. But the police soon drove them from this place, and it was then that they began to hold forth along Bayou St. John and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Here the king and queen took their places. Here the bonfires blazed and the drums took up their beat. Here were the snake and the sacrifice and the bowl of blood.
There are many versions of these ceremonies. In the original African rite the priestess lifted the snake from the box--it was a python, according to tradition--and allowed it to lick her cheek. From this touch she received vision and power and
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became an oracle. (According to a Dahomeyan legend the first man and woman came into the world blind and it was the serpent who bestowed sight upon the human race.)
In Louisiana the queen sometimes stood upon the box and passed the power to the king and the others by merely beginning a chain of handclasping. On other occasions the king lifted the box and shook it, and from the numerous bells which always adorned it came a magic tinkling that induced the hypnotic state desired by the devotees.
Sometimes the god--the Zombi--was also represented by a male dancer. A great caldron would be set to boiling over a fire in the center of the clearing in which the ceremonies were being held and into it would be tossed offerings brought by the members of the sect: chickens, frogs, cats, snails, and always a snake. The queen would begin a chant:
L'Appé vini, le Grand Zombi,
L'Appé vini, pou fe gris-gris!
"He is coming, the Great Zombi, he is coming, to make gris-gris!"
A Negro, clad in a scarlet loin cloth, would leap into the center of the clearing. In his hands he carried a small coffin about the size used for a baby. The celebrants would welcome him with cries of "Li Grand Zombi! Li Grand Zombi!" as he dropped the coffin at the feet of the queen and began a wild, whirling dance, spinning like a top until he collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Then the others danced, pausing to drink of the contents of the inevitable caldron and quantities of tafia, a strong, raw alcoholic beverage. Live pigeons and chickens were sometimes introduced into the rites, to be torn to pieces with the fingers and teeth of the dancers. Sometimes they drew blood from each other, clawing and biting and failing to the ground in embraces of frenzied lust. They were possessed. They had the power.
What they called the power was not all faked, nor was it all caused by alcohol. Make no mistake about that. There
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took place that transference of emotional electricity from one to the other, until the entire group was a seething mass of magnetic shocks. The same thing occurred among such sects as the Shakers and still takes place, with less bizarre results, among congregations of denominations of the revivalist type.
If a neophyte were present he was subject to certain ceremonies which took place before the actual rites. The king drew a circle on the ground with a piece of charcoal, and the new member was instructed to stand within this circle. Certain fetishes were given him: a wax effigy of a man, a bit of human bone and some horse's hairs. The king would then strike him on the head with a wooden paddle and begin a chant in African dialect, every word of which was repeated in chorus by the others present. At last the neophyte would begin to tremble and jerk. He was getting the power. If he stepped outside the charcoal circle the Voodoos would turn their backs on him. It was an evil omen. If he obtained sufficient power, the neophyte would pass from the shaking and jerking into a whirling dance, which included wild leaps into the air and yells of elation at his consciousness of acceptance by the Zombi. His dance would continue with increasing speed and violence until he fell to the ground in a dead faint He was then aroused by the king with a sharp application of the wooden paddle and given the oath of the Voodoos.
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