THE PEOPLE around Perdido Street are afraid of Julia Jackson. They do not avoid passing her on the street as they do Lala, but they treat her with a great deal of respect and they do not like to talk about her. Julia is more intelligent and has more education than Lala. She is shrewd and calculating and, it is said, very revengeful. Despite all her foolishness and her ignorance there is a bit of the mystic in Lala. Julia Jackson is a business woman.
Very black and over six feet tall, with eyes that are slightly crossed, you can never tell whether Julia is looking at you or at the devil seated on your shoulder, for she says that many persons carry these evil beings on their shoulders all their lives without knowing it.
"As soon as I see a person coming," Julia said, "I know right away if they has signed up with the devil and if they has one of his demons is riding that person's shoulder and grinning happy as can be about it." Julia laughed when she said this, and her eyes looked as if they were seeing demons then.
Perdido Street is a few blocks above Canal Street, and the section of it that is dominated by Julia lies just off South
{p. 188}
Rampart Street on what Orleanians refer to as the "Lake Side." Inhabited by Negroes of a low financial stratum, the street corners are nearly all occupied by cheap and noisy saloons and the locale reeks of stale beer and sweat and garbage.
During the day things are rather quiet. A few loafers drink in the bars and the women sit on their stoops and gossip. Sometimes they seem to look up at the sky, almost as if they were impatient for the coming of night.
When darkness comes Perdido Street returns to life. The barrooms turn on their signs, the juke boxes begin to blast out their jazz and swing music, and the places crowd with night creatures--prostitutes, drug addicts and petty criminals among them. There is much drinking of sherry wine, at five cents per glass, and of gin, at ten cents. Police hang on the corners and do not look particularly pleased with their assignment. The women sell themselves, sometimes for fifty cents, sometimes in dark alleys.
But, day or night, when Julia Jackson strides past there is a hush and a silence and many greetings of "Hello, Miss Julia!" "How is you, Miss Julia?" A trifle lame, she nevertheless walks quickly, nodding unsmilingly to those who speak to her. There aren't many who dare ignore her. There is a story that once she killed a man with two strokes of a red pencil on his forehead.
She's dynamite," said Minnie Lewis, who lived next door to her. "Don't you see how that woman walk? She walk just like Marie Laveau. No, me, I ain't got nothin' to say about her. Some says she does good and some says she does bad. They say everything about her. I done bought a few things from her, but I don't go in much for that stuff."
Julia has been practicing Voodoo for more than thirty years and it has bought her half the property in the block where she lives and an automobile that takes her on trips out into the country, where she has acquired an extensive trade in gris-gris. "Country people has more trouble than city people," Julia said. "I got me a good business in the parishes."
{p. 189}
The front room of her home contains the usual altar with the candies and pictures of saints and many more bizarre items. "I make all my own stuff," she said. "It saves me money and it's as good. People who has to buy their stuff ain't using their heads."
She doesn't laugh when you tell her how she is feared, but will confess, "They call me lightning and black cloud. They say I walk with the devil in the graveyard at night. But wait until they get in trouble. Who they come to first? Julia Jackson! I don't care what they call me so long as they keep coming and bring me money. I got sense.
"I use all kinds of things in my work," Julia admitted. "Most people like chicken feathers, earthworms, red pepper, coffee grounds, nails, beef tongues, and oils and powders. I done already cured a woman with bay leaf and soda when she was dying of heart trouble. It was partly faith. Don't ever forget the faith part. You gotta believe. But some of the things they say about me ain't true. I don't kill people and never have killed anybody that I know of. Of course hoodoo work is funny work, and sometimes things happen you don't count on.
"I know how to kill people with hoodoo. One way is to catch you a rattlesnake, kill it and hang it in the sun to dry. Write the person's name on a piece of paper and put it in the snake's mouth. Just like that snake dry up the person gonna dry up, too. If you keep that snake in the sun long enough the person's gonna die. That is a true charm.
"Another way to kill is to take a rooster, chop off its head and feets and take them to a graveyard. You can keep the body to cook. When you get to the graveyard put a black candle in the rooster's beak, lay it down in front of a tomb and bury the feets in the ground in the back of the tomb. Light your candle and pray for one hour that this man have bad luck. Then dig up the feets and take them and the head and go bury 'em in the man's yard. He won't last. a week.
"The wors' old hoodoo woman I ever knew was Mrs. Crobuzon. She was a old Urai hoodoo what had sold herself to
{p. 190}
the devil. You know when you do that you gotta kill one of your children every year. She had fifteen children, and she had already killed twelve when I first knew her. Her husband died and left her life insurance and she bought a house and furniture. But she had killed so many of her children that the spirits of 'em wouldn't let her sleep. I knew a girl named Lizzie used to always go see her. Lizzie's ma got scared and made her stop, and you know what Mrs. Crobuzon did? She put a curse on Lizzie to keep her from getting married, and the poor girl never did. She did terrible things, that old woman! Bad as I am, I'd never let her cross my door. She's broke now and she's only got three children left and they won't have anything to do with her. She sleep one place tonight and another tomorrow night, but she can't step over my sill. She'd like to because I got power and I built me a good business, but I'm not fooling with her.
"I'll tell you something funny I done. A girl came here and told me she was having trouble with her husband because he couldn't keep anything he had. When he got paid he lost his money gambling. When he wasn't gambling he got drunk and give it away. One time she went out and left him home and when she came back he'd given away almost all the furniture in the house. He even lost his clothes and his hats. I listened to her and I gave her some stuff. But about a week after that she came back and she was weeping and carrying on like she was out of her mind. 'Miss Julia,' she say, 'what you done to me? I went home and rubbed my feet with the powders and I rubbed his feet with 'em. I put some of your oil in his food and I sprinkled some on his pillow so he'd breathe it while he was sleeping. Now you know what happen? I found out all this time he had him another woman and today he took everything I had and went off with that woman. Miss Julia, I feel like you double-crossed me. The way he used to be he'd have forgotten this woman after a while and he'd have lost her like he done everything else. Now he done kept her.' I run that girl out of my house fast. How I know about all that stuff? All I promised her was that
{p. 191}
I'd cure her husband of giving everything away. It ain't my fault if it worked. That's what I'm supposed to do-just what people ask. Next day she came back and bought some stuff to make her husband come home. He came all right, but he didn't bring nothing with him. He'd lost everything to that other woman."
Like all Voodoos Julia is afraid to talk at any length about her work. "I know a man is coming after me," she said. "He says my work is illegal, but there ain't a thing illegal if the people want it, is there? If people is willing to pay for something, they ought to have it. It's said that I got rich on this stuff, but I'm not as rich as the politicians what send the police to run me in. How you figure that out?"
She could remember some of the Voodoo celebrations near the turn of the century. "I was just a child," she said, "but my ma was a hoodoo, woman and she used to take me to see 'em. The dancers held big Chinese scarfs behind their necks. They would march out to the center of the floor to the beat of tom-toms--and could they dance! You don't see nothing like that nowadays. In those days they could count on the police letting 'em alone as long as they stayed out of town. That's why all the big hoodoo queens held their meetings by Lake Pontchartrain. They was smart women and they knew how to run a first-class business.
"I would have done good in them days," she said. "I do all right now, but I got to be careful. I kind of got the people 'round here bluffed, and there ain't one of them got enough nerve to turn me in. They know what I'm like when I'm mad, and they ain't taking any chances. I have to watch out for the police, though."
John Matthews, who lives around the comer from Julia, thinks she has more power than anybody in the world. He swears she made a good woman of his wife, and he had not believed it could be done.
"I had the wors' woman in the world," said John. "I loved her, but she wasn't no good at all. I'd take home my money and she spend it on other men. I was always finding Pullman
{p. 192}
porters in my bed. I'd beat her and she'd beat me back. We was havin' patrol rides regular every Saturday night. Somebody told me 'bout Miss Julia and I come to see her. Man, the minute I looked at that woman I was scared of her, but I had to do something 'bout my wife.
"Miss Julia took me to her room and I give her five dollars to start wit'. She say she don't never do no work for less than ten dollars, but that was all I had, so she took it. She had all kinds of saints' pictures in her room and I had to walk around and put my hand once on all those pictures. Then she make me swear wit' my hand on a Bible that I was gonna bring her the other five dollars at the end of the week. I swore 'cause I knowed if I tried to fool that woman it was gonna be bad.
"'Now I'll tell you this,' she said to me. 'I know you is sincere 'cause you was born in April and everybody born in April is sincere. But if you think you can fool me you is crazy. And if you ever tells anybody on me you is gonna pay tenfold for it. Now I'm gonna make your wife sick, She's gonna be so sick you gonna think she is dyin', but she won't die.'
"She give me some white-lookin' stuff and made me kneel down in front of her altar for more 'n an hour. I think I ain't ever gonna get done kneelin'. Then she tell me to put this powder in some mashed potatoes and give 'em to my wife. I was to come back the next Friday and bring my wife's picture.
"Well, I fed my wife that powder all week and ain't nothin' happen. If I hadn't been so scared of Miss Julia I wouldn't have ever gone back to her, but I went and I brought her my wife's picture and the five dollars. Miss Julia made me kneel down in front of her altar again. She put the picture I brought up on the altar and she sprinkled it wit' some red ashes. She kept me kneelin' for a long time and all the time she was jumpin' up and down and shakin' and hollerin' and prayin' and scarin' the hell out of me. After that I went home and fed my old woman some more of that hoodoo powder.
{p. 193}
Does you know that in three days my wife was layin' up in Charity Hospital wit' doctors all 'round her bed shakin' their beads.
"She sure was sick, and for a long time I thought Miss Julia was wrong and that my wife was gonna die. I still loved her, but I figured she wasn't no good and if she had to live a evil life she might as well die. The doctors all said she had some new kind of disease they ain't never seen before and they all come to look at her and all the time she lay moanin' and groanin' and prayin'--and she never had been no prayin' woman.
"Do you know two weeks later the doctors done changed their minds and told me there ain't nothin' the matter wit, her and I could take her home? And when I brought her home she was like a changed woman. She saved my money for me and she ain't never messed wit' no other men since. I tell you this, I done sent at least ten fellows to Miss Julia to get their womens fixed up, and every time she done the same thing and those womens landed up in Charity Hospital. You can figure any time you see a woman in that place wit' somethin' the matter wit' her that the doctors can't figure out she's got a hoodoo woman workin' on her for that woman's man."
But not all Julia Jackson's clients are Negroes.
Mrs. Armantine Hebert believes she saved her daughter when the girl was suffering under a Voodoo spell.
"Me, I believe in anything that does you good," said Mrs. Hebert. "My daughter was going crazy. No doctor could do nothing for her. Somebody told me about Julia Jackson, and when I went to see her she told me my girl had been hoodooed from drinking lemonade. It was for true, because my daughter she had been drinking lots of lemonade to purify her blood. Miss Julia told me to go to my daughter's house and see if I find any powder on her floor and she give me some stuff to wash the powder away and some candles to burn. Me, I go there and sure enough there is powder like roach powder in the corners of the front room. I knew it wasn't roach powder 'cause my daughter is clean like me and
{p. 194}
she ain't never had a roach to her name. So I washed it all away and burned the candles on the mantelpiece.
"You know right away she started acting like her senses had come back? But it really took Miss Julia six months to cure her. Every week I go and every week she give me different things to help my daughter. The last thing she done was to tell me to comb my daughter's hair and to bring her a little piece of her hair and some ground meat. When I brought those things she made some meat balls and put a piece of my girl's hair inside each one. Me, I kept thinking that was a funny thing to do, yes, but I knew I had to have faith so I didn't say a word. Miss Julia told me to take the meat balls and go for a walk, and every time I see a dog to drop a ball. I done that until they was all gone. I just dropped them and the dogs ate 'em. up one by one. I never would look back to see what happened to the dogs, but you know a lady was across the street when I dropped the last meat ball and she tell me the dog that ate it dropped dead? When I got home my daughter was sitting on the gallery making her some curtains--and she ain't done that since she lost her mind. She's fine now and ain't crazy at all.
"Miss Julia can do anything, her! People know it, too. I already seen more automobiles lined up in front of her house than the Roosevelt Hotel is got."
{p. 195}