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WORK TITLE: Voodoo and Power
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://sites01.lsu.edu/wp/history/faculty/kodi-roberts/ * http://lsupress.org/books/detail/voodoo-and-power/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2015031603
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015031603
HEADING:
Roberts, Kodi A., 1979-
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PERSONAL
Born February 14, 1979.
EDUCATION:Louisiana State University, B.A., 2001; University of New Orleans, M.A., 2003; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic and historian. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, assistant professor of history. University of Chicago Trustees Fellow, 2004-09; University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Prize Lectureship, 2009.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kodi A. Roberts is an academic and historian. He earned degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans before completing a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in history in 2012. Roberts eventually became an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University, where he lectures on African-American history, African-American religious traditions, Black Power movements in the United States, the politics of race and resistance movements in the United States, and power relations in society.
Roberts published his first book, Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans, 1881-1940, in 2015. The account looks at the historically contingent and local nature of voodoo in New Orleans. Roberts insists that voodoo is a product of continual recreation by its practitioners and the diversity of their cultural practices, which, in the context of New Orleans, became notably southern and ethnically Black in its compositional makeup as this community sought greater power in the face of racial segregation, the evolving position of gender norms, and the rise in the commoditization of cultural products within the early twentieth century. He also looks at the way voodoo crossed ethnic lines and the way it empowered different segments of society while being demonized by others. Roberts looks at the lore behind fabled voodoo queen Marie Laveau and also how her legend was revitalized under the more contemporary Mother Leafy Anderson. Roberts additionally looks at the localized experiences of voodoo practitioners in New Orleans while opening up new areas for scholarly research in the fields of religion, history, and cultural production.
A contributor writing in the Journal of Pan African Studies observed that Roberts “provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced Voodoo and why.” In the Journal of Southern Religion, Yvonne P. Chireau insisted that Roberts “is at his best when meticulously documenting how Voodoo workers navigated difficult political and legal terrain in the city of New Orleans, detailing their struggles to own property, acquire tax-exempt status, and incorporate their churches.” Chireau remarked that the book offers “intellectual and academic credibility to a subject that has been fraught with dubious scholarship. Nevertheless, religionists may be dissatisfied with this book, which gives insufficient consideration to the processes of synthesis and hybridity.” Concluding her review, Chireau called Voodoo and Power “a much-needed perspective on a marginalized tradition that is shown to be nothing less than a true American religion.” Writing in Choice, A.C. Greene noted that the account is “particularly attentive to the dynamics of race, gender, and economics.” Greene also observed that Voodoo and Power offers “both a vivid narrative of New Orleans voodoo.” Overall, Greene “recommended” Voodoo and Power for students, researchers, and professionals in the field and for general readers interested in the topic.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June 1, 2016, A.C. Greene, review of Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans, 1881-1940, p. 1534.
Journal of Pan African Studies, March 1, 2016, review of Voodoo and Power, p. 549.
Journal of Southern Religion, 2016, Yvonne P. Chireau, review of Voodoo and Power.
ONLINE
Louisiana State University Web site, https://www.lsu.edu/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.*
Kodi Roberts
Assistant Professor
237A Himes Hall
578-6669
kodiroberts@lsu.edu
—
COURSES TAUGHT: 2061: African Americans in U.S. History; 3119: Radicalism and Resistance via African American Religion; 3119: The Black Panther Party and Black Power in America.
CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS: The Promise of Power: The Racial, Gender, & Economic Politics of Voodoo in New Orleans, 1889-1940 (book project).
INTERESTED IN DIRECTING THESES AND DISSERTATIONS ON: Intersections between race and religion; Afro-Atlantic Religion; the politics of race and resistance movements in the United States.
BRIEF VITA
Education:
BA, Louisiana State University; History and Religious Studies (2001)
MA, University of New Orleans (2003)
PhD, University of Chicago; History (2012)
Awards and Honors:
University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Dissertation Fellowship (2010-11); University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Prize Lectureship (2009); University of Chicago Trustees Fellowship (2004-09)
Notable Articles:
n.d. “The Bisness: The Centrality of Economics and Local Culture to Business Models in New Orleans Voodoo” in S. Striffler & T. Adams eds. Working in the Big Easy: The History and Politics of Labor in New Orleans, From Slavery to Post-Katrina. University of New Orleans Press (under contract).
The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender. By employing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century first-hand accounts of Voodoo practitioners and their rituals, Roberts provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced Voodoo and why.
Voodoo in New Orleans, a mélange of religion, entrepreneurship, and business networks, stretched across the color line in intriguing ways. Roberts’s analysis demonstrates that what united professional practitioners, or “workers,” with those who sought their services was not a racially uniform folk culture, but rather the power and influence that Voodoo promised. Recognizing that social immobility proved a common barrier for their patrons, workers claimed that their rituals could overcome racial and gendered disadvantages and create new opportunities for their clients.
Voodoo rituals and institutions also drew inspiration from the surrounding milieu, including the privations of the Great Depression, the city’s complex racial history, and the free-market economy. Money, employment, and business became central concerns for the religion’s practitioners: to validate their work, some began operating from recently organized “Spiritual Churches,” entities that were tax exempt and thus legitimate in the eyes of the state of Louisiana. Practitioners even leveraged local figures like the mythohistoric Marie Laveau for spiritual purposes and entrepreneurial gain. All the while, they contributed to the cultural legacy that fueled New Orleans’s tourist industry and drew visitors and their money to the Crescent City.
Kodi A. Roberts is assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University.
Praise for Voodoo and Power
“[A] textured study of New Orleans voodoo. . . . Particularly attentive to the dynamics of race, gender, and economics, this book provides both a vivid narrative of New Orleans voodoo that will appeal to casual readers and a sophisticated analysis of religion and cultural production.”—CHOICE
“Voodoo and Power provides intellectual and academic credibility to a subject that has been fraught with dubious scholarship. . . . A much-needed perspective on a marginalized tradition that is shown to be nothing less than a true American religion.”—Journal of Southern Religion
“Important and provocative. . . .[Roberts’s] use of the extant evidence is restrained and judicious. He successfully complicates what we know about Voodoo by demonstrating the extent of white involvement in Voodoo culture.”—Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
4/12/17, 2(57 PM
Print Marked Items
Roberts, Kodi A.: Voodoo and power: the politics of religion in New Orleans, 1881-1940
A.C. Greene
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1534. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greene, A.C. "Roberts, Kodi A.: Voodoo and power: the politics of religion in New Orleans, 1881-1940." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1534. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942952&it=r&asid=be7c7d56ebe802a2122fbdd8938f279a. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942952
about:blank Page 1 of 2
4/12/17, 2(57 PM
Roberts, Kodi A. Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881-1940
Journal of Pan African Studies.
9.1 (Mar. 2016): p549. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Journal of Pan African Studies http://www.jpanafrican.org/
Full Text:
Roberts, Kodi A. Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881-1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015, pp. 256, ISBN: 0807160504.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This book argues that religion on New Orleans was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants, and instead it was a much more complicated patchwork of influences which created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender. Hence, by employing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century first-hand accounts of Voodoo practitioners and their rituals, the author provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced Voodoo and why to show that what united professional practitioners, or "workers," with those who sought their services was not a racially uniform folk culture, but rather the power and influence that Voodoo promised, recognizing that social immobility proved a common barrier for their patrons.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Roberts, Kodi A. Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881-1940." Journal of Pan African
Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, p. 549. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461364095&it=r&asid=b5825b53cf34b421e488d8b2fb39b57d. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461364095
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Review: Voodoo and Power
Yvonne P. Chireau
Yvonne P. Chireau is Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College.
JSRVolume 18
Cite this Article
Yvonne P. Chireau, "Review: Voodoo and Power," Journal of Southern Religion (18) (2016): jsreligion.org/vol18/chireau.
Open-access license
This work is licensed CC-BY. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication.
Creative Commons License
Kodi A Roberts. Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. 231 pp. 978-0807160503.
Publisher's Website
In Voodoo and Power, Kodi A. Roberts brings revisionist perspectives to bear on Voodoo in New Orleans. Long neglected by scholars, Voodoo remains a poorly understood domain of American religion. Rejecting consensus histories, Roberts resituates Voodoo as the product of diverse racial and religious interactions within the unique social climate of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. Part cultural analysis, part denominational history, the book outlines the emergence of Voodoo by focusing on organizational structures, leadership, and economic operations as key aspects of its development from discrete magic practices into sustained institutional forms.
The chapters are arranged into two sections. The first concerns the role of two female progenitors of New Orleans Voodoo. The second focuses on lay and professional “workers”—an apt euphemism for the conjoining of economic and ritual activity, both public and private, that engaged religious practitioners. Although Marie Laveau remains the “mytho-historical” founder of Voodoo, its most significant innovator was Chicago-based spiritualist Leaf Anderson. Revisiting local ethnographic sources, Roberts shows how Laveau initiated the client-centered, service-oriented structure upon which Voodoo was established, while Anderson adapted Laveau’s model and built a thriving denominational network of Spiritual churches. The book examines Voodoo through the lens of practitioners’ aspirations, specifically their shared quests for economic power, social stability, and religious meaning. The book also highlights the multiracial character of Voodoo, arguing that its portrayal as an African-American religion has been based in large part on faulty associations, including an unwarranted focus on African origins and its distortion vis-à-vis the stigmatizing racial politics of the Jim Crow era.
The author is at his best when meticulously documenting how Voodoo workers navigated difficult political and legal terrain in the city of New Orleans, detailing their struggles to own property, acquire tax-exempt status, and incorporate their churches. Following Leaf Anderson’s model of religious entrepreneurship—and with extraordinary acumen and perseverance—practitioners lay the groundwork for the institutionalizing of Voodoo with chartered churches and viable commercial enterprises. “Their economic successes,” Roberts writes, “allowed these individuals to surround their socially and legally suspect spiritual practices with the material infrastructure of legitimacy,” including “lawyers, businesses and churches” (195). The book carefully maps the vast, contested realm of interests inhabited by Voodoo practitioners, their constituencies, and their detractors, a realm in which magical activity coalesced around strategies for achieving socio-economic well being. Far from its beginnings as a persecuted religion, and beyond the unfettered hostility directed toward its practitioners through physical violence, arrest, and imprisonment, Voodoo in New Orleans would come to attain a distinctive status, achieving a profound and lasting impact on the city’s identity.
Voodoo and Power provides intellectual and academic credibility to a subject that has been fraught with dubious scholarship. Nevertheless, religionists may be dissatisfied with this book, which gives insufficient consideration to the processes of synthesis and hybridity. This manifests in an inadequate treatment of the transformation of Catholic-infused Hoodoo into Protestant-styled supernaturalism, especially between the Laveau era and the Anderson era, when an emphasis upon personal healing and financial magic shaped the scope of extra-ecclesial services and practices in the emerging Spiritual churches. Furthermore, the book eschews potential connections between Voodoo and rival sectarians in nineteenth-century New Orleans, such as the creole Spiritualists, or notable male metaphysical healers such as Valmour. In casting his study within such an insular framework, Roberts allows external religious affinities to go unexplored. In terms of origins, for example, the book says nothing about the midwestern Spiritualist associations with which Leaf Anderson was acquainted, or the theological trappings of apostolic Christianity and Pentecostalism that surely informed the liturgy of the Spiritual churches. Further research might lead to greater clarity concerning religious syncretism and Voodoo, as exemplified by the veneration of the Indian Black Hawk, Anderson’s patron saint and topographic egregore. Questions also remain about the overlap between Voodoo ceremonialism and folk domestic practices among ethnic Catholics in New Orleans, as well as the centrality of somatic ritual practices such as spirit possession in the Spiritual churches. Greater attention to the tools and methods of Religious Studies might yield relevant insights regarding the production of culture in the transition of Voodoo from “magic” to “religion.”
Studies of Voodoo typically predicate their analyses of religious formation on the influence of African cultures, and so doing tend to highlight interpretive categories such as race. This is a mistake, according to Roberts, for the “common association” between New Orleans and Voodoo underscores “the impossibility of cultural containment along racial lines.” Perhaps more than anything else, the U.S. context marked Voodoo’s creation. “If indeed Voodoo began as an African or African American religion,” he writes, “by the twentieth century African religion had become New Orleans religion, and more broadly, American religion” (70). Accordingly, it may no longer be valid to separate Voodoo from other subjects in U.S. church historiography, as Voodoo and Power forces us to reassess the meaning of religious pluralism through its investigation of a regional church, charting its beginnings, its development, its growth and organization, while emphasizing the core themes of doctrine, practice, theology, and leadership that are common to other denominational narratives. It is a much-needed perspective on a marginalized tradition that is shown to be nothing less than a true American religion.
Voodoo and African-American political struggle
by Massoud Hayoun @mhayoun February 25, 2015 11:28AM ET
Analysis: Some practitioners are black power movement veterans, but there’s little Voodoo in modern identity politics
Topics: Culture Religion, Spirituality & Ethics Race & Ethnicity
voodoo New Orleans
An altar at the New Orleans voodoo shop Voodoo Authentica is dedicated to two spirits: Yemaya, the eternal mother (who represents domestic prosperity, family and children), and Oshun (who represents love, sensuality, beauty, romance, personal prosperity and the mystery of woman). William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
NEW ORLEANS — The Big Easy doesn’t have a #BlackLivesMatter movement like in many other parts of the country, even if Louisiana’s highest incarceration rates in the nation disproportionately affect black males. Why? It’s a tough city to organize, social justice advocates across the city say; attempts to channel a year-round Mardi Gras spirit into festive demonstration seem only to have added liquor to nascent movements.
What New Orleans does have is Elmer T. Glover, 68, who taught local Black Panthers karate in the 1970s and is now a Bokor, a priest who knows not just the religion of Voodoo but also the light and dark magic of it. In Haitian Vodou, Bokors are charged with sending dark spirits after enemies of the community. Simply put, Glover could send spirits like his Mait-Tete or patron deity Baron Samedi — usually depicted as a corpse in a top hat, who deals in life and death — after the arbiters of what many call systematic legal and socioeconomic inequality for black America. But he’s holding off for now.
“They aren't ready for nothing like Voodoo,” Glover said, laughing. Not yet.
He sat on the edge of a tomb at a Masonic cemetery in northern New Orleans. He does much of his work in cemeteries — related not just to death but also to life, love and the totality of human experience. Despite the warmth and lightheartedness of this soft-spoken man, blind in one eye and gifted with what practitioners of African spiritualist faiths from Benin to Haiti to New Orleans have called real sight, Glover doesn't kid. “All my enemies in the karate world are six feet under,” he said coolly.
Glover’s is the magic that he and his partner, Ina Fandrich, a scholar and priestess of Voodoo originally from Germany, said secured the slaves’ victory over Napoleon’s invincible army in the Haitian Revolution of the 19th century. One of the leaders of the revolt, François Mackandal, was believed to be a Haitian Vodou priest. It’s a magic that Glover and Fandrich said could have saved Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Thumbnail image for In Voodoo’s survival, a tale of black resilience
In Voodoo’s survival, a tale of black resilience
African religions fused with Christianity to create Voodoo, but today many open practitioners of the faith are white
voodoo New Orleans
Voodoo practitioner Brandi Kelley ties a gri-gris in her shop, Voodoo Authentica. William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
Local practitioners like Brandi Kelley, a white New Orleanian and a prominent priestess of New Orleans Voodoo, say that at the base of their faith is the ingenuity and subversion of the first black community here, the slaves.
“Rather than lose touch with their spirits, the ingenious African people did many things to stay connected and keep Voodoo alive,” she said. “They drew many parallels between their indigenous faith and the rituals and saints of Catholicism — the religion many of the slaves [in Louisiana] were forced to adopt — and outwardly appeared to embrace Catholicism, while most, in their hearts and minds, stayed devoted to their own spirit forces. The slavemaster would see what appeared to be a Catholic altar in the slave quarters with a saint’s image et cetera upon it and would accept and allow this.”
But Voodoo’s role as a source of power for black America — a subversion of white America’s dominance — has ebbed and flowed.
For generations after the Civil War, Voodoo was used against the black community, Fandrich said. Police arrested and incarcerated practitioners for crimes like practicing medicine without a license. A large part of Voodoo involves natural, holistic remedies.
Kodi Roberts, a professor of African-American history at Louisiana State University, said that during the fight in the mid–20th century for voting rights, Southern newspapers held up Voodoo as a justification for the view that blacks were too barbaric to vote.
With Voodoo’s history of being used against the black community, some in the United States reclaimed the practice in the 1970s as a religious expression of black empowerment.
“It becomes like joining the Nation of Islam, reaffirming your blackness,” Roberts said.
Glover proudly calls himself a former “militant” of the black power politics of the 1970s and said “racism is alive and well in America. Nothing ever changed.”
Whether or not Voodoo has any role to play in offering spiritual support to the re-emergent movement for racial justice remains to be seen, although there are few signs of it thus far. Roberts said that older practitioners, rather than see Voodoo as a contemporary progressive counterculture, are more likely to see it as “a looking back to what African-Americans are missing.”
In Voodoo’s survival, a tale of black resilience
by Massoud Hayoun @mhayoun February 25, 2015 3:55PM ET
African religions fused with Christianity to create Voodoo, but today many open practitioners of the faith are white
Topics: Culture Religion, Spirituality & Ethics Race & Ethnicity
Voodoo New Orleans
Brandi Kelley prepares a gris-gris bag at Voodoo Authentica, a cultural center and retail shop in New Orleans’ French Quarter. William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
NEW ORLEANS — Not looking like a stock version of a Haitian Vodou priestess, or mambo, has its challenges for Mache Cheche Lavi. One customer at Voodoo Authentica, where she sells handmade Voodoo dolls and copyrighted gris-gris sachets that draw good energy, didn’t realize the 26-year-old white woman — who today wears a Wu-Tang Clan thermal and skinny jeans — was a leader of the faith and began lecturing her about Vodou spirits.
“I don't usually play the ‘I’m a mambo’ card, but I did,” she says, smiling — explaining that the visitor was essentially preaching to the pastor. Lavi is her Vodou name, and she prefers to use it to avoid being recognized by pious Protestant relatives in her native Detroit.
Voodoo first arrived in New Orleans with slaves who continued their African spirituality in a Christian land by aligning each Yoruba deity with an alternate identity as a Catholic saint — a practice known as syncretism and echoed throughout the New World in the form of Santeria, Candomble, Umbanda and other faiths. Some see the practice as having disguised traditional African beliefs; others, like local Voodoo priest Elmer Glover, say the slaves embraced Catholicism as a faith with “a lot of magic in it,” coupling it with their African traditions to create what they saw as a more potent practice.
Thumbnail image for Voodoo and African-American political struggle
Voodoo and African-American political struggle
Analysis: Some practitioners are black power movement veterans, but there’s little Voodoo in modern identity politics
The second wave was taken to Louisiana by refugees from the turbulence of the Haitian slave revolt at the turn of the 19th century.
Passing itself as folkloric Catholicism, Voodoo involved drumming, dance and possession rituals and making offerings to the Yoruba demigods to seek their intercession in matters temporal. The practice also involves the African animist traditions of veneration of and communication with ancestors.
The survival of those African religious traditions is testament to the resilience and spiritual ingenuity of those who survived the Middle Passage, but today they are practiced by many who had no roots in slavery. Lavi is one of many white Americans active in the visible New Orleans’ Voodoo establishment. Another, Sallie Ann Glassman, originally from Maine and of Ukrainian Jewish heritage, is hailed by many in New Orleans as the most popular mambo du jour. Voodoo Authentica owner Brandi Kelley, a white woman from New Orleans, is another renowned priestess who holds an annual street festival to show a different face of Voodoo after what she calls years of maligning by Hollywood.
voodoo New Orleans
An altar at Voodoo Authentica dedicated to the spirits Elegua, with origins in West Africa, and Papa Legba, a Haitian figure. They are different spirits but represent similar things — communication, correct choice, opening doors. William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
voodoo New Orleans
Raw ingredients for sale at Voodoo Authentica.William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
While Voodoo may be a unique expression of African identity that survived the ravages of slavery, it faces strong opposition in New Orleans’ largely Catholic and Baptist black community. Gregg, an African-American tour guide and driver whose family has lived here for generations and who asked to withhold his last name, echoed sentiments widely shared by many in his community who declined to speak on the record.
“If it was up to me, every Voodoo shop in the world would be closed down,” said Gregg, a devout Catholic, “for the simple fact that no one should think they should have that much power over anybody’s life.”
African-American history professor Kodi Roberts, a native New Orleanian writing a book on Voodoo and power, began studying the religion “as a way to understand the evolution of black identity in the U.S.”
But he found it wasn’t so simple. “Funnily enough, the more research I did, the less black and African Voodoo started to look,” he said. “You ask yourself, ‘When was this black?’”
Some say that after centuries of vilification by the Catholic Church, literal demonization by Hollywood and being virtually outlawed in the South under codes that, for example, prohibited the unlicensed practice of medicine, Voodoo may have become a lot more attractive to white spiritual seekers than to their black counterparts.
“If you’re black and you’ve fought so hard not to be identified with barbarism, why would you say, ‘Yes, [I practice Voodoo]’?” said Ina Fandrich, a German immigrant, a prominent scholar and the author of “The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux.” Fandrich spoke to Al Jazeera from the Masonic Cemetery with her partner, Glover, an African-American native of Baton Rouge who practices much of his Voodoo in cemeteries.
‘Undercover Voodoo’
Voodoo New Orleans
Ina Fandrich, left, and Elmer T. Glover.Massoud Hayoun
“Voodoo has been vilified,” said Glover, 68, adding that he was disowned by his staunchly Catholic mother when he started practicing. But, he insists, “she was undercover Voodoo, for sure.” When Glover was a child, a tornado passed his Baton Rouge home, and the family took shelter in their bathroom while his mother said a rosary. Every house nearby was completely destroyed, in Glover’s telling of the event, except his childhood home.
“It’s the power of prayer,” Fandrich said, explaining that prayer as a magical tool is a core element of Voodoo. Glover’s “spiritual calling comes from the line of his mother. There’s not a single mother in his family [who wasn’t powerful]. They may have been good Catholics, but when people needed help …” She trailed off and smiled suggestively.
Many practitioners of Voodoo — like believers in Santeria and other unions of African spiritualism and Christianity in the New World — put God and Jesus above the pantheon of African demigods.
Marie Laveau, hailed by many in New Orleans as a Voodoo queen and believed to have been a free woman of color in 19th century New Orleans, is said to have been a devout Catholic who brought comfort to a beleaguered black community with her Voodoo. Her presumed tombs — there are three throughout the city — and other sites associated with her life continue to draw tourists and practitioners, but some say the Catholic Church hasn’t reciprocated Laveau’s respect for the Holy See. In December of 2013, a vandal covered one tomb in pink latex paint. Then the Archdiocese of New Orleans pressure-washed the structure, chipping away the original plaster and brick in the process. That came after decades of people kicking and drawing on the structure for luck, which caused the tomb to slowly deteriorate.
“What the Catholic Church did was really passive aggressive,” said Voodoo Authentica’s Lavi. “It seems kind of underhanded.” New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond told Al Jazeera in October that all tombs “should be respected” but that the church “does not endorse Voodoo.”
The church maintains that the ancestor worship common in African tradition is a form of necromancy and strictly against Catholic doctrine. But in the New World, Fandrich says, the church often turned a blind eye as long as Catholics accepted the basic tenets of the faith.
voodoo New Orleans
A visitor at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 stops to organize offerings at one of several graves alleged to contain the remains of Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.”William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
‘No Voodoo community’
Voodoo New Orleans
A close-up of the tomb above.William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
Regardless of the local church’s intentions toward African spiritualism, New Orleans black Voodoo society is in a state of decline, Fandrich said.
Under Jim Crow, “Voodoo was a crime. If you practiced Voodoo, you ended up in jail,” she said. “I have tons of records where Voodoo priests were accused and jailed for years for practicing medicine without a license.”
Roberts has also tracked the criminalization of African spirituality in his research.
“You have Voodoo practitioners arrested but never charged for anything related to their religion. The police charge them with nebulous crimes — disturbing the peace, charged with being a suspicious and dangerous character,” he said. Those running businesses involving Voodoo were “charged with the kinds of crimes you charge a con artist with — obtaining money under false pretenses.”
And until the 1940s, when many in black communities in the South started moving north and rejecting traditions in pursuit of urban modernity, newspaper articles covered Voodoo gatherings to illustrate that “blacks are uncivilized. Left to their own devices, this is what they do, Voodoo,” Roberts said.
The result is a persistent idea in the black community that “if you’re Voodoo, it means you are criminal, immoral, uncultured,” Fandrich said. “The stigma is so potent that if you do believe, [people wonder,] ‘Why would you sell yourself out?’”
There was a short-lived resurgence of Voodoo in the black community in the 1970s amid movements to embrace an African cultural identity as a means of empowerment, analysts say. But it didn’t take off broadly in black American communities where social justice movements were fueled by ideologies rooted in Christianity, Islam and socialism.
These days, there are no known initiations of priests in New Orleans Voodoo. Instead, priests and priestesses typically have initiations from Vooodoo centers abroad such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and even as far away as the West African city of Porto-Novo, Benin, where Glover was initiated.
voodoo New Orleans
Voodoo dolls for sale at Voodoo Authentica.William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
Voodoo revival?
Voodoo New Orleans
A neon sign at Voodoo Authentica.William Widmer for Al Jazeera America
Black Catholic and Baptist residents of New Orleans usually answered no when asked whether Voodoo had been practiced in their families. But upon reflection, a number said they observed practices that they conceded could be rooted in Voodoo. A medical student said his mother had told him that to keep a man, a woman should bury a pair of his underwear in the backyard. Akeia Bernard, a Rhode Island native and anthropology teacher at Boston’s Wheelock College visiting New Orleans with her students says that although she “grew up super-Catholic,” as an adult she realized her grandmother “did things super-African.”
“When we would brush our hair or clip our nails, we’d have to burn it,” she explained. “My grandmother would say it’s a sanitary way to get rid of bodily stuff. But my mother said later that she was afraid someone would take those things and do bad things to you” using Voodoo-related magic.
One of Bernard’s students, Mia Richardson, 22, offered a different take, seeing Voodoo as “a way of hope” in an America rife with racism. “It gave the slaves hope,” she said. “I think with all the recent events [in the black community], people are starting to lose hope. I would practice Voodoo. I’m interested in it. I feel it would give me hope.”
It may be easier to find outsiders embracing Voodoo than it is to find locals willing to admit to doing so, but there are some. Sitting at Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel, a predominantly black Catholic congregation near Congo Square, where Laveau is said to have practiced, Lacide Johnson, 53, is one New Orleans native who proudly professes belief in both Christianity and Voodoo.
“Voodoo is inspirational,” he said, adding that because of its emphasis on contacting ancestors and getting back to African roots, “it helps you to learn who you are.”
After an accident the night before, Johnson went with a severe back injury first to the church to get charitable help to pay for his expensive prescriptions, then to the Voodoo temple of Priestess Miriam Chamani, just a few blocks away on North Rampart Street.
At the temple, Chamani said she saw hope for black America in Voodoo. “I have things from Africa I never knew I’d have. They came freely. I didn’t have to pay no $3,000 to go there to get it,” she said, meaning that although her gifts come from a faraway continent, they are within her. She said her mother worked for slave labor wages in a Mississippi cotton field.
“The individuals who hid in a tree to keep from being eaten by an animal, they put their intention into surviving another day,” she said. “The archetypes of humanity help us to become more reflective.” For Chamani, like most anthropologists, everyone’s roots are in Africa, regardless of color.