A Dead Voudou Queen Led Me Back to Jesus

In my early thirties, after more than two decades of rejecting all organized religion, I found myself hungry for something I could not name. So I began seeking sustenance, and several years of reading, yearning, solitary exploring, and spiritual experimentation slowly brought me back to my Catholic roots and eventually into a Christ-lit contemplative journey.

There were circuitous twists and turns and wildly graced moments before that homecoming. I share one such moment here, in celebration of All Soul's Day.

It was early summer, 1994. After several years of graduate school and teaching college-level writing, I was depressed, burned out, and numb. The semester that had just ended had been exceptionally rough. I had received a few heart-breakingly horrible student evaluations at a time when it was taking every ounce of my energy to teach. Also--through dreams and through personal introspection--I had been hit with some deeply disquieting insights. The most disturbing of them was: I do not know how to love. Although I could put on a fairly good act of seeming concerned and engaged, interiorly I was exhausted and deeply thirsty. I harbored bitterness toward my students for not liking me and for not learning from me. I felt put-upon by friends who appeared to need something from me that I could not give. Everything and everyone seemed to be sucking my energy away, and my contracted little self felt utterly incapable of reaching out to others to give or receive genuine loving-kindness.   

Perhaps, I thought, I do not know what love really is.

At the time, my spiritual explorations had me dabbling in paganism and Voudou. Gathering magical ingredients, constructing small altars, preparing candles, and being attentive to the phases of the moon for ceremonial purposes had become a creative outlet for me. The rituals that I discovered in various local botanicas and psychic shops were tasty spiritual recipes; I was cooking, stirring it up, concocting potent cleanses and delectable spells. True: my educated, rational side remained fairly skeptical about the effectiveness of these rituals. But at the very least, I figured, they helped to focus intention and to approach projects and life events with conscious preparation and a sense of reverence.

Not a heavy-handed reverence, though. My skepticism allowed a light touch, a playfulness within the serious seeker’s hike I was on. These rituals initially served as a kind of lived performance art for me -- an expression of yearnings I was unable to articulate in any other way. My body, with the help of the earth and the cosmos and the motions prescribed in the rituals, was engaging in a dance of prayer, though that was not the phrase I typically used to describe my activities at the time.

I was particularly taken with the work of Luisah Teisch, a storyteller, teacher, and priestess of the goddess Oshun in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition. Teisch is the author of Jambalaya, a book of African-American wisdom, memoir, and Voudou-informed practices that a friend had given to me as a gift.

Undoubtedly, my Catholic upbringing had imprinted me with a taste for ritual, but in 1994 I was still avoiding anything having to do with mainstream religion. Teisch’s book was full of advice on altar-making, down-home spells, and candle work that appealed to me. It was also written with care, offered as an introduction to a rich blend of African wisdom, goddess spirituality, and Catholic ritual that had received little attention from religion-and-spirituality book publishers. I loved Teisch’s unashamed declaration that “Voudou has been mislabeled, misunderstood, and exploited …. Let the truth be known: Voudou is a science of the oppressed, a repository of womanknowledge.”

Delicious stew for my beaten-down soul, this Jambalaya.

Right after that horrific spring ‘94 teaching semester, I had to attend a family reunion across the country in South Carolina. Greyhound buses were offering a $68 summer special to travel anywhere in the U.S.A. So I decided to ride the Hound from southern California to South Carolina and back again, stopping for a few days in New Orleans. Roughly: a 6000 mile pilgrimage, by bus and on foot.

I wanted to go to New Orleans because there is a special ritual, described in Teisch’s Jambalaya, that requires a visit to the tomb of Marie LaVeau, the famous multiracial Voudou queen (and visitor-of-prisoners-and-the-sick church lady) of the Crescent City. The ritual enables one to address the spirit of Mam’zelle Marie and ask for her assistance. My crazy, unspoken hope was that a visit to her tomb would help me find a way out of the drought and disquiet that had settled into my life.

One week before my excursion, when the phase of the moon and the planetary hours were just right, I spent an entire night cleaning, blessing, and dressing (with sacred oils) special colored candles I had acquired at a local botanica. I felt like the timing of my trip was auspicious because a comet, a seed of the cosmos, would soon be colliding with Jupiter – the planet that represents expansion. I lit the candles for seven nights and invoked Yemaya, the Yoruba ocean goddess (and giver of fertility), asking her for a successful journey and a fruitful visit to Marie’s tomb.

I managed to rent a room in the French Quarter, just a few blocks from the St. Louis Cemetery, where Marie’s tomb is located. In her instructions for the tomb ritual, Teisch suggested wearing light clothing and a white gele or headdress. “If you’ve been sick, or feel a little frightened, you may further protect yourself by pressing a white carnation (bottom side down) to the center of your scalp beneath the headdress.” I spent my entire first day walking around New Orleans searching for a white gele and carnation. I found neither, but my wandering led to great opportunities to savor beignets, gumbo, and street-corner jazz.

The day of the ritual started out balmy and sultry, with a definite potential for thunderstorms. The atmosphere seemed laced at the edges with danger. What if there is lightning? What if I can’t find Marie’s tomb? Might I end up lost in a cemetery as a tornado approaches? Since I had found no gele or carnation, I would have to settle for my off-white floppy hat at as headdress. Remaining determined, I gathered the items I would need for meeting the spirit of Marie: seven dimes, an ankh around my neck, and my prayer, which I had written down on a small piece of paper.

“As you approach the gate of St. Louis Cemetery #1,” explains Teisch, “knock three times with your left hand, scrape the soles of your shoes on the banquette outside of the gate, and ask, ‘St. Peter, St. Peter, please let me in.’”

I did so, feeling a little foolish and thankful that no one was around. I also added, for good measure, a little prayer to the Mother that I had come across at the Voodoo Museum:

Shield me, keep me,
Dispel my fear.
Save me, shield me,
Be ever near.

“If you feel the response is no, step back and leave. If yes, step forward over the threshold, stop on the other side of it, and turn to your left. Walk down the aisle to the first available right turning and take it. You are now in front of Mamzelle’s tomb.”

I did not feel a response either way, so I just kept following the instructions. Marie’s tomb – above ground as all are in New Orleans – was broken down and seemed to need tending, but it was also decorated with wilting flowers, red beads, and various offerings: a tiny crown of thorns, a little glass-encased cake decorated with a white face and red eyes, slivers of wood with purple ribbons attached, pennies, and pieces of red brick.

I walked around and bowed at each the four corners of her disheveled grave. Then, with my back facing the front of the tomb, I extended my arms first to the sky, then to the ground, while praying aloud for Marie’s assistance. I asked her to help me find a way to be of service to the world – especially to lead me to a way that would benefit a few of my sad and lonely female friends, since there seemed to be nothing within me capable of being genuinely helpful or loving to them. I asked Marie to open the eyes of my thirsty soul, to make me sensitive, to deepen my intuition. I prayed for healing, guidance, and balance.

The instructions continued: “Return to the front of the tomb, face it, press your forehead against it, and place seven silver dimes in the basket attached to its front.”

There was no basket, so I simply laid the dimes out on a shallow ledge of the tomb.

“You will find several pieces of red brick lying on the ground. Pick one up and make your X on the spot of your choice.”

I drew my X, noticing that it was one among hundreds of X’s, some bright, some fading.

“Say thank you. Wait. Listen for a message.”

I stood there for a while, waiting and listening and sweating – it was probably 100 degrees, seriously humid, with thunderheads gathering above. I had a disposable camera with me and snapped a few pictures of the tomb. At that moment a pale, bedraggled, and seemingly homeless man appeared. He smiled at me and I saw that his upper gums were bleeding. “I hear that she especially appreciates tobacco,” he said as he placed a cigarette behind a piece of red brick. His presence was somewhat unnerving; I had thought I was the only living soul around. Was his appearance part of Marie’s "message?" I reached into my bag to get my pack of Newports, and left Marie yet another cigarette, this time one with menthol. Bleeding Gums then mentioned that he had just noticed another tomb was being built and that the artistry was amazing. Sure enough, in the near distance three men were pouring cement for a fresh tomb. I was beginning to get the heebee-jeebees.

If this were a dream, I mused, I might think that new tomb was for me . . .

Instead of cutting a hasty exit, as instinct would have me do, I ended up wandering around the cemetery for a little while, perusing the headstone inscriptions and statues of angels and saints. I was still waiting to hear a “message,” and began to wonder if I had unwittingly bungled things by taking photos inside a sacred burial ground, when I was supposed to be there to perform a brief ritual. Maybe Marie did not appreciate such a thing? I decided to walk by Marie’s tomb one more time – perhaps I should apologize for my clumsiness and lack of reverence.

Once again facing the crumbling grave, I noticed that my cigarette and seven dimes were gone! Everything else was still intact – several pennies, and the other cigarette that Bleeding Gums had left. Only my offerings were gone. Was this some kind of sign? Or had Bleeding Gums simply scooped up my seventy cents and menthol cigarette? And if he had, might that have some kind of hidden meaning? Was he something other than he appeared to be? Was Marie trying to tell me that she had accepted my offerings and heard my prayers?

Troubled, bemused, and sweltering, I decided it was time to go. “When you leave you should knock again (preferably with the right hand), scrape your feet and ask St. Peter to let you out,” Teish writes. “If you felt sad or scared while performing this ritual, it is advisable that you knock, ask, then step backward over the threshold.”

I thanked Mam’zelle and walked out backwards over the threshold. At that instant, the bells for a noontime Mass started ringing. There was a Catholic church right across the street from the cemetery – the International Shrine of St.Jude (the saint of the desperate and of lost causes). I hadn’t been in a church in maybe fifteen or twenty years. Something urged me to step inside.

The Mass was being held in a small, humble, interior chapel – not the main sanctuary of the church. It was a weekday so there were just a few people, mostly older black women, in attendance. I also noticed a couple of Mohawk-sporting punk rockers and some tourists. A youngish black woman wearing a black skirt, white tights and black shoes sat in front of me. Her nails were polished black, and her headscarf had the words “Grim Reaper” printed on it in red. Poking out from under her scarf were yellow hair rollers. She turned out to be the cantor and the lector – the person who reads the scriptures and sings the responsorial psalms as part of the liturgy. I loved this; she was definitely from the Voudou side of the street. The priest was a very young, bearded white kid with a gold earring in one ear. He wore jeans with black tennis shoes under his robes. He seemed new at the job and nervous, which was quite endearing.

Masses that I had attended as a child were frequently formal and stiff. So to see punk rockers with blue-haired old ladies, a funky cantor sporting a grim reaper scarf, and a young, nervous priest totally disarmed me. Everything seemed so improbable, in terms of the mixture of folks gathered there to worship, yet also so down-home, so grits-and-catfish, so unassumingly hospitable.

Still, I sat near the back and surveyed everything, attempting to maintain a tourist persona: I’m just going to sit here and watch the “natives,” I thought. And then the opening hymn, carried mostly by the crackly voiced and slightly out-of-tune older women, began. It was “Amazing Grace.”

Suddenly and strangely, I was flooded with emotion. Tears sprang to my eyes, and it is usually impossible for me to cry in front of strangers. A gate opened within me even as I struggled to keep the tears from reaching spill-point—a protective skill that I had practiced for much of my life. It was to no avail. The tears ran down my face. I bowed my head and wiped them away, hoping to remain unnoticed. I had forgotten all my childhood Catholic training, when to sit and stand and kneel, when to say amen and thanks be to God. I did not really hear the lector’s scripture readings, nor can I recall anything about the priest’s homily. All I was able to do was sit with this rush of emotion. Deep and dry interior spaces in my soul had opened up to receive an unnamable flow that was pouring into me with waterfall force. I also felt, obliquely and mysteriously, that I was being welcomed home after a long time away. Recognizing myself as the long-lost prodigal child, in a flash of gratitude I understood that everything and everyone I had encountered that day – Mam’zelle Marie, Bleeding Gums, the grave workers, the bones lying in the tombs, the punk rockers, the grim-reaper cantor, the blue-haired old women, the earringed priest, the thunderheads – each and all was in some hidden sense a family member welcoming me home. Here I was: fully home on Earth, a daughter of the human family, alive and afloat in a wild unfolding universe.

In my mind a recognition flowered: This is the Holy Spirit introducing me to the mystical body of Christ.

That particular summer bus journey and the ritual at Marie’s tomb, followed by the mass and my first Holy Communion (I’d never received the Eucharist as a child), shifted the trajectory of my life. I think of it as my moment of conversion – the moment when my heart opened to receive a flow of mysterious nourishment from a loving Source outside of myself. Love, I saw, could not be conjured up by a striving, half-formed ego attempting to sport compassion and kindness like some eye-catching garb. Love was not of my own making, nor could it be created through any mixture of herbs and oils and timed candle-lightings. Love, though “within,” originates outside of small-self me. Up until that day, I had lived my adult life as though I was responsible for manufacturing love and compassion on my own steam. In effect, I was living in a very small, self-focused world, a world largely closed to God, to the source of Love, to the wide river of Being itself. This unexpected moment of conversion entailed an opening up to this mysterious Source, this unbounded Vastness that is also – somehow -- intimate and cradling. 

Nothing was ever the same after that; there was no going back, no returning to the mindset I had previously occupied.

Now, I know what some folks will say about this event: that I had set myself up with all the rituals and prayers to Yemaya, the journey to NOLA to ask for Marie's intercession and guidance – isn’t Voudou really just another variant of Catholicism, anyway? A more subversive strand of it that would appeal to a confused and moderately depressed creative-writing grad student, a bridge back to the tradition that had been imprinted into my consciousness early on? Wasn’t there just a deep part of me that simply wanted to reconcile with this tradition – and all those experiments with paganism and Jambalaya provided the means to do so?

And I’d have to say: Yes – that’s entirely possible. Probable, even.

But here is another way that my soul, on this All Soul’s Day, likes to tell that story: I was lost, adrift in a dry land far from home. My heart cried out, and my cries were heard. Messages and wisdom from the ancestors arrived through friends and books and storytellers. I was given instructions on how to proceed: Visit the tomb of one of our saints, Marie LaVeau, an ancestor who knows what you need. Using rituals to help temper my skepticism, I approached her with reverence and with sincerity. And she, Marie, a beautiful echo of Mary, the God-Bearer, took me by the hand and led me to a temple built in honor of lost causes. There, in the midst of elders and rebels and hospitable strangers, I was found. Fed at the great banquet. And welcomed home.