by Ya Sezi Bo Oungan

New Orleans Voodoo, was a public ecstatic style of worship and veneration of a collection of Deities, folk saints, local heroes and legends, figures like Le Grand Zombi, Papa Lebas, Dani Blanc, St. Anthony, St. Rita, Sante Agassou, Pirate Rouge, Anne Christmas, and many others.

Surrounding the external public practice was a system of initiation and supporting magic, like we find in many African Diaspora Traditions. Borrowing largely from the Congolese and the Fon people from Dahomey, a first group of enslaved people brought to the colony. This tradition had a strong 200-250 years of public mixed class and race interaction. The Native people and the free Africans that lived and worked in the city lived on what is now named Bayou Road.  It would be remiss to mention this spot in this history as the people and descendants hold a part of the story.

Public Voodoo services would be held at Congo Square, which at one point was on the very edge of the city of New Orleans.  The service would be led by a Voodoo Queen, and a Voodoo King.  We can tell by the use of these titles that this was probably a Congolese insertion, as the Congolese brought this power structure, levels of interaction and importance with them to the New World.

The most famous of the Voodoo Queens was Marie Laveau I, who lived a long and storied life. But by the time Marie II took over, the Americans had purchased Louisiana from Napoleon, installed a Protestant governor from Pennsylvania in the city, and had begun cracking down on the Catholic and Bohemian levels of intermingling that the city had always know.

One of the things greatly changed was the level of interaction that black enslaved people could have with free people of color, and their intermingling with white people of the city. Only a few years before, a railway had been built to accommodate the many who desired to participate the annual head washing ceremony on Saint John’s Eve.  Now they found themselves the objects of spectacle and ridicule, as the shifting in sensibilities had been introduced. It would not be long before the Americanization act, which made the public practice of Voodoo illegal with capital punishment.  This became the choice way to deal with this undesired holding on to black African power, identity and self-expression.  This was in keeping with the legislation that was introduced in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion outside of Charleston, South Carolina in 1739. The Stono Rebellion saw the end of the use of the drum by Africans.

It stands to mention that one of the few surviving drum rhythms from the past that is still played to this day is the baseline of New Orleans Bounce rhythm.  It is accompanied by twerking, a dance that displays the hips, in the past and as it is now.  As the public practice went underground, so did the knowledge of the practice.  This was once a part of the supporting spiritual practice, like gris gris and other charms.  Some of this is still found in the other surviving tradition of folk healing and magic preserved by traiteurs (or treaters), who combined Catholic prayer and folk remedies to cure everything from colic to cancer.

 If one were to go to New Orleans back in the day, where would you find this Voodoo? Not in the French Quarter, not in the Garden District, but for sure in the housing projects where most of it lived up until the displacement of Hurricane Katrina.

The other part of the legacy of New Orleans Voodoo lives with the Black and Creole burial customs, and the other part with the Mardi Gras Indians. Everyone knows about the second line, but nobody talks about the first line and the rending of the veil. First line is the walking from the funeral service to the cemetery that culminates into the rending of the veil at the crypt side, where the entrance to the charnel house is open.  This is a moment of incorporation by the deceased, or by the ancestors, or other forces experienced by the person who is opening the tomb.

Another funeral custom is the intentional leaving of shells on the grave. This is a direct relation and retention to the idea of the Calunga – the sea of souls.

(Calunga is a Congolese spirit of death and the sea. The word Calunga literally means “sea” but has implications in Congolese cosmology beyond salty watery depths. Calunga also refers to the realm of the ancestors. The realm of death in many African traditions is located beneath the sea. The ocean is associated with fertility, abundance, and death.)

For the most part, Mardi Gras Indians were and are still Native American masking African practices. To be Native American or black was enough of a disadvantage, but it was somewhat better to be Native American.

More to come in part 2.