The woods of Louisiana are deep and dark enough to send a shiver down anyone’s spine. The woods span on for miles, sandwiching long stretches of winding highway, creating never-ending canopies of green, suspended high atop the long, lean trunks of mature pine trees. These canopies block the sun from penetrating the soil below and cast shadows over the tightly knit communities nearby.
What goes on in the depths of these woods is mysterious, so outsiders blanket their wonder with a specious answer, replacing one mystery with another: Where there is darkness, let there be voodoo.
The practice of voodoo is associated with darkness. In the dark underworld of blood-thirsty zombies and animal sacrifice, dark-skinned people are believed to congregate in secret underground locales to conjure spirits and hex foes using snakes and dolls. This understanding is all wrong, but it’s exactly what the vendors and tour guides up and down Bourbon Street want everyone to assume—because it sells.
The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau reports that New Orleans accommodated just over seven million visitors in 2007, and those visitors spent $4.8 billion. Around seventy percent of visitors were in New Orleans for pleasure in ‘07 and over eighty percent reported visiting the French Quarter and Bourbon Street during their stay.
Tourism is arguably New Orleans’ most important industry and judging from the number of voodoo-themed shops, tours, t-shirts, dolls, and mini-marts available throughout the city, the African-derived religion is a mainstay in the marketing of the place. But its public portrayal is largely inaccurate and plays into misconceptions that undermine its authenticity and perpetuate its negative reception as a religion and way of life.
“They’re presenting what people think is supposed to be there,” observes Patrick Polk, a professor of world arts and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. “From big parties with drums to priests, priestesses, and people getting possessed and calling down the gods, there’s no good evidence that this ever really existed outside our perception of New Orleans.”
This (mis)perception can be traced back to the findings documented for the Louisiana Writers’ Project, a New Deal relief effort organized by the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. The purpose of the writers’ project was to produce a series of sectional guidebooks that focused on the cultural, economic, and scenic resources of the United States. Some scholars argue that the writers based their New Orleans voodoo field reports on folklore, as opposed to historical research, and thereby question the validity of the completed project.
Author Robert Tallant, however, later based his book, Voodoo in New Orleans, on the work produced by the writers of the project. The book was well-received and widely distributed upon release—even local drug stores carried copies. It quickly emerged as the defining voice of New Orleans voodoo. Sixty years later, it’s still reprinted and used as a source of reference and controversy.
Tallant’s book served to “popularize” the idea of voodoo, says Jason Berry, a journalist and New Orleans native. The book was written with a racist slant, Berry acknowledges, and this set the stage for consumption of voodoo in the city in later years. Today most of the goods and services offered throughout the French Quarter pander to people’s wildest imaginings of black spiritual practice.
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Priestess Miriam Chamani’s Voodoo Spiritual Temple on N. Rampart street is a small shop filled with souvenir voodoo dolls. There is a hallway stocked with jarred herbs and other unlabeled ingredients used to make personalized gris-gris bags (which are thought to bring luck or protect their owners from evil). Outside, there’s a secondary building—an afterthought of sorts—entered only by exiting the rear of the shop. It is outfitted as the priestess’s temple, housing divination bones, other Catholic, Buddhist, and voodoo relics, and most importantly, the priestess’s snake.
Chamani is a local celebrity. She was named one of the top ten most powerful voodoo priestesses in New Orleans and has made numerous television appearances. She journeys abroad to offer her services to interested parties and claims to perform readings for international clients who fly into New Orleans for one-on-one consultations.
She is and does all of this, yet when pulled aside in the temple gift shop on a Saturday afternoon to briefly discuss her work and spiritual beliefs, Chamani seemed a bit bothered. She said only: “This space can tell you more about voodoo than I can tell you.”
By “this space,” she meant the gift shop.
“Voodoo is about moneymaking,” she said, half-jokingly, with a grin. She repeatedly vocalized her concern about missing sales during the interview. “We all got to pay light bills, heating bills, energy bills, water bills, and taxes, you know.”
Chamani says she receives one true believer for every person who walks into her temple to patronize the religion, “so it all balances out,” she reasons. Whether the self-appointed priestess actually practices what she preaches is questionable, but her need and lust for profit are not. She’s obviously willing to exploit her religion—by pushing handmade voodoo dolls and gris-gris bags onto non-believers—for the sake of a sale. Perhaps the only true religion behind her work is the worship of the ancestral spirit of one Adam Smith.
“When Miriam Chamani comes out with her snake, she’s sort of bringing to life the stereotypes and romantic popular culture images,” says Polk. “It’s not necessarily bad, but there’s not much behind it . . . It’s like going to Disneyland and riding the Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s all for show.”
Polk may be right. One of Chamani’s colleagues over at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, where Chamani worked when she initially moved to New Orleans over twenty years ago, spoke freely of the legitimacy, or illegitimacy, of the services provided by the museum.
“One of our priests is off doing a phony little reading for some convention as we speak,” commented Jerry Gandolfo, the general manager of the museum. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s very serious about himself, but if a convention calls and asks him to do a reading for them, he’s there for the money. He does those readings for show.”
Gandolfo explained that the work of the priests and priestesses is very draining, so to avoid throwing too much of themselves and their energy into each and every reading, they gauge the sincerity of the patron involved and tailor their services accordingly. For most of the readings and tours provided around Bourbon St., the sincerity of the patron is usually drowned out by a jumbo daiquiri, chased with a series of flaming shots, and a beer for good measure.
“What are you here for? Are you here to learn about voodoo or are you just here to be entertained?” asks Gandolfo. “I mean, we get a lot of people with drinks in their hands, drunk out of their wits, who ask, ‘Where can I find a voodoo doll? I got to find a voodoo doll to bring back home.’ I can either tell them to get lost, or I can sell it to them and tell them to get lost, so I’ll sell them one because rent here in the quarter is a fortune.”
Another popular request is, “I’m a good Christian, but will you do a death curse for me?”
Dora Hembry, a voodooist sales clerk at Voodoo Authentica, gets this request all the time. Hembry finds the request not only hypocritical, but also delusional and offensive. She complains that people often affiliate her with evil, an accusation that never quite loses its sting.
Lifelong Louisiana resident Sterling Hayes is one of those cynics,
“If you’re weak-minded, they’ll prey on you,” he argues. “It’s trickery. It’s harmful. It’s something used to deceive people. If you believe in it and go pay your money for it, they’ll go and take your money. No doubt about it.”
For the sake of getting the bills paid, New Orleans voodooists seem eager to sell out their religion for a fast buck. A voodoo doll here, a gris-gris bag there—but at what cost? The money paid for such items does little to correct the misunderstandings and strong opinions folks have of the religion, and it only perpetuates the notion that voodooists are out for themselves and cannot be trusted.
New Orleans voodoo is much richer than the “Made in China” tag found on most of the Bourbon St. merchandise lets on. It’s homegrown. It’s found in the soil and shadows that support and surround the everyday lives of Louisiana natives. It’s local folklore that finds its way into perpetuity by word of mouth.
It’s the doctor who tells the mother of a sick child to go find a woman who has never seen her mama and ask her blow into the child’s mouth for healing. It’s the Mason jar, filled with a foul-smelling concoction of atralagus, onion, and other herbs, stored behind the front door and used to treat the family when the common cold hits. It’s sweeping the porch with red brick dust every morning to uncross any gris-gris, or ill will, that may have landed on one’s front doorstep overnight.
Over sixty million people practice voodoo worldwide, and according to Gandolfo, fifteen percent of New Orleanians practice the formal religion. One hundred percent of the folklore that steers and colors the lives of New Orleans natives is rooted in voodoo, he stresses, and for the most part, this voodoo is disguised and passed on as family tradition.
New Orleanians are full of family stories that chip away at the darkness of voodoo. These stories illuminate the nuanced, folkloric presence voodoo-inspired practices have in their everyday lives and the role it played in their upbringing. The dark distortions and caricatures propagated in the French Quarter may be profitable, but the real voodoo experience cannot be bought and sold—because it’s locked away in the family vaults, or otherwise lost in those deep, dark woods where only the natives can find it.
Tags: new orleans voodoo