Read Online American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World by Rod Davis - Free Book Online

box of chirping, yellow-fuzz chicks. Ochosi must really be hungry, I figured, and had him wait in a folding chair under the radio, mercifully not turned on yet. Right after that came a young woman and her daughter. The mother looked like Dionne Warwicka lot, and I told her so. She was very shy, at least to a white man, but when I explained I was the temporary receptionist, she told me she'd come in about the girl, who had taken a chair in the corner, watching the boy with the chicks. Only eleven, the child was big and busty. She had started hanging around shopping malls and boys.
Before mom got much further with her story, Lorita banged open the door from her reading room. "Come over here, girl, 'case I need to hit you on the head!" she barked, striding up to the counter like she'd just been wired in to the main galactic transformer. The mother, who had been leaning languidly against the counter top, stiffened like she'd just been plugged in too.
"You run around and have different men over," Lorita snarled, "how you expect your daughter to respect you? Look at that child. She got titties big as mine. Why you let her go out alone? Juanika. thirteen and I don't let her go nowhere alone."
The mother mumbled something about having to work and not having enough time, but Lorita shooed the pair of them into her office. Before she followed them in she whispered to me. "The kid's problem is the momma's problem. I told her she got
     

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to take care of her business first. But she don't want to hear that."
She shook her head in exasperation and closed the door. I could hear yelling inside. Before there were any readings that day, there was going to be plenty of "bitching out," as they call it in New Orleans, and some praying. Nobody went in to see Lorita and came out with any ambiguity. The mother and daughter emerged looking like they'd survived a hurricane, but thought that things might now be better for them. They were to return the next day, when Lorita would clean the girl and wash her hair and feet with special herbs. She was not to bathe herself before then. And there was more: while reaching across her open Bible to hold the girl's hands, Lorita had seen the spirit of the girl's dead father. Killed in a drug deal, his hovering soul was

Reading desk (with Bible) inside Lorita's reading
room at St. Lazarus botanica.
     

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filled with unrest. Lorita saw that he had been calling out to his daughter, which would account for her change of behavior.
Lorita instructed the girl and her mother to prepare a gift for the egun, and also for the father, who must be placated so he could leave the girl alone and return to his own journey through the spirit world. Until then, the girl would remain in danger. The mother said okay, but it had to be secret, because her own father knew of Lorita and feared her as the "bu-du"a pronunciation common in New Orleanswoman. And the mother went through with her duties. Did it work? Who can say? When I saw the mother several weeks later, she said she and her daughter were getting along better, and both were attending Spiritual Church.

Altar table in St. Lazarus reading room. Pumpkin
for Oshun and various other gifts and candles 
for saints and orisha. Palo stick against the wall.
     

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Four or five more clients meanwhile had shown up, and the boy with the chicks leftapparently he was just delivering. I don't know which were truly "urgent," but all of them that daymost dayswere at least desperate.
The next appointment was distraught because her husband was being seduced by an "outside woman." Half-sitting on her desk, listening to the story, Lorita decided the husband had been "fixed," probably with a "binding poison" of urine, underarm sweat and moisture from the paramour's "cat" mixed into coffee. The wife made a face at the thought of such a beverage. Lorita laughed and said if you mixed it right, it wouldn't taste funny. She said every time the man