American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World Read Online Free PDF Page B

for that matter. There'd been very little time for sleep since the initiation started, and most of last night they had been up making sacrifices to the spirits in order to achieve ocha, the ultimate goal of the santeria quest. Ocha means power.
     

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Each altar featured. the statues, herbs, flowers, colors and offerings pecular to its god. Lorita's Oshun shrine, for example, was maintained in a wicker cabinet filled with superas, a fan, a small black doll, and mirrors.
I ducked Rogelio, grabbed a beer and went into the living room. Lorita was taking a break from the cooking, and came in to sit next to me on the couch. We had a lot to catch up on. Someone brought her a Coke, and while the Cubans and the church members and the relatives and friends went about their business, Lorita told me the story of how, only a year earlier, she'd met Rogelio in New Jersey. A strange, contradictory, angry tale, it was really her way of telling me she was fed up with her guests and couldn't wait to be rid of them. I'd only been there an hour and understood completely.
Someone interrupted us to tell Lorita that the yaguo had to "go." Miffed, Lorita excused herself to escort the initiate, as was her duty. But Lorraine must've done something wrong, and I could hear Lorita scolding her. "She's just a rich lady with long fingernails," Lorita muttered as they passed through toward the bathroom. "She's not used to being told what to do. But the Lord is good for bringing you down to the level of everyone else."
Rogelio swirled in from another room, primped up in a long, semi-translucent yellow shirt, untucked, in the Caribbean style. He joked about borrowing one of Lorita's furs, because an unseasonable cool front had blown down from Canada. Lorita's body tensed. The Cubans had been eating her food, using her phone for long-distance calls, sleeping in her bedroom, and now, it seemed, were also wearing her clothes. "He treat me like a slave," she whispered.
Yet he was her padrino. And more. He had, in the last year, initiated four of her children: Gary, Juanika, and the twins Andrew and Anthony. It was terrible to feel she was being used by the man to whom she had entrusted so much.
     

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In a few months she would break with him forever. By then she would have enough initiates in New Orleans, all black Americans, not to need the Cubans anymore. Consciously, and with the cunning of the streets, Lorita was making her own dynasty. It was funnyLorita never liked the word voudou, feeling it had long ago been propagandized as the stuff of evil and sorcery.
"Santeria" was okay, because the Cubans had convinced her santeria was something else. But santeria is voudou as surely as Catholicism is Christianity, and in her own way, forging untutored but determined into the nearly vanished world of the orisha in America, Lorita Mitchell was as true a daughter of the African powers, the vo-du, as had ever landed on these shores.
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Next time I saw her, near the end of initiation week, she had poured herself into a form-hugging denim sheath and was in full Oshunsensual, stunning, a volcano of vanity, all hallmarks of the goddess whose mythological links include Venus, Isis and Aphrodite. It was the night before I would go to the Quarter with Gary and Lorraineand time for what in santeria is called the medio, a feast. The hard work of preparing the sacrifices for the spirits, of the nights of praying, and the haggard demeanor of those who had participated, was replaced by a partybeer, wine, singing and dancing.
The yaguo sat under her canopy on straw mats, greeting but not speaking to those who came to pay their respects. She wore a plain white dress, and, on her head, for Shango, a silver crown with red parrot feathers. Her face bore white markings feigning mutton chop sideburns and a mustache, to symbolize the old man aspect of her patron deity, Obatala. Her neck was strung with the vari-colored beads of Shango, Elegba, Obatala,