It was a chilly January morning in 2001 when my family and I
arrived in New Orleans to drop me off at my new residence in the graduate dorms
of Loyola University. I was beginning a masters program in religious studies,
but more importantly I was finally moving to the one place in the country I’d
most wanted to live since I first visited when I was 18. After many, many trips
during community college (Co-Lin in Wesson), the year I took off from school
and lived in Jackson, and university (Mississippi State University), I would at
last have a New Orleans address and be able to call it home. I was a ball of
mixed emotions, trying to contain my excitement while also feeling sad saying
goodbye to my family as they helped me move into my room, then drive away. I
was also nervous about grad school at a private (and Catholic!) university,
being this public school-educated Mississippi boy. However, the religious
studies program sounded awesome and I couldn’t wait to dive in. Speaking of
religion, if you’ve read my account of my journey in Wicca and Witchcraft (“Journey
of the Moon, Parts 1 and 2”) you know at this point in my life I’d been
practicing a very eclectic form of Wicca for a few years, and I was super excited about meeting people in the New Orleans pagan scene. (If not, go read
it.)
The last thing on my mind at this point was trying to
connect with any “voodoo” people. In fact, the only thing I really knew, or
thought I knew, about anything Afro-Caribbean was what I’d read online about
Santeria. A couple summers prior while at Mississippi State I apartment-sat for
one of the counselors of the Campus Crusade for Christ, which was weird
considering I was the president of the Wiccan/Pagan Student Alliance at the
time, but whatever. She was a minimalist and didn’t own a TV, so radio it was!
One Sunday morning NPR did a special on Santeria featuring sound clips from
Desi Arnaz singing “Babalu!” which of course caught my attention. So I went to
the library to look it up. Keep in mind that was around 1999 (aka The Dark Ages
of the internet), so there wasn’t that much out there. Anyway, the point is
that I didn’t really know anything about any of it, and I certainly wasn’t
expecting my life to take a complete left turn into lands of “darkest Africa!”
But considering how life can be sometimes, that’s exactly what happened.
I had a Planet Gay (or something like that) profile back in
the Stone age of gay internet dating and was so happy about being in New
Orleans and not having the nearest person on the site be an hour away. About a
week or two after settling into my new fancy cosmo city life I got a message.
He said his name was Mark, but he went by Aboudja (however the fuck you were
supposed to pronounce that I had no idea!) and wanted to know if I was
interested in meeting him. So my first date in this awesome new dream bubble I
was living was him picking me up in his jeep and taking around town to show me
the lay of the land. We grabbed some food and went back to his place, and that’s
when I discovered he was anything but ordinary. He was renting half a house
from his godsister Michelle on General Pershing Street a block or two riverside
(that means south in New Orleanian, lakeside would be north) of S Claiborne
Ave. I walked into the living room and there were colorful altars with Catholic
images and statues, lots of bottles, and many other things, too many to take
in. Unable to ignore the elephant in the room he told me quite casually that he
was an Houngan Asogwe (a what?) of Sevis Ginen (of who?). “Oh, you’re a Voodoo
Priest!” Well, something like that.
After that date Aboudja and I became friends (not
boyfriends) and I spent a lot of time with him at the CC’s coffee shop he
worked at on the corner of St. Philip and Royal in the French Quarter. We
talked about religion, magic, and of course Vodou (he corrected my spelling
pretty early on.) He’d recently gone back to Haiti for his third time going through
the kanzo (initiation.) Now, I’ve written about much of this in an article “Memories
of Kay Aboudja” for the purpose of preserving my memories of the Vodou House
that Aboudja Built, but I want to emphasize at this point how much I didn’t
appreciate back then just how much knowledge Aboudja had acquired over many
years of initiations, training, and trips back and forth to Haiti and New York,
where his at-that-time Mambo (priestess) lived. He’d lived in Haiti for a year,
spoke Haitian Kreole, knew his herbs, his prayers, his songs, just so much! To
this day I’ve never met another non-Haitian who went that deep into Vodou. A
white boy from Texas. He hated it when I called him white, always talking about
some Eastern European and Native ancestors, way back when…but he was white.
Anyway, I got invited to my first Vodou ceremony a year
later at the same house he brought me to on our (one!) date. I had no idea what
to expect, but I certainly didn’t expect to feel the same type of electricity
in the air as when I was younger and attended a Pentecostal church (Church of
God) in Mississippi! That shit was cray! After the party was over it was a
Hallelujah moment where I was utterly convinced that I’d finally found what I
was searching for. (And it was. At that time.) REAL spirits coming down into
people and interacting with us, not someone wearing crushed velvet standing in
a circle spouting off psycho-babble. (“Look inside yourself. You are stronger
than you know. Here’s a cookie, don’t be hungry.”) Wicca-what? Wicca-who? I
shelved that shit so fast and dove right into the waters of Ginen, swearing
never to look back again. We all know how that went, but anyhow I was super
stoked to finally be part of something that had a legit history that went back
before the 1940s. (Burn)
From January 2002 to January 2003 life was Vodou. Vodou was
life. I dropped out of the grad program (goodbye, stuffy old academia; hello,
living religion!), got a job as an archivist for the State of Louisiana’s Vital
Records like a grown-up, and moved into the Marigny area to be closer to
Aboudja and the botanica one of the house members, Tribble, opened, The New
Orleans Mistic on St. Claude (more info in the “Memories” article.) I spent all
my spare money building altars for the Lwa and learning how to serve them from
Aboudja. And by October of that year I got THE DREAM. The one where the Lwa
show you secrets only someone who’s gone through the kanzo would know. That was
the sign! I needed to go to Haiti and initiate. I was chosen. I was special. I
was validated. I was VERY young and naïve. But damn it I was going to Haiti!
AND it just so happened that the brand new job I’d gotten with the state was offering
a lot of overtime that I could use to take the time off I needed for the trip,
and Brandi Kelly of Voodoo Authentica offered me a part time job at her shop in
the Quarter, so there was the money! I worked my ass off for two months, taking
no days off and getting everything together just in time to leave. Nervous,
excited, and full of an optimism only a twenty-something with no experience whatsoever
could have, off we went!
Yeah, they tried to prepare us for Haiti. But Haiti’s not
really something you can prepare for, not mentally, anyway. Not that first
time. As you leave the airport there are lines of beggars on either side of you
desperately asking for money in broken English. Pregnant women crying, guys
with no legs, and Haitian dudes offering to carry your luggage…for a fee, of
course. However, we were well cared for and got scooped into the back of a
truck with boards for seats and no fucking shocks at all! Every bump, of which
there were many because the roads are shit, was felt by my scrawny white ass. I
probably had bruises but I couldn’t tell cause it was dark as fuck by the time
we got to where we were going…where ever the hell that was. (The roads made no
fucking sense, and I’d given up all hope of knowing if we were anywhere near
Port-au-Prince still.) When you’re used to having electricity 24 hours a day,
you don’t realize how pitch-fucking-black it can get until you’re stuck in a
third world country, somewhere in the middle of bumfuckegypt, with only candles
going. It was at this point I started to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake and
would make it back to the U.S. alive. But who cares cause I was gonna be
initiated into Haitian Vodou, bitches! Yeah! (Slight eye-twitching at this
point.)
The next morning: Here’s the toilet. You have to fill the
back of it with one of these buckets to make it flush because the water hasn’t
been turned on yet…but only if you go Number 2. “If it’s brown, flush it down.
If it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Here’s your bath, from the same set of buckets
(because the water hasn’t been turned on yet!!!), try not to use too much. But
the fucking coffee was awesome!
The first few days was the “acclimation period,” and boredom
quickly set in. Using what little Kreole I’d been able to absorb in a year I
tried making really basic conversation with some of the locals. That didn’t
last long. Tried reading a book I’d brought, then thought, “I’m in Haiti for my
kanzo, why am I reading Lord of the Rings?!?” So I put that away and counted
chickens until the ceremonies started, slowly getting used to the feeling that
I could never rinse off all the soap from my morning baths. Oh, how I would
miss that feeing in just a couple of days!
We were taken from the house we first stayed at to the place
the ceremonies would take place. Another butt-busting trip from the middle of
nowhere to the middle of nowhere else. I’m not going to relate the whole kanzo
experience, but in a nutshell here we go. The first night those of us going
through the kanzo slept on mats on the dirt floor outside the room we’d
eventually be cloistered in covered from head to toe in a dark, gritty oil. It
kept us warm and moisturized. The next two days were us sitting in small wooden
chairs with woven seats while the loud and aggressive “bat ger” ceremonies took
place and many of the ritual items we’d receive were being made. Drums,
dancing, possessions! Now we’re talking! Finally! The day after they gave each
of us 21 cleansing baths made with sacred herbs. I’ve never felt sexier than
sitting there soaking wet, shivering, between baths 18 and 19, with okra
sliming it way down my face. I still won’t eat okra today. After that we dressed in
whites and sat and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally that night the
ceremonies began, and we were spiritual “balanced” before being blindfolded and
led into the djevo, that tiny altar room we wouldn’t come out of for five days
later. I can’t talk about the rituals that took place inside, but I can say
this. Being closed up in a small room, sleeping on sheets on mats on the
ground, hot and with open flames going the whole time, not being able to take a
bath, and eventually being covered with all sorts of “really spiritual stuff”
takes its toll. And the smell. Oh my God, the smell. I called it Djevo Funk.
One woman lost her shit and went balls-to-the-wall crazy. And then something
happened to me.
Crazy lady had a fear of fire cause she was badly burned in
an accident she was in at another New Orleans Vodou house involving a gauzy
dress, an open-faced heater, and an inattentive Mambo. So, when the ants came
in for the food that was laying at our heads and the people doing the kanzo
came in with gasoline to sprinkle down (cause that’s always a great idea with
open flames everywhere!!!), she acted a fool until they came back with bug
spray. Let’s review once again. Open flames and enclosed room…and now bug
spray? Well, the peristyle (temple complex) we were at was an old one having
recently been re-opened after many years of disuse. The altars in the room were
old and everything except the very front of them were the recent offerings were
was black with soot and age. The back of them contained only what God knew…until
now. Once the billowing clouds of bug spray reached back there, out crawled
about a dozen of the largest spiders I’d ever seen in my life. They crawled up
the walls and to the ceiling. Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me say that up to
this moment in my life…including this moment…I’d suffered from arachnophobia.
Badly. And now in this moment, I found myself trapped in a small room, in a
foreign (tropical!) land, looking up at my worst fear. One of those furry-legged
bundles of hope and joy decided to perch itself on the edge of the altar right
above my head. As I slowly maneuvered into a sitting fetal position and my skin
turned an even paler shade of white, I contemplated the choices I’d made that had
gotten me into that situation. And I started right at it and counted its eyes.
Yep, 8. Eventually the spiders crawled back into the altar, but I was stuck
with the truth of knowing we would co-habitate in that room for the remainder
of the kanzo. Still slightly arachnophobic, but not nearly as much as I used to
be.
With the kanzo concluded, we headed back to the U.S., and I
never loved my bed and my shower more than in those first few days back. (The
Djevo Funk lingered a bit.) I was elated and relieved it was over, and despite
the harsh physical conditions, it was the most awesome spiritual experience up
to that point of my life. The next test was getting through the 41 day taboo
period afterwards. No sex, a whole list of foods not to eat, nothing too hot or
too cold, no sex, not being outside after dark, wear white clothes, did I
mention no sex? Because it’s during those 41 days when I had every opportunity
I never had most other times to have sex all I wanted. Guys hitting me up left
and right! Day 42? Crickets.
I’d love to say that after all this my life changed for the
better and I’ve had a fantastic spiritual life ever since. But I can’t. In
fact, things kinda went to shit soon after. A tropical storm came through and
collapsed a ceiling in my apartment, and then I moved into a new one, only to
have the roommate quit his job and leave me paying all the bills I couldn’t
afford. And of course all the rumors of my kanzo not being done properly started
flying around and the Vodou house I was in started falling apart. I took these
as signs I’d probably been had and I should just go back to Wicca. At least with
Wicca I didn’t to pay lots of money for a whole lot of nothing! I tried to walk
away but got sucked back in time to help with one last ceremony before Hurricane
Katrina hit the city and I landed up in Massachusetts, where Traditional Wicca
took over my life for a while. (See “Journey of the Moon” for details.)
About two years after Katrina and having had no contact with
anyone Vodou I got invited to a presentation at Harvard where a Mambo from
south Boston would be lecturing and hosting a short ceremony after. I went, and
of course that reignited everything for me, so after I got back in touch with
Mambo Marie and went down to a ceremony at her place in New York. Before I knew
it I was on a plane going back to Haiti to go through the kanzo all over again!
The first time I initiated at the lowest level, that of Hounsi, basically a
ritual assistant. This time, however, I went for the third and final level (no,
you don’t have to go through all three; it’s whatever your spirits say…or you have
the money for) of Houngan Asogwe. My second kanzo was much better than my first
one! Much more organized, and even sweeter was that it was the same group of
people who had been hired to do my first one. But this time they were in their
home peristyle. And they remembered me! They had nicknamed me “Sen Josef”
because of my beard, and Sen Josef had returned. 2007 ended up being a great
year for many reasons, but also because almost immediately after getting back
from Haiti, I got a new job that would set the stage for me to return to New Orleans.
Just under three years of busing it to New York for
ceremonies and serving the Lwa on my own, 2010 rolls around and I said deuces to Boston.
Returning to New Orleans, where it all started for me was
bittersweet. The Mistic was a junk shop, with only remnants of the beautiful
peristyle behind it, and most everyone I knew in the house had gone elsewhere. Tribble
was on the West Bank, Toby, a godbrother who started attending ceremonies only
shortly after I did, came back to town a month before I had, and Aboudja was
making plans to return about a month later. However, because of past Vo-drama,
Toby and I kept to ourselves. We brought Mambo Marie down the following year,
January 2011, which re-connected Marie and Toby and he later that year went to
Haiti to make Asogwe. As I mentioned in “Memories,” though, Tribble passed away
in 2011 and Aboudja in 2012. So, that left just me and Toby to carry things on.
We slowly started to build things up, attract some interested folks, travelled
up to New York and brought Marie down for ceremonies. That continued until
Marie moved down here and set up a new Carmel and Sons Botanica in the Seventh
Ward, which brings us up to how things currently are.
This Vodou ride has been rollercoaster, and I’ve left out so
much just trying to touch on the major highlights. My road to Ginen has without
a doubt been one of self-discovery, growth, and all those other spiritual Hallmark
phrases. I wouldn’t be who I am today had I not gone to that very first
ceremony 15 years ago this month. Vodou has opened doors to other spiritual
practices, too, which I’ll be writing about in the future, but Vodou has done
so much for me personally, whether it be direct intervention of the Lwa
themselves or by having gone through all the experiences that I have because of
Vodou. If I had it to do over again I might tweak a few things here and there,
but the overall timeline would remain intact.
Steven Bragg
Houngan Twa Pote, aka "Sen Josef"
January 2017
