White Voodoo

This in regards to Season Four’s 4th episode, “La Maldición” (The Curse)

When I was working props on a show for six months in New Orleans, the script called for an evil-looking voodoo doll. I thought, “This is going to be easy. I’m in the voodoo capital of the world.”

So I went to all the tourist traps on Bourbon Street and surrounding areas. They all had sage and different sizes of colored candles and, of course, t-shirts, but they only had cute souvenir plush voodoo dolls, nothing authentic. I also noticed no books on voodoo, either. I informed each vendor what I was looking for, but their answers were extremely vague and not helpful. Finally, one shop had a psychic room. A sign outside the curtain read: Know Your Future. $25 a half-hour, $40 an hour. (Please wash hands with soap and ring bell for Madame Aires).

“What the hell,” I thought, “when you’re a tourist in New Orleans…”

There was a pitcher of water with a large bowl and a bar of soap with paper napkins on a small table under the sign. I did as instructed, and as I dried my hands and tossed the paper napkin in the small trash can. I could tell who I assumed was Madame Aires was standing behind the curtain watching me. I rang the bell. She stepped out, looking like the gypsy from The Hunchback of Notre Dame dressed complete with scarfs and bells.

She nodded at me, then took the bowl of water and screamed, “Incoming!” as she threw the water out into the street. She set the bowl down and flipped the sign over. It read GO AWAY.  She opened up the curtain and waved me inside. She performed this simple task like she was in a musical. I entered and sat at the opposite side of a small round table.

“How much do you want to know?” she asked.

I stuttered and said, “Everything, I guess.”

And with a little condescending smile, she asked, “Half-hour or hour?”

“Oh yeah, an hour,” I replied embarrassingly. I handed her forty dollars. I don’t know how she did it, but a small bell rang as she took it.

Then she said, “Ask me your questions.”

Now this kind of tripped me out because I didn’t know if she knew I had questions about voodoo or she knew I didn’t know how this all worked. So I just blurted out, “Why can’t I find a voodoo doll in New Orleans?”

She stared at me for a second and slightly shook her head and said, “That’s because real voodoo dolls aren’t real.”

She gave this a beat and let it sink in.

“Religion, books, and movies gave it that image. The truth is, slave owners, made the evil voodoo doll.”

I was confused and said, “But there is a doll, right?”

“Yes,” she said…

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and when she spoke, it was very precise and reverent. It was sad and beautiful. It was something you had to experience yourself, and of course, I’m going to butcher what she said with my California lingo, but this is what I remember her saying.

“Slave owners made it impossible for slaves to learn to read or write. A lot of slaves didn’t even know how to speak English. When a slave would get sick or hurt, the only way they could communicate with the doctor was to use a makeshift doll with small sticks to point out and to try to explain as best as possible where the damage was. This was a somewhat successful tool. Almost every slave family had one. The problem was that slave owners would see these dolls and think they were practicing some type of magical curse on them. Thought they were poking this doll, and it was an image of the slave owner. Slaves would get punished for having them. The church ran with this, and ‘voodoo curses’ were born. Truth be known, there are no curses in voodoo. You can’t make bad things happen to other people in voodoo. You have to pray for good things that would benefit you. For example, if you’re with a woman and you wanted her gone, you wouldn’t put a curse on her, you would pray that she would meet someone better or wealthier than you and her life would be improved without you and she would leave you.”

We sat in silence. Finally, I said, “Wow, thank you. Just real quick, what’s up with all the patron saints and Catholic crosses?”

She simply said, “When the slaves were allowed to learn religion, they incorporated their beliefs with the church’s. They found saints for each of the elements that they would pray to, and also they thought the white man’s God was doing ok for them, so upon their altar, he went.”

I thanked her, put a tip in what I hope was a tip jar. A small bell rang when I did, and I left. As I stepped out into the streets of New Orleans, I realized I was going to need to make a slave owner’s version of a voodoo doll. -M.A.R.