The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux

A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth Century New Orleans

Ina J. Fandrich

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415972505
• eBook ISBN: 9781135872915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This study investigates the emergence of powerful female leadership in New Orleans' Voodoo tradition. It provides a careful examination of the cultural, historical, economic, demographic and socio-political factors that contributed both to the feminization of this religious culture and its strong female leaders.

Chapter One

Introduction

“Our practice is not to clear up the mystery.

It is to make the mystery clear.”

—Robert Aitken Roshi¹

According to the tales about her (“what the old folks say”) Marie Laveaux (1801–1881), New Orleans’ famous Voodoo queen, must have been extremely powerful. For instance, an eyewitness who was interviewed at advanced age in the 1940s recollected the following childhood memory of Laveaux:

She come walkin’ into Congo Square wit’ her head up in the air like a queen. Her skirts swished when she walked and everybody step back to let her pass. All the people—white and colored—start sayin’ that’s the most powerful woman there is. They say, ‘There goes Marie Laveau!’ …²

Although stigmatized as a woman and a person of color and thus excluded from holding public office, narratives and eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that it was she who reigned over the city, not the municipal authorities. An obituary in the New York Times from 1881 remarks that “lawyers, legislators, planters, merchants, all came to pay respect to her and seek her offices …”³ It would be reasonable then to expect a great deal of information on such an influential character, but the contrary is the case. The historical material on her is fragmentary and contradictory.

The bits of information we have on Marie Laveaux, despite their conflicting, often tendentious nature, indicate that her prominence stemmed from the role she played in New Orleans’ counter-cultural religion Voodoo.⁴ This religion offered a model “of” and “for”⁵ female behavior that clearly contradicted the ideal of “true womanhood”⁶ of the dominant groups in New Orleans, i.e., the white, Catholic, French-Spanish Creoles,⁷ and the white Protestant North Americans.

According to this nineteenth-century ideal construction, a woman was characterized as “modest,” “passive,” “self-sacrificing,” and “domestic.”⁸ Laveaux, to the contrary, appeared to be the exact opposite: bold, active, self-assertive, and public.⁹ Also, she was not an isolated case in her faith’s traditions. There is substantial evidence that Voodoo priestesses were active in New Orleans before, during, and after her lifetime.

This study concentrates on the rise of powerful female leadership in the formation of an oppressed African-based religious culture, Voodoo, in nineteenth-century New Orleans. My investigation focuses in particular on Marie Laveaux, the controversial key figure of this tradition. Laveaux served as a symbol of resistance for the various oppressed groups in the city against the dominant sector. She represented the African heritage defiantly surviving the hegemonic¹⁰ strategies of a white-supremacist culture; she functioned as an assertion of female power in a patriarchal society; and she embodied outrage over the unjust distribution of power, wealth, and privilege in a profoundly class-stratified environment. In the following, I will provide a careful analysis of her legendary leadership role not only within her religious tradition, but also in context with her social group, the free women of color. As these two groups were deeply connected with one another, it is my contention that both find a paradigmatic exemplification in this famous priestess and community activist.

This book then is not a biography of New Orleans’ Voodoo icon per se, although it contains a wealth of carefully collected data about her. Rather, it explores Laveaux’s significance as the quintessential figure within a larger movement: the emergence of influential free women of color, women conjurers of African or racially mixed origin with strong ties to the Roman Catholic Church and a deep commitment to the spirits of their ancestors, who had considerable influence over the city despite their marginalized social and religious status. The heyday of this movement coincided with Laveaux’s lifetime. But, its origins go back to the colonial years. It challenged the rigid social hierarchies throughout the antebellum period, and slowly disappeared after the end of Reconstruction, under the pressure and merciless vilification and persecution during the Jim Crow years.

This study is a revised and updated version of my 1994 Ph. D. dissertation, whichwas the first comprehensive historical examination of the life of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux and the emergence of powerful feamle leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Voodoo. While there are four novels on her (Robert Tallant, The Voodoo Queen, 1956; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972; Francine Prose, Marie Laveau, 1977; Jewell Parker Rhodes, Voodoo Dreams, 1994) my research suggests that none of these accounts are historically accurate. All of them stress in a dramatic manner the rivalry between Laveaux and Dr. John (a prominent 19^th century New Orleanian Voodoo priest) and Laveaux’s internal struggle between her loyalty to the “good” Catholic Church and her calling to serve her “evil” African ancestral spirit world. Yet, the historical data reveal that: (1) Laveaux was hardly troubled by a conflict between the Christian God and the spirits of her African for-bearers as popular Catholicism and most traditional African religions easily blend into one another in a coherent way; (2) Laveaux’s primary enemy was not a male rival in the Voodoo religion but the encroaching racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism by the strictly segregated, profit-oriented, Protestant, Anglo-American new rulers of the city who violently cracked down on New Orleans’ influential and predominantly female free people of color. Hence, by emphasizing a sensationalized, individual drama without providing any structural analysis of the historical context, all of these fictive interpretations of Laveaux’s legendary life miss entirely her enormous socio-political impact, an important omission, which in my view needs to be rectified. In this book, I seek then to “debunk, unmask, and disentangle” (as womanist theologian Katie Cannon puts it) the silly Halloween monster images of Laveaux that emerge from these soap opera style presentations and are currently sold to the tourists in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Instead, I hope to reinstate her as who she really was, an important leader in American history.

My 1994 thesis was also the first book-length study of New Orleans Voodoo since Robert Tallant’s sensationalistic and in many ways racist classic Voodoo in New Orleans, 1946. Regrettably, this problematic text is still widely regarded as the “definitive” study on this topic, despite its considerable historical inaccuracies and offensive tone. There are several shorter, more recent, publications on Louisiana’s Voodoo tradition. For instance, Joseph Holloway’s edited volume Africanisms in Ameican Culture, 1990, contains a chapter on “The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans” by Jesse Gaston Muliera. Unfortunately, the author of this essay relied exclusively on secondary sources, primarily Tallant’s work, instead of conducting archival research on primary sources and offers thus no significant new data. Ron Bodin created a small booklet with the title Voodoo: Fast and Present in the same year, 1990, which contains some new interesting information on contemporary Voodoo practices, but no new historical information. Rod Davis mentions New Orleans Voodoo in his volume American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, 1999. Unfortunately, he addresses only Yoruba-derived traditions, which were marginal in New Orleans and misses thus completely the enormous influence from the Senegambia region and especially the Kongo region on South Louisiana.

Carolyn Long has a well-researched, lengthy chapter on New Orleans Voodoo in her study of commerce in religious supplies, entitled Spiritual Merchants, 2001, in which she relied almost exclusively on primary sources. She displayed a fresh and original approach to the topic, provided a clearly structured overview of African-based spiritual practices in Louisiana from the colonial era to the present time, and included some previously unpublished data on Laveaux and her spiritual tradition. However, none of these authors came up with an extensive, systematic study of New Orleans nineteenth-century Voodoo tradition that draws from original archival sources and is sensitive to the complex shifting dynamics of social stratification along race, class, and gender lines.¹¹

Marie Laveaux has long been a popular Louisiana folk character and was somewhat known throughout the United States. Yet, during the last decade, I have observed a steadily growing interest in her. For instance, her tomb in the old St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has become a major tourist attraction drawing daily thousands of visitors, and presently there are well over 20,000 websites on the internet mentioning her name (spelled either with or without the x at the end). There are also numerous popular songs and a full-length opera about her. Since we have so much fiction about her life, there is as well a growing thirst for reliable historical information on her. This study is a significant start in providing such data. It proves that “serious” historical research about Laveaux is indeed possible despite all the claims to the contrary. It is true, New Orleans’ mysterious Voodoo Queen must have taken many of her secrets with her into her grave. However, much of the mystery surrounding her life can be explained through concrete archival documents or circumstantial historical evidence.

OVERVIEW

The present study is structured like an onion, inviting the reader to peel off one layer after the other to uncover the mystery that has shrouded the life of Marie Laveaux, New Orleans legendary Voodoo Queen, and her powerful leadership role. This demystifying process will occur on seven distinct levels.

On the first level, in this introductory chapter, I will set the theoretical framework for my analysis revealing that the lack of research on Laveaux is not purely accidental but connects to structural lacunae in the fields of history (historiography), cultural anthropology (ethnography), and folklore (mythography) and to multiple forms of social stratification prevalent in the United States that originated in global Western imperialism.

On the second level, in chapter two, I shall explore the African cultural and philosophical roots of this urban, female-dominated religious tradition, Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Voodoo. Powerful leadership by women, whether in the religious or the secular realm, contradicted nineteenth-century American mainstream culture. With the exception of the queens of England, being female and a powerful leader was an oxymoron in the European heritage that arrived in the New World. Can the roots of this powerful female leadership within New Orleans Voodoo tradition then be traced back to its African religious and cultural heritage? To answer this question, I will identify the specific ethnic heritage of the African population that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had forcibly brought to Louisiana. A gender analysis of the religions, cultures, and societies of the respective African lands of origin of Louisiana’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century black population will therefore be the task at hand. While such an analysis in detail would be a book by itself of course, it is possible within the scope of this study to denote some general trends.

In chapter three, I will trace the complex history of New Orleans’ free women of color. The unusual situation of these women provides the sociopolitical context for the feminization of this Voodoo tradition, which will constitute the third level of my investigation. I will provide a historical overview of the presence of free women of color in Louisiana through its French and Spanish colonial phases, the antebellum period, ending with Reconstruction. The history of these simultaneously famous and infamous women helps to explain the female preponderance in both the leadership and the membership of New Orleans’ Nineteenth-Century Voodoo tradition.

Having set the stage in terms of cultural background and socio-political history, I will examine in chapter four the particular constellation of Marie Laveaux’s cultural and religious community, New Orleanian Voodoo, on the forth level of my analysis. According to my research, this urban Louisiana African-based religion is not of Haitian origin but emerged independently from Caribbean influences during the eighteenth century. Louisiana Voodoo as exemplified in the beliefs and practices of Marie Laveaux, the quintessential leader of this tradition, is an indigenous American religious and cultural complex. It was only after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that due to the turmoil caused by the Haitian War of Independence (1789–1804) large numbers of Haitian refugees poured into the city. About 10, 000 displaced Haitians (black and whote and many of whom free people of color) arrived alone in 1809, doubling the population of the city of New Orleans. These refugees first introduced Haitian Vodou beliefs and practices to Louisiana and blended into the already existing indigenous African-based religion. Regarding gender hierarchies, it appears that the urban New Orleans Voodoo tradition was overwhelmingly female-dominated in both its membership and its leadership. Most known Voodoo leaders were women.

On the fifth level, I am focusing more specifically on the key figure of New Orleans Voodoo, Marie Laveaux herself. Considering all the legends and folktales about her, I am challenged at this point to establish her very historicity. Was there, indeed, a concrete person with this name who triggered the creative imagination of a people to forge such fantastic stories? Which stories can be substantiated by archival data? Which might be fiction? The search for reliable information on the “historical Marie Laveaux” will be the subject of chapter five. For this purpose, I will comb through the bits and pieces of “hard” (written) data, unearthed during months and years of archival research. I will compare these findings with the “soft” (oral) data I have collected, such as the the rich narratives recorded between the late 1920s until the mid-1940s by Zora Neale Hurrston, the Louisiana Writers Project (LWP), and Harry Middleton Hyatt, and the interviews I have conducted since the late 1980s.

Much of the material on Laveaux, however, was never meant to be historical or biographical information but represents an altogether different genre of literature, the folktale or myth. I decided thus to look at the “mythical Marie Laveaux” in its various appearances on a sixth level. Like Martin Luther King or Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, she grew beyond her historical limitations and became a symbol for a whole segment of society representing African and female wisdom and power “alive and kickin’” in antebellum New...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two The African Cultural and Religious Roots of Voodoo
• Chapter Three New Orleans’ Free Women of Color
• Chapter Four New Orleans’ Voodoo Women
• Chapter Five The Historical Marie Laveaux
• Chapter Six The Mythical Marie Laveaux
• Chapter Seven Conclusion: The Politics of Myth-Making
• Appendix A Illustrations
• Appendix B Genealogical Charts
• Appendix C Chronology
• Appendix D The Term “Creole” in Louisiana
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index