American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World by Rod Davis

black. Latter-day witches, primarily white, and frequently gypsy, usually billed themselves as psychics or spiritual advisors. I knew I'd run into them sooner or later but I didn't want it to be now.
By the time we arrived in Lafayette, it was late afternoon and Sarah was so anxious to get out of the car and jump into a swimming pool she paid for the motel. But while she was changing into her suit, I picked up a local phone book out of an old reporting habit to check anything, now matter how improbable. Sure enough, under a listing for shops selling "religious supplies," was a name I couldn't resist. I jotted down an address and guilted Sarah into temporarily forgoing the spa.
"The Shining Two" operated out of a converted bungalow at the edge of a black neighborhood not far from downtown. Middle-aged black men in dark suits waited in two cars in the gravel lot in front as we pulled up. It looked promising. But as soon as I walked in the door I felt like a kid who falls for a barker's pitch at a traveling carney show. It was no botanica;
     

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rather, an occult shop: astrology, Tarot, Magik, psychic literature, wicca, New Age, channeling. The black-haired young white woman behind the counter was friendly but claimed to know nothing about voudou. My questions made her nervous, and, perhaps to get rid of me, she wrote down the name of ''someone who did," a woman who lived nearby and who gave "readings." She suggested, firmly, that I go there.
It had started to rain again. I wound through narrow residential streets in the black section of town where the best homes had a carport and the worst lacked screens or doors. A dead-end avenue led past a dilapidated frame house where two elderly men and a woman sat on the porch drinking beer. I parked beside a muddy ditch, and walked up. Sarah stayed in the car, reading a novel. The trio smiled as I approached, but their eyes betrayed wariness. I nodded my head in deference and tried to explain why I'd stopped.
The small unshaven man in the fedora finally spoke. "I don't know nothing," he said, "but my grandson might." With that, he pointed to a modest red brick home across the street. I picked my way back through his puddle-filled yard, and hurried across the asphalt. I knocked on his grandson's open screen door.
Kevin Guidry, a thin, fine-boned man of about twenty-five, was home taking care of his preschool daughter. I told him what his grandfather had said. He smiled. So long as I understood he was a Christianraised Catholiche didn't mind discussing voudou. He opened the door and showed me to a cloth couch next to the TV in the living room. He said his grandmother had treated people using the "old remedies," and that his grandfather, despite what he'd just told me, "was into one of those African gods," though Kevin didn't know which. I mentioned a few orisha namesElegba, Ogun, Shango, Obatalabut Kevin didn't recognize any of them. He did know his grandfather often made medicines of garlic, herbs, roots and worms.
     

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For a time, Kevin thought he might pick up the old ways himself, but he had not done so, preferring Jesus. Unlike Lorita Mitchell, he didn't think he could have both. Indeed, he had veered so far from the "old ways" that he had recently joined the Full Gospel Church, an independent Protestant denomination which, like the PTL Club, Word of Faith Ministry and similar charismatic or fundamentalist groups, have sprung up in the age of televangelism and cater mostly to middle-class and lower middle-class whites. But Kevin said he felt more at home there than in his Catholic chapel. He also said I should try his grandfather again, because "he knows more than he lets on." I crossed the street again. For ten minutes, I stood in the light rain trying to ignite a conversation with the old man, but all I learned was how to treat "thrash"a throat infectionin children by blowing three times into the mouth of the sufferer.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was to spend