American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World by Rod Davis Page A

countless days on such seemingly fruitless encounters. But you never knew until you asked, and even dead ends sometimes proved to be trailheads: the way of voudou no less than that of scientific inquiry.
The next morning, Sarah took the bus back to New Orleans. Missing her companionship as I left the downtown station, absorbed with thoughts of the long, solitary search ahead, I barely paid attention to where I was driving, and consequently got lost. Eventually I realized I was stuck in an engineering nightmare of one-way streets around the downtown square. Which is how I found the "Side By Side Bookstore." A cinder-block box building utterly dwarfed by the well-heeled, neo-colonial Baptist church across the street, it advertised itself as offering "African books and handicrafts." I slowed to make sure it was still in business. When I saw an "open" sign in a window, I pulled into a vacant pot-hole lot on the side.
     

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I knew it wasn't another "Shining Two" as soon as I opened the door. The walls were adorned with anti-apartheid T-shirts and black and white posters depicting African scenes and African people. The front display counter was chock-full of Senegalese bracelets and green, leather neck medallions shaped like Africapopular at that time among teenagers. A second room opened to wall shelves of books on black nationalism, Islam, civil rights, slavery, natural healingand voudou. In a third room at the very back I found the store's sole occupantthe owner, a slim, bespectacled man in his thirties sporting a well-clipped goatee. Cowrie shell medallions hung from his neck beside a red leather gris-gris. His hair was bunched Rasta-style under a red, yellow and green banded wool cap.
He introduced himself as Lionel Brown and showed me around the store. I asked about a book on African history, and he asked me why I was interested. I told him, and he showed me some new copper wrist bracelets he'd gotten in. I bought one. We talked about New Orleans. By the time the next customer walked in more than an hour later I knew that, even if I didn't locate Kathy's Creole relatives (I never did) I was going to find what I was seeking.
Until the Louisiana oil bust of the early 1980s, Lionel had worked as a machinist. Following his layoff he tried a few other jobs until a year ago, encouraged by his wife, he decided to turn his skill with his hands and his interest in his African roots into something manifest: a store, a focal point of African tradition. Though he knew little about it, I could tell that voudou was woven into the very fabric of his life. In his family, though, it was never called that. It was just a collection of stories. While he puttered around the shop, he began telling them.
There was his aunt in Port Arthur, Texas, who had suffered a sudden but extended illness, and was unable to walk. Lionel's mother had gone to assist her, and concluded that her sister had been "fixed." She searched her sister's house top to bottom, but
     

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Lionel Brown, Side by Side Bookstore, Lafayette, Louisiana.
found nothing. Then, in a crawl space, she spotted a small bag. She didn't open it, because of what might be inside, but she disposed of it at once. After that, said Lionel, his aunt recovered.
As he recounted other family legends stretching back generations, I remembered the tales of woe and hexing I had heard in Lorita's botanica. I was to hear many more, Louisiana to Miami. Each was unique to each family, and original in the details, but they were not unconnected. In each story, a mother, father, sister, or other relative became mysteriously ill. Conventional remedies, including doctors, were useless. Then someoneusually an aunt or grandmotherintervened and tracked down the cause, a hidden bag or talisman or similar hoodoo object "planted" by an enemy. When the object was found, and removed, the victim got well.
Whether these family tales were objectively true didn't matter. Their very pervasiveness pointed to