VooDoo Queen

Voodoo Queen

Inside French Quarter Catholicism, St. Louis Cathedral: Candles. A woman. Full black woman, proud, not mulatto or quadroon – black blood pedigree! White muslin dress. Shiny brass bangles. Red ribbon tied tightly around her waist. Earrings shaped in a Christian cross. Thick, curly hair. Reciting the Hail Mary in muddy Creole French, not quite Patois. White cloth cap, repressing that wiry hair. A python, alive and twisting, wrapped around her shoulders – Zombi! The walkways, cobblestone. No priest present. Heavy wooden pews. Humid atmosphere. Nearly empty church. All this – Mary Lavoi the Voodoo Queen.

          Outside French Quarter Catholicism, Bourbon Street: Rain. Hibiscus. Trumpets, trombones, banjos, and bones. Cobblestones. French and the Fleur de Lys. New Orleans and its terrible stench. Brothels, bordellos, pornography in the windows. Bars, booze, liquor, blacks, whites, palms, hydrangeas. More rain. Humidity. All this – another form of the blues.

          While walking out of the St. Louis Cathedral into the streets of New Orleans which were colored red, blue, green, and brown from the flowers and the filth, the voodoo queen Mary Lavoi was stopped by a man whose face was sullen and apathetic, but whose eyes told a story of miserable desperation.

          “Mary—”

          “I won’t have anything to do with you,” she interrupted. “You’re in love.”

          But the man was persistent, following her on her twisty way from the St. Louis Cathedral, through the winding streets and past jazz musicians in coats and white shirts who blew their brass instruments like New Orleans was a stage and whose hats kept the summer sun off their faces and the sweat from dripping into their scrunched-up eyes. He followed Mary past a barroom whose doors were open and whose men were talkative and molasses slow, sitting on barstools with cigarettes in their fingers and pointing at one another, their conversation oozing into the streets as the sound of a dull buzz. Mary ignored the man who walked beside her, striding slowly through the streets, holding her head high, as the man danced and hustled along side of her, bobbing from one shoulder to the other and whispering his case into her ear.

          “Mary,” he said, sidestepping a vacant, drunken-eyed man who was stumbling the opposite way on the sidewalk, “It’s true I’m in love, but the girl is a beauty, and you know her, Mary, she works for you. She has grey eyes the color of dolphins, hair like brown string, her breasts are small and perky, and her face is all intelligence and decision. Mary, you’ve got to make me a potion.”

          “It doesn’t matter,” Mary replied, keeping her eyes on all the people except him, and stroking the snake, Zombi, with her finger, “Women only want you when they know they can’t have you, and you’re falling all over yourself.”

          The man grew pale and thin-lipped as if his courage had been perforated by the razor beaks of doves, because Mary’s interpretation and analysis cut so true.

          A car passed them, its tires bumping over the cobblestones; its grumbling sound clearing people out of the road. It was a dirty, corroded car, eroded by the humidity of the pervasive Louisiana atmosphere, and its exhaust pipe was speckled with holes so that black smoke coughed out from underneath the car, and the smoke carried past the voodoo queen and the love hungry man, causing him to wave his hand in front of his nose. The fumes were dispersed, and the car rumbled out of range. The two were approaching Maison Blanche, a plantation manor of prostitution owned by Mary Lavoi, who held great regard for the women in her employ. She treated her prostitutes like queens, giving them sumptuous dinners twice a week, once after Sunday Mass and again on every Wednesday – save for the Wednesday of hung-over sobriety that follows bacchanal Mardi Gras; and every Saturday morning, just as the sun rose and the long work week climaxed and came to an unholy conclusion, she bought seventy-two gallons of banana ice cream to chill her girls’ sweat-soaked skins. The ice cream came two gallons per girl, loaded with chunks of bananas and tasting of South America and the tropics, and the girls were so hungry, so famished of everything save sex and degradation, that each girl wolfed the two gallons, saving not a spoonful for later.

          Conversely, the voodoo queen held the animalistic men who frequented the Maison Blanche in low esteem. “They’re pigs,” she said to one of her prostitutes, Kathrine Thibodeaux, “Always rooting for something.” The voodoo queen played tricks on the men who came to Maison Blanche, sometimes leaving them to wait and fidget for hours, until she knew the mens’ wives would be expecting them at home, and only then would she announce that a girl was available. She left Zombi coiled, sleepy, and intimidating in the hallways of the bordello, so that the men would have to pass by it, and she laughed as she watched the men – their backs against the wall – sliding past the serpent. “Its fangs are poisonous!” she would shout, “They inject impotence and cyanide!” Other times, Mary used her knowledge of the occult and Catholicism to mix remedies of startling potency which caused a somnolence of the most effective nature, and this potion she poured into the drinks of the men in the waiting areas, so they felt lethargic and gave the girls relief. So Mary Lavoi conceived a reputation as a trickster and a woman of bad omen, yet Mary’s women were in high demand, so her business did not suffer.

        >Read More

1