| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Ina Johanna Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (New York: Routledge, 2005)

OWING TO THE remarkable bravado with which New Orleanian Marie Laveaux led her life, literary artists, reporters, and filmmakers sensationalized her story in the fragmentary, fictionalized or semifictionalized works that proliferated both before and after her death. One needn't look far to understand the reasons for such myth making.

In one of the antebellum South's largest slave cities, Laveaux, a free woman of African descent, led an underground, African-based religion that had been central to slavery's destruction in the Haitian Revolution. She braved deadly epidemics of yellow fever to attend to the sick and the dying alongside the equally enigmatic Père Antoine (Father Antonio de Sedella), the Spanish cleric who controlled St. Louis Cathedral until 1829. She anticipated Sister Helen Prejean's modern-day Catholic ministry to Louisiana's death row inmates by over a century. And, she defied a state law prohibiting interracial marriage by living openly with a white man, Christophe Glapion, for nearly thirty years in a domestic partnership that produced at least five children. In 1874, newspaper reports that Laveaux would perform her Voodoo religious rites on St. John's Eve drew an estimated 12,000 New Orleanians, both black and white, to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

In 1984, author Fandrich entered Temple University's Religious Studies Program after just completing her graduate degree in theology at the University of Hamburg. In Germany, she had grown frustrated with a prevailing theological scholarship that divided Christian Europe's strong women leaders into the saintly, submissive type on the one hand, and on the other, the assertive, independent type like Joan of Arc who was burned at the stake as a witch. In Pennsylvania, she resumed her search for spiritual "foremothers." (7)

A showing of Maya Deren's documentary film on Haitian Vodou, Divine Horsemen of Haiti, and Fandrich's discovery of Laveaux proved irresistible. For the author, Laveaux clearly bridged the "saint" versus "witch" dichotomy in her successful blending of devout Catholicism with deeply held African religious beliefs. Moreover, in New Orleans, just as in Haiti, Voodoo upended power relations in a society that demeaned all persons of African descent. In nineteenth century New Orleans, the phenomenon produced a powerful female leadership. In Laveaux's case, the results were extraordinary. Fandrich quotes an eyewitness: "She [Laveaux] 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!'" (1)

Fandrich confronted considerable obstacles in researching Laveaux. Her project was considered undoable. After all, Voodoo was a persecuted, underground religion of an oppressed people who left no written records. Happily, she prevailed and this pioneering book is a revised version of her 1994 dissertation.

At the outset, Fandrich recognized that archival records alone could not explain Laveaux's influence. An understanding of her power required an examination of the African American oral tradition that preserved her memory. The author's close study of songs, oral histories, and folk tales revealed recurring references to a mythical Marie Laveaux who possessed the wit of a trickster figure; the vision of an oracle; the healing power of a miracle worker; and the wizardry of a witch. In an impressive example of her command of the subject and her interpretive skills, the author shows how the city's dominant white elite, fearing the lore of Laveaux's supernatural powers, became complicit in the myth-making.

Fandrich rightly emphasizes that Voodoo is "one of the world's most misunderstood faith traditions" and explains that it "actually refers to a cluster of bona fide religions with great depth and beauty." (10) Building on the path-breaking work of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Fandrich shows how it emerged in Louisiana soon after the arrival of the first slave ships in 1719 when enslaved Africans blended their ancient religious beliefs with Catholic and Native American practices. French planter Antoine Le Page du Pratz, reflecting upon his experiences in the 1730s, offered evidence of Voodoo's presence when he described how Africans attached enormous importance to "little toys which they called gris-gris ...[and] would believe themselves undone if they were stripped of these trinkets." (122) Fandrich concludes that by 1773, when Spanish authorities tried two enslaved Africans for attempting to kill their overseer with a "poisonous grisgris," (123) Voodoo was widely practiced in Louisiana.

But Voodoo's greatest influence followed in the wake of an 1809 influx of Haitian refugees that nearly doubled the size of the city. The large proportion of African-descended migrants, both enslaved and free, reinforced the city's religious culture. Fandrich is careful, however, to distinguish between Haitian "Vodou" and New Orleans "Voodoo" for neither in Haiti or Africa was there an African-based religious culture so dominated by women.

In part, the city's female leadership derived their power from West and Central African religious traditions in which the spirits of the dead remain among the living and participate actively in the life of the community. Important decisions require the consent of ancestors and deities. In the highest form of religious experience, the gods are contacted through the phenomenon of spirit possession. Communication occurs when the deities inhabit and speak through the body of a male or female medium. Since the medium becomes the vessel through which the gods make their wishes known, mediumship is considered an extraordinary power. Believed to possess such power, Laveaux and other influential women of colour dominated New Orleans Voodoo.

African religious customs alone do not, Fandrich explains, account for the feminization of the religion. Other factors included a population of influential free women of colour whose presence originated in the city's early history when a shortage of white women resulted in a high number of interracial liaisons. Owing to their access to the dominant white male population, Afro-Creole women enjoyed an exceptional degree of influence. One of their most important allies, Père Antoine, Laveaux's confessor and mentor, won their loyalty with his openness to African-descended peoples and their traditions. Under his auspices, free women of colour redefined Catholic rituals and sought sisterhood and greater prestige in Voodoo religious practices.

Fandrich counts Laveaux among the nation's most powerful African American women leaders including such luminaries as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. In the case of Laveaux and Tubman, the two women shared much in common. Though great differences in social status, religion, ethnicity, and geography separated them, both women defied the repressive slave regime in which they lived; both were driven by the power of their religious beliefs; both were illiterate and suffered economic hardship despite their achievements; both had an electrifying effect on those with whom they came in contact; and both were lionized during their lifetimes. Now, happily, both are the subjects of three authoritative biographies each. A new generation of women's studies scholars has undertaken to disentangle fact from fiction in an almost simultaneous burst of academic publications: Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman (2003); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman (2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound For the Promised Land (2004); Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen (2004); Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen (2005); and Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess (2006). These twentyfirst century scholars deserve high praise for giving two extraordinary nineteenth century women the serious academic study they so richly deserve.


CARYN COSSÉ BELL University of Massachusetts Lowell

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