Portrait
of Marie Laveau
Franck
Schneider after George Catlin
c. 1920s
Oil on canvas
Although
there is plenty of information about Marie
Laveau and her daughter and namesake in
the legends and lore of Old New Orleans,
known as Marie II, separating the fact
from the myth has always been a challenge
for those seeking a true history of this
famous New Orleans icon. Nearly everything
that is known about them originates in
the secretive oral tradition of the practitioners
of Voodoo and that information has been
embellished with hearsay and drama, making
an already larger than life persona absolutely
formidable in the tales that survive.
Marie
Laveau - Voodoo Queen of
New Orleans
The Marie
Laveau image by New Orleans' artist, Dimitri
Fouquet, of his original oil paintings
as featured on Dr. John's
CD "Creole Moon."
Voodoo
Queen author, Martha Ward, is quoted in
New York Times article on Voodoo:
"Something very real
is happening," said Martha Ward,
a professor of anthropology at the University
of New Orleans who wrote one of the forthcoming
books about Laveau. "Americans today
are hungry for spiritual fulfillment,
and voodoo offers a direct experience
with the sacred that appeals to more and
more people.
"This is especially
visible in New Orleans, which has always
been a center of those beliefs,"
Ms Ward said, "Marie Laveau rules
the imagination of this city. People think
about her, see her, have visions of her,
dream about her, talk to her. I know because
these people are showing up on my doorstep
almost every day."
from "Interest Surges
in Voodoo, and Its Queen," New York
Times, November 30, 2003
Martha
Ward www.marthaward.net/disc.htm One
of the famous above-ground cemeteries
of New Orleans is known as St. Louis No.
1, the oldest graveyard in the city. A
tall marble and stucco tomb there is a
site where devotees frequently leave gifts
- flowers, candy, salt, coins, beads,
bourbon - for Marie Laveau, the famous
voodoo priestess. She still attracts attention,
and some people still talk to her. One
of these is Martha Ward, an anthropologist
at the University of New Orleans, who
has written
Voodoo Queen:
The Spirited Lives of Marie
Laveau
(University Press of Mississippi).
It is a book from a strange sort of participatory
journalism; the author says she has "relied
on dreams, intuition, a hyperactive imagination,
and funky Voodoo luck." She admits
to standing in front of the tomb and hearing
Marie laugh when asked "What really
happened?" Marie's answer: "Who
knows the whole story, and maybe it's
better that way." There is such a
gumbo of legend and fact here, along with
earnest attempts to clear up history and
legal agreements that were deliberately
made murky in the first place, that calling
upon voodoo as a reference source isn't
as dicey as it might seem. Ward is a competent
guide through confusing social customs
of strange times in a strange locale,
and she interprets the gaps as carefully
as possible. "There's hardly any
peg in this whole narrative that's literal,
truthful or absolute," she warns,
but there is plenty of good storytelling
and historical recreations of New Orleans
nonetheless.
There is a legend that the
infamous New Orleans native and Voodoo
Queen Marie Laveau ( Leveaux, Lavaux,
Le Veau, Levaux ) never died, that, in
fact, her spirit lives on in selected
female descendents in Her Secret society,
and Laveau's faithful are awaiting her
return. Jewell Parker Rhodes (Voodoo Dreams,
Douglass's Women, Magic City) births a
modern day Marie in the second book of
the Marie Laveau/Voodoo trilogy, Voodoo
Season: a Marie Laveau Mystery.
Marie
Laveau and the
Devil Baby of Bourbon Street (
Find out more here.)
