what you need is love potion number nine

On Heidi's last morning, I wanted to go on a "Voodoo and Cemeteries" tour. I was interested in seeing the old St. Louis cemeteries, and one of the characters in the screenplay I'm writing with Tim- the one I was supposed to be writing in New Orleans instead of doing arbitrations - is a voodoo practitioner, so I thought it would be interesting. Brie wisely decided to stay home in the a/c and work, but I got Heidi to come along, wearing an appropriate long black sundress with skulls all over it.

Part of the tour went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, built in 1826 as a burial chapel for yellow fever victims. Yellow fever (called Yellow Jack, the Black Vomit, or the American Plague by the people who suffered from the summer epidemics in the 18th and 19th centuries) is also part of our story, so maybe we'll... set a scene here or something. I don't know.

Then the tour went to St. Louis Cemetery #1, on the edge of the quarter in Treme. (This was the cemetery that I passed on my way to the pound.) I was interested in seeing because it's the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, with graves dating back to the 1700s, but I had been told by three different people that you can get mugged in that cemetery. Paul told me not to go in alone if I didn't want a bat to the back of my head.

New Orleans is known for its Cities of the Dead. Because of the high water table, you hit water digging only a few feet into the ground, especially before the city was drained in the early 20th century. Early settlers tried placing stone on top of the graves, but after rainstorms, the rising water table could pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. So the French colonists co-opted the Spanish vault style. Poor families are buried in wall vaults, or oven vaults, seen on the right side of this picture. Wealthier families are buried in a mausoleum, where coffins are stacked one on top of another. When the vault is full, and a new coffin needs to be added, the coffin on the bottom of a stack is opened, and the contents (ashes by that time... the vaults get so hot that there is a natural cremation process) are moved into a bag and placed at the back of the vault. Then that coffin is burned and room is made at the top for a new coffin. But the coffin has to lie undisturbed for a year and a day, and during epidemic years, sometimes the vaults would completely fill up within a year. In those cases, families would lease space from another family's vault until the year and a day is up. We saw one huge mausoleum, shared by forty families, that contained the remains of thousands of people. Even above-ground, though, the vaults slowly sink into the earth. This is a picture of the top of a marker in a wall vault, now at ground level.

I was really interested in the cemetery, but by the time we actually got in there and were standing between the whitewashed tombs, it was about a thousand degrees outside and I thought I might have actually died myself. And that I didn't go to Heaven. The guide kept talking and talking, and I was about to pass out so it kind of sounded like "tomb of Marie Laveau.... blahgerg mishnear flep... marngy prawl... voodoo priestess... grog nuffle." There were x's drawn all over her tomb (markings to bring luck) but according to the guide, this is "just Hollywood superstition." I've noticed in other parts of the country, "Hollywood" is sometimes used as a synonym for "ridiculous."

The tour ended at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, where we sat in the courtyard and were given what seemed to be a sermon by Priestess Miriam, formerly of Chicago. I'm guessing it was a sermon because about 80% of the time I had no idea what she was saying. She kept laughing at her own comments and said stuff like, "You do the e-harmony, and then you wonder why your kids are doing the internet dating, and you say, 'what? what are they doing?' but it was you who did the e-harmony." And that was the part that I could understand most of the words for.

Then we went inside, to the altar room, which was full of tapestries and various statues and figurines, many with tightly rolled bills stuck in their mouths and ears and hands. A couple of the people in the group clearly did not want to enter the room, and tried to linger in the hallway outside, but Priestess Miriam insisted they come in and form a circle. Then she talked more. Some of this I got on Heidi's camera. I just opened it up at waist-level and hit record because I wasn't sure she would be ok with me taping her. After watching this a few times, I can follow what she's saying, and I have to say, I really think she was making more sense here than she was earlier, and I wish I had gotten part of her speech in the courtyard on video.



The yellow flyers she's holding in her hands had a prayer printed on them. I kept mine but can't find it now. It said something like "We ask the Father to grant us compassion. We ask the Son to grant us strength. We ask the Spirit to grant us love." Voodoo originates in Africa as a form of ancestor worship. When the African people were brought to Louisiana and enslaved, they were also forcibly baptized Catholic. Modern Voodoo reflects strong Catholic influence.

Since the priestess got through both of her talks without really telling us about Voodoo, when she asked if anyone had any questions (at which point the couple who tried to stay in the hallway shot for the exit) I asked her if she could tell us about the objects in the room. She looked annoyed and said, "I already told you everything." (About e-harmony.) But she told a story about how they got one of the statues in the room from a man who lived upstairs. A story that still had nothing to do with Voodoo. Then she said she wasn't "consecrated to talk about physical Voodoo." And that was it.

I was a bit disappointed. I did do some other research later, though mostly I didn't find much I didn't already know. Last Monday Paul and I tried to go to a hoodoo shop across the river in Algiers called House of the Seven Sisters, but it was closed. Shocker. Paul kept saying, "She went to a hoo-doo shop in Al-geeahs and ne-vuh came back" in an exaggerated Brooklyn-Southern New Orleans accent. Hoodoo is a local version of Voodoo... it's folk magic, superstition, conjuration. The spells without the spirituality.

To find the lucky numbers for gambling, take the Bible. Now, I want you to read the ninth chapter of Psalms - reads it over three times before going to bed. When you read it over three times before going to bed, open the Bible and sleep with it - sleep with that Bible right under your pillow and you'll dream of that lucky number. When you get up the next morning, you can tell a person exactly about that number. And if you throw that number then they'll catch it.

~ from "Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted By Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks and Whites, Volume Three"
by Harry Middleton Hyatt (1973)

Various Voodoo remedies used to be sold in pharmacies in New Orleans in the 19th century. Potions were labeled by number so that customers could ask for "Number Six" without asking for "Love Success," for example. There's a pharmacy museum on Chartres Street in the Quarter that had some old voodoo stuff that was pretty interesting.


Voodoo was mentioned a couple other times on my trip, in sort of interesting ways. On Brie's last Sunday, we went to Mass at St. Augustine Church in Faubourg Treme. They sometimes have "Jazz Mass" there but I think we were there for a regular service. I had never been to Mass before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but Brie tells me that it's unusual to sing "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "This Little Light of Mine" at Mass.

At one point in the sermon, the priest said, "God is not magic. God is not gris-gris." Gris-gris (pronounced "gree gree") is a Voodoo talisman, a small cloth bag full of herbs, oils, bones, nails, hair, grave dirt, etc. that one wears to ward off evil or bring good luck. I noticed his comment especially because he didn't have to explain what gris-gris is... the congregation would have obviously known... but I didn't really think more about it, until two days later, when I was driving Brie to the airport. We were listening to a recording of Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, speaking at our church retreat this year (which I didn't attend,) and he said, "What happens in our religion, what happens in our faith, is that we want God to help us get the things (we want.) ...It depersonalizes our relationship with God. God is no longer a Father who we trust, who is guiding us to live a better story by shaping our character. What is He? He's a genie in a lamp. And if we do this religious thing, He will grant our wishes. You know what that is? It's Voodoo. The closest thing we have to Evangelical culture in America is Voodoo."

Sometimes I think when I'm supposed to really hear something, God will tell me several times. And here was a sermon from a Catholic priest in New Orleans and a podcast by a post-modern thirtysomething writer saying the exact same thing: God is not Voodoo. And I wonder if I've been trying to do things, things that are not literally magical but are like little head games that I play with myself, to make my life turn out the way that I think it should be. Rather than listening for God's voice and trying to follow it. And maybe God wants me to quit worrying about the future and just do the best that I can with what I have.

It's also possible He just didn't want me to get a tarot card reading in Jackson Square, which I wanted to do because I've always thought tarot cards were cool and creepy, and I could use it as research. So I didn't. Just in case.

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I'd been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, What you need is
Love Potion Number Nine

~"Love Potion Number Nine"
Lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller