Notes toward a voodoo hermeneutics: Soul rhythms, marvelous transitions, and passages to the creole saints in praisesong for the widow

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Cartwright, Keith

At the start of the final section, "The Beg Pardon," an exhausted Avey lodges with Lebert's daughter Rosalie, who bathes her and gives her a massage that strikes "a powerful chord . . . in the remotest corners of her body" (224). Avey finds the candle and ear of corn set out for the ancestors "no more strange than the plate of food that used to be placed beside the coffin at funerals in Tatem" (225). To her surprise, she harbors no regrets that Lebert "tricked" her into coming and agrees to meet him "at the crossroads" where the Big Drum will be held (230). Later, at that crossroads gate, he becomes Eshu/Legba, the path-opening trickster represented as an arthritic old man with crutch or cane: he "suddenly appeared older . . . his body more misshapen and infirm than ever before. He would have been unable to stand without the aid of the walking stick" (233). Arriving at a clearing beneath a calabash tree atop a hill, they enter the sacred space known in Cuban santeria as, "el monte," where the loas/orishas are called by dance and drums as Lebert falls to his knees inside the circle, summoning the "Old Parents" with a falsetto "Pa'done mwe. . . !" (236).

After the "Beg Pardon," the drums of the nation dances call the elders who identify themselves by "nation" (Cromanti, Manding, Congo, etc.). In response, the ancestral "Old Parents" come, "visible, metamorphosed and invisible" as land crabs, insects, night creatures (239). When the creole dances start up, the drums receive a fresh misting of rum, and an iron gong, "calling for its namesake and creator" summons "Ogun Feraille" (246), loa/orisha of iron/war/wilderness recognized by some 70 million people in Africa and the New World (Barnes 1). As Ogun presents himself, Avey follows the dancers "in their loose, ever-widening ring" and can "feel the reverberation of their powerful tread in the ground" till finally "she too moved-a single declarative step forward" into the familiar shuffle linking Carriacou's "Big Drum" to Carolina's ring shout (247). Moving "cautiously at first, each foot edging forward as if the ground under her was really water-muddy river water-and she was testing it to see if it would hold her weight" (248), Avey rejoins the Ibo stepping across the waters back home: "She had finally after all these decades made it across" (248). She keeps stepping the "rhythmic trudge," the old "shuffle designed to stay the course of history," till suddenly "these strangers . . . become one and the same with people in Tatem" (250). Then as Avey's "arms went up and her body seemed about to soar off into the night" (250), Lebert and the older dancers bow, one by one, to some awesome manifestation from the Old Parents incarnate in Avey's dance. When a bearded woman, a "Tiresias of the dried dugs," bows and asks "And who you is?" Avey replies, as Aunt Cuney had always insisted, "Avey, short for Avatara" (251). Finally, she has made it across to claim her true head (ori), that reincarnate self that makes the prenatal choices of destiny we work to fulfill (Gleason 4) and the orisha or "head-source" that is source of this self, "source of that consciousness that makes us what we are" (Murphy 132).