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

Consider, for example, that the current Cuban presence in Florida marks a "reincarnation" of a Spanish/Caribbean presence in a part of the US held longer by Spain (256 years) than by England and the US combined. The colony of la Florida offers a West Indian literature emerging from the foundations of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo's epic "La Florida" (1605?), Fray Francisco Pareja's Confessionario en lengua Castellana y Timuquana (1613), Florida-born Alonso de Leturiondo's petition to King Philip V (1701), and Zephaniah Kingsley's unusual Treatise defending slavery and inter-racial marriage (1828), trace creole boundaries of identity, which-even as they bind-reveal a catholicity relatively open to inevitable cross-cultural exchanges.

In recalling that the first North American crossroads of creolization was not Plymouth or even Jamestown, but la Florida, we must also not forget to invoke la Nouvelle Orleans. French Louisiana, called by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall "the most significant source of Africanization of the entire culture of the United States" (157), rapidly developed a creole culture that was an extension of the Francophone Caribbean. Louisiana offers our earliest work of African American fiction, Victor Sejour's story of Haiti, "Le Mulatre" (1837); as well as the first anthology of poetry by black North Americans, Les Cenelles (1845). In Le Vieux Salomon (1872), New Orleans novelist/spirit-medium Charles Testut depicts a spiritualist abolitionist society's efforts to help escaped Louisiana slaves return to their home in Guadeloupe. Alfred Mercier's L'Habitation Saint-Ybars (1881), Alcee Fortier's creole folktales (1895) and George W. Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) delve even deeper into a creole marvelous real that-through the jazz of Louis Armstrong, the voodoo loas of Marie Laveau, and the carnival crewes of Mardi-Gras-has provided spirited channels of American identity and culture.

Having acknowledged the Caribbean roots of Florida and Louisiana, we must recognize South Carolina's ties to the British West Indies. Settled from Barbados in 1670, Carolina grew slowly until the sudden boom of rice culture led to massive importation of African slaves. The creole language of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah, shares many features with Anglo-creole languages of the Caribbean. William Bascom's comparative study of Gullah folktales retold by writers such as Joel Chandler Harris (1883) and Charles Colcock Jones (1888) reveals the African origin of many of the Gullah tales and shows them to be "virtual equivalents" of creole tales told throughout the New World. The Georgia/Carolina blackbelt that gave rise to the fabulous realism of Uncle Remus also fed the vision of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903),Jean Toomer's Cane(1923), and Julia Peterkin's Black April (1927), which along with the "two-headed" work of voodoo initiate, Zora Neale Hurston, has charged a new body of "mojo" or neohoodoo writing that has been marking the Sea Islands as locations for powerfully enduring Afro-creole systems. Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash, and Tina McElroy Ansa share a vision that, while it inherits magical realist techniques, lays strong claim to the "true-true conjury" of Afro-creole folk sources shared with sister Caribbean writers such as Erna Brodber and Simone Schwarz-Bart. This is the grounding by which Paule Marshall, as the Brooklyn-born daughter of Barbadian immigrants, turns in Praisesongfor the Widow to the Carolina creole coast, first colonized from Barbados, for a homegrown voodoo efficacy that, as South Carolina Sheriff J. E. McTeer has testified, "works" (27).