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

Reconnecting North America with the Caribbean and Africa, the power of Marshall's Praisesong rises in large part from its immersion in the soul musics and continuing rites of spirit possession that have provided counter-cultural resistance to "zombifying" forces of enslavement. From Tacky's rebellion (Jamaica) to revolts led by Denmark Vesey (SouthCarolina) and Mackandal (Haiti), "the slaves rebelled not just because they had unbearable living conditions . . . but also because the greatest voodoo loas (Legba, Ogoun, Damballah) had willed it so" (Benitez-Rojo 162). The voodoo mysteries appear most "marvelous" and least "real" to observers habituated to Christianity's "radical divorce of spirit from matter" and to those bound by post-Christian legacies of rationalism and positivism, systems which have led to the divorce of soul from working bodies, driving "the entire modern world, progressively, into a frenzy of absolutely despiritualized materialism" (Campbell xii). As the title of Praisesong's opening section, "Runagate," suggests, Marshall's novel of the spiritual awakening of a New York widow, Avatara (Avey) Johnson, begins with Avey running from a kind of slavery towards freedom, taking flight from the suddenly zombifying experience of her Caribbean cruise. When we meet her inexplicably abandoning her two friends on their annual cruise-and planning to fly home to New York-attentive readers can only agree with her friend's insistence: "somethin' deep's behind this mess" (28).

The creolized Gullah culture of South Carolina provides the music and myth by which Avey is compelled to dare transition in the Caribbean. In dream-encounter Avey faces her dead great-aunt Cuney calling her to their ritual walk shared "during the Augusts she had spent as a girl on Tatem Island . . . on the South Carolina Tidewater" (32). The dream transports Avey to church sounds of the ring shout filled with a creole spirit of worship that, while Christian, is suffused with something else:

They were propelling themselves forward at a curious gliding shuffle which did not permit the soles of the heavy work shoes they had on to ever once lift from the floor. Only their heels rose and then fell with each step, striking the worn pineboard with a beat that was precise and intricate as a drum's, and which as the night wore on and the Shout became more animated could be heard all over Tatem.

They sang: "Who's that riding the chariot? / Well well well. . ."; used their hands as racing tambourines, slapped their knees and thighs and chest in dazzling syncopated rhythm. They worked their shoulders; even succeeded at times in giving a mean roll of their aged hips. They allowed their failing bodies every liberty, yet their feet never once left the floor or, worse, crossed each other in a dance step.

Arms shot up, hands arched back like wings: "Got your life in my hands / Well well well . . ." Singing in quavering atonal voices as they glided and stamped one behind the other within the larger circle of their shadows cast by the lamplight on the walls. Even when the Spirit took hold and their souls and writhing bodies seemed about to soar off into the night, their feet remained planted firm. I shall not be moved. (34)