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

The ring shout, reconciling African worship styles with Anglo-Protestant prohibition of dance and drums (Courlander 195), provides an enduring medium of soul transition. As structure of authority and freedom, the counter-clockwise movement of the ring shout enacts the spiritual/cultural grounding and flight signified in Avey's name: Avatara-"bird-earth" and "avatar." Something of the ancestral loas (mysteries/saints) lives in the rhythmic support that "bases" the shout, enabling the steadiness that contemporary shouter Lawrence Mclver observes in an accomplished holy dancer: "she could be just as level. . . . Her meats'd be shakin', but she could be-so level in time" (Rosenbaum, McIntosh 4).

While the shout provides transfiguring "level" movement and psychic flight, the object of Avey's childhood walks with Aunt Cuney is Ibo Landing, where a group of chained Ibo, as the historians describe it, committed mass suicide by leaping into the tidal river on which their ship was docked. Aunt Cuney, however, tells a more marvelous version:

those pure-born Africans was peoples my gran' said could see in more ways than one. . . . And when they got through sizing up the place real good and seen what was to come, they turned, my gran' said. . . . They just turned . . . and walked on back down to the edge of the river here. . . . chains didn't stop those Ibo none. . . . They just kept on walking like the water was solid ground. Left the white folks standin' back here with they mouth hung open and they taken off down the river on foot. Stepping. (37-39)

Providing precedent for Avey's escape from the cruise ship, this story, passed to Avey via Aunt Cuney from Cuney's "gran," Avatara, is meant to be received in good faith. When little Avey expresses her doubts, Cuney chastises her: "Did it say Jesus drowned when he went walking on the water in that Sunday School book your momma always sends with you?" (40). We see that the Christian miracles are accepted because they are scriptural, sanctioned by canonical texts, while the collective memory of Afro-creole tales faces dismissal as folklore or fantasy. The Ibo Landing tale, a "real" folk tale that Marshall retells from the Georgia Writers' Project's interviews with ex-slaves (1940), offers a vision that challenges us to "see in more ways than one," to nurture an ear for what John Miller Chernoff calls a "profoundly pluralistic" polyrhythmic perspective (156). Similarly, the ring shout provides the base rhythms by which the community may remember the Ibos' water-walking escape across the Atlantic. As shouter Odessa Young puts it: "you got to get your foot together. If your feet can't say what the song say, you might as well not to do it" (Rosenbaum, Shout 76). We can see how Haitian drumming's spiritual embodimentled Alejo Carpentier to articulation of America's "marvelous real." For Afro-creole music trains us to "expect dialogue . . . there is always an in-between, always a place to add another beat. . . . beyond any one perspective a person can bring to it" (Chernoff 158).