In this article I am drawing on the last chapter of my PhD dissertation “The Mysterious Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux: A Study of Power and Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleanian Voodoo” (Philadelphia, Temple University, 1994).

1. There are numerous versions of how to spell her name: La Veau, Le Veau, Labeau, Laveau, Lavau, Lavaud, Laveaux. I selected “Laveaux” because that is the way her father Charles Laveaux and her half-sister Marie Laveaux, the wife of François Auguste, signed their names in all legal documents. The famous Voodoo Queen herself was illiterate and signed with an “X”. The few notary record entries that mention her also spell her name consistently “Laveaux”.

2. Robert Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans, Gretna, LA, Pelican Publishing Co., 1990, pp. 56-57 (first published 1946).

3. Numerous scholars consider Congo Square to be the birthplace of jazz and rock'n roll music. Marie Laveaux becomes then the mother of jazz. See for instance Michael Ventura, Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A., Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985. Congo Square was also a market place where enslaved and free people of color were able to sell and buy their goods and their information freely. It was the only public space where free and enslaved people of color were allowed to legally assemble and mingle. For more information on the events in Congo Square see Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans' Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation”, Louisiana History 32 (Spring 1991): 117-157.

4. For an elaborate explanation of the feminization of New Orleans Voodoo see my dissertation, op. cit., Ch. 3. See also Tallant, op. cit. Note 2; Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms Practical Rituals, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985; and Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1935.

5. For archival data on the historical Laveaux see my dissertation, op. cit., Ch. 5.

6. Ibid.

7. Robert Tallant Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, p. 11 cc.

8. Tallant, op. cit. Note 2, pp. 95-97.

9. Marcus Christian, “Marie Laveau — Saint or Sinner?”, unpublished manuscript, Marcus Christian Collection, Rare Manuscript Collection, University of New Orleans, p. 1.

10. Christian's entire work, most of it unpublished, is stored in the Rare Manuscript Collection, University of New Orleans.

11. For an insightful analysis of this debate, see Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978; also E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, Liverpool, University of Liverpool Press, 1963; and Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1958.

12. Katie Cannon, professor of religion and ethics at Temple University, uses this expression in her teaching as a guiding strategy of Womanist ethics. See Katie Cannon, Katie's Canon, New York, Crossroads, 1995.

13. Pierre Bourdieu has developed the concept of “cultural capital”. Although I am aware that he uses this concept only in reference to European elites, I think it can also effectively be utilized to describe the accumulative symbolic power of marginalized, subaltern groups such as New Orleanian Voodoo. See P. Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire, Paris, Fayard, 1982.

14. Asante defines Afrocentricity as a metatheoretical framework that, at its core, is “concerned with African people as subjects of historical and social experiences rather than objects in the margins of European experiences”. An Afrocentric perspective is thus a philosophical and ethical position that aims to correct the Eurocentric hegemonic “dislocation” of the African experience — be it on the continent of Africa or in the diaspora — and calls for a “relocation” of the African individual and community within an African perspective on history, politics, culture, language and worldview. See Molefi Kete Asante, “The Afrocentric Metatheory and Disciplinary Implications”, The Afrocentric Scholar 1 (1)(May 1992): 98-99. I understand the concepts of Afrocentricity and Eurocentricity as historical constructs of interpretable human experiences which should not be mistaken for essentialisms.

15. New Orleans Commercial Bulletin (5 July 1869), p. 1, c. 6; Tallant, op. cit. Note 2, pp. 72-73.

16. I am drawing here from James Scott's work. Instead of deconstructing the power of domination in the Foucauldian mode, Scott concentrates on the power of the subjugated and deconstructs resistance. He distinguishes between “public transcripts”, i.e. the prevailing discourse of the dominant social group, and “hidden transcripts”, i.e. the hidden discourses of any subordinated, discriminated or silenced social group. In my view, Scott's concept of “hidden transcripts” offers a helpful solution to capture discourses from below, in which the subaltern inscribe their own agendas of a myriad artful ways of resistance. See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1990.

17. Tallant, op. cit. Note 2, p. 116.

18. Daily Picayune (17 June 1881), p. 8, c. 4; Daily States (17 June 1881), p. 3, c. 3; see also discussion in my dissertation, op. cit., pp. 263-267.

19. New Orleans Democrat, June 18, 1881.

20. The 19th-century ideal of the true woman had sexist as well as racist aspects which are described in detail in Barbara Andolsen, Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Boothblacks: Racism and American Feminism, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press, 1986, Ch. 3. For the specific variation of true womanhood of the Southern woman in the antebellum era see Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1988. For a detailed analysis of the implications of the Southern white ideal of true woman for free women of color see L. Virginia Meacham Gould, “In Full Enjoyment of their Liberty: The Free Women of Color of the Gulf Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1796-1860”, PhD dissertation, Emory University, Atlanta, 1991.

21. That is the official number according to the tales of New Orleans' oral history. In my archival detective work I could only discover five. See my dissertation, op. cit, Ch. 5.

22. See Note 20.

23. Her death on 16 June 1881 was mentioned in all major New Orleans newspapers. But the fact that there was a lengthy obituary in the New York Times on 28 June 1881 only 12 days after her death confirms the extraordinary popularity of Marie Laveaux.

24. This popular “second-line” jazz song with the title “Marie Laveau” has been recorded many times. I used a recording by Dejan's Olympia Brass Band, New Orleans' Jazz, Mardi Gras Records, 1989.

25. New Orleans Democrat (18 June 1881).

26. Tallant, op. cit. Note 2, p. 77.

27. Robert Tallant, The Voodoo Queen, Gretna, LA, Pelican, 1956; Musee Conti—New Orleans' Historical Wax Museum, Souvenir Guide Book, 1964.

28. John Kendall, “Old New Orleans Houses and Some of the People who Lived in Them”, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (3): 794-820.

29. Ronnie Clayton, Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers' Project, New York, Peter Lang, 1990, p. 40.

30. Scott, op. cit. Note 16, pp. 221-222.

31. Ibid., p. 222.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 223, emphasis original.

35. Ibid.

36. The origins of the feminization of New Orleanian Voodoo and the emergence of powerful female leadership are described in detail in my dissertation, op. cit., Ch. 3.

37. Overcoming Habermas's undifferentiated idea of the “public sphere”, Nancy Fraser creates the concept of “subaltern counter public spheres” which she defines as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs”: Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992, p. 121. I believe 19th-century New Orleanian Voodoo houses, too, could be regarded as such subaltern counterpublics where a disenfranchised religious culture consisting almost exclusively of women could freely exchange their discourses, discourses not only encompossing the spoken word but also expressed in elaborate sacred rituals, in the vocabulary of syncopated African body movements and dance steps, in polyphonic songs, and, most important, in the polyrhythms of their drums that led them into communion with the spirit world.

38. The term bricolage is taken from Claude Levi-Strauss's classic work The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966. For an explanation of how syncretistic bricolages are expressions of subversive behavior of marginalized people see Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 197-198.

39. See Gould, op. cit. Note 20.

40. Concerned about the senseless violence and poverty that ravages today's African American urban communities, Cornel West proposes that current western materialistic individualism has caused the corrosion of moral values. According to him, it is this crisis of meaning which lies at the root of the current violent social crisis. His solution for warding off this crisis is prophetic leadership. See Cornel West, Race Matters, Boston, MA, Beacon, 1994, Chs 1 and 8.

41. Ibid., p. 100.

42. Ibid., p. 101.

43. Ibid., p. 105.

The Politics of Myth-making: an Analysis of the Struggle for the “Correct” Appropriation of New Orleans' Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux

Abstract