Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau

Rating:
Summary: Wow what a fascinating read
Review: I admit the last time I had even a passing curiosity in the subject of voodoo was when some Ivy League graduate was on the Phil Donahue show back in the early 1980's. And the only reason the book peaked my interest was because of its interweaving of Catholicism, because of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau who was also a 'practicing' Catholic.

The churches toleration of pagan or non-Christian practices, in mostly third world countries is something equally fascinating.

New Orleans has such an eccentric, eclectic and exotic history when it comes to its cultural roots, which makes this book a fascinating read.



Rating:
Summary: Fantastic for history buffs and spiritualists alike!
Review: I bought this book on a trip to New Orleans, at the advice of a Voodoo Goddess named Anna, who owns a wonderful shop in the French Quarter. This book is wonderful!!!!! It provides the reader with colorful imagery that teaches not only about Voodoo, but also the history of New Orleans. It debunks myths about the TWO Marie Laveaus....and provides the most solid research of these two women to date! I reccommend this book to anyone remotely curious in Southern Style Voodoo/Hoodoo, New Orleans culture or history, and just something different!

Rating:
Summary: Worth the Read!
Review: I have never heard of Marie Laveau or Marie Laveau the Second, except in passing mentions in other novels. I have heard only rumors of Voodoo and Hoodoo. Now that I have read this book I have a better understanding of Voodoo and the women they called "Voodoo Queen". Martha Ward it seems had a daunting task of sorting through numerous newspaper articles, legal documents and church documents to find out who Marie Laveau was. I feel that she displayed an objective view of this information, relating what it would have been like to live during the times that Marie Laveau lived in.

We can only guess and surmise what really happened then, the only way we could possibly know for sure would have been to actually live then. The book truly gives you a clear view of the times and the people who lived then.

I feel the book is worth the price and the time to read it is enjoyable!

Rating:
Summary: Worth the Read!
Review: I have never heard of Marie Laveau or Marie Laveau the Second, except in passing mentions in other novels. I have heard only rumors of Voodoo and Hoodoo. Now that I have read this book I have a better understanding of Voodoo and the women they called "Voodoo Queen". Martha Ward it seems had a daunting task of sorting through numerous newspaper articles, legal documents and church documents to find out who Marie Laveau was. I feel that she displayed an objective view of this information, relating what it would have been like to live during the times that Marie Laveau lived in.

We can only guess and surmise what really happened then, the only way we could possibly know for sure would have been to actually live then. The book truly gives you a clear view of the times and the people who lived then.

I feel the book is worth the price and the time to read it is enjoyable!

Rating:
Summary: The history of Martha Ward and her influence on New Orleans
Review: Martha Ward's biographical coverage of Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, whose curse has ruled the imagination of New Orleans for many years, provides an intriguing coverage of the magical deeds, powers, and achievements of the woman's life. There were actually two historical figures with the same name: a mother and daughter who were prominent Catholic Creoles and legendary leaders of Voodoo. Professor Ward applies concepts of anthropology and women's studies from her background to the history of Martha Ward and her influence on New Orleans history, making Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives Of Marie Laveau a scholarly analysis which is hard to put down.


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Summary: Review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 28, 2004
Review: On June 21, 1874, reporters at the New Orleans Times unexpectedly received an invitation to attend the annual St. John's Eve voodoo celebration on the lakefront. That the invitation was from the famous Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, came as quite a shock. White newspapermen in the city had long been critical both of Laveau and her religion. They could not, however, pass up an opportunity to attend the mysterious event. As the reporters boarded the Lake Pontchartrain Railroad bound for Milneburg two nights later, they expected to witness a wild ceremony complete with snake dancing, animal sacrifices, and scantily clad women. When they arrived, however, Laveau and her followers were nowhere to be found and the reporters soon realized that they had been duped. The invitation was a hoax.
The fooled reporters were not the first individuals to be thwarted in their efforts to find Marie Laveau, nor would they be the last. The Marie Laveau the reporters set out to find was actually Marie Laveau the Second. Her mother, Marie the First, was the original Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Both women were elusive figures during their lifetimes, and each became even more mystifying in death. For over a century, historians, folklorists, theologians, and writers have pilgrimaged to New Orleans with hopes of learning the true story of the two Voodoo queens. The anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston found mixed success during the 1920s. During the Great Depression, the Federal Writer's Project employed an entire team of interviewers to press elderly New Orleanians for any information about the Laveaus. In recent decades, scores of articles, theses and dissertations, have been written about the fabled mother and daughter priestesses. Despite such efforts, the Laveau women's history remained shrouded by conflicting and often apocryphal legends, facts, and details.
Martha Ward's Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau will change that. Ward (a professor of Anthropology, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies at the University of New Orleans) has meticulously combed through baptismal and notarial records, court documents, and other concrete evidence of the Laveaus' lives. With a critical eye, Ward incorporates the fascinating legends and rich folklore that surround the Voodoo queens, sifting out those that contradict historical facts. And she places the Laveaus within the context of their times. Dismissing the pejorative rantings of nineteenth century newspaper editors who, like many in the white establishment, found the Laveaus threatening, Ward portrays the Leveaus as influential leaders in the Creole community who resisted the Americanization of New Orleans. In Ward's skilled hands, the Laveaus are restored to their rightful place as important historical actors.
Many readers may be surprised to learn, for instance, that Marie the First shared a remarkable working relationship with Père Antoine, the Pastor of St. Louis Cathedral. Laveau was a practicing Catholic, baptized and married at the church, and educated by the Ursuline Nuns. As an adult she struck a bargain with Antoine. She guided worshipers to his Cathedral and made sure Afro-Creole parishioners observed feast days, baptisms, and the sacraments of marriage and in return, he allowed Laveau and her followers to practice their syncretic version of Catholicism that blended European traditions with African spiritualism. He allowed Voodoo women to construct alters to the Virgin Mary in the cathedral and replaced hymns in some ceremonies with ritual chanting and drums. Together, Antoine and Laveau visited death row prisoners, and built altars in the cells of the condemned. "Marie the First," Ward writes, "was Antoine's disciple, coworker, devoted parishoner, and best friend." Until his death in 1829, the Spainard Antoine and the Creole Laveau resisted the rigid racial order the American regime attempted to enforce.
During the 1830s and 1840s, government officials, fearful the voodoo spiritualists would incite slave revolts, demonized Laveau and other prominent leaders of New Orleans's free Afro-Creole community. Slaveowners already viewed free people of color with suspicion, even if they didn't practice Voodoo. Their mere presence was a destabilizing force to the racial status quo that defined slave society. The fact that many whites and blacks believed that the Laveau women possessed magical powers made them even more of a threat. Many New Orleanians bore witness to their ability to curse cruel slaveholders, freeze policemen in their tracks, and fix the outcomes of court proceedings using charms and incantations. Convinced of the women's omnipotent powers, even many white New Orleanians called Marie the First to their bedsides during yellow fever outbreaks, or visited the Laveaus' house on St. Ann Street seeking homeopathic remedies. Such widespread confidence in the Laveaus' abilities fueled the suspicions of police, politicians, and editors who accused the Voodoos of cannibalism, devil worship, and other "figments of fevered white imaginations." These condemnations grew more visceral as racial tensions increased on the eve of the Civil War.
The Reconstruction era did not bring relief from these attacks. Propagandists for the defeated Confederates now vowed to fight the "Africanization" of the city and used sensationalized accounts of Voodoo ceremonies to malign black culture. Although Marie the Second was able to practice her religion more openly during Louisiana's brief experiment with biracial government, the white establishment was unrelenting in their attacks on her character. When ex-Confederates regained control in 1877, efforts to disempower the Afro-Creole community escalated. Armed with the law and uninhibited in their use of harassment and extra-legal violence, the police forced Voodoo spiritualists into hiding.
Scrupulously researched and written, Ward's biography is a welcome corrective to Robert Tallant's Voodoo in New Orleans (a poorly researched artifact of the1940s that remains in print). Ward does utilize the Creole folklore, often referred to as gumbo ya-ya, concerning the Voodoo queens that circulated both then and now. But, in contrast to may previous accounts, she handles those materials carefully. Like Donald Marquis, whose classic work In Search of Buddy Bolden: The First Man of Jazz reconstructed the life of another fabled New Orleanian, Ward uses rigorous scholarship to chip away at accreted myth and deciphers what we can and cannot know about the Laveaus. In the process, her book restores both Marie Laveaus to their rightful places as women who used faith to resist oppression. "Both women," Ward concludes, "led dangerous, secret lives but not because of midnight ceremonies in graveyards." "They were free women in a slave society, French Catholics in an Anglo-Protestant nation, and Creole leaders in the largest and strongest community of color in America."

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Summary: Voodoo Fact and Voodoo Legend
Review: One of the famous above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans is known as St. Louis No. 1, the oldest graveyard in the city. A tall marble and stucco tomb there is a site where devotees frequently leave gifts - flowers, candy, salt, coins, beads, bourbon - for Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo priestess. She still attracts attention, and some people still talk to her. One of these is Martha Ward, an anthropologist at the University of New Orleans, who has written _Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau_ (University Press of Mississippi). It is a book from a strange sort of participatory journalism; the author says she has "relied on dreams, intuition, a hyperactive imagination, and funky Voodoo luck." She admits to standing in front of the tomb and hearing Marie laugh when asked "What really happened?" Marie's answer: "Who knows the whole story, and maybe it's better that way." There is such a gumbo of legend and fact here, along with earnest attempts to clear up history and legal agreements that were deliberately made murky in the first place, that calling upon voodoo as a reference source isn't as dicey as it might seem. Ward is a competent guide through confusing social customs of strange times in a strange locale, and she interprets the gaps as carefully as possible. "There's hardly any peg in this whole narrative that's literal, truthful or absolute," she warns, but there is plenty of good storytelling and historical recreations of New Orleans nonetheless.

Marie Laveau was born in 1801 to an unmarried "free woman of color." She grew up in religious training around the famous St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. Such Christian learning did not limit Marie to being Christian; one of the themes repeatedly emphasized here is that voodoo was not in opposition to any traditional Christian spirituality, but an addition to it. There are plenty of examples, for instance, of official or folklore saints being incorporated into voodoo. Marie formed a strong partnership with a controversial priest, Pere Antoine. Ward says that Marie guaranteed to Antoine the support from her followers and a church full of them, and in return he would perform sacraments of baptism and marriage for interracial couples who otherwise could claim no legitimacy. Ward concludes that after Pere Antoine's death, the church joined in with the proslavery religious orthodoxy of the times, and that her daughter (also Marie Laveau) made voodoo an alternative for those Pere Antoine could no longer welcome. She took her herbal and voodoo arts to new spheres in her occupation as hairdresser to upper-class white women. She also helped slaves escape. She was famous for her dancing, luridly described by eager reporters, which might involve different states of nudity, on the part of all races, with the movements being called by Marie herself. Marie would have such dances in her own back yard in her New Orleans house on Friday nights, followed by a voodoo benediction and blessing for everyone; when you left, said one attendee, "you surely had the belief." Marie would see individual clients during the week for the same sorts of problems now brought to counselors or advice columnists.

Reconstruction collapsed in 1877, and tolerance for alternative beliefs took a downturn. Police took up attacks on voodoo practitioners, and in 1897 the city passed regulations that prohibited "trance artists, 'voodoos,' and similar tricksters from operating in the city." Eventually, reading palms for payment, influencing evil or good luck, bringing together enemies, settling lovers' quarrels, and other familiarly voodoo services could lead to arrest. Practitioners moved across the river to the Algiers neighborhood, and Spiritual Churches continued the practice in small groups. The beliefs continue; Ward has visited contemporary ceremonies, and of course the flowers and candles keep coming to the Laveau tomb. (No one knows when the daughter Marie died, or where her remains are.) It has sometimes made Ward's research difficult. A librarian at the New Orleans Public Library sighed, "If it has Marie Laveau's name on it, it just disappears." Ward has also dug into baptismal and marriage records, land deeds, and notary files to try to sort reality from legend. Especially illuminating are oral histories given by ex-slaves to the WPA during the depression. Ward's book gives a new aspect to women's history within New Orleans, as well as showing the history of the city's vivid Creole culture. It is a quirky history, with more than its share of supposition about its two main characters, but anyone who expected "just the facts" about the voodoo queens hasn't even started to understand how voodoo works.


Rating:
Summary: The only real book on Marie Laveau
Review: This book paints a beautiful portrait of New Orleans in the 19th centurery and the free people of color who lived and worshiped here.
It shows the Marie Laveaus not only as powerful spiritual leaders (which the were) but as activist women, surviving in an almost impossible time.
Heck, this book even explains why the Saints (New Orleans football team of sorts) always do so badly.
If you have any interest in New Orleans history, this book is a must read!