Free Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs Page B

SLEPT LITTLE, I AGAIN ROSE AT DAWN. COFFEE AND a muffin, and I was on my way to the MCME.
    By eight thirty both femora lay on the counter. So did three other sections of long bone. The latter were sawn, and came from a smal mammal. Or mammals. Since no anatomical landmarks remained, the osteology text was of no use. I’d need histology to determine species and numbers.
    By ten I’d emptied the large cauldron. The remaining soil produced three more red beads, a segment of antler, probably deer, and a smal plastic skeleton.
    After photographing the colection, I turned to the human femora.
    The two leg bones were similar in size and robusticity. Both were slender and lacked prominent muscle attachment sites. One was a left, the other a right. Both were straight, with little shaft concavity, an African-American more than European trait.
    As with the skul, I took measurements. Maximum length. Bicondylar breadth. Midshaft circumference. When I’d completed two sets of nine, I ran the numbers through Fordisc 3.0.
    Both bones classified as female. Both classified as black.
    I turned my attention to age.
    As with the cranium, long bones come with some assembly required. Here’s how it works.
    As the tubular part, or shaft, elongates throughout childhood, caps, condyles, crests, and tuberosities form around it. It is the joining together of these fiddly bits to the straight bit, sometime in mid to late adolescence, that gives each bone its characteristic shape.
    Union occurs in set sequence, at roughly predictable ages. Elbow. Hip. Ankle. Knee. Wrist. Shoulder.
    Both femora exhibited identical patterns. The hip ends were fuly adult, meaning ful fusion of the heads to the necks, and of the lesser and greater trochanters to the shafts. At the other end, squiggly lines above the joint surface indicated the articular condyles were stil wrapping things up at the knee. The picture suggested death sometime in the late teens.
    The leg bones came from a young black female. So did the skul.
    I felt, what? Relieved? Resigned? I wasn’t sure.
    I flashed on the girl in the photo. The very modern photo.
    I surveyed the cauldrons and the artifacts they had held. Thought of the chicken, the goat, the statue, the dols, the carved wooden effigy.
    The human remains.
    Deep down, I had a strong hunch what it al meant.
    Time for research.
    Ninety minutes later I’d learned the folowing:
    A belief system that combines two or more cultural and spiritual ideologies into a single new faith is caled a syncretic religion.
    In the Americas, most syncretic religions are of Afro-Caribbean origin, having developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the slave trade. Forbidden the right to folow their traditional beliefs, African slaves disguised their practices by assigning images of Catholic saints to their gods.
    In the United States, the best-known syncretic religions are Santería, voodoo, and brujería. Most folowers live in Florida, New Jersey, New York, and California.
    Santería, originaly caled Lucumi, emerged in Cuba and evolved from the southwestern Nigerian Yoruba culture. In Brazil it’s known as Candomble; in Trinidad, as Shango.
    Santería recognizes multiple gods, caled orishas. The seven big dogs are Eleggua, Obatala, Chango, Oshun, Yemaya, Babalu Aye, and Oggun. Each has his or her own function or power, weapon or symbol, color, number, feast day, and favorite form of offering.
    Each deity has a corresponding Catholic syncretism. Eleggua: Saint Anthony of Padua, the Holy Guardian Angel, or the Christ Child; Obatala: Our Lady of Las Mercedes, the Holy Eucharist, Christ Resurrected; Chango: Saint Barbara; Oshun: Our Lady of Charity; Yemaya: Our Lady of Regla; Babalu Aye: Saint Lazarus; Oggun: Saint Peter.
    The deceased rank with the orishas in Santería, thus ancestor worship is a central tenet. Both the gods and the dead must be honored and appeased. The concepts of ashe and ebbo are fundamental.
    Ashe is the energy