Free American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World by Rod Davis Page B

have to confront those feelings, and that I would have to do so through Lorita. I had watched her as priestess but had avoided becoming one of her clients. My hesitation wasn't caused by doubt. I wasn't worried about finding out if she really knew her stuff. I was worried about what stuff of mine she would find out. Not until I was about to leave town did I ask for an appointment. "I was wondering why you didn't want a reading," she smiled, almost as though I'd been a lover too shy to offer a kiss.
So, for the first time, I sat in the client chair in her office, on the other side of her reading table and Bible, facing her directly. She looked at me in a way that almost seemed objective, cold as a doctor's eye in an examining room. And me as vulnerable. Then she unscrewed the cap on a vial of healing oil and told me to hold out my palms. I did, and she rubbed them tenderly. I calmed. Then she gripped my oiled hands hard, looked in my
     

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eyes and recited the Lord's Prayer, a Hail Mary, and a prayer asking the spirit for success. She pushed the Bible across the desk and said to open it anywhere.
I chose a passage in the middle, somewhere between Chronicles and Psalms in the Old Testament. She instructed me to write my name on a piece of paper, which she inserted in the place I had chosen. She shut the Bible and shifted back in her chair, eyes closed behind her bifocals. When the eyes re-opened, she cracked the Bible exactly to my spot. She picked up a pencil and used the point of it to skim the page, stopping occasionally on a single letter. Each seemed to be a key to a spiritual insight, which she would tell me as though from a trance. When she felt each onset she would jolt rigid, head tilted back and eyes shut, sometimes sharply crying out "Jesus!" and always prefacing the subsequent observations with "Spirit say ...."
One of the things the Spirit said was that I should be careful on my trip. In and out of trance, she told me I should pay attention to my father's spirit and light candles for him in Catholic churches. I should read the twenty-third Psalm, the part about "the valley of the shadow." I should never stay in "a log cabin or something like that in a wooded areayou might get robbed." I shouldn't drive late at night. I should beware of hoodoo people, root doctors, prophets, witchesall of whom she saw as elements in a spiritual evil empire out there waiting for naive fools like me. I should refuse all offerings of food and never let myself be cleaned by any kind of meat, nor leave anything behind. I should participate in no ceremonies, especially those involving sacrifices. I would manage to violate many of her injunctions, and yet they never left me completely.
When she had finished, Lorita put down her pencil and started to close the Bible. She wondered, almost as an afterthought, if there were anything I wanted to ask about. She looked at me, fingers poised on the worn margins of her holy book.
     

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There was, but I hadn't wanted to bring it up. Maybe it seemed too much like what I'd heard from other clients. Maybe I thought it too revealing. Maybe I didn't want to know. But I did. I wanted to know about a woman.
"That good, baby," she said at once, and told me to write her name on a piece of paper and insert it in the Bible, as we'd done before. It went the same until she looked at what I'd put down. She shut her eyes tightly. When she opened them, she asked, "Is that her real name?"
I laughed. "Yes, of course it is."
"You sure?"
I double-checked. "Yeah. That's her name."
Lorita shook her head. She closed her eyes and tried again. She looked me. "Spirit say: 'No report.'"
I smiled uneasily. Swords of skepticism unsheathed. After all this, I thought, Lorita has let me down.
"How can that be? I mean, I know her. That's her name."
Lorita didn't budge. Just sat back in her chair and looked at me over the tops of her glasses, Bible in her lap. "I don't know. Spirit say no report." I didn't know how to