Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New
Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her
favors or fear her lingering influence. "Voodoo Queen: The Spirited
Lives of Marie Laveau" is the first study of the Laveaus, mother
and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of
religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil.
The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent
French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s
when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce
affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter,
in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the
imagination of New Orleans.
How did the two Maries apply their "magical" powers and uncommon
business sense to shift the course of love, luck, and the law? The
women understood the real crime--they had pitted their spiritual
forces against the slave system of the United States. Moses-like,
they led their people out of bondage and offered protection and
freedom to the community of color, rich white women, enslaved
families, and men condemned to hang.
The curse of the Laveau family, however, followed them. Both
loved men they could never marry. Both faced down the press and
police who stalked them. Both countered the relentless gossip of
curses, evil spirits, murders, and infant sacrifice with acts of
benevolence.
The book is also a detective story--who is really buried in the
famous tomb in the oldest "city of the dead" in New Orleans? What
scandals did the Laveau family intend to keep buried there forever?
By what sleight of hand did free people of color lose their
cultural identity when Americans purchased Louisiana and imposed
racial apartheid upon Creole creativity? "Voodoo Queen" brings the
improbable testimonies of saints, spirits, and never-before printed
eyewitness accounts of ceremonies and magical crafts together to
illuminate the lives of the two Marie Laveaus, leaders of a major,
indigenous American religion.
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