They arrive the way twilight arrives — all at once, and from every direction. You do not summon a single spirit when you call the Gede; you open the gate to a whole nation. They come crowding into the peristyle in the bodies of the faithful, pushing back the reverent hush of the ceremony with laughter that has no shame left in it. A pair of dark glasses appears, often with one lens knocked clean out, so the wearer may look upon the land of the living with one eye and the land of the dead with the other. The voice goes thin and nasal, pinched in the sinuses of the tomb. A cane taps. A cigarette is demanded. And then the hips begin the banda, that lewd rolling dance upon the very edge of the grave, obscene and holy at once — for the dead have crossed the last river, and those who have died no longer fear anything at all.
What the Grave Governs
Gede is the company of the ancestors, the great multitude who have gone before and returned to keep watch over those still breathing. Their dominion is the whole circuit of mortality: death and the corpse, yes, but also sex and the seed, resurrection and the stubborn return of life. This is the deep wisdom folded into their filth. The Gede thrust their hips and speak of the phallus and the womb not to scandalize the pious, but because they know what the living forget — that the same act which makes a grave makes a child, that the cemetery and the marriage bed are two doors in one wall. They are unashamed because they have seen the far side of shame. They are the great truth-tellers, mocking the vanity of the powerful, exposing the hypocrite, laughing at pretension until it cracks. And they are healers, most tender toward the sick and the small; a Gede may plant himself at the bedside of a dying child and simply refuse to let the little soul be taken, bargaining with the grave he himself embodies.
The Nanchon of Gede
The Gede belong to no borrowed rite. They are their own nanchon, a nation apart from the cool waters of Rada and the fierce fire of Petwo, and they carry both temperatures in a single body — grave-cold and pepper-hot together. This is why they come last in the liturgy, after every other family has been saluted, and why they so often crash the feast uninvited, tumbling in through the back door of the ritual to have the final word. At their head stand the Barons — Baron Samedi, Baron Lakwa, Baron Simityè — and beside them Manman Brijit, the fierce mother of the burial ground. Do not mistake the Baron for his children. Baron is the lord and gatekeeper, the first man ever laid in the cemetery, master of the black cross that marks the boundary of the dead. The Gede are the innumerable throng who pass through that gate behind him — Gede Nibo, Gede Loraj, and a legion whose names spill out endlessly, the whole rowdy family of the tomb.
How the Dead Are Fed
Dress the altar in black and purple, the mourning colors worn by Brijit and the Baron, with white for the bones and the shroud. Keep their day on Saturday, and let it swell into their great feast, Fèt Gede, on the first and second of November, when the living pour into the cemeteries to crowd the black cross with candles and song. Their sign is drawn from the grave itself — the cross upon the tomb, the coffin, the crossed spade and pick of the gravedigger. Feed them as the dead like to be fed: kleren steeped with twenty-one hot peppers, that pepper rum so fierce a living throat can scarcely bear it, which a mounted Gede will pour over his own flesh to prove the body he rides feels nothing now. Set out cassava bread and black coffee bitter as loss, fried food heaped and glistening, tobacco in cigars and cigarettes and pipes. Sing the songs that make the mourners laugh through their tears, the sly and filthy verses that only the dead may sing aloud.
A Benediction at the Cross
Papa Gede, whose hat is the color of night and whose glasses hold two worlds, come dancing when we call you. Baron of the black cross, Brijit of the burial mound, and all your countless children in the ground — accept the pepper and the smoke, the coffee and the cassava. Teach us your unafraid laughter. Stand between our small ones and the open grave. And when at last our own hour comes and the earth is turned, let us find you already there at the crossing, cane in hand, cigarette lit, ready to take us in dancing. Ayibobo.