The Wedding of Two Waters
On the shortest nights of the year, when the June dark comes late and heavy over Louisiana, the old calendar keeps a feast. The twenty-fourth of June is the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the forerunner who went down into the Jordan and poured water over the head of Christ. Its eve, the night of the twenty-third, is one of the oldest fire-nights in Catholic Europe, a midsummer of bonfires and blessings. When the faith crossed the water into the Americas, it met something already waiting: the river spirits and water rites carried in the memory of enslaved Africans from the nations of Kongo, Dahomey, and the Yoruba. From that meeting, on the low banks of a New Orleans bayou, came the great night of Louisiana Voodoo.
It is worth naming plainly what braided together here, for the strands are often confused. Haitian Vodou is a religion of the lwa, the spirits, grown into a full liturgy in the one land where the enslaved won their own freedom. Louisiana Voodoo is its cousin, not its copy: seeded by the same African nations, deepened by refugees who fled Saint-Domingue’s revolution and reached New Orleans by way of Cuba, and wedded closely to Roman Catholic devotion to the saints. Hoodoo is neither. It is not a religion at all but a body of folk magic, rootwork and conjure, that a churchgoing Christian might practice without contradiction. St. John’s Eve belongs first to the religion, though its waters have touched all three.
The Queen on the Bayou
The name that rules this night is Marie Laveau. A free woman of color, a hairdresser, a devout Catholic who kept her pew at the St. Louis Cathedral, she became in the middle of the nineteenth century the acknowledged Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Where lesser gatherings were hidden, hers were half in the open. Each St. John’s Eve she led her followers out to the shores of Bayou St. John, the slow water that runs to Lake Pontchartrain, and there kept the feast by torchlight.
What the faithful came for was the washing of the head. In this tradition the head is no ordinary part of the body; it is the seat of the spirit that guides a person, the crown where the guardian dwells. Haitian Vodou keeps the same understanding in its lavé tèt, the head-washing of its initiations, and the kinship is real, though the rites are distinct. To have the head washed on St. John’s Eve, with water drawn from the bayou, with herbs, with prayer and the names of the saints, was to be cooled, cleansed, and made new, a spiritual rebirth timed to the very turning of the year’s light. Around the washing moved the rest: the drums, the singing that ran from French to Kreòl to older African tongues, the bonfires, the cauldron, and the great serpent. New Orleans knew the snake as Li Grand Zombi, the word taken from the Kongo nzambi, meaning a god, and no kin to the shambling corpse the moving pictures later stole the name for. Through the serpent, it was said, the spirit spoke.
Fire in the Newspapers
The city watched, and the city did not understand. To the newspapers of the day, the Picayune and its rivals, St. John’s Eve was scandal and spectacle, and they wrote it so: columns of lurid invention, naked dancers and unholy rites, the fear of a white readership dressed up as reportage. The coverage sold papers and hardened suspicion. Ordinances followed, and police, and arrests. Assemblies were broken up, drums silenced, the worship pressed back out of the torchlight and into shuttered rooms. Much of what we think we know of these nights comes down to us through that hostile ink, which means it must be read the way one reads any testimony given by an enemy, for the shape of the truth beneath the slander. That Marie Laveau led the people to the bayou is history. The wilder embroideries, and the tale that her daughter took up the crown behind her so that the Queen herself seemed never to age, belong to legend, and are best held as legend.
The Bayou Remembers
The suppression did not end the practice; it drove it deep, where such things survive. Through the twentieth century the head-washing was kept quietly, in families and small houses, waiting. Then, in the last decades, it returned to the open air. Since the 1990s practitioners have gathered again each twenty-third of June on the banks of Bayou St. John, near the old Magnolia Bridge, to light the fires and wash the heads of any who come with an open and reverent heart. It is a ceremony revived in living memory by the priestess Sallie Ann Glassman and carried on by others of the city’s temples and houses.
Stand there now on the warm dark bank, and the years fold together: the same water, the same short night, the same cool herbs poured over a bowed head. The names of the spirits are still spoken. The Baptist’s feast still opens its door to the older gods who kept their appointment at the river long before it. New Orleans has not forgotten. On St. John’s Eve, the bayou remembers, and the head is made new.