American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World

20: Urban Herbs and Little Haiti

20 EACH MORNING IN Miami I ate a big Cuban breakfast of eggs, bacon, black beans, potatoes, hot bread and cafe cubana. I liked to sit on the round stools at the freshly wiped counters of the small diners that pervaded Little Havana and watch the men at their tables reading the sports pages, mother and children coming up to the take-out windows for egg and bacon tacos and fresh juices. You could get lost in aromas of roasting meat for the lunch trade, simmering kettles of rice, wafts of sweet plantains frying on the grill. I had been in South Florida about a week and was developing a taste for Cuba that didn't stop at my palate. It had gotten into my ears and down to my feet and would have made it to my groin if I'd had the chance; not that Frances ever called back. The music, the clothes, the way the people moved, looked and talked-it was very infectious. But ultimately it was Caribbean. There's a fair trade in revisionist academia which argues a hegemonic Caribbean influence in the slave and post-slavery culture of the U. S. That influence is obvious and was often heroic. Yet the African-American experience in this country was, espe276 URBAN HERBS AND LITTLE HAITI - 277 ciallybefore the twentieth century, profoundly and deliberately isolated from the Caribbean-except near port cities such as Miami, New Orleans, Charleston. The development ofvoudou thus took markedly different turns in the American South compared to Cuba, or Haiti or Brazil, with their much larger, denser African populations. The purpose ofmyjourneywas to see what had happened here. This was the unstudied terrain. This was where voudou's mark had been most tenuously held; it was also where the efforts to re-forge the links were most noticeable, for being most consciously retrieved. I did not want to lose sight of that. I needed to get back to black America. I wanted to see not only santeria in Miami, but orisha voudou. And I could; I had been in touch with Chief A. S. Ajamu. I was to meet him at 2 P.M. at his house on the northeast flank of the city, up Biscayne Boulevard about where it gives way to the eastern edge of a continually expanding Little Haiti. A forty-nine-year-old Chicagoan who had once studied to be a Catholic priest, then became one for Obatala, Ajamu had lived in Oyotunji in the early seventies, striking out for Miami in the eighties. It was lonely going at first. Cliquish santeros considered him an outsider. But over the years Ajamu made inroads, and now was known not only among the Cubans, but among the Haitians , with whom he felt the most spiritual kinship. His business had thrived, and at the time I called him, he was on the eve of an extended trip to Nigeria, from which he would return as a babalawo, the only such African-American priest in the city. He greeted me at the door smoking a cigar, wearing a green caftan and a bright red fela (a cap). His hair was dreadlocked, which he said was in honor of the orisha Shalako. His concrete block bungalow was large and airy, in the style of the city. Half the house served as living quarters for him and his wife, a priestess of Shango, but two huge rooms on the other side-enclosed 278 - AMERICAN VOUDOU patios with louvered breeze windows-were devoted to business . The front room was a kind ofcottage boutique, filled with racks of African-style clothing, jewelry and sundries. Folding tables next to the racks were spread thickly with literature about African culture, and with business cards touting Ajamu's other, perhaps more active, enterprise-the Divine Guidance Psychic Clinic, described as "Professional Practioners ofAfrican Science, Staffed by Traditional African Priests." The boutique room led into an even larger, L-shaped space at the rear of the home. There, Ajamu or his wife conducted client readings at a long wooden table. Beyond that was another room lined with paintings ofthe orisha and altars to them-and also, touchingly, an oil painting ofAjamu's close friend and godfather , Owolawo. It was a ceremonial chamber. Bimbes, festivals , sacrificial rites-anything that could not be conducted in the back yard or in the open could be performed inside. It was the...