Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau [Hardcover]

Martha Ward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 2004

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.

Martha Ward is the author of Nest in the Wind, A World Full of Women, and A Sounding of Women: Autobiographies from Unexpected Places, among other books. She is University Research Professor of Anthropology, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies at the University of New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Two commanding Creole women reigned supreme in New Orleans between the 1820s and 1880s, the spiritual leader Marie Laveau and her similarly gifted daughter of the same name. Ward, an indomitable researcher and inspired interpreter, not only tells the entire astonishing and moving story of the two Marie Laveaus but also offers a fresh perspective on Creole culture and voodoo New Orleans style, a religion of the African diaspora that, as Ward so sensitively explains, was crucial to the survival of African Americans during the grim days of slavery. Official documentation of the lives of Marie the First and Marie the Second is scant and confusing, but Ward brilliantly deciphers evidence of the shrewd strategies the Laveaus employed in order to conduct the voodoo gatherings so essential to practitioners and so feared and demonized by the white establishment, and, most critically, to help free slaves. Citing numerous sources new to history books, Ward brings tumultuous nineteenth-century New Orleans vividly to life as she reveals the true nature of the equally maligned and mythologized Marie Laveaus, devotional, dramatic, and subversive women of otherworldly power and courage who saved numerous lives, and made life livable for many more. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher

The lives and times of the two most powerful spiritual women in Creole New Orleans

Includes

History of nineteenth-century New Orleans

Account of voodoo religious practice in New Orleans

Story of both Marie Laveaus, a mother and daughter team

Struggles of Marie Laveau against New Orleans police and journalists

Efforts by Marie Laveau to represent and empower Creole population

New understanding of Marie Laveau as healer and helper to poor and oppressed

Description of Laveaus' many battles against slavery system of the United States

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi; 1st edition (March 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578066298
• ISBN-13: 978-1578066292
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #170,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Voodoo Fact and Voodoo Legend, December 26, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (Hardcover)

One of the famous above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans is known as St. Louis No. 1, the oldest graveyard in the city. A tall marble and stucco tomb there is a site where devotees frequently leave gifts - flowers, candy, salt, coins, beads, bourbon - for Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo priestess. She still attracts attention, and some people still talk to her. One of these is Martha Ward, an anthropologist at the University of New Orleans, who has written _Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau_ (University Press of Mississippi). It is a book from a strange sort of participatory journalism; the author says she has "relied on dreams, intuition, a hyperactive imagination, and funky Voodoo luck." She admits to standing in front of the tomb and hearing Marie laugh when asked "What really happened?" Marie's answer: "Who knows the whole story, and maybe it's better that way." There is such a gumbo of legend and fact here, along with earnest attempts to clear up history and legal agreements that were deliberately made murky in the first place, that calling upon voodoo as a reference source isn't as dicey as it might seem. Ward is a competent guide through confusing social customs of strange times in a strange locale, and she interprets the gaps as carefully as possible. "There's hardly any peg in this whole narrative that's literal, truthful or absolute," she warns, but there is plenty of good storytelling and historical recreations of New Orleans nonetheless.

Marie Laveau was born in 1801 to an unmarried "free woman of color." She grew up in religious training around the famous St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. Such Christian learning did not limit Marie to being Christian; one of the themes repeatedly emphasized here is that voodoo was not in opposition to any traditional Christian spirituality, but an addition to it. There are plenty of examples, for instance, of official or folklore saints being incorporated into voodoo. Marie formed a strong partnership with a controversial priest, Pere Antoine. Ward says that Marie guaranteed to Antoine the support from her followers and a church full of them, and in return he would perform sacraments of baptism and marriage for interracial couples who otherwise could claim no legitimacy. Ward concludes that after Pere Antoine's death, the church joined in with the proslavery religious orthodoxy of the times, and that her daughter (also Marie Laveau) made voodoo an alternative for those Pere Antoine could no longer welcome. She took her herbal and voodoo arts to new spheres in her occupation as hairdresser to upper-class white women. She also helped slaves escape. She was famous for her dancing, luridly described by eager reporters, which might involve different states of nudity, on the part of all races, with the movements being called by Marie herself. Marie would have such dances in her own back yard in her New Orleans house on Friday nights, followed by a voodoo benediction and blessing for everyone; when you left, said one attendee, "you surely had the belief." Marie would see individual clients during the week for the same sorts of problems now brought to counselors or advice columnists.

Reconstruction collapsed in 1877, and tolerance for alternative beliefs took a downturn. Police took up attacks on voodoo practitioners, and in 1897 the city passed regulations that prohibited "trance artists, 'voodoos,' and similar tricksters from operating in the city." Eventually, reading palms for payment, influencing evil or good luck, bringing together enemies, settling lovers' quarrels, and other familiarly voodoo services could lead to arrest. Practitioners moved across the river to the Algiers neighborhood, and Spiritual Churches continued the practice in small groups. The beliefs continue; Ward has visited contemporary ceremonies, and of course the flowers and candles keep coming to the Laveau tomb. (No one knows when the daughter Marie died, or where her remains are.) It has sometimes made Ward's research difficult. A librarian at the New Orleans Public Library sighed, "If it has Marie Laveau's name on it, it just disappears." Ward has also dug into baptismal and marriage records, land deeds, and notary files to try to sort reality from legend. Especially illuminating are oral histories given by ex-slaves to the WPA during the depression. Ward's book gives a new aspect to women's history within New Orleans, as well as showing the history of the city's vivid Creole culture. It is a quirky history, with more than its share of supposition about its two main characters, but anyone who expected "just the facts" about the voodoo queens hasn't even started to understand how voodoo works.

30 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointingly Unreliable and Insensitive, February 8, 2006

By 

Jacqueline Jones - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (Hardcover)

I have always taken great interest in the history of my home town, New Orleans. I read whatever I can find about the corky characters that made this city so unique, and Marie Laveau has always been one of my favorites. Unfortunately, this book was a terrible disappointment.

Much of the insights about Marie Laveau in this book are not new but drawn from other sources that Martha Ward, the author, often fails to acknowledge and what is actually new here contains considerable mistakes on nearly every other page or is blurred with unsubstantiated fiction. Ward also displays little familiarity with Voodoo practices and Catholicism. To make matters worse, Ward makes painfully racist statements such as the best hotels in town "held tasteful slave auctions in their carpeted lobbies" (p.80). In my view, there is nothing "tasteful" about a horrendous ordeal like that, at least not for the men, women, and children who ended up on the auction block. Sadly, Ward, a white woman from Oklahoma, identifies here with the perspective of the slave buyers who indeed must have considered fine hotels to be a more "tasteful" environment than the dingy slave pens filled with stench.

The abundance of fiction and incorrect data makes me wonder whether Ward should have considered writing a historical novel instead, because her passion seems to be in the fiction not in caring about complex historical data. That way it would have been more honest and less confusing for the reader. As it is, Ward's book is both entertaining and an easy read, but should not be mistaken for a meticulously researched serious academic work despite the fact that it appeared in a scholarly press. Even major plots in this volume cannot be backed up historically. For more reliable sources on Marie Laveau see for instance Carolyn Long, Spiritual Merchants, and Ina Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic for history buffs and spiritualists alike!, October 26, 2004

By 

Shyla Jannusch - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (Hardcover)

I bought this book on a trip to New Orleans, at the advice of a Voodoo Goddess named Anna, who owns a wonderful shop in the French Quarter. This book is wonderful!!!!! It provides the reader with colorful imagery that teaches not only about Voodoo, but also the history of New Orleans. It debunks myths about the TWO Marie Laveaus....and provides the most solid research of these two women to date! I reccommend this book to anyone remotely curious in Southern Style Voodoo/Hoodoo, New Orleans culture or history, and just something different!