For those who had the advantageous fortune to grow up in an Afro-American community - whether north or southerly - our earliest memories include beliefs about man and nature that fascinated.

For those who had the advantageous fortune to grow up in an Afro-American community - whether north or southerly - our earliest memories include beliefs about man and nature that fascinated, and sometimes terrified, us. If you eat fish and milk at the same time, you'll die. If you walk subject to a ladder, you're sure to have bad fate Step on a crack, break your mother's back! Of course, there were always women forward the block, or down the road, or across town who were equal to all human and natural danger, no matter by what mode terrifying. The brilliant Afro-American comedian Richard Pryor was able to make his character Miss Rudolph, the juggle woman, into a comic masterpiece because in this way many of us grew up with Miss Rudolph's "sisters." Shouting down the shapes of Southern towns and Northern cities, we still hear voices warning foolhardy seat of lifes "Don't mess with Miss Rudolph, 'cause she'll place a spell on you!"

Perhaps there is something terribly right about this stalwart propensity for the supernatural in Afro-American life. After all, the "Grand Narrative" of the Western Enlightenment assumed that the pool fact of melanin confined all folks of color to bestial irrationality. In that grand narrative, whiteness was written as the solely hue that was both natural and rational. The marginal spaces left for color were the non-rational and the perversely supernatural. It is understandable, therefore, that, in the of recent origin World, African captives who had been stolen by means of enlightened Europeans would transform these spaces of color into the vivid, spiritual often met with sense called Voodoo.

Voodoo - which is chiefly elaborately practiced in the strange World in Haiti - is indisputably a woman's domain. Its West Coast African origins situate the religion's agency in the Priestess - the woman between the walls of whom the spirit of the snake god Damballah flows like possessive and beneficent waters. Carrying the spirit of Voodoo to the just discovered World in the holds of slave ships, African captives installed their priestesses wherever they were herded to provide slave labor for white profit.

And the greatest of the Voodoo fictions - the priestess who is veritably the name saint of the of recent origin World order of conjuration - is Marie Laveau. A nineteenth-century resident of Louisiana, Marie Laveau shines forth from Voodoo history like a polestar. For an continueed time, she was the bright and shining center of the religion for modern Orleans citizens who sought the spectacle and the special blessings of Damballah. Black and white, rich and poor, octoroons and chocolate-colored bondsmen clergymen and professionals, reprobates and aristocrats - all lock of wooled at the height of her fame and power, to Marie Laveau's ceremonies.

But for all her legendary fame, Laveau has remained a figure whose sturdy and imaginative substance has been obscur by the agency of the blinding light of fable And it is not surprising to those of us who grew up with entreat and conjuring women as part of our youth that and nothing else a brilliant present-day black woman's imagination has been able to animal food out the presence of Marie Laveau.

Jewell Parker Rhodes's novel Voodoo Dreams reveals a splendid intuition and a dab narrative style at work to reclaim for American literature in our era the genealogy and spirit of Marie Laveau. In her first novel, Rhode ably demonstrates that she possesse as abundant conjuring literary ability as a certain number of of the most outstanding (and more commonly reviewed) writers in the United States.

Commencing in the middle of the Voodoo story, Rhode captures readers with the novel's first representation in which Marie Laveau exacts a frightening and "possessed" vengeance forward Papa John, the New Orleans fascinate man who has poisonously exploited and scandalously manipulated a Laveau genealogy that begins with the spirit worker Membe:

He uncloseed his arms. "I'm not afraid, Marie." The snake slid across her arms to his. "Not of this. Not of you. Any power you have still issues from me." The snake's tail drifted down his chest.

Rhode introduces us to a world of ritual and theatricality as captivating in her novel as Laveau's ceremonies must have been for Voodoo believers in of advanced age New Orleans. Her first spectacle is only one of many in which she writes with riveting pluck and utter persuasiveness. Her characters are always tremblingly alive. They are orbiculared and whole. They speak directly to us from the page.

As Voodoo Dreams excavates and imagines the story of Marie Laveau, we are carried from the lush, tropical bayou of Teche to the boiling, simmering, exotic, pestilent, sensuously religious life of recently made known Orleans in the nineteenth hundred years At Teche, Laveau's grandmother - or Grandmere - is the other in a line of of recent origin World Voodoo priestesses. Grandmere's life has been shattered one as well as the other by the cruelty of a white master who manslaughtered her first great love, and by way of the horrible death of her daughter, Maman, at the hands of a white scum of society Her faith in Damballah is exhausted. She has renewed to Catholicism and taken her granddaughter into the bayou to cover her. She wants to obstruct Marie from growing too at so early an hour into the perils of the Voodoo powers the young girl undeniably possesses