Voodoo Dreams
Product Description The story of Marie Laveau, the character featured on American Horror Story: Coven. New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century: a potent mix of whites, Creoles, free blacks, and African slaves, a city pulsing with crowds, commerce, and an undercurrent of secret power. The source of this power is the voodoo religion, and its queen is Marie Laveau, the notorious voodooienne, worshipped and feared by blacks and whites alike. From Library Journal In this first novel, which is based on the life of a 19th-century voodooist, Rhodes attempts to place her subject within a feminist context. Brought to New Orleans from the bayou by her grandmother, a former slave, the fictional Marie is persuaded to marry Jacques, a black sailor, in order to escape her mother's fate. Marie's mother was a voodoo queen who was killed because white people feared her powers. Marie leaves Jacques and falls under the spell of John, a voodoo doctor who beats her and exploits her ability to influence crowds. When Marie recognizes and accepts her powerful voodoo heritage, she is able to free herself from John. While Rhodes effectively captures the erotic and racist climate of 19th-century New Orleans, her plot is overwritten and occasionally repetitive. - Harriet Gottfried, NYPL Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review “An overwhelming journey navigated with skill and imagination . . . captures the dazzle and showmanship of voodoo.” ―Los Angeles Times “Bewitching . . . a character of vast dimension and feminine power.” ―Booklist “Splendid intuition and a deft narrative style . . In her first novel, Rhodes demonstrates that she possesses as much conjuring literary ability as some of the most outstanding writers in the United States.” ―Houston A. Baker, Jr., African-American Review “Marie Laveau is the most interesting character in American culture . . . Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A gripping first novel that limns the life of African-American Marie Laveau, the legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, with all the brooding intensity and latent menace of a summer's night on a lonely bayou. Assembling scattered references to Laveau in Creole folklore, Rhodes not only tells a riveting story but creates a panoramic portrait of New Orleans life in the early 1800's. Like a Dickensian London, the city where Marie confronts her destiny is a vibrant place teeming with Creoles, slaves, free blacks, aristo descendants of the French and Spanish settlers, and Yankees. Marie is a direct descendant of Membe, who, instructed by Damballah, the great snake god, became a slave so that she could mother the god's lost children in America. As Marie lies dying, an old woman revered for her good deeds, she tells her story to lifelong admirer Louis Delavier. Beginning in the middle--since ``the middle is the beginning of everything. Everything spirals from the center. Lies, pain, and loss haunt the future as well as the past''--she describes how she deliberately let her python, with whom she shared the spirit of Damballah, murder John--her Svengali, her nemesis. She then goes on to recall the happiest years of her life--her childhood with grandmother Marie in rural Tech, where on her tenth birthday she not only saw visions but had a frightening encounter with a man who ``smelled of ash and withered leaves.'' The man is John, who, sold into slavery, is interested in voodoo only for his own ends. He later seduces young Marie, exploits her visionary gifts, and ruthlessly destroys all those who thwart him. Marie's murder of John alienates her from her daughter, but--reconciling her Catholic upbringing with voodoo, an affirmative power when properly handled--she becomes a noted healer. All the ingredients of a bewitchi