Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau - Hardcover

Rhodes, Jewell Parker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312098693 ISBN 13: 9780312098698

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

New Orleans voodoo queen Marie Laveau runs from her bayou roots into the arms of a voodoo doctor who will teach her what Grandme+a7re would not.

About this title

About the Author

Jewell Parker Rhodes is an English professor at California State University, Northridge.

Reviews

NEA Fiction Award-winner Rhodes introduces a fearsome heroine and comments on the slave trade in an astute, evocative first novel based on the life of an actual voodoo priestess. From the age of 10, Creole girl Marie Laveau has visions of voodoo rites, yet her grandmother, who raised her, refuses to explain these supernatural occurrences. "Grandmere" wants to protect Marie, whose maternal lineage includes many dangerous voodoo queens, but her secretiveness only makes the girl resentful and curious. When they move from their secluded country home to New Orleans in 1819, Marie fulfills her destiny, forsaking her kindly husband on their wedding night to conduct ceremonies in which she's possessed by her dead mother's ghost and by the god Damballah. Rhodes eschews literary aspirations in favor of steamy, violent interludes worthy of a bodice-ripper--an abolitionist who loves Marie from afar, an incestuous relationship between aristocratic twins--but her insightfulness about black heritage, antebellum history and gender roles raises the tale well above the norm. Melodramatic yet mesmerizing, it effectively synthesizes the twin themes of female and African American empowerment.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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 bewitching read--atmosphere, adventure, mystery, and romance--as well as enough intellectual substance to give it a satisfying heft. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312098693
• ISBN 13: 9780312098698
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 436