A Childhood Voodoo Initiation Story

It was sometime in 1965 when I was first introduced to the Mysteries. I was a little girl then, visiting my grandmother who lived on a Mississippi bayou. Behind her humble home was a small yellow building. As kids, we didn’t give that building much thought, racing past it on our way to the bayou that lay just an arm’s length away.

The banks of that bayou were low, swampy ground where trees draped thick curtains of gray Spanish moss. Their funereal strands brushed against a damp carpet of rotting leaves. Salamanders crept from fallen logs. Snakes lay coiled in the brush, hidden beneath thorn and thicket. It was a place alive with secrets, both natural and unseen.

One day, my aunt invited me into the yellow building. It was simple: tables and chairs, with the look of a place where grown folks gathered for meetings. At the long table, a single white candle sat before her. She struck a match, lit the wick, and showed me how to call upon the spirits in a way that was as direct as it was profound. It was my first séance—the same kind once practiced by Marie Laveau when she reigned as Voudou Queen of New Orleans in the 1800s. Just as Laveau led her followers in the old days, my aunt guided me in that moment, continuing a line of women who have carried these mysteries forward. I was too young to remember all the details clearly, but something from that day stayed with me—an imprint, a knowing. As I would come to realize years later, that experience was my initiation into the Voodoo Mysteries. This is my childhood Voodoo initiation story.

What I received was not a formal ceremony conducted in a temple for a fee, nor the kind of initiation often spoken of in Haitian Vodou. It was older and quieter and passed through my maternal family line like a hidden inheritance. My aunt, a spiritualist who practiced discreetly in a Baptist household, gave me my first head washing with “green blood” and my first spiritual lessons. I was raised and confirmed Catholic—my father’s faith dictated that—but Voodoo came another way. It is not a religion one chooses. The spirits choose you.