The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  Inspired by Mardi Gras, these Secondary Parades were put on all year round except in the Hurricane Season by neighborhood associations or sports fans or whatever else felt like dancing through the streets for the fun of it. People paraded in homemade costumes and sometimes there were silly homemade floats, more often not, but there were always bands hopefully auditioning for paying gigs, and assorted street acts such as the Boudreaus hoping at least to gain enough buzz to enhance their take as street acts around the Quarter.

  There were even a few so-called Secondary Parade Queens who aspired to and sometimes even occasionally gained places on actual Mardi Gras Krewe floats, and while MaryLou had not even risen that far, it was the next step up the only ladder available to her.

  In the pursuit of which she created a character for herself for the parades and the performances around Jackson Square and other French Quarter venues: MarieLou Laveau.

  Although she knew little about voodoo except that there had been several voodoo priestesses who had called themselves “Marie Laveau,” or a singular Marie Laveau who had been reincarnated several times if you wanted to believe such stuff, “MaryLou Laveau” sounded pretty much like Marie Laveau if you slurred it enough.

  And if you danced around in a black bikini sprinkled with stardust sequins, an open diaphanous black lace cloak done up likewise, and a fake gold crown, you could at least become known around the Quarter as a street character who called herself “MaryLou Laveau,” even though no one really believed you were the latest reincarnation of the fabled Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.

  “MaryLou Laveau the Voodoo Queen” might be a semicomic character but she was generally received good-naturedly since she didn’t go so far as to take herself seriously, and at least it was an identity and a modest measure of very local fame.

  MaryLou had partaken of the herb in the spaghetti sauce or brownies, the occasional mushroom in the tea on special occasions, for as long as she could remember—didn’t every mama’s child and wasn’t it always around the house?—though being righteously anti-tobacco her parents wouldn’t let her actually smoke anything, so even as an adult, she didn’t favor hash pipes or blunts or joints.

  But one magic evening, the three of them ventured to Jackson Square to do the act, which as usual was drawing more mosquitoes than coins tossed in the hat, when a tottery and feeble old black man in threadbare tails and a comic opera top hat stopped for a moment to listen.

  A patheticoid old rummy in top hat and tails wasn’t exactly outré in these environs, and of course he would be carrying an ivory-headed cane, though the dreadlocks didn’t exactly match the rest of the costume. What he was smoking looked like a fancy cigar, but the smoke smelled more like the herb.

  He took a deep drag on his spliff, if that was really what it was, meeting her eyes with a rheumy and bloodshot glance as he did, and completely changed on the exhale.

  His posture was abruptly transformed from that of a feeble old drunk into that of a lithely upright ballet dancer, and those eyes lit up like icy green lasers boring into her soul with irresistible power and terrifying precision.

  “You and me are gonna be like husband and wife,” he told her. “Erzuli wants a ticket to ride, and the horse she’s betting on is gonna be you. You’re gonna be a one-trick pony, chile, but it’s gonna be the best trick there is.”

  MaryLou found herself opening her mouth to receive the cigar or spliff or whatever it was between her lips, and taking a long drag and—

  —and the next thing she knew was the fading memory of having been dancing like a fiend on fire, with Mom banging out the same intoxicating drumbeat on a garbage can as Pop was on the body of his banjo, as the crowd around them was doing with their feet on the pavement, with the rhythmic clapping of their hands.

  How long had she been there, how long had she been dancing like that? No way of telling, she hadn’t exactly been there, wherever there was, she had never danced like that before or even imagined it, and she hadn’t exactly been dancing; something or someone else had been dancing her body like a hand up a puppet.

  But now it was gone, it was over, her knees were rubber, her lungs were panting, and Pop had to catch her in the act of falling down in total exhaustion.

  The old man in top and tails was still there, but what he had become with a deep breath of whatever he had been smoking was gone with the wind, and he looked as dumbfounded and poleaxed as MaryLou felt as he turned and staggered away through the crowd.

  There was a crowd, by far the biggest one the act had ever drawn, and the hat was fuller than it had ever been before, and for the first time ever, there were more bills than coins. And maybe a dozen of the audience were crossing themselves as they slunk away as if they had been caught watching a fuck video while a dozen more smiled knowing smiles and exited with little phantom bows, whatever all that meant.

  MaryLou might not know what it meant, but Pop thought he did. “Voodoo,” he told Mom on the way out of Jackson Square. “Some loa was riding her—”

  “You believe in that stuff?”

  “Does it matter? Half this city does, and that’s what the act looked like and that’s good enough.”

  “Good enough for what?”

  “Good enough for this!” Pop declared, shaking the hat stuffed with money and shoving it under Mom’s nose.

  “But how did it happen?” Mom’s hungry eyes became more suspiciously guarded. “And why? They say those loas have their own reasons.”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is figurin’ out how to make it keep happening.”

  They tried their best. The magical performance proved to be repeatable once in a while and enhanced proceeds but it was hit and mostly miss. Mr. Top Hat and Tails never showed up again, a drag on a spliff or a puff on a cigar didn’t necessarily call anything forth. It happened or it didn’t. Whatever it was took charge when it felt like it and had a mind of its own.

  All MaryLou could remember was what Mr. Top Hat and Tails had been wearing, so she googled that. It wasn’t easy or exactly definitive, but what the old drunk had been wearing seemed to look like the Mardi Gras costume of a voodoo spirit, a demon, who called himself Papa Legba, a sort of ringmaster of the supernatural loa krewe, a gatekeeper or doorman at the velvet rope to their magical realm.

  And that clue to the who keyed her memory of the what he had said before she had blacked out, and therefore the who or what that had taken over.

  “Erzuli wants a ticket to ride and the horse she’s betting on is gonna be you. You’re gonna be a one-trick pony but it’s gonna be the best trick there is.”

  Now she had the name of who supposedly danced her body around when she felt like it, so she googled “Erzuli,”and learned that Erzuli was the most powerful female spirit in the pantheon of voodoo loas, powerful enough to have Papa Legba himself by the balls when she wanted to, the power of the female spirit itself—muse and seductress, nurturing and ambitious, earth mother and vamp, loved and admired, but too complex and capricious to be entirely trusted.

  Did MaryLou believe in this voodoo stuff? Mom and Pop professed to believe in it and encouraged her to do likewise, since when it happened it was great for business and when it didn’t the act stunk as usual. And something did take her body over from time to time, something that gave her dancing powers that she never remembered having, something that would seem to be having a high old time at her conscious expense.

  So she googled “Voodoo” and “Vudu” and “Voudon,” for there were many ways of spelling it, and more versions of what it was supposed to be about than you could read in a lifetime, and more disagreement on the details of the loa krewe than that. But she was able to boil it all down into what seemed to be agreed on, the Voodoo for Dummies version.

  Voodoo was an ancient religion brought over by slaves from Africa. Nothing to do with Jesus or Mohammed or Moses and their singular honkie God. Spirits, whole carload lots of them, with powers of this or that, and it could get pretty specific, and they didn’t care
about sin all that much, in fact they mostly like to boogie, and if you did the ceremonies right and were lucky, you might be able to ask for their assistance and get it, though maybe not always exactly as you had intended.

  So she bought her way into a voodoo act in a fancy back alley cellar off Bourbon Street that tourists could pay to get into as spectators but whose cast might just have been the real thing.

  They cut the head off a chicken and let it run around headless and spread the blood around with a whisk. They spit rum on a fire, they beat on drums and then they danced to it, and a few of them commenced to twitch and jerk, to roll their eyes back into their heads.

  But none of it summoned forth Erzuli as far as MaryLou was concerned. Seemed like she needed to connect up with the real deal to find out if there really was a real deal, and if so, what to do about it.

  Having a rep around the Square and the Quarter as “MaryLou Laveau” the street character “Voodoo Queen” got her into any number of phony conversations with phonies, but wasn’t any help in tracking down a serious not-for-tourists voodoo ceremony, and while actually dancing while possessed from unpredictable time to time might fill the hat and even get her a second identity as “White Girl Who Dances With Loas,” getting to be allowed to actively participate in a serious voodoo ritual was not so easy for a white girl, chosen as a horse by a loa from time to time or not.

  But all kinds of people did bear witness to these possessions, so the word did get around, so getting it around to someone who took them seriously and might be sympathetic to a White Girl Who Dances With Loas and was a who who mattered was the luck of the dice.

  Well, roll the bones often enough long enough, and sooner or later they come up seven instead of snake eyes, and the time finally came when MaryLou came down from where she could never remember not being with a middle-aged black woman in a kind of white robe cinched at her ample waist and a candy-striped kerchief artfully wrapped around her head like a turban studying her speculatively or knowingly or maybe both.

  “Who’s the loa been riding you, White Girl Dances With Loas?”

  “I believe it’s Erzuli—”

  “What gives you the right to believe that?”

  “Well, uh, Papa Legba told me that—”

  The woman in the white robe rolled her eyes and shook her head, and managed to do both sarcastically. “Papa Legba told you, did he?”

  “Well I googled her, but—”

  “You googled her, did you?”

  “I mean, I never exactly met her, but—”

  “Of course you ain’t, riders don’t go around swappin’ idle chitchat with their horses! Who you think you are, girl?”

  “Well, uh, maybe that’s what I’m trying to find out, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean, White Girl Dances With Loas, and maybe we all might like to find out what they up to if we can,” the woman in the white robe said, handing her some kind of business card. “Tomorrow at midnight, I’d tell you don’t be late, but this is New Orleans, so don’t be too early.”

  “Where N. Villiere crosses Congress” was all MaryLou saw written on it when she looked down, and the woman was gone when she looked up.

  When she got there at more or less the appointed hour by electro-rickshaw, N. Villiere crossed Congress in a neighborhood that was not quite ominous at midnight, but not someplace where it seemed prudent for a white girl or any girl to hang around looking lost for very long. Rickety shotgun houses and bungalows and suchlike up on stilts, earthen sidewalks that had long given up on post–Hurricane Season repaving, working streetlights and lights in the windows, but nobody on the streets.

  Fortunately, or more likely by design, a middle-aged black man in clean blue jeans and a Saints T-shirt emerged from an alley and beckoned. “This way, White Girl Dances With Loas,” he said to reassure her when MaryLou hesitated, and she followed him up the alley into what had no doubt once been a garage.

  No cars, of course, about a dozen people, all of them black, standing around, none of them under forty to look at them, all of them plainly dressed as if for a day of hand labor, except for the woman in white. Strange African-looking masks, Indonesian shadow puppets, colorful flags of unknown and maybe nonexistent countries on the gray walls. A round barbecue grill turned into a brazier with a wood fire flaming in it. Something that looked like a homemade Hindu altar to something that looked vaguely like a cross between Shiva and a vampire Buddha.

  Three guys squatting on the floor, in fact an act she had seen around Jackson Square, an African bass drum, ancient hippie bongos, and a nameless instrument that was a vacuum cleaner hose you whirled around while playing the thing with a saxophone mouthpiece.

  Everyone stared at her but nobody said anything.

  The woman in white threw a big handful of herbs mixed with incense on the fire, and billows of white smoke smelled like a mix of pot, jasmine, and patchouli perfumed the room. The band began to play, a heavy regular beat on the big drum, something strange at nearly tap-dancing speed on the bongos, something even stranger coming out of the whirling vacuum cleaner hose as if a jazz sax were being played through an Aussie didgeridoo, which in fact it more or less was.

  A bottle of rum was passed around, just enough for everyone to have a single swallow, including MaryLou. Cheap cigars were passed around, not everyone took one, and MaryLou passed.

  People started dancing. No one danced with anyone, free-form old hippie style and nothing particularly special about it, and after hesitating for a bit, MaryLou joined in. The woman in white finished the rum and spat a mouthful into the fire.

  The bongo beat quickened, the dancing got somewhat frenzied, but nothing more than what you’d see in a crowded Bourbon Street disco. A few eyes began to roll. The bass drum became insistent and dominant.

  The bongo beat faded into the background. The whirling sax-hose became a deep bone-tingling mantric hum. More eyes began to roll. A few of the dancers began to groan, and moan, and twitch.

  Someone produced a chicken from somewhere and slit its throat before the altar, showering it with blood, and the chicken ran around for a few bars as the music got louder and louder, as three or four of the dancers went into full spastic like the chicken, shouting and hollering in what might have been speaking in tongues.

  MaryLou felt herself swept up in it, but there was nothing supernatural about it, the only difference between this and the family act during the usual performance was that what would have been the skeptical audience was dancing with her, and she was sure nobody was going to pass the hat.

  A gray-haired man who must have been in his sixties jerked and twitched up to her with his eyes rolled back in their sockets and the whites showing, waving a lit cigar. He took a big puff, maybe even a lungful drag, and blew a huge cloud of smoke in MaryLou’s face. As he did, the eyes rolled back to where they belonged, but were red and glowing as they stared right through her from—

  —the next thing MaryLou knew, she was lying on her back on the dirty concrete floor, panting to catch her breath, her legs achingly sore, her face dripping sweat, and a circle of people staring down at her with little knowing smiles and looks of dreamy satisfaction. Or maybe stupefaction. Or maybe both.

  The woman in white glided through the circle, reached down, and helped MaryLou to her feet. “Well?” MaryLou demanded in a hoarsely breathless whisper.

  “Well, White Girl Who Dances With Loas got a new name for herself. You her horse, all right … White Girl Who Dances With Erzuli.”

  That was the exit line, but after that, MaryLou became an occasional participant and she was ridden by Erzuli maybe half the time. But no one except the woman in white would deign to tell her anything of significance—it seemed partly a race thing, and maybe envy too.

  But from her, over time, MaryLou got a little beyond the short course in voodoo. Yes, brought from Africa, come to America, along with the slave trade, settled in New Orleans and vicinity for reasons no one human knows, and seems like the loas maybe don�
��t know either.

  What are the loas?

  Spirits, you might call them, spirits with powers or the spirits of powers, not demons or angels, nothing to do with something called Satan, not the sons and daughters of some singular honkie God, not exactly gods themselves, not like in the superhero films, don’t look like anything, ’cause they ain’t got no bodies. Whole boatloads of ’em, somewhere which is nowhere, with all sorts of powers, they don’t care about sin, they ain’t good or bad ’cause they don’t even understand what that is ’cause they ain’t got no morality neither.

  What do they want from us?

  Same sort of thing we want from them. We don’t have their powers so we want them to use them for all sorts of our own purposes. They don’t have bodies, and they like to boogie in the flesh, so they borrow ours. Sometimes you might get a favor if you asked for it, but it might not be exactly what you wanted, they got what some folks might call wicked senses of humor.

  How can you … summon … invite…?

  You can’t, White Girl Who Dances With Erzuli. You the horse, she’s the rider. A loa don’t ask, and you can’t tell.

  Well, how can I … talk to her…?

  Well, sometimes a loa might ride a horse to use his or her lips to speak to a human, but they talk first and you usually just listen.

  I mean, while she’s … riding me … so I can tell her I want to experience what’s happening.

  You can’t, chile, nobody can. It just don’t work that way.

  Why not?

  Because they rule what they want to and that’s the way they want it.

  This was not sufficient for a street dancer who needed to tell Erzuli to show up for performances when called upon and allow her her own awareness when being ridden. MaryLou was far from being satisfied being ridden by Erzuli; she wanted to be Erzuli—what red-blooded American girl wouldn’t, or at least be there with Erzuli to enjoy the experience and the memories.