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Ina Johanna Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (New York: Routledge, 2005)
OWING TO THE remarkable bravado with which New Orleanian Marie Laveaux led her life, literary artists, reporters, and filmmakers sensationalized her story in the fragmentary, fictionalized or semifictionalized works that proliferated both before and after her death. One needn't look far to understand the reasons for such myth making.
In one of the antebellum South's largest slave cities, Laveaux, a free woman of African descent, led an underground, African-based religion that had been central to slavery's destruction in the Haitian Revolution. She braved deadly epidemics of yellow fever to attend to the sick and the dying alongside the equally enigmatic Père Antoine (Father Antonio de Sedella), the Spanish cleric who controlled St. Louis Cathedral until 1829. She anticipated Sister Helen Prejean's modern-day Catholic ministry to Louisiana's death row inmates by over a century. And, she defied a state law prohibiting interracial marriage by living openly with a white man, Christophe Glapion, for nearly thirty years in a domestic partnership that produced at least five children. In 1874, newspaper reports that Laveaux would perform her Voodoo religious rites on St. John's Eve drew an estimated 12,000 New Orleanians, both black and white, to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.
In 1984, author Fandrich entered Temple University's Religious Studies Program after just completing her graduate degree in theology at the University of Hamburg. In Germany, she had grown frustrated with a prevailing theological scholarship that divided Christian Europe's strong women leaders into the saintly, submissive type on the one hand, and on the other, the assertive, independent type like Joan of Arc who was burned at the stake as a witch. In Pennsylvania, she resumed her search for spiritual "foremothers." (7)
A showing of Maya Deren's documentary film on Haitian Vodou,...