The inevitable question

I don’t think it’s possible to be involved in this religion, in Vodou, as a non-Haitian without someone asking pointed questions. I thought I’d get this out of the way: I’m here because I was invited. Explicitly. Repeatedly.

I’m also here because it was do this or die.

Here, many readers will roll their eyes. They’re justified in doing so. After all, very few things are truly do it or die—mostly it’s aggravation and martyrdom at mild inconvenience out here in these streets. Pour one out for the fallen, who had to wake up earlier than they wanted to or had to pick an alternate cup of coffee because Starbucks was out of plant milk.

I can at least provide a doctor’s note, or rather a doctor telling me that my blood pressure and cholesterol were monumentally high, and my heart was failing. At 36, with no previous history (and in fact, a long history of exercise and healthy diet), that’s a hell of a conversation. I could tell you also, and here people in the religion will recognize the symptoms, that I couldn’t get out of bed, nor could I sleep. I just laid in bed, stinking and unwashed, and stared at the ceiling, unable to think and focus except vaguely feeling the encroaching symptoms of death that surely wouldn’t be that bad, all I had to do was lie there.

I’m not vain, but best believe I am a daily showers kind of a girl. I am also not a lie there and take it sort of person, in most circumstances.

One night, in a particularly dark place, my then-partner decided to bully me into drinking. My stanky drunk ass sat down at my computer and, in a fit of clarity, finally listened to the voices I’d been trying to suppress my whole life, which repeated a single word very loudly: vodou.

Bemused, I searched. My godfather’s name was, if memory serves, the second link. I opened his website and started reading, punctuated by my slurred and surprised commentary. A few pages in, suddenly I was quite sleepy, for the first time in about a year. I stumbled to the bedroom and laid down, immediately falling into a trance.

For those of you following along at home, a trance is differentiated from a dream in that you are aware that you are awake (among other things.)

Standing at the foot of my bed was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen in my life. A black man, appearing to be in his late twenties to mid forties, formally dressed from top hat to patent leather shoes, and sexy as a crime you’ll never be prosecuted for.

He flicked his cigar, ashing on the floor before dropping it.

“Poor baby,” he crooned, shrugging out of his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

I’ll spare you the truly (epically) prurient details and say that I eventually did fall asleep and woke the next morning clear-headed, weak as shit, and startled. I walked around startled the way really good sex will do you for a few days afterward.

Nothing rings a woman’s bell like surprisingly good dick.

I asked for and immediately got a confirmation sign because I was quite worried about my sanity.

I got out of the situation I was in and booked a consultation with my godfather, where I was shocked again, because there, for the first time in my tattered and spattered life, was family.

The invitation was repeated several times, because I am also what the therapists used to like to call “challenged by human connections” and what the lwa like to call “coconut headed.” I finally took ‘em up on it a few years ago, to my infinite gain.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I’m doing in this religion. Coming home.