Voodoo Dreams.

For those who had the good fortune to grow up in an Afro-American community - whether north or south - our earliest memories include beliefs about man and nature that fascinated, and sometimes terrified, us. If you eat fish and milk at the same time, you'll die. If you walk under a ladder, you're sure to have bad luck. Step on a crack, break your mother's back! Of course, there were always women on the block, or down the road, or across town who were equal to all human and natural danger, no matter how terrifying. The brilliant Afro-American comedian Richard Pryor was able to make his character Miss Rudolph, the conjure woman, into a comic masterpiece because so many of us grew up with Miss Rudolph's "sisters." Shouting down the blocks of Southern towns and Northern cities, we still hear voices warning foolhardy souls, "Don't mess with Miss Rudolph, 'cause she'll put a spell on you!"

Perhaps there is something terribly right about this strong propensity for the supernatural in Afro-American life. After all, the "Grand Narrative" of the Western Enlightenment assumed that the mere fact of melanin confined all people of color to bestial irrationality. In that grand narrative, whiteness was written as the only hue that was both natural and rational. The marginal spaces left for color were the non-rational and the perversely supernatural. It is understandable, therefore, that, in the New World, African captives who had been stolen by enlightened Europeans would transform these spaces of color into the vivid, spiritual common sense called Voodoo.

Voodoo - which is most elaborately practiced in the New World in Haiti - is indisputably a woman's domain. Its West Coast African origins situate the religion's agency in the Priestess - the woman through whom the spirit of the serpent god Damballah flows like possessive and beneficent waters. Carrying the spirit of Voodoo to the New World in the holds of slave ships, African captives installed their priestesses wherever they were herded to provide slave labor for white profit.

And the greatest of the Voodoo legends - the priestess who is veritably the name saint of the New World order of conjuration - is Marie Laveau. A nineteenth-century resident of Louisiana, Marie Laveau shines forth from Voodoo history like a polestar. For an extended time, she was the bright and shining center of the religion for New Orleans citizens who sought the spectacle and the special blessings of Damballah. Black and white, rich and poor, octoroons and chocolate-colored bondsmen, clergy and professionals, reprobates and aristocrats - all flocked, at the height of her fame and power, to Marie Laveau's ceremonies.

But for all her legendary fame, Laveau has remained a figure whose strong and imaginative substance has been obscured by the blinding light of legend. And it is not surprising to those of us who grew up with conjure and conjuring women as part of our youth that only a brilliant present-day black woman's imagination has been able to flesh out the presence of Marie Laveau.

Jewell Parker Rhodes's novel Voodoo Dreams reveals a splendid intuition and a deft narrative style at work to reclaim for American literature in our era the genealogy and spirit of Marie Laveau. In her first novel, Rhodes ably demonstrates that she possesses as much conjuring literary ability as some of the most outstanding (and more frequently reviewed) writers in the United States.

Commencing in the middle of the Voodoo story, Rhodes captures readers with the novel's first scene, in which Marie Laveau exacts a frightening and "possessed" vengeance on Papa John, the New Orleans conjure man who has poisonously exploited and scandalously manipulated a Laveau genealogy that begins with the spirit worker Membe:

He opened his arms. "I'm not afraid, Marie." The snake slid across her arms to his. "Not of this. Not of you. Any power you have still comes from me." The snake's tail drifted down his chest.

Rhodes introduces us to a world of ritual and theatricality as captivating in her novel as Laveau's ceremonies must have been for Voodoo believers in old New Orleans. Her first scene is only one of many in which she writes with riveting energy and utter persuasiveness. Her characters are always tremblingly alive. They are rounded and whole. They speak directly to us from the page.

As Voodoo Dreams excavates and imagines the story of Marie Laveau, we are carried from the lush, tropical bayou of Teche to the boiling, simmering, exotic, pestilent, sensuously religious life of New Orleans in the nineteenth century. At Teche, Laveau's grandmother - or Grandmere - is the second in a line of New World Voodoo priestesses. Grandmere's life has been shattered both by the cruelty of a white master who murdered her first great love, and by the horrible death of her daughter, Maman, at the hands of a white mob. Her faith in Damballah is exhausted. She has converted to Catholicism and taken her granddaughter into the bayou to protect her. She wants to prevent Marie from growing too soon into the perils of the Voodoo powers the young girl undeniably possesses.

At nine years of age, Marie is happy, innocent, and in harmony with her Grandmere and with the spirits of nature in Teche. But on her tenth birthday, she has her first visitations from both the spirits and Papa John. John finds her in an isolated revery and sexually assaults her. Rubbing between her thighs, the middle-aged man passionately urges her to "grow." The plot lines are set at this moment of Marie's initiation - and violation.

Catholicism (a European, Old World staple) stands in opposition to Voodoo (a New World, African arrival). Women of spiritual power are menaced by materialistic men who seek wealth, earthly influence, and the complete subjugation of women. White masters control a sexual economy that allows them to rape black women and kill black men with impunity. The peace and spiritual interdependence of Teche's landscape stand in marked contrast to the raucous horror of urban New Orleans.

Grandmere and Marie journey to New Orleans when the girl becomes an adolescent. Their first encounter finds them brutalized by an arrogant Antoine DeLavier and his sister Bridgette. Bridgette's fiance and cousin Louis DeLavier looks helplessly on. In this scene, filled with unexpected energies, Rhodes shows the pathetic vulnerability of all blacks touched in any way by the institution of slavery. She also reveals - in astonishingly convincing detail - how the "soul killing power of slavery" absolutely corrupts families such as the DeLaviers. Manhood rituals that are utterly disgusting, incest, impotence, adultery - in a phrase, all the decadent, "yellow" madness and corruption that Marie immediately senses in the DeLavier household - are the burden of white Southern history in Voodoo Dreams.

It is against the power of such madness and corruption that Voodoo sets itself and its magic. However, the powers of the Laveau priestesses are challenged not simply by external, and madly corrupt, white power. Voodoo's spiritual leaders are also sharply challenged by the envy, meanness, and petty jealousies of the Afro-American community itself.

At a revealing moment in Voodoo Dreams, the character Ziti tells Laveau that it is unfair for Marie to be light-skinned and possessed of straight hair and fine features. Ziti insists that she herself should have been blessed with such attributes. The black character Nattie hates the whole lineage of Laveaus because they, and not she, are visited by the gods. Papa John - who traces his genealogy through royal African parentage - is an evil combination of Iago and Rasputin in his relationship to the Laveaus. Voodoo Dreams thus refuses to paint an idealized or partisan and black nationalist picture of the social complexities Voodoo has negotiated in the New World.

The novel's minor characters, such as Ziti and Shad and the community at Haben Haven, are so engaging in their day-to-day acts and emotions that we are almost tempted to read them as historical figures. Indeed, the great virtue of Voodoo Dreams is that it allows us to feel the spirit of history primarily through its characters. We gain a sense of time and place not by plowing through cumbersome detail, archival research, or interspersed historical references. We come to know history through the palpitating lives of characters in motion.

Rhodes has a sure command of form. Her creation and introduction of Louis DeLavier's fictional journal in Voodoo Dreams allows the novel to record a tender interracial relationship and to display a convincing omniscience. The italicized possession sequences carry the same force as the journal. They energetically move us through space and time, creating trance-like land- and seascapes that are dazzling. Further, they contribute in important ways to the development of one of the major themes in Voodoo Dreams - the spiritual self-discovery of Marie Laveau. By the novel's conclusion, Marie is physically, psychologically, and historically aware of precisely who she is. She knows her ancient properties and African inheritance.

Voodoo Dreams represents an engaging and accomplished addition to American letters. Rhodes's novel lends substance and clarity to aspects of Afro-American common sense that have, in the past, been accessible only in oral and aural form as "legend." But, of course, this is not to claim that Voodoo Dreams lacks room for improvement. (What first novel ever lacks room for improvement?) Nor is it to argue that no further cultural work remains to be done with Voodoo or Marie Laveau.

Sometimes the novel's free indirect discourse reminds us far too much of Afro-American Studies feminism par excellence. For example, when Marie is told by Louis DeLavier that he knows everything about Voodoo because he has read all the books he could get his hands on, Marie angrily reflects that Louis probably hasn't read any black books on the subject. Again, at a particularly critical juncture in the novel, even the most sympathetic reader will be distracted by Rhodes's meditation on power in the Old South as distinctively white and male. At such moments, Rhodes seems to substitute heartfelt anachronisms for adept novelistic development.

It has already been noted that Voodoo Dreams does not fit the conventional framework of an historical novel. And readers should be prepared to give themselves over to the world of romance that Rhodes offers, and be ready for the novel's occasional melodrama of sex and violence. But they should also realize how excellently melodrama is balanced by what can only be called the novelist's proper scenic sense. This scenic sense is best characterized as an astute understanding of the necessary ratios between novelistic substance and sensationalism, titillation, or romance. The fullness of Rhodes's scenes usually converts her melodramatic moments into an acceptable excess.

I suspect there are many of us who heard the shouting down the block about "Miss Rudolph" in our youth who wish Jewell Parker Rhodes had been around then, writing her engaging first novel, providing a fuller context for the Voodoo we simply felt in the air. Reading the novel provided a serious addition to my American cultural adulthood, for Rhodes teaches us how a carefully crafted novel can take up the legendary, shadowy, supernatural stuff of everyday Afro-American life in the New World and give it a poetical habitation, and a name like Marie Laveau.