I heard a very bizarre fieldwork story today in an anthropology talk. A female graduate student in the late '90s gave one of her professors a tape she recorded of her encounter with one of the "swamp people" in Mississippi. He put the tape aside and never listened to it until after she graduated but when he did, he was utterly amazed. The woman on the tape told an old santeria story in a language that existed 150 years ago, containing mostly English but also Catalan and Choctaw words, and is unlike anything known to exist today. He had to find out what this tape was and one of his colleagues tracked the student down on the internet. The story of the encounter that resulted in the tape was even stranger. She was doing research in the swamps of Mississippi and came upon a house of an old woman who was nearly 100 years old. The woman called herself Yansa (the name of a voodoo goddess), and told the student when she came to her door, "Come in. I have been expecting you". The woman was dressed in unusual garb, unlike anything people in the area normally wear, and her house was also unfamiliar in its furnishings and looked very, very old-fashioned in retaining African heritage. It was like stepping into another time and era. Then the woman fed the student some rice and touched her face in an annointing sort of way (I forgot exactly what happened), and the student got out the tape recorder to record the woman's story. And then the student asked her first question, but it wasn't in her natural English but in this obscure lost dialect, she opened her mouth and somehow just said, "You ye di ya" meaning, "Are you from around here?" Maybe she knew something of this broken English from her past, but she just knew what to say subconsciously. Then the old woman told a santeria story about Dambala, the snake goddess, in this strange archaic language. The student didn't understand all of it, but followed along. I listened to the tape and it is freakingly spoooooky. The old woman suddenly spoke like she was 30 years old, full of youth and vigor, but the way she spoke by hissing out the words and chanting them and whispering them could make your skin crawl. Then the student started getting scared and misunderstood something the woman said and she blurted out, "But I never knew you before". And then the old woman started mocking her and taunting in a sing-song voice, "Fraid a babaloo," and the student defensively said in standard English instead of dialect, "No, I'm not afraid of a babaloo". And the old woman said, "Good. Turn off the damn thing -- it take my namayama (soul)". And there the tape stopped. And then, not long after this encounter, the old woman died.....it's like she passed on the story for posterity and then she died. Later on, when others became interested in the tape, the student returned to the swamps to find the community to see if she could learn anything more about this woman but despite several attempts, the woman's house could never be found -- almost as if it never existed.
Spooky true story
by Leolaia 14 Replies latest jw friends
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bebu
Yep! Weird and spooky. ( And what's a babaloo?? Is that taught in anthropology?)
bebu
BTW, Leolaia, congrats on being a jedi!
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ohiocowboy
Yes, that is a very interesting story! There are still people that live in the swamps in Florida (Everglades), quite a different culture. It would be soooo neat to be able to talk to some of these people, and get their viewpoints on life, etc. and what it is like living in a very different environment. Thanks for posting the story!
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FlyingHighNow
Fascinating. I used to live in Southwest Louisiana. All kinds of strange things going on down there. One of which happened to me.
Flyin'
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Country Girl
Leolaia:
Nothing should be surprising down n Lousiana. The people down there belive in, and practice, voodoo. I have had TEXAS cops tell me that they will never set foot back in the bayous, the people will put voodoo on them, and they are scared. They already know that they will have the hoodoo on them, and the alligators will eat em up. I have a friend that is from the bayou area and her cousin stole her inheritance from her, and she always tells me about the LAW ... how crooked they are.
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Leolaia
The incident seemed reminiscent of the motif in American movies of kids daring one of their own to go to the haunted house on the block to talk to the mysterious resident therein. And then the denizen of the house opens the door and says, "Come in, I have been expecting you".
bebu....I had wondered the same thing; I just knew it as a word Dezi Arnaz liked to say. And the online Urban Dictionary wasn't much help, defining the word as an "afro-cuban word which was used by ricky ricardo in one of his songs on i love lucy" and "the rush you get from commiting racialy influenced crimes"... But babaloo as a word meaning "high priest" comes from West African baba "father" and lawo "secret", literally "father of secrets". Its phonetic form however recalls one of the main gods of the santeria tradition. According to About.com: "In Santeria/Lukumi, the Babaluaye (also spelled Babaloo, Babalue) is Chief Orisha, the supreme deity of whom the other Orishas are but aspects. Unlike the other Orishas, Babaluaye does not become involved in human affairs. He is closely related to Bondye of Vodoun." Another site says that he is best known as curing or causing "highly infectious diseases such as smallpox and must be approached with caution, since he has been known to cause disease instead of cure it if he is offended". Sheds some light on what Dezi Arnaz was singing about....
Country Girl, ohiocowboy, FlyingHighNow....Interesting experiences. I seem to get both extremes; the popular American stereotype of voodoo as just spooky magic and not a real religion, and the clinical ethnographic view which describes the structure of the ritual and language of Santeria, Palo Monte, etc. It is very interesting, for one thing, that the ritual language (what is used when the priests are possessed by spirits) is usually considerably ancient, conservative. In Jamaica, the ritual language maroons is pretty much what everybody could speak 200 years ago but now survives only in cases of spirit possession. The story told by the old woman seems to be of a similar vein. Hearing more about how voodoo and the people of the swamps are perceived kinda puts the student's reactions in perspective.
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gespro
Hey there Leolaia!!
All the things you have mentioned are a part of my heritage (Jamaica, Choctaw, Mississippi etc). My grandmother was into some very intense things but, my mother kept us boys away from her practises as much as possible.
This story brought back that memory. Thanks! Now I can't sleep! LOL! But, really thank you.
gespro
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Leolaia
gespro.....Jeepers, creepers, well if you know anyone who knows or might know some elderly person who can speak a bizarre ritual dialect mixing Patwa and Native American words, with some Spanish or even Catalan thrown in, I know someone who'd be very interested in meeting him or her. I know one guy in Cuba who goes to Palo Monte rituals to hear this broken Yoruba that the priests speak.
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joannadandy
Interesting...anyone a fan of Zora Neale Hurston?
It's not totally related to this, but sort of, her book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamacia, is a totally engrossing read. I just picked it up because I am a fan of her other work and was at the library and spotted it on the shelf. If anyone is even remotely interested in learning more, I'd highly suggest it. She was actually invited in to the culture and shown all sorts of "secret" things. It's also an interesting read to see how different cultural things when in close proximity mutate and feed off each other.