Reviews for A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau

The average rating for A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-17 00:00:00 Hilda Corbett The best thing I can do to start out is quote this line from the conclusion: "Some elements of the Laveau Legend can be debunked as pure fantasy, some cannot be verified or refuted, and some are true." That pretty much sums up this book in its entirety. It's clear that Morrow intends to present a historical accounting and she does an admirable job. For the most part this book is dry as a bone - there are no juicy secrets here, no lascivious stories, no outrageous claims. As far as I'm aware this is the first and only work that actually tries to demystify who Marie Laveau actually was. Unfortunately there's very little there to work with. Parish and municipal records are thin at best, family trees are a mess of knots and missing information, and this tentative arrangements of facts is assaulted on all sides by sensationalist storytellers and unreliable narrators. As a book on a thin slice of New Orleans history during the mid-to-late 1800s, though, it's fascinating. Morrow does a great job detailing how she's pieced together all these snatches of history and manages to attach little informational tidbits. She takes great pains to explain the striations of society in antebellum New Orleans, differentiating between whites, free people of color, Creoles, slaves, etc., all of which is necessary to better understand Laveau's heritage and her own place in this society. Small asides about the Catholic churches being almost completely integrated before bigotry flourished during and after Reconstruction made it more clear why there's now such a divide in houses of worship here, the separation between the predominantly black Baptist and Methodist churches and the mostly-white Catholics. Every few pages turned showed off another facet of the city at that time and how it factors into where we are today. One of the most fascinating for me personally was Morrow's detailed breakdown of the different types of religions: vodu from Africa, Haitian vodou, and New Orleanian voudou. I had not previously realized what a distinct and separate system this city generated in the mid-1800s and it was enlightening to read how it all came about. This book is no page-turner, though. There are large sections of "who begat who" and "let me carefully and politely detail why Previous Writer's research was flawed, wrong, sensationalist, fully fictional, or any combination of the above." I recognize that these are necessary in terms of being the support structure upon which her conclusions are built but I had no compunctions about glossing over them. If you're looking for a sweltering and shocking biography full of scenes of snake blood and chicken feathers and naked writhing, well, this isn't for you. If you love the city of New Orleans and want to understand some of its history better as it's wrapped around the story (both real and fictional) of one of its most famous inhabitants ... well, get to readin'.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-28 00:00:00 Timothy Gohr While I did find this book interesting, it doesn't quite live up to its promise. I picked it up expecting to learn some cool and scandalous Voodoo stories about the Queen of Voodoo, and learned instead that the many salacious rumors about Marie Laveau were just that - unfounded rumors, or else complete fabrication. While it's definitely more than okay that Carolyn Morrow Long is separating fact from fiction here, what's disappointing is that not a lot is actually known about Marie Laveau's life. The book spent a lot of time describing the city of New Orleans at this period in history, and the society that would have been familiar to Marie Laveau. Slavery is discussed, as is the religion of Voudou [sic] and certain other famous figures in Voudou's annals. Most of the information about Marie Laveau was tables and charts of her descendants, information about debts and house sales, etc. Without the inaccurate elaborate stories, there isn't much there worth learning about. I think this book would have been better focused had it been a book centered on Voudou itself. The New Orleans history, slavery history, and rites and festivals would have fit right in. The chapter about Dr. John wouldn't have seemed so random. And there could have been a chapter or two detailing the Marie Laveau facts vs. fictions, because while she seems to be an important figure in the religion, there isn't enough interesting factual information out there for an entire book about her. When it was all said and done, that's basically what this book was - 2/3 history of a place and time, and 1/3 debunking Marie Laveau myths and explaining her genealogy. The title is somewhat misleading in that way. This book is worth a read for those interested in New Orleans history and the roots of Voodoo, but I would sooner recommend Carolyn Morrow Long's biography of another notorious New Orleanian, Delphine LaLaurie: "Madame LaLaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House". More is known about her life, the scandalous stories are bigger and scarier, and the book is ultimately more factual and still more entertaining than this offering.