When Death Comes for You by Marjorie Florestal

Author:Marjorie Florestal [Florestal, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Press
Published: 2018-03-13T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Seven Stabs of the Knife

An hour later, Renée stretched her arms toward the ceiling and yawned. John had called to say he would pick her up in forty-five minutes. She should get ready, but the book was so engrossing she couldn’t put it down.

So far, the most intriguing passage was on the origin of Vodou and its orthography. The word Vodun—meaning sacred energies or natural forces, such as the land, the ocean, and death—came from the Fon Kingdom in Benin. It traveled from West Africa to Columbus’s New World on the tongues of those forcibly enchained.

The slaves planted the word and many of its traditions on Haitian soil. Vodun practitioners worked to communicate with the sacred energies in this new land. They called these energies Lwa or Spirits. Interestingly, Haitians themselves seldom referred to their religion by name—they preferred to say they “served the Spirits.”

The various spellings of the word held slightly different connotations. Vodun harkened back to an African past, while Vodou became the spelling of choice among Haitian intellectuals. Voodoo, the most popular spelling in Western circles, carried the heaviest baggage. It was an epithet to be hurled at anything deemed strange, dark, or sinister.

Renée flipped through the book and thought back to the 1980 presidential campaign when candidate George H. W. Bush labeled Ronald Reagan’s market policies Voodoo Economics. It was a derisive attack on a strategy to reduce income tax and capital gains for the richest Americans. As a sound bite, it proved effective, but what must it feel like to have your religion flung around as an insult?

Then again, once Bush became Reagan’s vice president, he learned to love Voodoo Economics.

She flipped through several more pages. The material was fascinating, but none of it resolved the mystery of eighteen dead bodies. It was time to prepare for a day of meetings. She went to close the book when a line of text caught her attention:

Who am I? You dare ask that question? I am Erzulie, a Spirit of many faces.

Erzulie. There was that name again. Even now, the haunting lyrics of Rose’s song made her shiver.

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