“Be afraid of me;
Be afraid of my voodoo.
Be afraid of me –
For I am Hoodoo!”
Through the generations New Orleans has had many great “queens” of Voodoo; Sanite Dede, African Rosalie, Madame Popaleuse, Fanny Mosebury, and, of course, the iconic Marie Laveau all loom large in the magical folklore of this most magical city. These powerful women cast a long shadow of many other voodoo practitioners, a large majority of whom were males.
Perhaps this is because the male vodusi were more intimidating, taking on the dark work of the bokor priest or employing their powerful “obi” to exact vengeance on behalf of their followers and clientele.
Squire John, known to legend as “Bras Coupe” after his arm was broken during his escape from his master, subsisted for years in the swamps and bayous surrounding New Orleans; he employed his considerable knowledge of the local flora and his native powers to transform followers into “zombis,” amassing a small army of the living dead.
According to the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who tells the story of Bras Coupe in his Notes of a Pianist, the hoodoo man was finally caught and hung, but his body began to decompose immediately. Instead of hanging from the gallows in the Place d’Armes for the customary week, the body of Bras Coupe had to be removed after only one day. The stench and reek of the body was so offensive that many firmly believed Bras Coupe had died long before his capture and that, indeed, it was a zombie that had been hung in the square.
Because there had been so many failed attempts to capture Bras Coupe – Gottschalk himself describes the bullets of soldiers “flattening against the chest” of the great zombi leader and that he was impermeable to fire – the rumor spread quickly among the colored community that the authorities had finally decided to beat the vodusi at his own game. According to some accounts, the soldiers had employed the services of another little known, but widely feared hoodoo worker – specifically Alphonse Abelard Avetante, a French half-gypsy, half-Jewish magician whom the local slaves and free people of color called “Doctor Cracker” because he was a white man.
A trained physician, Avetante is alleged to have come to New Orleans in the 1820’s after practicing for a time in Havana, Cuba; some records suggest that prior to this he had received medical training in Germany and Italy. “Doctor Cracker” Avetante was also known as a magician who delighted in performing tricks for children and adults alike in the Congo Fields. What most did not know, but legend seems to indicate, is that Avetante was also a magician of another sort; an adept in the occult arts, Avetante’s practice of voodoo (most say it was hoodoo) was a simple step from the complicated magical systems he already knew.
If the legends are true, it was Avetante that the local authorities went to for help in counteracting Bras Coupe’s hoodoo, ultimately allowing them to capture and hang the infamous criminal. The superstitious wondered what had become of Bras Coupe’s zombi army; most believed that because he had defeated their master, Avetante gained control over the mindless horde. Rumors like this highly elevated Avetante in the minds of the locals who came to fear him because of his obviously great hoodoo powers
Avetante is known to have been an intimate of many of the wealthiest families of New Orleans who paid him well for his services as a worker of hoodoo, but accounts of his whereabouts after 1835 are sketchy. According to certain anecdotal family accounts, “Doctor Cracker” left New Orleans with a much younger woman, possibly a cousin of the pianist Gottschalk, and was last encountered in Paris around 1842.
But arguably the greatest of New Orleans’ voodoo hierophants is a man Lafcadio Hearn called “The Last of the Voodous” – Doctor Jean Gree-Gree, the original Doctor John.
According to Hearn, this man whose name became as synonymous with voodoo as that of Marie Laveau, went by the legal name of John Montanet and claimed to be the descendant of African kings. Montanet claimed to be a Senegalese prince – in proof of which he would point to patterned scars on his cheeks which exactly replicated the marks given to Senegal nobles of the Bambarra tribe – and explained that he had been captured by Spanish slave traders who brought him first to Cuba. There he rendered loyal service as a cook to a West Indian master who held Montanet in such high regard that ultimately he rewarded John with his freedom. Montanet immediately took to the sea, working as a cook on numerous vessels plying the Atlantic and Caribbean trades until he finally put in at the port of New Orleans and decided to stay.
John Montanet took a job as a cotton roller along the Mississippi docks and here, as he had in the Cuba, he so distinguished himself that his employers soon promoted him to leader of a “gang” of cotton dockworkers. Broad shouldered and muscular, with a resonant voice and authoritative manner, Montanet quickly earned the respect of his gang, but moreover he soon began to impress them with his mysterious abilities, supernatural powers which he claimed came down to him from his Senegal ancestors.
“Obi” was the name Montanet gave his powers, one of which included foretelling the future from the patterns of the huge cotton rolls. How he was able to do this no one knew, and John never revealed his secrets, but his predictions were eerily accurate and consequently his reputation grew. Fellow workers, free people of color, and slaves looked upon Montanet as a great vodusi; word of his fantastic powers soon spread across the New Orleans community – at the height of his popularity Montanet counted his clientele “in the thousands.”
Having obtained a considerable amount of money for the times, John Montanet, now known widely as “John Gree Gree” and “Doctor John,” retired from the docks and bought a large tract of land outside of the city located off the Bayou Road between Prieur and Roman Streets. His property encompassed an entire city block – now completely built up – though at the time it was swampy grassland where Montanet erected a mean hut with few furnishings. He placed his prized possession – a huge elephant tusk - in a place of honor near a portrait of the Virgin Mary, who he insisted helped in his divination. He kept a cache of magical cowrie shells and was never without his magic fetish – two bones (some say they were toad bones) on a leather sting about his neck. And here along the Bayou Road, near St. Jean’s Bayou, the name of Doctor John entered into the legends of old New Orleans.
Doctor John happily took the money of the rich for whom he performed all manner of alleged predictions and cures. An expert in the botanical wonders of the area, thanks to his friendship with the nearby Allapoosa Indians, Doctor John would often prescribe tonics and tinctures to his clients, who never seemed to get enough of his special kind of medicine. Sometimes there would be lines waiting to see him; mixed in with the mean and barefooted were ladies in fancy dresses with long veils covering their faces to conceal their identities. Soon, Doctor John was a phenomenon who took on multiple wives – one of whom was white - and produced numerous children. He had earned enough to build a better home, to keep a horse-drawn trap in which he rode about the city, tending to his French Quarter clients and often visiting the sick and needy on the “American side” of New Orleans. In times of pestilence, when the yellow fever or cholera raged, Doctor John was there, with his student Marie Laveau at his side, ministering to the sick and needy.
As so often happens with honest men of goodwill, Doctor John eventually ran afoul of people who sought to cheat him out of his reputation and fortune; he took to burying his money in jars in his yard, and for years after his death people were digging up the area all around Prieur and Roman Streets looking for Doctor John’s fortune. Ultimately John made the innocent mistake of asking someone to teach him how to write his name, and soon there were all sorts of miscreants turning up to take advantage of him. Trusting the intentions of these people, Doctor John unwittingly signed all sorts of papers until ultimately he lost his home, his fortune, and all his investments.
His health failing, his clientele dwindling with the spread of public and religious education, Doctor John spent his last days in a rude hut near the Bayou on land that was donated to him by the Planas brothers – Gabriel and Jose, sons and namesakes of the famous “Kings of the French Market” who had established their business on the Spanish Docks at the old St. Jean Bayou portage in the early 1800’s. Here, Doctor John was often visited by his old friends, the Allapoosa Indians, and Jose Planas especially spent a great deal of time with the fading voodoo king. One day, Doctor John asked Planas for a strange favor.
Jose Planas borrowed a produce cart and helped the fragile Doctor John climb up into the seat. A short time later, the little cart and its occupants pulled up at the crumbling old gallows that stood along the Canal Road at the spot where Jefferson Davis Parkway crosses today. Planas helped Doctor John climb down from the cart and as he ambled over to the gallows a small crowd began to gather; soon Doctor John stood in the very spot where so many men – guilty and innocent – had met their end before the new Parish Prison was built and another gallows was put into use.
“Now yo’ lissen heah!” the old Doctor cried out, his voice feeble at first but quickly taking on strength. “Lissen heah, New Awlins!” he said, and the people around him – including, of course, Planas – wondered what he was up to.
“Heah dem mens be hanged fo’ gen’rations past,” said Doctor John. “Heah the blood o’de guilty and de innocent been spilt fo’ years, so yo’ see, dis New Awlins be a sacreed place! And so I stands heah and I tells yo all,” he hollered, “and dis man heah is mah witness!” Doctor John pointed at Jose Planas.
“Be afraid o’ me! Be afraid o’ mah voodoo!” Doctor John said a voice as deep and resonant as it had been in his youth. “Be afraid o’ ME – fo’ I am de Hoodoo! I am de Zombi – de eternal Zombi dat lives agin and agin! I winds mysef arown you all – in an’ out I go, wit’ de years, forever. I am de Hoodoo, and I will be’s heah fo’ever!
“And now yo ask yo’selfs,” he went on, “I wants yo to ask yo’selfs, what IS de meaning o’life? What do yo’ life mean? Dat is de riddle. And I is comin’ back, agin and agin, and I gwon ask ever’ one o’ yo to answer me when de time come!”
With that the shrunken figure of the Doctor ambled toward the gallows steps where Jose Planas waited to help him down. The sun shone of his bald head, his beard white like snow against his coal black face, but as his foot touched the ground he smiled and winked a shiny, yellowed eye at Planas. The Doctor laughed softly to himself for the entire ride home, but never uttered a word more.
At the shore of St. Jean’s Bayou, Jose Planas watched the revered hierophant of voodoo, the great Doctor Gree Gree, amble away like any other bent old man in the lengthening shadows of the August afternoon sun. When his brother Gabriel asked him what had happened, Jose found he had no reasonable explanation.
Within a week, at the end of August 1885 Doctor John closed his eyes – but many say it was only for the first of many, many times. The eternal zombi? The meaning of life?
Some members of the local voodoo community, especially those people who adhere to the branches that reach back in an unbroken line to the time of the great voodoo kings, say that the promise (some might say “curse”) of Doctor John continues to come true to this day. They point to the living legacy of strong voodoo priests – the Chicken Man, Brother Armando, Dr. Elmer Glover, and others, among them a possible reincarnation (or could it be return?) of Alphonse “Doctor Cracker” Avetante – as proof that the priests are “The Hoodoo” and The Hoodoo is the priests, who move through time, coming and going through the magical fabric of New Orleans for generations – and generations to come.
Story and all associated content Copyright © 2010 Alyne A. Pustanio, All Rights Reserved. Also see, Lafcadio Hearn, Harper’s Weekly, November 7, 1885.
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