AWAKENINGS
AWAKENINGS
“Don’t look so nervous, mon petit.” The old woman smiled with teeth so white her plump skin looked like polished mahogany. Her thick Cajun accent rounding out the depths of her voice like a laugh. “Ms. Dominique, take good care of you. You our boy-d’he Loa already be claimin’ you. D’ey be claimin’ you since you were born.”
“Yes, Ms. Dominique. I ain’t scared-I know I be safe w’it you and Mr. Lucas, here.” Louie had been born in New Orleans 23 years before, but his time in Haiti and Jamaica had shifted his accent closer to the islands, yet New Orleans does not yield its hold on any soul that ever calls the place home-it peppered his thoughts, his walk, and occasionally his choice of words.
“Mr. Lucas!” Dominique called. “You ready, cher? D’he spirits be w’it us. It be time to call d’he circle.”
By the growing bonfire, a massive silhouette began to approach, flicks of the firelight catching his black skin, glinting off his dark eyes like burning embers in a sea of shadow. He approached closer, his massive right hand holding a chicken by the throat, his left a bowl of herbs. He began to chant in language that seemed to Louie alien beyond anything he had ever heard but still oddly familiar. For a brief moment, he could swear that the fire light he was seeing was radiating from Mr. Lucas, as if a halo of fire was around his head.
The goat-skinned drums came next-their rhythmic beats pushing Lucas’s chant to a hypnotic state-from the corner of his eyes, Louie could see revelers of St. John’s Eve, dressed in all white, begin to dance and chant around the three of them.
Lucas’s deep, rumbling voice spiked in intensity as he broke the chicken’s neck with a sudden twist of his wrist and poured it’s blood into the bowl. Louie felt Dominique hands on his shoulders. “D’hey be here boy…” she said, her voice as if the voice of ten people whispering. He looked back to see her eyes covered in a milky film. “D’he spirits be w’it us. Tu maman, dieu reposent son âme, est avec…”
Louie’s heart raced as the drums came in a fever pitch. “Louie Marcus Laveau St. John-here me.” Lucas’s voice seemed to penetrate each fiber of his being, as he felt his full name spoken he felt as though he had been solidified in the air. “D’he choice be yours.” With that he dipped his large black fingers into the blood and anointed his forehead.
At once, Louie felt a tingle overwhelm his body. Unseen hands seemed to grab him, pull him in all directions. The world span as the Great Loas tightened their grip, casting him into a whirling dance about the fire that seemed to bend the very space he moved through. The drums raced, the dancers leaped, and the bonfire exploded into the night sky. When the light dimmed and the drums calmed, Louie Marcus Laveau St. John was gone.