(2 of 2)
Her tool was Voodoo, until then amateurishly practiced. Out of salt, pepper, graveyard dirt, twists of human hair, knucklebones from babies' skeletons, black candles, brick dust, face powder, oil of cinnamon, oil of cloves, she made gris-gris (pronounced greegree) : Voodoo symbols that a Voodoo curse has been laid. She studied jungle vegetable recipes for poisons and remedies. Her God became Gran' Zombi, the Snake God, represented in New Orleans by the harmless Louisiana kingsnake, black with candle-drip markings. Marie Leveau made Voodoo into big business by frightening or bribing thousands of slave house-servants to give her information about their employers' indiscretions. Her blackmail takings were so great that, though she gave away large sums in charity, she still had $1,000,000 when she died. Her enemies she killed by having their own servants poison them on threat of Voodoo. Others she forced to suicide by threat of exposure. Each St. John's Eve she presided on a kingsnake's cage over a Negro orgy in the marshes beside Lake Pontchartrain. Her black consort beheaded a white cock, drank of its spouting blood, gave it to her to drink. Into the Voodoo ritual she incorporated impressive bits from Catholic high mass. Then gourd fiddles, drums and tambourines and plenty of sugarcane rum roused her naked Negro followers to an orgiastic romp culminating in anything anybody could think of.