Martha Ward

Ward, Martha. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau. Mar. 2004. 224p. illus. index. Univ. Press of Mississippi, $28 (1-57806-629-8) 299.6

Two commanding Creole women reigned supreme in New Orleans between the 1820s and 1880s, the spiritual leader Marie Laveau and her similarly gifted daughter of the same name. Ward, an indomitable researcher and inspired interpreter, not only tells the entire astonishing and moving story of the two Marie Laveaus, but also offers a fresh perspective on Creole culture and Voodoo New Orleans style, a religion of the African Diaspora that, as Ward so sensitively explains, was crucial to the survival of African Americans during the grim days of slavery. Official documentation of the lives of Marie the Fist and Marie the Second is scant and confusing, but Ward brilliantly deciphers evidence of the shrewd strategies the Laveaus employed in order to conduct the Voodoo gatherings so essential to practitioners and so feared and demonized by the white establishment, and , most critically, to help free slaves. Citing numerous sources new to history books, Ward brings tumultuous nineteenth-century New Orleans vividly to life as she reveals the true nature of the equally maligned and mythologized Marie Laveaus, devotional, dramatic, and subversive women of otherworldly power and courage who saved numerous lives, and made live livable for may more.
Donna Seman