Dead Cats and Voodoo on the Mississippi River

“And they shall eat the meat of a cat. And of his bones. They would be the feast”

                                                                                                                                   Book of Sorrows

Don’t pick a fight with a Mardi Gras float.

He was still locked in the bathroom grinding his dentures down with a drimel. They were painfully over sized due to the fact they had belonged to someone else as recently as yesterday. That guy certainly wouldn’t need teeth where he was going. Even the laminate faux wood paneling begin to smell like burnt bone. Burnt pig bone.  Like the grinding of metal-on-metal gears gone far too long without the save of some lubricating salve. The grinding may just go on forever but there’s always a way back. El zono finale has a rocky reputation.

He promised himself if could just find his dead cat and get out of New Orleans with a shred of what he used to call his mind, it would be the straight and narrow from here on out. From now on, the choices that lay ahead would be attacked with a furtive drive reminiscent of a more noble and stoic figure, like Thomas Jackson.

Another lost cat? There’s no way that’s a real thing. Full tilt Watusi boogie of the second Def-Con, to be sure. The last real tragedy was Lucky, who after mixing Ketamine and sawdust, threw himself into the Holiday Inn La Concha incinerator. Sometimes bad things happen to bad cats.

Around Bienville St. Frito saw Doornail entering a side door with a with a crate full of stolen Mardi Gras beads. Long ago, the crooked sign used to read “The Low Hanging Fruit” but most of the milkleaf had faded.  Luke saw him huddled in the corner, suppin on a dusty bottle of Butterfly absinthe and watching Baylor and Texas play girls softball in the afternoon shadows. Predictably, as the sun dropped in the sky the bits of shouting and profanity increased and after one unforgiving rant he was ejected from the tavern only to be seen stumbling from the curb into a mud hole slotted between broken cobblestones. At this point, all signs pointed to Madame Francis. He wouldn’t be able to go much longer without one of her Le Omelets Dauphine.

Known as an absynth drownery, Jean Lafitte’s has been a, “Muse”eum of sorts since way back. Thatcher Owen Mullins has always been a big fan of the, “Synthdriver”, an imaginary cocktail featuring absinthe, eye of newt, powdered bat wing, and the juice of virgin oranges.

The short man’s fountain of bigness is a prominent effigy in this fine establishment. None other than the biggest short man ever tops this pyramidal obelisk.

“Black Lung”

Her Christian name was Odessa but folks called her Black Lung and it was not a self-moniker. She found herself to be critical of people who gave themselves hippy-dippy names like “Harmony” and “Peace” when they were anything but. She was drinking wine out of a cardboard box. She said it was cardbordeaux. Eventually, she dumped the box and slung the bag over her should like a bloated udder. She made everyone slap the sack in order to get a shot of cheap wine. Somewhere between the warm wine and the second tin of grease, Frito realized she was trouble and no more than a godless savage.

She had been using dead cats in Vodoun ceremonies for years, but with all the new fly-by-night tourist brands of “voodoo” it had begun to seem gauche. Normally, it was pretty harmless business. A head full of mescaline and a couple weeks of dancing nekid with painted chicken’s feet punctuated by the occasional vat of animal blood. Often, the leftovers could be found wandering Lafayette St., covered in neck tattoos and uttering nonsensical gibberish about Mayan codices and the end of the world.

GRIS-GRIS LOVE SPELL

Author: Okrabeaux

Prep time:  30 mins

Cook time:  1 hour

Total time:  1 hour 30 mins

Serves: 1

This magic will help someone to fall in love or at least have an attitude adjustment.

INGREDIENTS

• leather pouch
• powdered lizard bones
• 3 pebbles from a cemetery
• human hair
• malachite crystal shard
• freckle
• shot of bourbon

INSTRUCTIONS

1. To create a gris gris, you should set up a basic gris gris altar or working space. This altar should contain the four element: a bowl of water to represent water, incense to represent air, a bowl of graveyard dirt to represent earth, and a candle flame to represent fire.
2. Choose a color specific to your need.
3. Gris gris must contain an odd number of items: more than three, never more than thirteen.
4. It must be filled with items that are specific to the desired purpose.
5. It must be dressed with a liquid of some kind.
6. Be very careful of the words you speak when making gris gris.
7. Each ingredient can be smudged or smoked in incense, and so can the final bag.
8. A petition petition should be added
9. Words of power are spoken over the bag as a means of activating the divine energy.
10. Breathe upon the gris gris to give it life.

In his screened-in kitchen, Okrabeaux used to tell stories about the old river woman who used to make up the gris gris. In the New Orleans tradition, there’s a gris gris for anything.  It’s a mixture of herbs and common ingredients such as powdered minerals, graveyard dust, roots, bones, and sacred words and seals. It can be used as a powder thrown in the path of an enemy, in an amulet or gris gris bag, in a doll, mixed with water and drunk, or used in a bath. Gris gris is part of a belief system that has remained relatively intact in New Orleans since it came from Africa by the first Senegambian slaves in the early 1720s.

Dead Cat Hit By Falling Statue

MAY 11, 2017

During the Jefferson Davis Statue removal today, an unidentified dead cat was crushed by the 400 lb obelisk. Subsequent removals of Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard Monuments will involve increased accountability measures. 

NEW ORLEANS – After two years of planning and court discussions, City officials continued the process today of removing the three remaining monuments that prominently celebrate the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” The crowd of onlookers was still applauding the removal of the statue as the unidentified dead cat was found crushed under the ruble. Said one eyewitness, “I guess the war called home one more soldier.”

All inquiries should be directed to New Orleans Police Department.

From his perch on the second floor, Thatcher saw the cat get into Black Lung’s El Camino. It was the one she’d driven since Reuben’s death but it had a new, bad paint job and the shag carpet on the dashboard had been changed and not for the better. She was perched behind the wheel, a mulatto girl with nose rings and a tattoo of Jesus eating a bowl of cheese and rice. The old man in the back seat had orange eyes and reeked of urine. Once he’d probably been handsome, but an M-16 bullet changed that, so now he was forced to eat, pray and love with scant amounts of teeth. They were all obviously tweaking and a curious cloud of dark magic seemed to follow them as they sped away from the drive-through daiquiri shop. Maybe never to be seen from again. Cat or no cat, the G-Train train was rolling to Texas and beyond. Maybe he would show up on the Mexican Blackbird.

May 22, 2017

Check out some other wookish delights including The Spirit of Suwannee Music Park: A Pictorial History. Keep up with the family as we head to Brainquility, Suwannee Spring Reunion and more.