This week, I’ve been writing about the inspirations behind Mike Casey’s horror novel, Chinchuba. I published it for him back in 2005. It has been sitting on its virtual shelf on Amazon for the past few years, and I thought it was time to revive it. Mike’s villain is a voodoo priest called Dr. John. There is a musician who goes by that name now, but both the musician and Mike’s character got the name from a real voodoo priest who lived in New Orleans in the late 1800s. He was a contemporary of Marie LaVeau, the famed voodoo queen. In earlier life, John had been a prince in the African nation of Senegal before being captured and forced into slavery. I’m not sure if the real Dr. John was as evil or as terrifying as the character in Mike’s novel, but, given his life experiences, it is easy to understand why he might have an axe to grind.
Mike’s depiction of Dr. John immediately made me think of the Baron Samedi figure portrayed by Jamaican actor Geoffrey Holder in the 1970s James Bond movie, Live and Let Die. He was a tall black man who often wore a top hat and sometimes painted his face with the image of a skull. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl3SzHw0mA8) Dr. Facilier, the Shadow Man, in Disney’s The Frog Princess, was probably inspired by him even though Disney avoided identifying him with Baron Samedi. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZAY-78zhmw) I wondered how close these Hollywood depictions came to reality. Since The White Zombie came out in the 1930s, most Americans have associated voodoo with dark spells, zombies, and voodoo dolls. Apparently not all voodoo is malevolent and, according to one source I read, the voodoo dolls actually came from hoodoo instead of voodoo. Hollywood and the news media are often guilty of portraying religions according to their weirdest and most radical practitioners. The real voodoo, as I understand it, is a fusion of several forms of African spirituality with images drawn from Catholicism. In Catholicism, people sometimes pray to departed saints to intervene with God for the living. The slaves in Haiti saw similarity between this practice and their religion’s form of magic which involved consulting with various spirits to influence a creator who was not overly concerned with the affairs of the living, They adopted the images of the saints to represent those spirits. Unlike the Catholic saints, however, not all of the spirits or loas the voodoo practitioners consult with are benevolent or virtuous. Baron Samedi, who guards the gateway to the world of the dead, is associated with both resurrection and sexuality (an interesting combination.) and shown wearing a top hat and having the face of a skull.
Sometimes truth is more terrifying than fiction. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, was a dictator who ruled the island nation of Haiti with an iron fist. According to biography.com, he was responsible for more than 30,000 deaths. Duvalier portrayed himself as an incarnation of Baron Samedi. He sometimes wore a top hat to reinforce the image. He recruited voodoo priests to serve as his allies and convinced his enemies he had magical powers. He once had the severed head of a guerrilla group leader brought to his palace and claimed he could extract information about the group from the dead man’s skull. (This is a Time article about him: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876967,00.html)
Given the choice between having Papa Doc or Mike’s depiction of Dr. John on your trail, I’m not sure which would be more terrifying. At least you could escape from Papa Doc by leaving Haiti.
This is the link to Mike’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Chinchuba-Kevin-Michael-Casey/dp/0972554963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508933165&sr=8-1&keywords=chinchuba