Black is beautiful at ‘Voodoo Queen’ Marie Laveau’s new shrine

The shrine will be dedicated in a ceremony at the New Orleans Healing Center, a holistic wellness facility not far from the city's French Quarter.

The center’s priestess, Sallie Ann Glassman, a popular practitioner of Haitian Vodou, told Al Jazeera that previous depictions have reflected the artists’ notion of beauty. Laveau lived in the 1800s, and “there were some eyewitness accounts, but no images of her,” Glassman said.

The most widespread image of Laveau, painted by Frank Schneider decades after her death, depicts her as zaftig and fair-skinned and is based on a work by American painter George Catlin, one of Laveau’s contemporaries.

Schneider’s portrait reflects a different aesthetic era, particularly in New Orleans. A black community elder told Al Jazeera that before the 1960s, a paper-bag test determined entry into local events organized by black high society: People darker than a brown paper bag were often turned away, as a premium was placed on being light-skinned.

“Even as early as the [late] 19th century, when you ask people about Marie Laveau, they describe her as tall and fair-skinned with curly hair. She’s black, but she’s not black. She’s Creole,” said Kodi Roberts, an African-American history professor at Louisiana State University.

“But then you get other people who still practice Voodoo in the 20th century saying they prayed with her or danced with her. They say she was dark and short and fat,” Roberts added. “That conflict goes back as far as I can tell.” 

Documents from Louisiana oral history projects call her a “quadroon,” or a person who is one-quarter black and three-quarters white. And an 1875 interview with a Voodoo priestess called Marie Lafont — a name many suspect is an incorrect transcription of Marie Laveau — said she had “dark bronze skin” with “grizzled black hair.”

Times have changed since Catlin and Schneider painted Laveau. The 1960s “Black is beautiful” movement and subsequent campaigns to embrace black physical features may have had some effect on contemporary interpretations of her.

In one recent example, Angela Bassett, recently described as an “ageless beauty” by Essence magazine, was nominated for an Emmy for playing Laveau in the 2013 FX television hit “American Horror Story: Coven.”

Pustanio’s Marie Laveau, two years in the making, isn’t alabaster, onyx or any other type of stone. It’s painted papier-mâché.

“She’s intended to have brown-colored skin. I think it’s just respectful,” Glassman said.

“We’re honoring someone who was a source of great strength to the African-American community especially,” she continued. “Voodoo itself was a great source of strength to people who were enslaved. Voodoo had the power to look beneath the surface of things to find a spirituality that couldn’t be destroyed by the slavemaster’s whip. That’s what we’re honoring.”

Each year on June 23, St. John’s Eve, a central holiday in New Orleans Voodoo, Glassman goes to Bayou St. John, “very close” to where Laveau is said to have practiced, to perform rituals of healing and protection for the community in Laveau’s honor.

Glassman said that on St. John’s Eve when Laveau possesses believers, her image remains elusive and that her mannerisms are always “refracted” by the person she’s entrancing. While her skin tone will never be known for sure, Glassman said, there's one constant: her grace and authority.