sheriden booker.
d’zaklèr é dolo
cohort. 2025-26
project. D’zaklèr é Dolo: A Lineage of Lightning and Water
location. Louisiana
medium. exhibit
Theodore Müller, Vue Générale de la Nouvelle-Orléans lithograph, c. 1850s. Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, object 46394. Image provided under Yale University Art Gallery Open Access Policy. Accession Numbers: 1946.9.1888.
the spectacle.
“Bonjou, Madamm Toledano! Byinvini enkò a mò kour,” (“Good day, Ms. Toledano! Welcome to my court again”) Recorder Joseph Genois sang out, as the bailiff pressed a Bible into Betsy's hand. “Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, ki pou Bondjè èdé vou?” (“So help you God?”)
“Byin sir, Misyé Joseph,” (“Of course, Mr. Joseph,”) Betsy stated with just a tinge of familiar defiance, enough to make clear who she was in relation to him, in spite of his formal position and office.
Maintaining a proud countenance, she chuckled to herself as she surveyed the room in anticipation of the theatrics about to unfold. Several dozen people had filled the foyer, balcony, and courthouse steps, all to catch the latest episode of The Voudous Go To Court Again. Indeed, Besty and her sisters’ courthouse appearances had become more popular of late than Père Antoine’s Catholic masses had been next door at St. Louis’s Cathedral when she was a child. The hour of the Voudous had arrived. However, now that their names were on the lips of everyone in the Vieux Carré and all the Uptown newspapers, how would they use their influence to restore balance? Fame was a dangerous spirit. Once summoned, who could truly command its course?
Courthouse and Church, Place d'Armes, New Orleans, 1845. Watercolor, artist unknown. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection via the Louisiana Digital Library.Courthouse and Church, Place d'Armes, New Orleans, 1845. Watercolor, artist unknown. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection via the Louisiana Digital Library.
“Would you like to conduct business in English today, Madamm Toledano?" Joseph continued, looking at her over the rim of his glasses, testing ever so slightly to see if he could get a rise out of her. She paused to assess his challenge and reposition her strategy, replying confidently,"Yes, I would.” Unlike many black women her age on this side of town, Betsy felt quite comfortable communicating in English. She had grown up between the Old Ursuline Plantation and the rough docks where the Kaintucks[1] unloaded their flatboats. Long before most of her generation learned English, she had listened to merchants, sailors, and speculators pouring into the city, cursing over cargo and lusting after opportunity.
At the time, her father was a stevedore at the Toledano warehouse and whenever business was afoot, he'd wave her off and tell her to go hush and stand inside. Though she had been born free and he enslaved, she respected his word and rarely disobeyed or talked back. Instead, she’d make herself invisible hiding behind bails of cotton, sucking on stalks of sugarcane, watching the world go by through the slatted walls. Years of studying the movement of mice and men in this manner had taught her plenty about the American temperament. So she felt no particular concern about the English-speaking journalists swarming the interior perimeter of the court room. If they wanted a spectacle for the Picayune or the Daily Delta, she was more than willing to give them one. But she was certain her testimony would fly right over their heads, just like lightning.
Abomey, Benin (Former Kingdom of Dahomey) | Photograph by Susan Middleton, 1994 Note: Hevioso and Sogbo are not distinct, separate deities, but rather different names and aspects of the exact same supreme spirit: the god of thunder, lightning, and justice. While Hevioso is the specific spirit associated with storms at the lakeside village of Hevi, Sogbo is viewed as the "parent" or ruler of the entire pantheon of sky and thunder Vodun.
Musée Africain de Lyon, France. Vodun Pottery of the Dan Cult: Poterie du culte vodun Dan. Fon, Bénin, circa 1900. Artist Uncredited. Note: Dan is the primordial, cosmic rainbow serpent, while Dangbe is the earthly manifestation of that spirit, specifically associated with the sacred python.
the root.
As a priestess of Sogbo in the royal house of Abomey, as her mother and her mother's mother had been too, Betsy was certain she could never adequately explain such things to the uninitiated eye of in jij amerikin (an American judge), or even a Creole one who may occasionally turn to Voudou when life necessitated it.
The policemen believed they had confiscated a few pots, some stones, a necklace, and a saint's statue. And the newspapers would likely repeat the same.
Yet standing before the court, Betsy knew that what sat in police custody amounted to 238 years of devotion born from an unbroken lineage of hands and names called upon to mend broken worlds whenever things fell apart. This kind of devotion transcended continents and oceans. It survived kingdoms and changes in government. It rallied against oblivion and erasure, outliving the ambitions of men.
Betsy's understanding of the world rested upon this certainty. And despite what those gathered in the courtroom might have thought, she had not come to reclaim a collection of objects today. She had come to retrieve her lineage.
This photograph and the following three are of Voudou priests and community members gathering in Glidji, Togo for the annual Ekpe Ekpe Festival where they enter the forest to pick a stone that will forecast the health and well-being of the community for the year. https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/Ekpe-ekpe-voodoo-festival-roots-of.html
https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/Ekpe-ekpe-voodoo-festival-roots-of.html
A pot could break.
A necklace could be lost.
A statue could burn.
But lineage was neither something one could replace nor purchase. And yet that seemed to be the very thing they were hell bent on taking from women like her. Fortunately for Betsy, however, her grandmother, Agbolete—this ram is a worthy sacrifice to the god of thunder and lightning—had spent a lifetime resisting erasure through storytelling. She spoke often of secret women's gatherings held beneath the moonlight in the swamps beyond the city walls, and of the grand balls Mina men held each year in Pointe Coupée to crown a new king.[2] She spoke of the power of lightning and how its presence had been summoned when it came time to revolt—first in '91 and then again in '95.[3]
(Ekpe Festival, Glidji) https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/ Ekpe-ekpe-voodoo-festival-roots-of.html
https://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/Ekpe-ekpe-voodoo-festival-roots-of.html
Yet Agbolete never spoke openly about the circumstances that brought her from Abomey to Louisiana. There were silences in her stories. Things that remained untouched even after decades. Certain betrayals and details of palace intrigue that stayed buried, certain wounds that remained unhealed and unnamed. They lingered in the spaces between words as they sailed down the bayous toward the lakefront, dressed in gleaming white to make offerings to the Mother of All Waters, just as their ancestors had done.
But instead of pressing her grandmother for answers, Betsy was content to watch her sail. She knew enough.
She knew there had been darker moments in the hull of a ship. And that Sogbo had crossed those waters with her grandmother, holding her firmly when the only escape from the abyss was to fly away in one’s mind. And she knew that something stronger than fear had carried Agbolete through the years that followed. She was certain of this. For the day her grandmother placed the beaded cowrie-shell necklace over her shoulder, beckoning her to carry Sogbo on her head, was the day Betsy caught lightning for the first time.
(Queen Mother of the African Diaspora, Benin) Photograph by Maya. Reproduced with permission of the subject.
A serpent biting its own tail, representing King Guezo as the male god Dan. From the zinkpoho, formerly known as the Hall of Thrones in the Royal Palace of Abomey, Benin (Former Kingdom of Dahomey). Photograph by Susan Middleton, 1994. “By comparing himself to a god, Guezo projected an aura of timeless power; this image can be interpreted to signify that the kingdom of Dahomey was so vast that it was universally known.”
Placing offerings on the water, her grandmother would continue with stories. Sweet cakes and flowers amidst stories about Abomey, Glidji and Oyo. Arada, Ouidah, and Popo. Stories of kings and foolish men. Stories of women whose patience was greater than the kingdoms they sustained. But the one Betsy loved the most concerned Agaja, the Greatest of Black Kings.
And Agbolete loved that story too.
She delighted in recounting how King Agaja—her grandfather, Betsy’s great-great-grandfather—while attempting to negotiate the containment of the slave trade, had dictated a letter to a yôvô scribe held at court, who was to deliver it to King George I of England.[4, 5] After an exhausting exchange, translating back and forth—Fongbe to English, English to Fongbe, with some Portuguese and Yoruba thrown in—the young yôvô scribe began reading back the king’s words: “We think it strange that women are somehow allowed so much power in England, as we hear they are even to reign over men.”
Agbolete’s grandmother, Hwanjile—utterly incredulous that this was what her husband had meant or would
even concern himself with in the midst of war—had sucked her teeth so long and hard that it sounded as
though Dan, the primordial serpent of wisdom, had coiled his tail around the royal courtyard rattling the
earth itself. After all, was it not the women who birthed the leopard, the Kpodjito who advised the king?[6]
Aren’t I sitting here before you now?
Every time her story reached that point, Agbolete would lean forward demonstrating for her audience the
sound of Hwanjile’s disdain and all the children would laugh. But even as a little girl, Betsy understood that
stories were not just stories. They were blueprints for the house that we live in and the future ones we plan to
build.
Some stories were told by the water, and others while chopping vegetables in the servant’s yard of the
Ursuline plantation. Betsy could still see her grandmother seated beneath a sprawling oak draped in Spanish
moss, slicing okra with practiced hands, stained blue as the deepest ocean from years spent cultivating indigo.
"Bayou Landscape", Harold Rudolph. 1879. Lot 390. Neal Auction Company, New Orleans, LA, February 03, 2023. Via Invaluable.com.
"Okra cries slimy tears, ti shèr,"(little dear, sweetheart; shèr is literally something that is precious, expensive) she would say.
"Don't be like okra. To komprenn, twa?"(Do you understand?)
Then, having set aside several pods, she would thread them together and hang them, along with a fan of
palmetto fronds, across the door sill to mark the entrance to her home.
Protection against tears yet to come.
Protection against the sorrows of childbirth.
Protection against grief.
Some women inherited land, and yet others inherited jewelry. But Betsy inherited stories and from that she would mold her own kind of lineage. The newspapers would later call her stout, obese, intelligent, disorderly, articulate. Dangerous. She would read every word, certain that none could define her. For the day she caught lightning for the first time, was the day she understood that lineage was not a metaphor but a living substance. It was the accumulation of everything lived and learned from time immemorial. It was the things we elected to remember, and the material we selected to build with. From that day onward, she carried herself differently. As she moved through the world, she learned early that those with money could purchase newspapers, elections, judges, and laws with astonishing ease. Living on Conti Street, only steps from the St. Louis Exchange, she possessed a front-row seat to one of the greatest theaters of wealth in North America. Planters, merchants, brokers, politicians, and speculators drifted through its halls, smoking fine cigars and sipping cognac, all while boisterously making bids on sundry items such as furniture, machinery, human beings, and art. They arrived speaking French, Spanish, and English, and departed speaking the universal language of profit. They called themselves powerful, but Betsy only found them remarkably fragile.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "Sale of estates, pictures and slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Engraved by J.M. Starling after work by William Henry Brooke, 1842. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8b40e1c0-c61f-012f-0a28-58d385a7bc34. Most likely depicts an auction under the dome of either the St. Louis Hotel or the St. Charles Hotel, both of which operated opulent commercial exchanges where enslaved people, land and other commodities were sold year round.
A drop in cotton prices.
A failed investment.
A bruised ego.
A beautiful woman.
Any one of these could puncture their pride, resulting in a duel in the field behind Tremé. As her
grandmother often used to say, pride was the most widely available ingredient of character, and yet the most
expensive one to preserve. And in this, Betsy found nothing to envy.
She owned no plantation.
No bank.
No newspaper.
No voting rights.
No political office.
What she possessed instead was something far older and more valuable. Because those who knew knew, to be
a priestess in an order as venerable as the Voudous was an honor bestowed! Ay Kandjo! Most people who
passed her never understood this nor what they were looking at and nor did they need to.
They saw in fenm de koulœr lib (free woman of color)
A Voudou.
The Dauphine.
A curiosity.
A nurse.
An inconvenience.
A headline.
Some money.
A woman so free
A nymph of the pave
In pèbon! (prostitute)
Tchsssss, can you believe?
What they did not see though was Abomey, nor the women who had carried Sogbo before her. Nor did they
see the generations of hands who had survived long enough to place their pot upon her. And that, more than
anything else, was why she found herself standing in court that day. Not because of the stones, nor the statue,
although they were important. And not because of the police, although their ignorance and abuses were
enraging. She stood there because lineage, like water, had a tendency to outlive the structures built to contain
it, and lightning a tendency to set it all ablaze.
University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, William E. Groves Collection. (The name of the sitter is unknown). Louis Nicolas Adolphe Rinck. 1844.
Louisiana Digital Library. Artist uncredited. https://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/hnoc-lph%3A86
dangerous meditations.
And yet there was something else. Genois's preemptive request to conduct the proceedings in a foreign language had deeply bothered Betsy, and she wondered to herself whether lezamérikins (the Americans) were applying a new kind of pressure from their bankhouse perches Uptown. But the law was clear and uncomplicated with regard to the matter of language. They might translate everything afterward, stack it away in English ledgers, call it progress in the form of records, but she still had every legal right to testify in her mother tongue, especially when appearing before a municipal judge who was Creole. The true source of her irritation, then, was the inconvenient and unacknowledged fact that she and Genois were both amphibious creatures maneuvering in and out of other worlds—worlds that had become increasingly difficult to articulate as real.
Added to this, Betsy could not help but notice Joseph's discomfort with her eagerness to meet his challenge. She realized he had goaded her over the rim of his spectacles, without entirely expecting her to say yes to his question. But she did, and so now, here she stood before his bench with her arms akimbo and her feet firmly planted against the worn cypress wood—the bowed floorline making her appear slightly sway-legged, leaning toward the Recorder's bench as if daring the room itself to object. Joseph was both embarrassed and amused. And now he was the one chuckling to himself, because he knew that defiant look all too well. In fact, he was certain that at that very moment a fruit seller was standing in the Place d'Armes out front in much the same posture, commanding attention through nothing more than confidence and presence.
It occurred to Betsy, then, that perhaps this was precisely what he had hoped to avoid. The truth of the matter. Not because he believed she was incapable of speaking English; he knew better than that. But because the familiarity in their exchanges offered a glimmer of what they could not say. Had she refused, had she insisted upon speaking Kouri-Vini, it would have been easier to distance himself and to position her as an artifact—a quaint remnant of an older New Orleans slowly receding before the advance of the American century.[7] After all, was this not what they were already saying? That New Orleans needed to clean its act up, if it wanted to attract investors. That no bank or insurance company in New York or London would underwrite a city where beaux nègres were allowed to beat drums in the marketplace, Voudou queens to sing praises at the water's edge, and pompous cavaliers to drink cognac for breakfast, lunch and dinner.[8] It would have been much easier to treat her case as a fleeting curiosity than it would have been to explore the inside of hypocrisy.
And so, he was surprised she had accepted the challenge because he had not quite anticipated her disloyal commitment to the whole charade. When she answered in English, and with such confidence no less, he now found himself in the awkward position of having to explain this incident to colleagues at City Hall. Soothe their concerns about this wild but articulate black woman claiming she could command lightning, rain and fire, all with a necklace bequeathed by her African grandmother. And he would have to reassure those Anglo politicians who had secured the Whig vote for his reelection. Convince the bankers with deep pockets that this city—sewn from a collage of tapestries—was somehow still governable, still inviting, still lucrative.
This fluent, non-verbal repartee between Joseph and Betsy was somewhat deceptive, however. Joseph’s brother Charles had served as mayor of New Orleans, and while their father had been an immigrant, albeit successful, Venetian merchant, their mother was a scion of the aristocratic de Morant line, whose patriarch had laid down roots in Louisiana over 100 years prior. Carrying forth this venerable legacy, Joseph himself occupied one of the most influential administrative posts in the city, to which he had been reelected three times, beating out the other Democratic candidate, Clement Ramos.
“Portrait of a Creole Gentleman,” (the name of the sitter is unknown). Louis Nicolas Adolphe Rinck.
1841.
He could vote.
He could hold office.
He could shape policy.
He was white.
He was a man.
Betsy could do and be none of those things. Yet for more than twenty years they had lived and worked within a few blocks of one another, their lives intersecting in ways that would have scandalized even the nosiest Uptown
journalist. But alas, this is what happens in cities built upon water. They had a peculiar way of forcing people together, especially during times of crisis.
Just last year, when the Sauvé Crevasse had burst seventeen miles upriver, the Mississippi had bypassed the riverfront levees, spilling through the back swamps to inundate more than half the city.[9] Streets vanished beneath muddy water. Chickens floated past church steeples. Furniture drifted through intersections. Families took refuge on second-story galleries, and the poor built makeshift huts and tents on high ridges. While some people bought steamboat tickets to tour the rushing waters at the site of the breach, Joseph climbed into a boat, rowing through the flooded back end of town toward Congo Square, distributing bread and fresh water, helping to organize the construction of a makeshift levee along the Carondolet Canal. Betsy remembered seeing him row down the street with surprising ease. He appeared as comfortable navigating floodwaters as municipal politics, so much so that his Venetian ancestors would have been proud. Betsy, with a hint of Ganvié in her blood herself, took to the converted waterways too, tending to displaced residents along with several of her sisters.[10] They moved from house to house to house, dressing wounds, preparing remedies, and distributing supplies to those in need. For two and half months, those who stayed worked side by side, the flood having washed away many things, if only temporarily. The city was too small, too porous, and too vulnerable for the neat boundaries and maps legislators constantly attempted to impose upon it. Water had little interest in ethnicity, race, municipal boundaries, property lines, or political factions. And every few years it returned to remind New Orleans that it had built its certainties atop a swamp.
Alfred R. Waud, Canal Street, Flooded During the New Orleans Flood of 1871, wood engraving published in Every Saturday, July 8, 1871. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Note: I chose this lithograph simply out of preference for its visual detail. However, a similar painting by Elizabeth Lamoisse specifically depicts the Flood of 1849, and was later reproduced and referenced as a lithograph or sketch. Like Waud, her painting also depicted New Orleans as a veritable Venice, with Canal Street underwater and residents traveling by boat.
And yet as soon as each crisis had passed, the divisions would return. Joseph resumed conducting municipal business with bankers and merchants in the coffeehouses along Exchange Alley. He effortlessly passed holding cells of human captives awaiting sale in the squeezed passageways between buildings. In the winter, he resumed attending balls, auctions, and civic functions at the St. Louis Exchange, making some purchases of his own. And Betsy passed through those same streets on her way to market, occasionally crossing paths with him in doorways or at intersections where they traded brief nods of recognition. When they were younger they might have stopped to exchange pleasantries. But such things had become more complicated. Each year produced new laws regulating the transfer of wealth, inheritance, and legal status. Public interactions acquired political meanings. Relationships that had once existed in uneasy but fluid proximity now carried risks. Even the ability of enslaved people to purchase their own freedom, as Betsy’s mother had once done, had been eliminated under the new American order. Every week free people of color left for Haiti and Mexico, to join family members who had found peace and freedom abroad. And all of this had only intensified the aristocratic tendency among old guard families who had yet to accept that the ancien régime had died with the Revolution and that both France and Spain had long since abandoned Louisiana.[11] Joseph would never risk his family name lightly. One could say, these were the fireproof bricks out of which he had chosen to build his lineage.
Yet no amount of legislation could untangle lives woven together over generations. The clearest example was the cabaret on Royal and St. Philip, operated by Marie Rose Voltaire, a free woman of color whose perfectly seasoned courtbouillon could draw politicians, merchants, sailors, and neighborhood gossips through the door on any night of the week. If the Cabildo represented the levee conducting the official flow of power, Marie Rose's establishment was the place where the water found its way around. One of the sharpest businesswomen in the Quarter, she also happened to be, not incidentally, Betsy's goddaughter.
Over the years, Joseph had grown particularly fond of the place. So fond, in fact, that his and his associates’ frequent appearances prompted Marie Rose's husband, Mathurin Rivaros, to emerge on occasion from the carpenter's shop in the rear. A tall, muscular grif with straight black hair and cinnamon skin, Mathurin had
a handsome stature and protective presence that, without saying a word, conveyed love and respect for Marie—traits that would eventually bring him tragic ruin, a testament to the deadly undercurrents of water.[12]
Yet, within those walls, municipal boundaries also softened. Business forecasts were discussed. Political rumors circulated over glasses of claret. Information traveled through the room with greater efficiency than many government offices. Years earlier, when Betsy and an enslaved woman named Caroline had appeared before Joseph's court on charges of operating a “disorderly house”, Marie Rose had quietly intervened, securing forgiveness for Betsy's fifty-dollar fine and a reduction in Caroline's corporal punishment. Later, when Joseph faced difficult decisions involving investments, elections, and political alliances, he accepted more than one private consultation with Betsy in a back room of the cabaret.
Henri Rivière (attributed), Le théâtre des ombres au cabaret du Chat Noir, Paris, 1887. La Presse /Musée Carnavalet/Paris Musées. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Although this image depicts Belle Epoque Paris, Antebellum New Orleans’s cabarets probably approximated the atmosphere and interracial social mixing occurring in this image, and perhaps to an even greater extent as many working class cabarets in the French Quarter were cited and fined for serving liquor to enslaved people who frequented venues down by the docks during their off hours. Increasingly over the 1840’s and 50’s this interracial and intercaste socializing was curbed by reactionary local government officials and vigilantes.
The arrangement suited everyone—at least at first. Boom times produced opportunities, but they also produced competition, and men like Joseph needed every advantage they could find. His dealings with Voudou had brought him a measure of stability, and in private he often credited his reelections in ‘46, ‘48, and ‘50 to the readings and spiritual guidance that Betsy had offered.
What fascinated Betsy, however, was not Joseph's participation in these exchanges but the contradictions they revealed. As Recorder and President of the First Municipality Council, he spent much of his professional life enforcing regulations designed to control the movement of people, property, and power. Standing before him that day, her own case dealt with unlawful assembly, for she had deigned to gather free and enslaved, black and white for a women’s ceremony in her home. Yet his own life routinely crossed those very same boundaries his municipal regulations sought to maintain. He remained, at heart, a Creole man—the son of a Venetian merchant and a French Creole mother, born in a Spanish colony where both water and people resisted containment with a vengeance.
At fifty-three, widowed and without a single legitimate heir, Joseph resided in a townhouse on Orleans Street
where he was the only white person in the household. His longtime companion, Nenette Pouplon, was a free
woman of color of Saint-Domingan extraction by way of Cuba and a good friend of Betsy's whom she often
saw at worship ceremonies held every Friday at the Laveau’s. Everyone in their social circle knew that Nenette, her daughter, her grandson, the Lartigues, their children, and a collection of enslaved domestic servants, two of whom were rumored to be Nenette’s cousins, all lived under the same roof with the President of the First Municipal Council. And so yes, as she stood there in court to retrieve her lineage, Betsy wondered whether Joseph reflected upon the meaning of unlawful assembly when he sat down for supper with his family. Or if he thought about legacy when he visited his black daughter, Marie Joséphine, whom he had sent to live with his brother Charles and his wife Eulalie a few blocks away. Or better yet, if he contemplated Voudou and the blessings of health and longevity, when he held Nenette at night in their mahogany wood bed.
This was why his question about English had troubled her so deeply. Not because it was offensive, not because it presumed her ignorance. But because it drove right to the farcical heart of their shared reality. He knew exactly who she was, just as she knew exactly who he was. Yet, they stood on opposite sides of a courtroom bench
performing roles demanded by a legal order neither had created but both understood better than most.
And being a priestess of Sogbo—justice and truth embodied—it irritated Betsy to no end that he felt content
to wake each morning committed to preserving a system so diametrically opposed to the most intimate corners of his life, while simultaneously stripping lineage from her own.
How many silences did it require?
How many compromises?
How many carefully rehearsed performances?
She suspected Joseph asked himself these same questions in the quiet hours of the night. But a man who survived by mediating opposing worlds could never afford to answer them honestly. And that, Betsy thought, was the true definition of dangerous, like a wet metal rod waiting to be struck by lightning.
Benin, Fon Culture, Hevioso Staff. Artist uncredited. Lot 526. Aalders Auctions, Stanmore, Australia,
December 03, 2023. Via Invaluable.com.
author's note.
In 1850, Betsy Toledano was arrested in New Orleans's French Quarter and charged with unlawful assembly. Her offense was gathering free women of color, enslaved women, and white women together in her home for a Voudou ceremony.
Betsy was a real woman. She appears in the historical record as a free black woman, a Voudou priestess, and a well-known if not respected religious leader within her community. The courtroom confrontation at the heart of this story is drawn from archival documents, contemporary newspapers, municipal records, census records, city directories, and other surviving sources that preserve fragments of her life and the lives of those around her.
Agbolete, Betsy’s grandmother, and her father, the stevedore, were both extrapolations as I have yet to locate Betsy’s baptismal certificate or other evidence of her exact parentage. But every other major character in this story was a real person I’ve encountered in the archive. Most lived where I say they lived. Many knew one another, moved through the same streets, and inhabited the same social world. Yet the archive rarely grants us access to their inner lives. We often know where people were, but not what they thought; whom they lived with, but not what they felt or what transpired between them. This story then emerges from that space.
Inspired by the methodology scholar Saidiya Hartman has called "critical fabulation," I have relied on archival
evidence, historical context, and informed imagination to reconstruct the social world surrounding Betsy’s arrest and to conjure a picture of how she might have experienced the circumstances unfolding around her. While the dialogue, interior reflections, and certain scenes are fictionalized, they are grounded in research on mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, Louisiana Voudou, and broader AfroAtlantic world history. Throughout the story, I use the spelling Voudou when referring to the religion as it was described in 19th-century Louisiana sources and newspapers. I also use the contemporary West African spelling Vodun when referring to the related religious traditions of present-day Benin and Togo. Lastly, all Louisiana Creole/Kouri-Vini language dialogue is written in the orthography developed by Landry, et. al.
This project also draws upon my years of teaching about and studying African traditional religions throughout the Americas and West Africa. Those experiences have reinforced my belief that religious practitioners are too often remembered through the fears, fantasies, and prejudices of those who sought to regulate them, rather than their own understanding of themselves. Also, they are rarely imagined as politically-informed people.
Betsy Toledano's voice survives only in fragments. Yet one of those fragments is extraordinary. Standing before Joseph Genois’s First Municipal Court, she reportedly declared that it was an honor “to be a priestess in an order as venerable as the Voudous", that she had every right to practice her religion under the current law, and that she had inherited her tradition from her African grandmother. In that one statement, she said so much, and thus, that statement became the seed for this story.
“D'Zaklèr é Dolo” is my attempt to imagine the world from which such a declaration emerged: a world shaped by lineage and memory, by contradictions and silences, by floods and migrations, and by women who spoke with conviction. It is also a first sketch. As new evidence emerges and this project continues to grow, some details may change, deepen, or take unexpected turns—as is only fitting for a story concerned with lightning and water. For now, this is Betsy's world as I have come to understand it. I hope the ancestors are honored.
selected bibliography.
Bay, Edna G. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. University of Virginia Press, 1998.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Long, Carolyn Morrow. A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
notes.
[1] Kaintuck was a historic and regional American slang term used primarily to describe a native or resident of Kentucky, often characterized as a rural or rustic frontiersman. The term was also used to describe boatmen from the Ohio River Valley who floated commercial goods down the Mississippi River to trading hubs like New Orleans and Natchez. After selling their goods, these “Kaintucks" would famously walk hundreds of miles back home along the Natchez Trace. The term itself derives from various Native American names for the Kentucky region. Depending on the specific tribe, it is rooted in indigenous words meaning "at the head of the river" (Shawnee), "meadow land” (Iroquoian), or "land of tomorrow" (Wyandot).
[2] Mina was a colonial term used to designate people hailing from the region between the Volta River in what is today Eastern Ghana eastward through Togo to present-day Benin, the country. This is an area that is today considered the heartland of Vodun worship in West Africa. Ethnic designations under the Mina designation typically included the Aja and Ewe peoples who were genealogically and politically related to the Fon of Dahomey. In the diaspora, the Mina term was used often in the Caribbean and Brazil. Other related ethnic designations included the Arada, as in the kingdom of Arada which was captured by Dahomey in 1724. Their name and ethnicity are reflected in the Rada rites of Haitian Vodou and the Arara religion of Cuba.
[3] In July of 1791, a group of Mina slaves revolted on the estate of the Widow Provillar in New Roads, Point Coupee Parish led by Cesar, an enslaved man from Jamaica; Jacó, an enslaved Mina man; and Juan Luis (Jean Louis), another Mina man, who was known for organizing regular balls there for Mina men. When their plot was discovered by the Spanish colonial authorities, 17 were brought to trial in New Orleans, where the authorities called in local Mina-translators for the trial. As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall pointed out in her groundbreaking book Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992), this conspiracy revealed an existing network of Mina-speaking slaves along the Mississippi River corridor who were not yet fluent in Louisiana Creole. Given the ceremonial and regular periodicity of their gathering in Point Coupée for a men’s “ball”and their maintenance of strong Mina-ethnic affiliation, I am suggesting it is highly likely that Vodun/Voudou was involved in the planning of this conspiracy as it was in Haiti in August of that same year. In 1795, a group of enslaved people along with three collaborating white men again revolted in Point Coupee. This time 23 were hung, their corpses decapitated, and their heads posted along the Mississippi River Road. Thirty one enslaved rebels were sentenced to flogging and hard labor, and all three white men were deported, with two being sentenced to six years of forced labor in Havana.
[4] Yôvô is a word in the Fongbe language that translates to "foreigner," "white person," or “someone with light skin." It is used as a common, everyday term to refer to any visitor or traveler from the West, regardless of their specific racial background. The term is not necessarily meant as an insult.
[5] In 1726, King Agaja of Dahomey wrote a letter to King George I of England and had it delivered via a European trader who was being held at his court. It took five years for the letter to finally be delivered to authorities in London, at which time it was examined by the Board of Trade and deemed to be a forgery. Some Africanist historians, however, have debated the validity of those forgery claims, and have urged scholars to at least consider the letter as evidence of trade negotiations and attempted communication between Dahomey and England, as King Agaja sent one of his men back to Europe with an employee of the Royal African Company. The original copy of the letter has now been lost to history, but copies of it exist in the archived transcripts of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom Parliament and in various newspapers that reprinted it in parts.
[6] The Kpodjito was the female counterpart, reign mate, or "Woman King" who co-ruled with the King of Dahomey. Frequently of commoner or enslaved origin, the Kpodijto represented a balance of monarchical and commoner authority, and held immense political and religious authority, including the power to negotiate and form coalitions that determined royal succession and influenced the ascension of new kings.
[7] Kouri-Vini is what is typically referred to as Louisiana Creole in English. It is an endangered, French- based Creole language native to Louisiana that developed during the 18th century as a result of contact among enslaved West Africans, French colonists, and Indigenous peoples. In order to distinguish it from Louisiana French as well as distinct languages spoken in the Caribbean such as Haitian, Guadaloupan, or Martinican Creole, language activists are now encouraging the community to refer to the language as Kouri-Vini (KV), a term coined by Creole speakers on the Bayou Teche in Louisiana. It is derived from the way the phrase "I went, you came" (Mo kouri, to vini) is spoken in the language, distinguishing it from standard French (J'ai été, J'ai venu). For more on the history of Kouri-Vini’s official recognition, please see https://www.mylhcv.com/kouri-vini-whats-name/
[8] Translation from Standard French: “Handsome Blacks”; this was in fact, what the early French colonists called initial shipments of Africans arriving directly from Africa to Louisiana in the early 18th century, particularly when they arrived healthy after the long Transatlantic voyage. “Beaux Nègres, grand, bien fait”—handsome, big, and well-made—were in such high demand, members of the Superior Council in the 1720’s and 30’s traded and swapped them amongst themselves and gave some to their friends. See Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992, 67).
[9] Sauvé Crevasse was a Mississippi River levee failure that started 17 miles upriver from the city of New Orleans on May 3rd, 1849 at Pierre Sauvé’s plantation. Initially, the residents of New Orleans had hoped that the water which had bypassed the riverfront levee defenses would find another channel for draining into Lake Pontchartrain in its 17 mile run downriver, but it did not. Instead, it ran right through the swamps and by May 17th entered through the back of the city, flooding a good portion of New Orleans. It took two and a half months for engineers to both repair the breach in the levee up at Sauvé’s and drain the water that had already gotten into the city. The flood displaced 12,000 people, many of whom built huts or pitched tents on the Metairie Ridge to escape the water. It also precipitated a yellow fever outbreak and starvation, as many people did not have fresh food and water for the duration. A Picayune reporter perched on the top of the St. Charles Hotel during the flood said that New Orleans “look[ed] like Venice”.
[10] Ganvié is a lake village in Benin, Africa on Lake Nokoué, near Cotonou. The village was created in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries by the Tofinu people who took to the lake to avoid Fon warriors and slave raiders. The Ganvie villagers are often referred to as "water men" and the area, the "Venice of Africa.”
[11] The ancien regime literally means “the old regime” in French and refers to the monarchical, political and social system of pre-1789 Revolutionary France. Society in France under the ancien régime was characterized by an absolute monarchy and defined by a rigid social hierarchy and a strict three-estate system: First Estate: the clergy (Catholic church leaders); Second Estate: the nobility (aristocrats and royals); and the Third Estate: commoners (peasants, merchants, and professionals).
[12] Grif (KV)/Griffe (Standard French) is a historical racial classification used predominantly in the Americas—especially in Louisiana and the Caribbean—that refers to someone of mixed African and European descent, typically an offspring of an African person and a mulatto. In Louisiana, however, the term was also heavily used to refer to someone of mixed African and Native American ancestry. These classifications did not follow exact blood quantum, but referred to how someone appeared. In archival documents, Mathurin Rivaros was labeled as “mulatrê” (mulatto) sometimes and as “griffe” on other occasions.
gratitude.
This project was funded by a Fellows Grant from The Crossroads Project, a collaborative research initiative directed by Judith Weisenfeld, Anthea Butler, and Lerone Martin and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University. Ongoing research for this project has also been supported by a Monroe Fellowship from Tulane University and a Community Solidarity Fellowship from the Guilbeau Center for Public History, University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Special thank you to Ms. Beryl F. Hunter at the New Orleans Notarial Archives for helping me not only to access documents but to imagine how our ancestors might have experienced Antebellum New Orleans spatially and somatically. Dr. Nathan Rabalais for initial French translations of archival documents. Queen Mother Sêmévo Dr. Dòwòti Désir for feedback on the final draft of this story.
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Citation: Booker, Sheriden M. “D’Zaklér é Dolo: (A Lineage of Lightning and Fire)." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. July 2026. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/booker
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