According to legend, the slave revolution in St. Domingue started with a voodoo ceremony at Bois Caiman, headed by Boukman, one of the military leaders of the rebellion. In most of the versions of this event, there is some sort of priestess present. As a matter of fact, one of the more authoritative sources for the event emphasizes the role of the priestess without mentioning the presence of Boukman at all, thus showing an event in which a woman officiates without sharing her power with a man. (Geggus 89) The historicity of the Bois Caiman ceremony is impossible to verify, since most of the sources about it are written by white men (not women) who were themselves not present at the event. Nevertheless, all of those sources claim to base themselves in testimonies and oral histories of those who were themselves participants in the event, and taken together, they can be seen as evidence that some sort of voodoo ceremony did in fact take place. (Geggus 82) The evidence is especially compelling when combined with the fact that Boukman and Jeannot, two major military leaders of the Revolution were probably voodoo preists (Geggus 6), a fact that is in keeping with the presence of Boukman at the Bois Camman ceremony.
According to a family oral tradition recorded by Etienne Charlier, Cecile Fatiman, the mulatresse wife of the mid-eighteenth century president Louis Pierrot, was a voodoo priestess who participated in the Bois Caiman ceremony. If this tradition is correct, it would place a face, a name, and a life story behind the mysterious woman who appears in various versions of the Bois Caiman story. (Geggus 82, 90) Another proposed identity is that of Charlotte, who was crowned queen of the "negroes" along with Jean-Francoise, who was crowned king, in a religious ceremony directly preceding the revolt. ("First Days of the Insurrection" 57) The tradition of crowning a king and queen is well documented in voodoo, as well as Afro-Brazilian traditions. It is very possible that this king and queen are the priest and priestess to which the sources refer.
In various versions of the event, the priestess is tall, a young virgin, or an old crone. These versions tell us more about the projected image of African women and their descendants than they do of the women themselves: For Dante Bellegarde, speaking as a representative of Haiti, it was important to represent the woman as tall, with the associations of strength and authority height embodies. For Dumesle, harkening back to classical culture with its cults of virginity, as well as Catholic culture in which virginity is the sacred embodiment of the pact between female religious authorities and the God who they serve, it was important to state the virginity of the priestess as a way of legitimizing the religious ceremony. For those who present the priestess as an old crone, they are harkening back to a Western tradition of presenting old women gifted with knowledge of healing herbs as witches, compounded by the racist tradition of presenting African women as witches. The body of the African woman is essential to all of these descriptions, as she literally becomes the embodiment of the narrator’s political agenda. This is indicative of Western culture’s habit of using African women as the projection of the Western imagination’s fears and longings. These stereotypes are indicators of the lives of women in the African diaspora, for they tell us of the images of themselves that African-descended women saw projected at them, images that they had to combat in their daily struggle for self-worth, as well as respect from others.
The three projected images also conform to three different aspects of the iwa Ezili, who is often associated with the Haitian Revolution, most notably in her Danto and je-wouge forms. There is Ezili as the virgin Mary, Ezili as a beautiful, seductive mulatresse, and Ezili the old woman, who is very maternal and is often considered the protector of prostitutes. (Metraux 110, 111) These aspects of Ezili encompass different aspects of womanhood slave women were deprived of, aspects they could possess when possessed by Ezili. Virginity, the right to not have sex, was the opposite of the condition of many slave women forced to have sex. The seductive mulatresse denotes wealth and the opportunity to beautify oneself and choose one's lovers, an opportunity denied to the majority of slave women, especially those of darker skin, considered uglier than their lighter-skinned counterparts by the white male establishment. These dark-skinned women could claim the beauty of the mulatresse as their own when possessed by Ezili, which also gave them the opportunity to don her accoutrements, luxurious beauty-aids unavailable to the average field slave. Then there is the maternity of the old Ezili: Maternity was a right many slave-women were deprived of, both through conditions that fostered infertility and high infant mortality, and through the constant threat of one's children being sold away. if there was a Bois Caiman ceremony, it is very possible Ezili was invoked that night, for she is married both to Ogu, the warrior-iwa associated with the Haitian Revolution and General Dessalines, and to Damballah, a major Dahomean deity. Damballah has another wife in addition to Ezili, who also may have been invoked alongside him. (Metraux 110, 111, 112)
Whether or not the Bois Caiman meeting did in fact take place, voodoo ceremonies and meals provided a chance for slaves to gather beyond the prying eyes of whites, opportunities that could be used to plan rebellions. They also provided slaves with a sense of empowerment and divine protection that could inspire people to great feats on the battlefield. Similarly, whether or not a priestess was in fact present at the Bois Caiman ceremony, priestesses certainly were active in voodoo ceremonies in general. Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau De Saint-Mery, in his “Description …of the French Part of the Island of Saint-Domingue”, describes a king and queen officiating over a voodoo ceremony involving snake-worship, spirit-possession, and dance. While Saint-Mery was biased, and the extent to which he himself witnessed such ceremonies is doubtful, his descriptions are in keeping with those of ceremonies in Brazil which were also presided over by a king and queen. Furthermore, the Ewe, Fon, and Yoruba worshipped snakes as deities, and spirit-possession and dance are two major factors of voodoo until today. (Sweet 130) Additionally, Damballah, a major Dahomean snake-god is still one of the major gods of voodoo. (Metraux 8) All of this lends credence to Saint-Mery’s tale. Reports of priestesses having high positions of authority within Afro-Caribbean religions and performing dances and spirit-possession at religious ceremonies can be seen from both the French and British Caribbean (Bush 74). According to some, voodoo priestesses played used their role to give “superhuman courage” to the warriors of the revolution. (Bush 74). Saint-Mery describes the king and queen of voodoo as also taking the titles of “master and mistress” and “father and mother”. Given the slave system, such titles make perfect sense: King and queen are titles that invest the priest and priestess with authority and can draw on traditions of kingship harkening back to Africa, while at the same time inverting the power dynamics of slave society, in which rich whites were kings and queens of their slave-staffed households and plantations. Master and mistress are a direct inversion of the power dynamics, while father and mother are indicative of the fictive kin networks slaves set up, with the voodoo group functioning as a pseudo-family. (Mcarthy Brown 5) The functioning of voodoo as a pseudo-family continues until today, where voodoo centers headed by “fathers” and “mothers” help urban Haitians deal with their separation from their rural families. (Mcarthy Brown 7) In voodoo, possession of females by male was and vice versa is common. Thus, possession by voodoo was also a way for women to transcend their gender.
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