Papa Legba

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The drums have not yet found the spirit. The assembly stands in the peristil, the covered court of the temple, around the poto-mitan, the center-post down which the lwa will come; and the manbo lifts the ason — the beaded calabash rattle strung with snake vertebrae that is the badge of her office — and shakes it toward the door. Before Ogou, before Danbala, before Ezili, before any of the hundreds of spirits a Vodou house may serve can be called, the song rises to a bent old man leaning on a cane at the edge of the yard. It asks him to louvri bariyè — to open the barrier. He is Papa Legba, and the whole invisible world waits behind a gate that only he can unlatch.

He is figured as an elder walking with a limp, a broad-brimmed straw hat on his head and a clay pipe between his teeth, a ragged straw sack — the djakout — slung at his side; sometimes he drinks a little dark rum. The dog is his. His sign, traced on the ground in cornmeal or ash before the singing begins, is a cross — the crossing of two roads — with his walking cane set upright beside it. Nothing in a service happens until he consents. He gives, or he withholds, the permission to speak to the other lwa at all, and because he alone stands at the hinge between the human world and the world of the spirits, he is greeted before them all.

Line-drawing vèvè of Papa Legba: a cross of the crossroads with an upright walking cane. chris 論, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The road from Dahomey

Legba did not begin as an old man. His root is in West Africa, among the Fon and Ewe of the kingdom of Dahomey and the wider Yoruba world of the Bight of Benin — the coast of present-day Benin, Togo, and Nigeria — where he is the vodun Legba, and where the Yoruba know the same power as Èṣù or Ẹlẹgbara. In West African Vodun he is the youngest child of the creator twins Mawu-Lisa, and because he was given no single province of the world he was made the messenger and interpreter of the whole. He is the linguist of the gods, the only one who can render the speech of Fa, the oracle of fate; he keeps the gate; and he is a trickster — hot, ribald, quick to expose the gap between what a person intends and what a person does. Among the Fon his earthen shrine sits at the threshold of the compound and at the fork of the road, and no rite reaches its object until Legba at the gate has been fed first. The cousin traditions of the Orisha religion carry the same crossroads power across the Atlantic under other names — Elegua in Cuba, Exu in Brazil.

He crossed in the holds of the slave ships. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue — the western third of the island the Taíno had called Ayiti — captive Fon, Yoruba, and Kongo peoples, baptized by force under the 1685 Code Noir and forbidden their own gods, forged the creole religion whose fuller making belongs to the Haitians: Haitian Vodou, in which the African nanchon — “nations” — are served together beneath a remote creator and the outward forms of the Church. The lwa are the active powers a Vodou house serves; and among them, at the gate, first as always, stands Legba.

Something happened to him on the crossing. The African Legba is young and dangerous, all appetite and heat; the Haitian Papa Legba is old and gentle, a patient grandfather who leans on his stick and takes his time. His heat did not vanish — it was set aside into a distinct figure. In the Rada rite, the “cool” ancestral register descended chiefly from Dahomey, he is Atibon Legba, also given as Legba Atibon, the elder at the barrier who opens the way. But at the Petwo crossroads — the “hot,” Haitian-born rite whose fierce, fast spirits carry the anger of enslavement and revolt, and whose character owes most to the Kongo — the young combative crossroads-power stands apart as Mèt Kalfou, Maître Carrefour, the master of the intersection. Where Legba opens the gate, Kalfou commands what happens at the crossing: he “controls the crossroads and has the power to grant or deny access to all other lwa,” an enigmatic figure who understands chaos and misfortune and injustice, and who takes his rum laced with gunpowder. The two are not rivals so much as the two faces of a single office — the opener and the crossroads itself, the cool elder and the hot young man, served in two waters.

The first salute

Everything in Vodou turns on the fact that the world of the spirits is elsewhere and must be reached. It lies in Ginen — Guinée, the ancestral Africa beneath the waters, the moral home from which the lwa come and to which the dead return. Between here and there hangs a bariye, a barrier, and the crossroads, the kalfou, is the place where the two roads meet: the horizontal road of the living and the vertical road down which the spirits descend. Legba keeps that meeting-place. He is the pòtay, the gate; he holds the key; and because the invisible world does not open of itself, the first act of any sèvis is to salute him and ask him to draw back the bolt. The classic opening songs address him directly, asking Papa Legba to louvri bariyè pou mwen — open the barrier for me — so that the lwa may pass through and the service can begin. Deny him that first courtesy and the gate stays shut; no spirit answers, because none has been given leave to come.

He is trusted with this office because he is the great translator. Believed to speak every human language, he carries the prayers of the assembly up to the lwa and brings the lwa’s answers back down; he is the interpreter at the threshold, the one who makes the mortal and the divine intelligible to one another. To serve any other spirit, one must first pass a word through Legba. This is why he is old and why he is patient: the gatekeeper of a house cannot afford the hot temper of the young. His age is dignity, not weakness — the authority of the elder who has stood at the door longest and knows who may come in.

The ason, a beaded calabash rattle strung with beads and snake vertebrae, the emblem of the Vodou priesthood. DKDHoungan, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

He is a Rada lwa, and the offerings that please him are those due an old man of the countryside: strong black coffee, tobacco for the pipe, a little rum, roasted corn and yams and other roasted foods, candy, and — at the larger services — a rooster. His colors are usually given as red and white, and his service day is most often named as Monday, though some houses keep Wednesday, and others hold that Legba owns every day, since every rite whatever its purpose must open through him. These details are not fixed doctrine but house-variable: a lwa’s day, colors, vèvè, and preferred offerings differ from one lakou and one temple to the next, and differ again depending on which of the many Legbas — for the great houses distinguish several — is being called. What does not vary is the office. The cane, the limp, the straw hat, the pipe, the ragged sack, the dog, the cross of the crossroads: the figure is legible across the whole tradition, and so is his place at the head of every service.

The Church calendar the colony imposed gave Legba a set of saintly doubles who share his shape: Saint Peter, who holds the keys of heaven and stands at its gate; Saint Lazarus, the sore-covered beggar-elder on crutches; and Saint Anthony of Padua, on whose feast, the thirteenth of June, Legba is often kept. To serve the lwa beside the sen — sèvi lwa — is not a survival of something lost or a mask to fool a priest but a theology that learned to hold two languages at once; and Legba, the divine linguist, is a fitting spirit to sit at that crossroads too.

He does not stand alone in the pantheon he opens onto. Once the gate is drawn back come the others in their order — Danbala the white serpent whose arc is the rainbow, Ezili in her love and her grief and her scarred fury, Ogou the fire of iron and war, Baron Samedi the top-hatted lord of the cemetery who decides whether the dead may pass. Legba is the one who lets each of them through. His whole meaning is the hinge: not a personality to be dwelt on for its own sake, but the permission to begin, the first word that makes the rest of the service possible.

”Voodoo” and the refusal of it

There is another Legba, and he is a slander. In the Anglophone imagination the crossroads gatekeeper of a living religion was ground down, over the twentieth century, into a stock figure of horror — the sinister “voodoo” spirit of the pulp novel and the film, most recently the murderous Papa Legba of American television, stripped of his role as the patient opener of the way and dressed instead in menace. That “voodoo,” with its pins and its zombies, is a datable twentieth-century construct — its making, in the years of the United States occupation, belongs to the story of the Haitians — and it is not the name of anything Haitians serve: the tradition is Vodou, from the Fon vodun, “spirit,” and Legba is its doorkeeper, never its demon.

The same refusal is owed to a more recent lie. Vodou is woven into the founding of Haiti itself. A ceremony in the wooded north — Bwa Kayiman, Bois Caïman, remembered on the night of the fourteenth of August 1791 and led by the houngan Dutty Boukman and the manbo Cécile Fatiman, with a black pig offered in sacrifice — is held to be the spark of the insurrection that opened the revolution. That revolution, alone among the great slave revolts of history, succeeded: on the first of January 1804 the enslaved of Saint-Domingue declared the independent state of Haiti, the first Black republic. The exact details of the ceremony are part oral tradition and part later embellishment, and historians genuinely debate what happened and where; what is not in doubt is that an act of Vodou stands at the root of Haitian freedom. Since the 1990s some foreign evangelicals have recast that founding rite as a “pact with Satan,” a blood-covenant to which Haiti’s later suffering is owed. It is a false and cruel reading, rejected by most Haitians, and it is the “pact with Satan” and not the ceremony that deserves the name of superstition.

Legba’s own century of reception is a chapter of that longer contest, and the fuller record of it belongs to the story of the Haitians as a people. It is enough to mark here that the religion at whose gate he stands was attacked again and again — criminalized under the penal codes of the independent state, raided during the occupation, and, most severely, in the Catholic “anti-superstition” campaign, the campagne de rejeté of roughly 1939 to 1942, which peaked in 1941 and 1942 under President Élie Lescot. Parishioners were made to swear oaths renouncing the lwa; temples, drums, sacred objects, and the great sacred trees were burned with the backing of the state, until urban unrest and the protests of Haitian intellectuals — among them the ethnologist Jacques Roumain, founder of the Bureau of Ethnology — brought it down. Later the Duvalier dictatorship, from 1957 to 1986, cynically dressed itself in Vodou imagery and drew some of its networks into the Tonton Macoutes, an appropriation the religion suffered rather than authored; and after the earthquake of 2010, the old scapegoating returned for a season. Through all of it the gate was still opened. The sèvis still began, as it always begins, with the elder at the crossroads.

Today the refusal is winning. The Haitian state formally recognized Vodou as a religion in 2003, and a young, public revival has carried it out of the defensive crouch the long attack imposed. In the Rada lakou at Souvenance, at the Kongo lakou at Soukri, at the falls of Saut-d’Eau where the pilgrims bathe, the drums still call the spirits by name, and the marronage that first defended this faith — the story told under the Maroons — is remembered in the songs. Papa Legba asks nothing of history except that it let him do his work. He is the first spirit greeted and the door through which the rest arrive; and wherever the ason is raised and the song goes up to louvri bariyè, the old man at the gate leans on his cane, taps out his pipe, and draws back the bolt.

→ Related: Erzulie · Baron Samedi · Damballa · Ogou · Souvenance · Lakou Soukri · Bwa Kayiman · Saut D Eau · The Haitians · The Maroons · The Kongo · West African Vodun · Orisha Religion · Fon Cosmology Mawu Lisa · The Fon · Bakongo Cosmology Dikenga · Taino