Chapter 28: What is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to you?
Originally written June 28, 2021
This is another question for which there are just way too many answers. Sometimes I feel like I’m living a Sister Rosetta Tharpe song: “Strange Things Happening Every Day.”
But one strange — and spooky — thing that happened to me back in the summer of 1975 sticks out. It was on my second great hitchhiking adventure, the same trip I mentioned in the first chapter of this thing.
My first hitchhiking odyssey was two years earlier. As I wrote a decade later in a song:
“I was 19 and getting restless the whole world was in a lull,
I was lonely lost and horny, college life was getting dull,
I put two shirts into a backpack and a Bible for good measure
and I headed down the road to seek the Vagabond Treasure ...”
I hitched all over the west and Midwest, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, northern California …
My song “Vagabond Treasure,” from which I quoted above, also had a verse that said:
“Every highway has a demon, and buddy I met some
But there are angels who will answer when you’re praying with your thumb …”
That certainly was the case with my 1975 trip.
By 1975 I was 21 and my plan was far less grandiose than my grand Kerouac plans of ’73. I was going down to Birmingham, Alabama (by way of Arkansas and Kansas City) to help my friend Julie move her stuff back to Albuquerque, and decided to stop in New Orleans for a few days.
This was my first trip to New Orleans. (A few days before was the first time I ever went to Austin, Texas.)
Now let’s get folkloric:
There's an old New Orleans superstition about going to the crypt of the famous Voodoo Queen Marie LaVeau and making a red X on the crypt with a brick. For good luck. So on my last day in town I decided to do that, just to get a little good hoodoo going for the last stretch of my trip.
Not familiar with Ms. Laveau? Here’s a little song about her by The Holy Modal Rounders:
Marie has been dead for nearly 150 years, but she seems to be everywhere in the French Quarter. Right on Bourbon Street there’s a pretty cool little Voodoo-themed curio store called Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo. Sure it’s a little tourist trap, and I doubt if the Voodoo Queen ever actually set foot in there.
But it’s been around at least since 1975 and I always drop in everytime I’m in town.
So on the last morning I was in town back in 1975, I found the cemetery where Marie is interned (St. Louis Cemetery #1) and went looking for her crypt.
There are rows and rows of big marble crypts that all look alike, so I just wandered around for several minutes trying to read the inscriptions on each one.
Very frustrating. I was almost tempted to give up.
Then I saw the black cat.
The dang thing literally crossed my path so I decided to follow it.
Was he an emissary of Marie? A spirit animal? A demon in disguise?
Whatever, I followed the cat who turned a sharp corner. As I turned I almost bumped into this very tall, thin Black man in some weird, red Sgt. Pepper-like uniform.
“May I help you, sir?” he said in some kind of accent that sounded Caribbean. Right out of central casting.
I told him I was looking for the grave of Marie LaVeau.
“Right this way,” he said and led me through the graveyard maze. I had to wonder: Was this man might be an incarnation of Baron Samedi, Voodoo loa of the dead.
Whoever he was, he showed me the way to the white marble crypt covered with red Xs. On the ground, conveniently, were lots of pieces of red bricks.
My mysterious guide disappeared before I made my X and asked Marie for her blessing for my travels.
Despite some bumps in the road, I’ve traveled with that blessing ever since.
I tried to go back to St. Louis Cemetery #1 when I was in New Orleans nearly 40 years later. But it was on a Sunday and it was closed and I was leaving town the next day.
In 2019 I went back on a weekday during regular business hours. But this time the cemetery was only allowing guided tours, for which there was an admission fee. I balked when I saw the tour guide who was neither the tall black man the Sgt. Peppers suit nor a black cat.
So I’ve never returned to Marie’s resting place, but I’m still traveling.
(Below: A sign at St. Louis Cemetery #1 in 2013)
So let’s end with perhaps my favorite Marie song, despite the fact there’s little, if any actual historical accuracy here. Shel Silverstein wrote it and Bobby Bare sings it:
Strangest thing ever? The answer is always New Orleans, for those of us lucky or cursed enough to have been there.