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Voodoo Village would have been the perfect urban legend, if it weren't for the fact that it was real. I drove through there numerous times. You'd hear about it in elementary and high school in Memphis back in the fifties and sixties, always in terms and tones that bespoke rumor and myth. There was a certain all-black neighborhood, people said, where Voodoo was practiced. Tales were told of white people who went there and were warned to stay away. Some even claimed to have been assaulted. Strange structures were said to be seen in the front yards there. We had come to think of it as a sort of legend, until one day we found it. "Duh Gang", a loose collection of some of the few bohemian intellectuals in Whitehaven those days, was out cruising one night and decided to look for it. We had heard it was on a dead-end street off Shelby Drive. We drove around for what must have been an hour or so, up and down Shelby Drive. Back then, this was just outside the suburban areas, just barely rural. Just as we were about to give up and call it a night, we spied Darwin Christian Church atop a low hill by the side of the road. It was a small white building of wood, about the size of a two-bedroom shack. This was a time in the Bible Belt just after the Tennessee legislature had repealed the "Monkey Law". The name "Darwin" was still a dirty word among perhaps a majority of Memphis residents, Duh Gang excluded. In fact, belief in evolution of humans from apelike ancestors was the first oddball viewpoint that had made us notorious around Whitehaven. It was but a short skip and a jump from there to views sympathetic to agnosticism, pacifism, free sex, and (Heaven forbid!) the notion that it might not be so bad to have black people and white people attending the same schools together. So a church named "Darwin" drew our instant attention. Of course, it had to have been named after someone other than Charles Darwin, right? But still, it was worth checking out. We turned down the street. We came upon a scene from out of a Fellini film. Almost every house on the street was decorated with the most amazing monuments, all painted in both bright and pastel colors. The first one we saw was more or less cube-shaped, about seven feet in height. It was painted bright orange, lined in deep blue. The side facing the street was studded with what appeared to be shiney silver nails driven halfway into the wood. Beyond that, in the other yards were small domes, spheres, crosses, stars, and other structures. One figure appeared to be the Virgin Mary. We drove through slowly, gawking. We saw no one outside, and there was no sign that anyone objected to our prescence. After that, we took to driving through there once in awhile, night or day, just to have another look. We brought friends there who had doubted its existence. It was always interesting, and the monuments had a surreal beauty that was pleasant to the eye. The only drawback was that sometimes the air was rife with an odor like rotten eggs, which we took to be sulphur burning. No one ever molested us or asked us to leave. There was one time, though, when someone threw a brick through my windshield. I had just broken up with a girlfriend and I drove through there that night in a blue funk, hoping the sight would cheer me up. As I was driving out, someone who appeared to be a teenage boy threw a brick right into the windshield of my '62 Mercury Comet. I guess he wasn't crazy 'bout a Mercury. I sped home at ninety-per. Years later I used to make the Avon run to Voodoo Village. Minuteman Delivery Service, a company owned and operated by hippies, delivered Avon inventory to their representatives. One lived in Voodoo Village and we used to bring her products to her. She seemed like a rather ordinary sweet little old lady. So that's Voodoo Village. To this day, I don't know what the monuments were all about, nor whether or not they were associated with Darwin Christian Church. I haven't been there in decades and I suppose it's all suburbia now.
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