by Casey Cep
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After the acquittal, Tom Radney got back to work on the civil cases. The Reverend had agreed to pay him half of any judgment he recovered, so the lawyer went after every one of the companies that had insured the life of Mary Lou Maxwell. He secured payment on policy after policy, partly because of his talents as a lawyer but also because the facts, at least as far as the courts were concerned, were on his side. Lacking a conviction, the insurance companies got nowhere with insinuations that Maxwell had killed his wife, and their argument that murder was not a form of accidental death found even less favor with juries.
By October 1971, Radney was left with only three unpaid policies, all held by Independent Life and Accident, which was still refusing to pay, because the Reverend had purchased the policies only a few days before his wife had been murdered. Radney wanted to take Independent to court, too, but his customary strategy had hit a snag. Facing an unusual limiting factor in the life of a lawyer, he wrote to a friend and fellow attorney to ask for help. That friend practiced in the state capital, and Radney wondered whether he might not sue the insurance company for him in Montgomery County, because, Radney confided, “I have just about worn out the Tallapoosa County juries with the Reverend Mr. Maxwell.”
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Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
A man accused of killing his wife is not likely to find another. The lofty reputation Willie Maxwell enjoyed around Lake Martin before Mary Lou’s death collapsed after he was charged with her murder, and the well-spoken, uncommonly elegant man of God came to seem suspect and sordid. He was dismissed from all four of the churches where he had been pastoring, and when he was invited to preach again all the way over in Pike County at Holly Springs Baptist, people closer to home assumed that the parishioners there hadn’t heard about what happened. It was just as possible, though, that a man who could persuade a jury of his innocence could also persuade a parish and that, absent a conviction, the congregation preferred to believe that a man of the cloth could not be a murderer. What was certain, though, was that the Reverend had persuaded at least one person of his innocence. In November of 1971, barely fifteen months after Mary Lou’s body was found and only four months after he was acquitted of her murder, the Reverend Maxwell took another wife: his neighbor, and the state’s would-be star witness, Dorcas Anderson.
Born Dorcas Duncan in Tallapoosa County in 1944, the second Mrs. Maxwell had known her new husband, or known of him, for quite a while. By the time she was a teenager, the Reverend’s preaching was already renowned around Lake Martin, so she’d heard of him long before she and her first husband moved in next door to the Maxwells in Nixburg. Like the Reverend, Abram Anderson had been born and raised in Coosa County, served in the army, and then returned home to Alabama to take a job in a textile mill. The money he earned there was meant to support his wife and two young children, but his life, as well as theirs, was tragically derailed when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Still in her early twenties, with two small boys at home, Dorcas became Abram’s full-time caregiver.
That experience brought its own kind of grief, and after Mary Lou Maxwell was murdered, Dorcas and the Reverend began talking more and more. Although she was eighteen years his junior, they had a lot in common. She had two young sons; he had a little daughter, albeit not by Mary Lou. He had lost his wife, while she was watching ALS ravage her husband’s body; the disease had already forced him into a wheelchair, and it would keep wasting his muscles until he died. The doctors thought Abram would live at least a few more years, but he went into the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee on the last day of February 1971, not long after the grand jury convened to hear the charges against the Reverend, and died there three months later, at the age of thirty-five. Abram’s death certificate listed the cause as pneumonia, but no autopsy was performed, and when the Reverend married Dorcas later that same year, people began to talk.
Some of it was the age difference (Dorcas was twenty-seven and the Reverend was forty-six), and some of it was the alacrity with which both widower and widow got over their grief (Maxwell had barely been widowed a year, Dorcas only a few months). Mostly, though, it was the convenient timing of Abram’s death that made people suspicious. Some claimed that Maxwell had poisoned the man with antifreeze or embalming fluid, but most people had a different theory. It was after the death of Abram Anderson that the voodoo rumors started to spread.
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The word “voodoo,” like the practice, got to the South the long way, over land from port cities like Mobile and New Orleans and before that over sea from Togo and Benin, where, in the Fon language of the kingdom of Dahomey, it means “spirit” or “deity.” It traveled to Europe chiefly in the newspaper dispatches and travelogues of early explorers—mangled variously as “veaudeau,” “vaudoux,” “vudu,” “voudoo,” “voudon,” and “vodoun”—but it came to America via its practitioners: men and women from the African continent brought to the United States in chains, sometimes after a generation or two of slavery in the Caribbean. No one knows when exactly it arrived, because its early history in America was effectively erased by a dominant culture that forbade enslaved people from practicing their indigenous religions, subjected them to forced conversions, and punished them for any spiritual activity deemed aberrant.
As early as 1782, voodoo was so feared that Louisiana’s governor, Bernardo de Gálvez, banned the purchase of slaves from Martinique, on the grounds that they “are too much given to voodooism and make the lives of the citizens unsafe.” By then, voodoo was already well on its way to becoming a pejorative, and its beliefs and practices—also known as, although somewhat distinct from, hoodoo, obeah, conjure, folk doctoring, and root working—were being steadily delegitimized and criminalized. By the nineteenth century, voodoo had become a cultural bogeyman, shorthand for everything from orgies to human sacrifice; by the twentieth, it had become a cinematic grotesque, reduced to torture dolls and zombies. Many of its rites remained illegal long after emancipation, and the hostility of law enforcement officers to its believers and practices persists even today.
Most early anthropologists and historians shared the biases of the culture at large, leaving them uninterested in or even antagonistic to African spirituality in general and voodoo in particular. One of the first scholars to take it seriously was a graduate student at Columbia who had been born and raised in the South and longed to return there to document its folklore: the writer Zora Neale Hurston, best known for the novels she would publish years later, including Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the winter of 1927, Hurston boarded a train in New York City and headed for Mobile, where she began a tour of black towns and villages throughout the South.
Driving a Nash that she called Sassy Susie and carrying a chrome-plated pistol in her suitcase, Hurston followed what she called “the map of Dixie on my tongue” and recorded in the vernacular of her sources their best stories, recipes, sayings, songs, and customs. Hurston was frank about the obstacles to studying her chosen subject. “Nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo,” she wrote, “because the worship is bound in secrecy. It is not the accepted theology of the Nation and so believers conceal their faith. Brother from sister, husband from wife. Nobody can say where it begins or ends. Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”
One sign of the silences surrounding voodoo was the extremes to which even Hurston had to go before her subjects were willing to talk to her. Before he agreed to share any of his secrets with her, one practitioner required her to undergo a series of tests, including bringing a gift of three snake skins, draining the blood of one of her fingers into a cup with the blood of five other novitiates, and helping to slaughter a black sheep. Father George Simms, whose clients knew him as the Frizzly Rooster, sold Hurston his powders and potions but would tell her h
ow to use them only after she underwent a candlelit initiation. As Hurston quickly learned, outsiders had viewed voodoo with fear and suspicion for so long that insiders now returned the favor.
The resulting secrecy deterred most scholars, but a few years after Zora Neale Hurston headed south, a white Episcopal priest named Harry Middleton Hyatt took a similar tour, gathering material for what would become his five-volume Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork. Hyatt spent years driving around Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia recording more than a thousand subjects on Edison and Telediphone cylinder cutters. When transcribed, those interviews ran to five thousand pages and covered everything from the spiritual talents of children born with cauls to the poisonous possibilities of graveyard dirt.
Between them, Hyatt and Hurston produced some of the earliest records of voodoo in America and documented three of the least appreciated aspects of the belief system. First, voodoo in this country was always syncretic, incorporating saints and feast days and enlisting pastors and priests of countless Christian denominations; a Baptist minister might overlay his Christian theology with voodoo practices, preaching the gospel in public worship but conjuring in private settings for a parishioner who lost his job or wanted to find a wife. Second, voodoo was in part a flourishing alternative medical system that served much of the South, including through drugstore clerks and pharmacists who sold essential ingredients like dragon’s blood, goofer dust, eagle eyes, and John de Conqueror root, which were marketed as cures for everything from indigestion to infertility. The healing aspects of voodoo were essential for a population routinely unable to access health care because of their race, socioeconomic standing, or distance from doctors and hospitals; the incorporation of elements of other religions was, as with many syncretic faiths, a product of forced migration, social coercion, and cultural appropriation. Finally, voodoo had tremendous interracial appeal. Almost from the time that voodoo arrived with enslaved Africans, it had white clients, practitioners, and suppliers.
The role of voodoo in Alabama, in particular, was recorded by one of the state’s most notorious chroniclers, Carl Carmer, a New Yorker who came to Tuscaloosa to teach at the University of Alabama but ended up writing a kind of Deep South tell-all-and-invent-some. Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama offered an unconventional but romantic explanation for why Alabamians were drawn to voodoo and susceptible to other superstitions. According to him, the entire state had fallen under the spell of sorcery during an unusually heavy meteor shower that dazzled the southeastern United States in 1833, and some counties remained more prone to it than others—in particular an area he called “Conjure Country.” “I got troubles,” Carmer told a black woman who lived there, Ida Carter, “and the white folks up around Birmingham say you can help me.” She did, apparently: for a dollar and a quarter, Carter told him how to ward off the woman who was causing him problems; for another dollar and a half, she taught him how to cure his back pain.
Among Carmer’s more astute observations was that even those who claimed not to believe in voodoo at all were not immune to being scared of it or above resorting to it. Think of Mark Twain and the dozens of cures, tricks, and old wives’ tales earnestly invoked by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like their literary equivalents, southerners were steeped in a culture that gave them something to do when the world was alarming or incomprehensible. In that, of course, they were not alone; like banshees in Ireland or fairy glens in Scotland or the ghosts and goblins of the Tohoku region of Japan, the influence of voodoo culture in the South pervaded its landscapes and enchanted its people, regardless of race, from cradle to grave.
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Whether or not the Reverend Willie Maxwell was actually a voodoo priest, he lived in a community willing to believe that he was. Plenty of good Christians in Coosa County shook out their pillows at night and scrubbed their steps in the morning to fend off spirits and spells, warned their children that the hoodoo man would get them if they stayed out too late, and told their spouses that they would lay a trick on them if they did not stop drinking or lying or lying about drinking. “Coincidence” just wasn’t a word that rolled off tongues in Alabama as easily as “conjuring,” so when Willie Maxwell was acquitted of murdering his first wife and remarried the young widow of his conveniently deceased neighbor, a lot of people were convinced that he had used voodoo to fix the jury, put death on his neighbor’s trail, and charm a younger woman. Maybe Maxwell had burned a court-case candle or used law-stay-away oil; perhaps he had nailed a photograph of Abram Anderson to the north-facing side of a tree and added another nail every morning for nine mornings until the man weakened and died; as for Dorcas Anderson, well, he might have sprinkled wishing oil on a sample of her handwriting, worn it for nine days by his heart, and then buried it under his front steps.
However unlikely such theories might seem, they were more comforting than the alternative. For many of the Reverend’s neighbors, it was better to believe that, in the face of conjuring, there was nothing that law enforcement and the judicial system could do than to believe that, in the face of terrible crimes, they had not done enough. Supernatural explanations flourish where law and order fails, which is why, as time passed and more people died, the stories about the Reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.
The most widespread one began, like a fairy tale, with seven sisters and seven brothers. Willie Maxwell, people said, was the seventh son of a seventh son, a numerological curiosity that meant that he had been born with power over life and death. To augment this natural gift, he supposedly went down to New Orleans to study voodoo with the Seven Sisters, a fearsome septet well known throughout the South. “I went to New Orleans, Louisiana,” one old blues song began, “just on account of something I heard. The Seven Sisters told me everything I wanted to know, and they wouldn’t let me speak a word.” After the sisters help the singer, someone recognizes his new powers and tells him, “Go, Devil, and destroy the world.”
Although their history and even their existence are disputed, stories about the Sisters have circulated since the 1920s. They were said to be clairvoyant, ageless, and available to sell their blessings, curses, candles, and potions to anyone who came calling at their seven identical dwellings on Coliseum Street in the Garden District. Out-of-state license plates were always pulling up there, and people came and went at all hours of the day and night. Some of the visitors were just customers, but others were disciples—including, supposedly, one lean, elegant, well-dressed man from Coosa County.
Never mind that the Reverend Willie Maxwell actually had just four brothers, plus four numerologically inconvenient sisters: the rumors about him grew taller than loblolly pines. He hung white chickens upside down from the pecan trees outside his house to keep away unwanted spirits, and painted blood on his doorsteps to keep away the authorities. He carried envelopes filled with deadly powders. He had a whole room at home just for voodoo, lined with jars labeled “Love,” “Hate,” “Friendship,” and “Death.” If he got sick, he drank someone else’s blood to feel better. Drive by his front door, and the headlights of your car would go dark. Say a cross word against him, and he would lay a trick on you. Look him in the eye, and he would curse you forever. He could move faster than was humanly possible, traveling the 150 miles from Birmingham to Atlanta in twenty minutes. When he needed to vanish quicker than that, he could turn into a black cat.
Like many rumors, these might have contained a grain of truth. Reporters whom Willie Maxwell later invited inside his house found no evidence of voodoo there, but then, given the lengths to which Zora Neale Hurston had to go to see voodoo in action, they likely wouldn’t have found any whether he was a practitioner or not. As for the Seven Sisters, it is perfectly possible that Maxwell met them, in a manner of speaking, but extremely unlikely that he did so in Louisiana. Like Marie Lav
eau—the most famous voodooiene in America, who was said to have worked her dark magic near the Bayou St. John for so long that the Marquis de Lafayette kissed her when he came through New Orleans after the American Revolution and soldiers returning from World War I passed her in the streets—the Seven Sisters obeyed no chronological or geographic boundaries. People all over the South claimed to be one of them or to have been trained by all of them, and many individual women went by the name “Seven Sisters.” One of these was the conjurer Carl Carmer interviewed, otherwise known as Ida Carter, who lived not far from the Reverend Maxwell near the Georgia line. If Maxwell studied voodoo with anyone, it probably was not with the septet and it probably was not all the way down in New Orleans.
Up in Nixburg, though, people were less inclined to fret about where the Reverend Maxwell had learned his magic than about how he used it. Virtually everyone was convinced that he had killed his wife, and most people thought he’d had a hand in the death of his neighbor, too—before, during, or after successfully wooing Abram Anderson’s wife, a woman half the Reverend’s age. The only reason she would have lied for him in court, they thought, was that she had quite literally succumbed to his charms. Because the authorities could not get a homicide conviction, the toxicologists could not detect any poisons, and no one was in a position to say why Dorcas fell in love, it was easy for people around Lake Martin to believe that the Reverend Maxwell had mastered the three chief domains of voodoo: justice, death, and love.
As another year of flowers faded on the grave of Mary Lou Maxwell and the grass began to cover the fresher one of Abram Anderson, the people of Coosa County kept wondering and worrying—not just about what Willie Maxwell had done, but about whether he was done doing it. Unlike those around him, though, the Reverend’s mind was not on otherworldly matters but on worldly ones. With both of their spouses dead, the widower Maxwell and the widow Anderson said their vows on November 21, 1971. The day after that, the Reverend’s insurance man came by.
