The Black Madonna and the Revolution

Erzulie Dantor is served under the image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the dark-skinned Polish Virgin whose face bears two scars on the right cheek, the very scars the lwa is said to carry. The historical link is concrete: copies of that icon reached Haiti with Polish soldiers sent by Napoleon around 1802 to help crush the Haitian Revolution, some hundreds of whom deserted to the side of the formerly enslaved and fought for Haitian freedom, and the image was taken up and remade as the face of Dantor. She is remembered in connection with the ceremony at Bwa Kayiman traditionally said to have launched the great uprising of 1791 that overthrew slavery and founded the first Black republic, so that her fierceness is bound up with the fight for liberty itself. Her number is seven, and she is offered the things of a hard-working woman, unsweetened black coffee, pork, rum, and served with the respect due to a mother who fights. Vodou is a living religion, and its Petwo spirits, born of a real and terrible history, are an essential part of it; Erzulie Dantor is among the most beloved of them, the scarred, knife-bearing mother who defends the wronged and stands for the freedom her people won.