What Was Buried, Not Broken

On the 9th of June, 1987, the city council of Hialeah, Florida, held an emergency public session. The minutes record the reason plainly. A congregation had announced it was opening a church, and the city moved to stop it. Over a series of meetings that year the council passed four ordinances. On paper the ordinances were about public health, animal cruelty, and the proper disposal of carcasses. In practice they were drafted so precisely that only one kind of gathering could violate them: a Santería service.

The council did not hide what it was doing. Residents stood up to denounce the religion by name. The chaplain of the Hialeah police department told the council that Santería was a sin, that it was “foolishness,” that it was “an abomination to the Lord,” that it was the worship of “demons,” and he closed by exhorting them not to permit the church to exist. The council president asked what the city could do to prevent it from opening. The city’s own resolution recorded residents’ “concern” that certain religions “may propose to engage in practices which are inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety.” Then the council voted, and the ordinances became law.

The congregation sued. The case ran all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in 1993 the Court ruled. Not narrowly. Not 5 to 4. The decision was unanimous (nine justices, no dissent) that the object of the ordinances was the suppression of a single religion, and that this is the one thing the First Amendment does not permit a government to do. The city of Hialeah lost completely.

Read the case cold and it looks like an aberration. A small council overreached, the Court corrected it, the system worked. But the case only looks like an aberration if you don’t know what came before it. Hialeah was not the beginning of the story. It was the most recent entry in a ledger three centuries deep.

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I went through every door they put in front of me. Baptist family. Catholic school K-12. Converted Catholic. Baptized Baptist. Got saved in my mid-twenties. I was always searching. And the whole time I was searching, there was something pulling at me that none of those doors led to. Not because I wasn’t looking. Because nobody told me it was there.

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What nobody told me has a paper trail, and the paper trail starts with the law.

In 1685 the French crown issued the Code Noir, the body of law governing enslaved people across its colonies. Article 2 required that the enslaved be baptized Catholic. Article 3 forbade the public exercise of any religion but Catholicism and declared every gathering held for that purpose an unlawful and seditious assembly. Practice was a crime; replacement was a mandate.

Now read Article 3 again and notice what is not in it. It never names African religion. Not once. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary the crown was aiming at Protestants in the very year it revoked the Edict of Nantes. The traditions people had carried across the ocean, the names of the spirits, the rhythms, the rites for the dead, were not singled out and were not argued with. They were swept up in a net cast for somebody else. The first thing French law did to African religion in the Americas was outlaw it without conceding that it existed.

The British colonies wrote their own version. In 1760, after Tacky’s Revolt, Jamaica folded a clause into an omnibus act on slave control, and that clause is where Obeah enters English law. Its preamble is the sentence everyone quotes: it speaks of Obeah men and women “pretending to have Communication with the Devil and other evil Spirits, whereby the weak and superstitious are deluded.”

Read it slowly, because it does not say what it appears to say. The law does not accuse these men and women of consorting with the Devil. It accuses them of faking it. The Devil is the con and the believer is the mark. This is a colonial state refusing the tradition twice in a single sentence: first denying that the power is real, then criminalizing the claim to it. Not heresy. Fraud.

And the clause that carries the punishment does not argue at all. It lists objects. Blood, feathers, parrots’ beaks, dogs’ teeth, alligators’ teeth, broken bottles, grave dirt, rum, egg-shells. Possession, proved before two magistrates and three freeholders, was enough. The sentence was “Death or Transportation.” Household things, a summary tribunal, the gallows, and no hearing anywhere on what a single one of those objects meant to the person holding it.

This is where the language did its work. Long before a modern ordinance was ever drafted, the naming had already been settled (witchcraft, sorcery, superstition, devil-work) and the naming decided in advance which traditions a person was allowed to study and which a person was only allowed to fear. Call a practice a faith and you owe it a hearing. Call it the Devil and you owe it nothing but a turned back. The words came first. The bans came after. By the time anyone thought to ask what these traditions actually were, the answer had been criminalized for generations.

The independent states inherited the habit. Haiti is the one nation born from a successful revolt of the enslaved, a revolt whose own organizers met under the cover of African religious ceremony. Its penal codes of 1835 and 1864 already banned le vaudoux. That is thirty-one years after independence. A century later the state was still at it: a decree-law of the 5th of September, 1935, against “les pratiques superstitieuses,” which it defined as the ceremonies, rites, dances and meetings where offerings were made to so-called divinities. The colonizer wrote the first law. The freed nation kept writing it, and kept writing it, for a hundred years. That is how deep the reflex ran.

Set the four documents beside one another and the method shows itself. Not one of them holds a hearing. Not one asks a practitioner what the practice is for. Argument would concede there was something worth arguing with. Each one simply assigns a category and moves on. What a believer calls worship, the paper files as fraud in Kingston, as superstition in Port-au-Prince, as a carcass-disposal violation in Hialeah. Once the practice is logged as a crime, nobody is owed an answer for it. Four jurisdictions, three centuries, one technique: the wording changes with the era, the function does not. You do not have to refute what you are permitted to simply outlaw.

A caution before going further. It is easy, from the outside, to fold all of this into one word and call it African religion, and the folding is its own kind of erasure. Vodun in West Africa, Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Hoodoo and Conjure, Santería or Lukumí in the Spanish Caribbean, Obeah in the British islands, Candomblé in Brazil. These are related but distinct. Different homelands, different languages, different spirits, different rites. They share a root and a history of suppression; they are not interchangeable, and treating them as one undifferentiated mass repeats the original colonial move of refusing to look closely. The honest thing is to name them separately, even when their persecutors did not.

Because they did persist, and how they persisted is the part the warnings never mention. Forbidden to honor the spirits openly, practitioners set the spirits behind the faces the law required. An orisha was prayed to under the name of a Catholic saint, so that what looked from the doorway like devotion to the Church was, inside the house, something older and unbroken. In the American South, the same knowledge moved as folk medicine and home remedy, a grandmother’s cure that drew no attention because it asked for none. Ceremonies went underground and stayed there, lineages handed down in private across generations who were never permitted to practice in the light. This was not the romance of resilience. It was concealment, chosen deliberately, because open practice was a punishable act. The burial was forced. The continuation was a decision, made over and over, by people who could have let it die and did not.

So the Hialeah ordinances of 1987 were not an aberration. They were the same instrument, reached for again: newer paper, identical function. The Code Noir mandated the church and outlawed the rest. Hialeah simply tried to do it through zoning. The difference, three centuries on, was that this time there was a court willing to read the minutes and say out loud what the council had done. The ledger finally had an entry where the suppression lost.

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All those years of Catholic school. Theology. Scripture. Saints. Sacraments. If you asked me what I learned about Vodou, Hoodoo, Santería (the traditions my own ancestors carried), I can tell you exactly what I was taught. Bad. Witchcraft. Devil worship. That was it. Not a chapter. Not a unit. Three words and a turned back. The only place I ever saw these practices was on TV. In movies. Which means everything I knew about them was what somebody else decided to show me. A horror movie. A plot device. Never a practitioner. Never a historian. Never my own family saying: this was ours.

I only started looking because I was building a fictional character. Alaric needed a spiritual history connected to his actual roots. So I went looking for something real. And I found out that the thing I had always been curious about (always called “other,” always called blasphemous by the same institutions that educated me) had been criminalized and suppressed for 300 years by the same governments that ran the slave trade. The Code Noir. The colonial church. The Hialeah city council in 1987 passing four ordinances against one congregation and losing 9 to 0 at the Supreme Court. The receipts exist. I just wasn’t supposed to find them.

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I’m not here to tell you what to believe. I’m not a practitioner. I’m a man who went through every door organized religion offered and came out the other side still searching. And what I found when I finally went looking wasn’t the devil worship I was warned about. It was a tradition that survived everything they threw at it. That organized a revolution. That encoded itself in Catholic saint names just to stay alive. That kept lineages intact across generations of people who weren’t allowed to practice it openly.

If you’re not ready to accept another practice, don’t. But don’t dismiss it either. Give it the same respect you want given to yours. Do your research. Find your connections.

This may not be the answer to your questions. But it can lead you to asking the right ones.

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CORRECTIONS, 14 July 2026

This casefile was published on 29 May 2026. On 14 July 2026 it was checked line by line against the four primary documents. Five things were wrong, and they are corrected above. The record of what was wrong stays here, because an archive that quietly edits itself is doing the thing this casefile was written to oppose.

The Hialeah ordinances were enacted in 1987, not 1993. The emergency council session was held on 9 June 1987. 1993 is the year the Supreme Court decided the case. An earlier version of this piece collapsed a six-year gap into a single year.

Catholic baptism is mandated by Article 2 of the Code Noir, not Article 3. Article 3 is the ban on the public exercise of other religions. An earlier version attributed both to Article 3.

The Jamaican statute of 1760 was misread in this casefile’s favour, which is the worst way to be wrong. The phrase “communication with the Devil” is genuinely in the law, but the law says practitioners were pretending to it, and that believers were deluded. The colonial state did not file Obeah under the Devil. It filed it under fraud. The phrase also sits in the statute’s recital, not in its operative clause, so an earlier version’s claim that this was “the operative wording of a criminal law” was false.

An earlier version stated that a council member read aloud from scripture at the Hialeah hearing. That is not in the record. It has been replaced with what the record actually contains: the testimony of the Hialeah police chaplain, which is worse than the invention.

Haiti’s criminalization of le vaudoux begins in the penal codes of 1835 and 1864, not with the decree-law of 1935. An earlier version dated the reflex a century too late and understated its own argument.

The four primary documents are cited in the docket above and are retrievable in full.