A fetisheer there in Togo whose recipe calls for a clutch of partridge feathers shouldn’t ever have to hunt partridges to get it. For small change, he can just purchase it or some swallow heads, porcupine quills, monkey paws, crocodile jaws, gorilla teeth, buffalo horns, elephant tusks, or even rabbits feet--the rest of the rabbits still attached--at the very odiferous outdoor market in Be, where fetisheers go for whichever ingredients they’ll want to bubble, bubble, inside of their secret cauldrons. The tourists to Togo go there too, and I once met an American there as she bought a $5 baboon’s head for her race-relations professor at Harvard, who had requested one for God knows what.

The woman, a senior, was hoping to go to Harvard Medical School, and I mentioned that I could escort her to a man who might help her, a certain fetisheer in Gbloenvie. I explained that, as his specialty, the man undertakes to get everyone an A in his or her final examinations at the University of Benin and that every spring there’s a steady stream of cycles, scooters, motorcycles, and cars chugging up to Gbloenvie, the drivers all bringing up Bics to get them endowed with an occult infallibility there. In summer, I said, there’s another procession as the new graduates bring up chickens, etcetera, their way of saying akpe or thanks to their learned fetisheer. "He may have some ceremony for Harvard Medical School. Are you interested?" I said to the corn-braided student, and she said enthusiastically, "Yes!"

We rented a car, passing dozens of women who balanced baskets of tropical fruit like the hats of Carmen Miranda as we drove to that miracle maker in Gbloenvie. At ten this morning the red earthen huts of his village were as hot as pottery kilns, but he escorted us to the comparative cool of his little white circular shrine like a pillbox in World War II. Inside, we sat on some colorful cloth as the fetisheer, a man with the build of a basketball player, began by invoking the voodoo gods as thoroughly as the Bible’s begats, Afan, Aglo, and Aholu down. To tempt them into his modest hut, he tinkled a dinner bell and he sprinkled the local ambrosia--schnapps, as you may recall--on his cluttered altar, in time telling all the invisible and inaudible gods the reason that he had assembled them. The fetisheer said, "This woman here—’’

"Melanie Moses," my interpreter said, introducing the gods to the Harvard student.

"--is hoping to go to the doctors school in America. Help her," the fetisheer now beseeched the uninterrupting gods, and, on his altar’s farmer’s market of calabashes and cowrie shells, he reached for a cone-shaped cloth that he clapped like an anesthesia mask to the Harvard student’s astonished face.

He held it ten seconds there. Far from being anesthetized, the woman was now being charged like an automobile battery, so I was later told. The cone, calabashes, and corncobs possessed what the Chinese called tch’i, the Tibetans called tumo, the Indians of India called prana, and the American parapsychologists called psi, so I was helpfully told by a scholar in Togo from Sacramento, California. All of these fetishes have the red, orange, yellow, whatever, auras that a man could actually photograph if he employed a Kirlian camera--so I was told by that earnest scholar. If that was so, the Harvard student had a full measure of psi herself as the fetisheer took off his odor-laden cone and, in its stead, put a splash of Akuavi perfume on her still amazed face. Akuavi, the man explained, is the traditional name for a woman born on Wednesday in Togo, where

Monday’s child is all-powerful,
Tuesday’s child is rich,
Wednesday’s child is intelligent--

is smart, as the Harvard student would need to be to be accepted at Harvard Medical School. Hence the special perfume, the fetisheer in Gbloenvie explained.

The sacrifice of a protesting hen concluded our $5 consultation, and the medical school will announce in February whether or not it was successful. If it was, there will be a further installment due of $7.50 and a $2.50 bottle of the ubiquitous schnapps, a way of saying akpe that the Harvard student decided on in Gbloenvie. The more accepted ways--a hen, a cock, a ewe, a ram--seemed to her too unwieldly to deliver by parcel post, and she had decided against a 14-carat cross such as she herself wore as faithfully as an African’s fetish, for, she believed, a cross on the chest of a pagan might anger her own jealous god in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tip of some sort from a satisfied customer is de rigeur for a fetisheer, and I myself would have owed $10 in cash and a $2.50 bottle of, you’ve guessed it, schnapps to my fire-eyed one in Agbanto if the Dodgers had won. The man hadn’t wanted an autographed ball, as I had originally offered.

One thing in Gbloenvie had somewhat upset the Harvard student. It happened late in the ceremony when a hen was being sacrificed and a man in a wide brown bou-bou had to hover above her, his arms outstretched like a guardian angel’s to intercept all the splurting blood. Its throat slit by the deft fetisheer, the hen had lain around listlessly before it had died dramatically by flap, flap, flapping around the now red-spotted shrine like a little fireball. Its effect on the Harvard student wasn’t as severe as another moribund hen’s on a woman in Ademehouve, an Italian who had once moaned to me, "Mi viene il’ vomito!" But today as she went outside to sit underneath a straw awning, the Harvard student admitted to me, "I felt a little sick."

The fetisheer turned to us in surprise, saying, "But don’t you do sacrifices in America?"

"Not anymore," I answered. "Our ancestors used to in Bible times."

"But that’s passe. It was how many years ago?"

"Two thousand,’’ I answered.

"But then your gods wanted it. So who decided to stop it?"

"Um, maybe the ASPCA," I answered uncomfortably.

"I don’t understand," the fetisheer said. "The gods have given so much to America. What are its people giving them back?" He looked in my eyes levelly but he really had me: I couldn’t answer the frank fetisheer in Gbloenvie.

A word about schnapps, if I may…More