BOOK REVIEW : A Trip Through the World of a Vodou Priestess : MAMA LOLA: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn <i> by Karen McCarthy Brown</i> ; University of California Press $24.95, 388 pages

Vodou must be the world’s most misunderstood--not to mention misspelled--religion. Our leader, President Bush, employed the carelessly spelled phrase Voodoo Economics and most of us see vodou as a way to curse an enemy or animate a corpse. To Webster’s it’s “a primitive religion based on a belief in sorcery and in the power of charms,” a definition that fits Catholicism just as well.

Karen McCarthy Brown, professor of the sociology and anthropology of religion at Drew University in New Jersey, has been traveling to Haiti and writing scholarly articles on vodou for 20 years. For her first book, Brown tells the life of a priestess born in Haiti and living in Brooklyn. Brown’s subject, Alourdes Margaux, a stocky, sexy, generous and funny single mother, also known as Mama Lola, works full-time as one of a group of healers and spiritual leaders to a particularly hard-pressed community.

Her clients are some of the 450,000 Haitians who have fled a country that still has diseases wiped out generations ago in other countries, a country where half the children die in their first year. Most of these people have a hard time getting a job, to put it very mildly. The poverty of their country of origin plays a part, but so does racism and so, too, does vodou.

We associate the word vodou with black magic, while the people who believe in the vodou pantheon, which blends African gods and Catholic saints, consider themselves good Christians. (A joke Brown cites claims that of Haiti’s 6 million people, 85% are Catholic, 15% are Protestant, and 100% serve the Vodou spirits.)

Instead of a scholarly explanation of vodou’s roots and current role among Haitian-Americans, Brown has chosen a daring form for her book. As she observed Alourdes Margaux for 12 years, the professor couldn’t help becoming a friend of the priestess.

In a sense Brown has been possessed by Alourdes; she describes herself as an unhappy and anxious white academic with a tendency to think too much, but in “Mama Lola” she has written a life story that’s full of feeling. Brown translates into novelistic form the stories she has heard in bits and pieces from Alourdes over the last 12 years. Starting with Alourdes’ slave great-grandfather from West Africa, Brown’s chronicle develops into a five-generation Pilgrim’s Progress from Haiti to America, full of terrible problems and cruel turns of fate.

The novelistic chapters, beautifully written, are alternated with a narrative of the present, including descriptions of the members of the vodou pantheon and how Alourdes serves them. Alourdes’ religious ceremonies are essentially birthday parties for her favorite spirits.

Clients and friends come to pray and sing until a spirit is enticed to possess or “ride” Alourdes. The spirit, speaking through the priestess, advises clients about personal or health problems. There are, as you might expect, practical problems in transporting vodou to Greater New York. You have to pour libations on linoleum instead of on an absorbent dirt floor, and the only good place to get a live rooster is a Puerto Rican market in the Bronx. It’s not simple to carry a live rooster on the subway back to Brooklyn.

It’s a measure of how sympathetic the reader becomes to both the author and her subject, that we find it perfectly acceptable when Alourdes convinces Brown, who’s just been through a painful divorce, to marry Ogou, the warrior. As husbands go, he’s fairly undemanding--he asks that for one night a week she refrain from sleeping with any other man or, we suppose, god.

The climax of the book, Brown’s vodou initiation, is harder to take. She wants us to reject the idea of vodou as sensational, but then describes a ceremony that begins with taking off her clothes in a Port-au-Prince cemetery, and moves to a temple where the guy at the door is snapping a bullwhip. The picture fades at this point because, as Alourdes counsels, if Brown tells us what went on after that, she dies.

Brown’s involvement with Alourdes gives her an intuitive understanding of vodou, and certainly makes for an engaging book. At times, though, she suspends judgment. The reader wants to know whether Alourdes can really heal. The priestess is obviously very good at group psychotherapy. But Brown accepts stories about healing that she doesn’t witness, and her disclaimer that Alourdes knows when to send a client to a medical doctor seems perfunctory.

Disoriented immigrant or unhappy Ph.D., if you’re a human being you have a deep wish to believe in something and be included in something larger than yourself. When someone with a magnetic personality invites you in, it’s hard to resist.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “A Season for Justice” by Morris Dees with Steve Fiffer.