They were a friendly bunch; very animated and full of questions. Quite honestly, they were the nicest people all day. The younger guys left, but there was one tall gentleman who stayed behind to chat it up with me. He joked about his weight and how he could stay buoyant effortlessly due to the fat content of his body, but I was so awkward about it. If I laugh, will he think I'm laughing with him or at him? Gahhhh the torture. So I did my best awkward laugh. It worked. We talked about a whole slew of other things: pythons, minerals, precious stones, swimming, piercings, gay marriage and how his religion is very accepting of all people, no matter what their sexual orientation.
...And then he glanced over at the snake tank and was excited to see the snake skin pinned under a rock on top of the tank. I didn't understand why he was so happy to see the massive papery flake of old snake skin flapping in the breeze, but he treated it almost reverently.
"This," he said, "Is why I want a snake. For the skin..."
Stupidly, I had an odd image of him collecting skin in a mason jar like some other OCDs of gathering every single toe/fingernail that has ever been clipped off in a perfect crescent moon shape. Sensing my confusion, he added.
"I practice Vodou. Haitian Vodou*." (*Haitian is Vodou, Louisianan is Voodoo; still said the same way)
I stared at this six-foot-tall white male in goth-ish clothing and wondered what he had to do with enslaved and impoverished Haitians and Africans, or how one would even practice an Island religion in the middle of the United States. I asked him how popular Vodou was in the states or even globally (surprised that Vodou was actually centered around love and caring and looking down on greed. My bias had me thinking of dolls with pins stuck in them). I also asked what exactly he uses the snake skin for.
"The snake skin is to make curses. I'm not a traditional Vodou priest, they would actually look down on what I do." He said matter-of-factly with an unsettling smile. The warm, friendly, bubbly, kindhearted man who was teaching a young girl the importance of reading mere minutes ago was telling me he enjoyed and routinely cursed people.
At that moment, the room filled with a lot of people asking questions about our shark exhibit, so I excused myself to go help the visitors. Again, I could hear the young man stressing the importance of reading to the young girl. I turned around after educating the people to ask the man another question, only to find he wasn't there. He vanished; a six-foot-tall 250+lb man disappeared from a room without my notice. I dashed over to see if my snake's skins were still where they had been left last.
They were still there, fluttering in the crossbreeze, looking so innocent and inanimate despite their dark purpose.
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