This is On Being's Unheard Cut. I'm Krista Tippett. You're listening to my unedited conversation

with Patrick Belgart-Smith. He's a professor of Afrochology at the University of Wisconsin

in Milwaukee. I spoke with him on May 16th, 2007, from the Studios of American Public Media

in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was in the Studios of Public Radio Station, W-H-A-D, in Milwaukee.

Download the MB3 of the Produced Show at On Being.org.

You know, we get to have a real conversation because it's not live and you know,

I'll do justice to it because you've heard the show. Many, many times. I wake up early on

Sunday morning for this. And it doesn't have to, you know, it may or may not be completely linear,

but we can really just talk about what this is. It's actually for my subject matter,

it's best for it not to be linear. Okay, good. That's a little too westward for me.

Okay. Well, let's just begin. And actually, this is a question, a version of a question I

ask everyone, whatever we're talking about. You know, I'd like to hear about the religious background

of your childhood. You know, in your case, as I understand it, you spent most of your childhood

and young adulthood in Haiti as a descendant of one of Haiti's very prominent families.

Tell me, you know, how Rudu figured in your life growing up, you know, how it was a manifest,

what, what it mean to you? Well, it's quite intriguing because I, I realized all of this

after I had left Haiti and I, after I had come to the United States, my immediate family

was not concerned about these issues. And as a matter of fact, they were quite opposed to them,

at least formally. As it turns out, the immediate family, the nuclear family is not the important

segment of Haitian societies, the extended family. And I realized decades after the fact that

I had had great grandparents and grandparents and people of that ilk who had been

practitioners, but it was never talked about in the immediate family. But in Haiti, as elsewhere,

...