~4700 words, ~23 minutes reading time
Ma-Mère was a saltwater woman, conceived and born on the other side of the sea in Africa. She had tasted free life along with her family before capture and long-water journey by boat, and esclavage here in these West Indies. She was Amina, then, but when she was sold, first in Barbados to work sugar cane, and then here to Providence, the planter’s other sugar estate on Île Marie-Joséphine, the overseer called her Duchess.It amused him to see a field hand on the sugar estate toil under hot sun with a noble title. Now we all call her Duchess. Hardly anyone alive remembers Amina just like hardly anyone remembers Binta, the name she gave me. Most esclavage people call me Estelle.
Since Ma-Mère arrived, Île Marie-Joséphine has had different French and English majesties. They fight all the time while we are buried in sugar cane. Now it is the English in charge again. As we load the sugar barrels at the bay, we see the soldiers come and go on their bateaus at the deep-water harbour. The soldiers stay in their stone forts on the northeast side of the island, their eyes and guns looking out to sea for their English majesties’ enemies. They watch us too, especially in town, in Port William, on market day. They watch us in the streets and in the taverns. They sail on to other parts of the Leeward Islands, their food stores and water supply refreshed, and other bodily appetites whetted.
***
Ma-Mère had first itched as a girl when she was half my age of twenty-six years. Old people say her early itch was brought on by the Guineamen ship itself, The Agatha. The ship had left with its terrified cargo from the fort at Gorée Island, after the captives stepped through that final door of no return. Oya’s winds stirred the ship’s sails and caressed the captives’ bruises when they stumbled stiff limbed on board. With the first skin-tingling, Amina had heard the desperate whispers, prayers and pleas of previous captives that had become imprinted in the wood and sails of the Guineaman ship. As the grand bateau rocked on the sea battered by the waves of the Atlantic, and the wind gusts blew the sails, Amina heard the first voices say Leave this place now and May the gods help you, girl. Their bodiless voices, the cramped stench of the ship’s hold, and the salty air on deck that night must have set she off so early. She was force-ripe, picked before her time. Her smooth skin felt the warnings, prickled and screamed before her child’s heart and eyes ever saw a single stalk of sugar cane.
Amina was bound in the hold with the other captives, feeling her first woman blood trickle without her own mother to attend to her, when she felt the tingle in her back and the itchy puckering of her skin. When the sailors brought her on deck that night to move her stiff and rusty body, she reached one hand ‘round and her nails raked her skin open. Amina half emerged right there on deck. A burning fire atop her thin, flesh legs, she stood starboard, facing the sea. None of her people were there to guide her through this change. She was enflammée — her own pyre. She was desirée — her first flesh ignited by her desire to flee her human body. She was glorie — her girl skin pushed down to her waist, her arms, head, and torso aflame as she bounded up and off the deck. Amina leapt, hurtling upwards into the sky, crimson flames trailing in flight that first time. She reached high into the ship’s rigging, burned a hole in the top sail and then plummeted, a phoenix embering on the timber.
The crew — ship captain, parson who also served as doctor, and captives were all witnesses. They saw the flames out themselves as she was doused from a barrel, the midship man remarking on the waste of precious drinking water. Why not throw this burnt, poxy wretch overboard like the other sick, he had said. Because, answered the parson, this is not pox or sickness. This is sorcery and lest this she-devil capsize our ship from under the sea, we must lock her up. The captain added his agreement and sealed her fate: We must rid ourselves of her at sale and say nothing of what has transpired.
My mother’s charred skin crawled back and reattached to her skull and spine, the cooling air turning smokey embers to flesh, bone and sinew. Many of the captives viewed her with fear. Others watched with saddened eyes for they now knew what she was, and what she was capable of doing, while they also realized that she herself, only a child, had no sense of her power and thus could not help herself, or them. She was a sword that could not wield itself. Amina was restrained for the remaining fortnight of the journey and doused periodically with water by her captors, nearly drowning, lest she alight again. She never saw sunlight until they reached the deep-water harbour in Barbados.
***
She was sold on board ship, one of about 200 captives. I have seen ads like that having learned a letter or two from the Christian mission. I imagine it would have been worded like other such advertisements: To be sold on board the ship The Agatha, a choice parcel of 200 fine and healthy Negroes, just arrived from the Windward and Rice coast. The utmost care has already been taken and shall continue to keep them free from the danger of being infected with small-pox, no boat having been on board and all other communication with people from town prevented. My mother had itched but it was not pox. Only an indentation on her shoulder where she had first hit the deck showed any sign of her molt, the burning of her temporary human flesh, and her terror-ridden first flight. Confused, her dislodged flesh obeyed the part of her that wanted to jump, and free herself, and it had inched snail-like into the briny sea, while the rest of her body stayed on the ship.
I was born in Barbados two years later when my mother was little more than a girl, and then we were sold, she and I, on the auction block here to Île Marie-Joséphine. We were a bargain, Ma-Mère told me. She said that the seller at the Bridgetown slave market described her as a good Crop Hand with a mulatto infant. That was twenty-five years ago. And so, I had thought, hoped and prayed that at twenty-six years, twice her age, that the itch had bypassed me.
***
At first, there was a prickly burning near my shoulders like a thousand small, red ants and everything flying and biting at Providence Estate, had taken a taste of my flesh. It was unbearable — hard to describe except to those who had experienced it or had cared for someone during their first molt. This was different from the itch of the poor souls whose poxy bodies carried, and passed on the sickness that afflicted the big house maîtres and maîtresses in their youth. Some grands blancs were left with small pits on their faces which they then filled with black stars and moons at the fancy balls at carnival.
The tingly itch ran from my shoulders, down my arms, as I was lifting a calabash with water from one of the streams, that ran in the bush, near the west of the sugar estate. This stream was for drinking and cooking. It ran full during the rainy season. During drought, the stream was a trickle of muddy water with the smell of earth and rotting plants. It was at the start of the big sugar cane harvest, after the sun was highest in the sky, and I had slipped away to get the water. I dipped the calabash in the stream catching a small glimpse of myself, a round-bodied brown-skin woman with eyes the colour of mossy stones.
I took off my headtie and sopped my whole head with water. My tightly coiled hair was worn in narrow rivers of congo plaits which ran a course over my shoulders when not tied away. They were fashioned every fortnight by my comère Madeleine. We stole away for a little bit, she and I. We went down to the sea or another stream on a new moon night to wash. We washed everything — body, hair, dress, and any small clothes if they last. Mostly, we tried to rinse away a little bit of the sugar estate from we spirit even for a short while. My feet lit the way, just like they talked to the drums when I dance. I feel where the drum’s rhythm will fall, and I follow. Sometimes I led the drums. When I put my feet on stone and earth and wood in the dark, Madeleine followed me. She saw the little light that my foot made in the earth, on the vines in the forest and in the sand at night. Madeleine even saw where I had been after a moon has passed if I stamped my foot on stone.
***
I had picked ten years of sugar cane in sunlight, and in moonlight, alongside my mother here at Providence Estate, on Île Marie-Joséphine, before she was taken away from me that first time. Even after she was sold away to Paradise, another estate on the island, she was always my mother, Ma-Mère, and I felt her presence nearby.
I used to hear Ma-Mère moving around in the cabin while everyone else was asleep, even though I couldn’t see her body. All I see is little twinkling lights in the dark, like the sky is in the cabin. And I know is she, just she alone. I hear her voice coming from different corners of the cabin to soothe me. Don’t cry, doux-doux. I don’t see my mother these days, but I feel that she is out there somewhere looking at me when I look up at the tiny holes of light in the night sky. I look back at the sky and I wouldn’t mind at all if La Vièrge herself decided to swoop down and take me with her to Ma-Mère. People said that Ma-Mère and La Vierge were good-good friends and that she was not afraid to look at herself in the rushing cascade, in the copper in the big house or in the water in the calabash. She wasn’t afraid and that’s why out of all of us, they chose she among the first to sell off. By the time I was thirteen years, Ma-Mère was gone forever, sold off the island to la Grenade. She was part of a lot, including a tanner and a cooper, sold to settle the estate owners’ debts after a hurricane had destroyed crops.
***
As I drank the water from the calabash, I felt the stinging first in the left and then in the right side of my body just where those bones rise in the back, the ones where the cane rests when taking cut bundles from the edge of the field. Fearing the itch and what it meant, I refused to scratch bearing the tingly sear. I had learned to feign strength when both the sun on my back, and cane-cutting metal in my hand, burned my flesh. But eventually, I succumbed, and I scratched just like I eventually drank di water and put down di cutlass. To not scratch is to will oneself to perish slowly from the inside out as the bubbling, that’s what the people then and now, called the pox from within, cannot be held back by will, neither can it dissolve like spoiled food by human organs toughened by being tested. People say the itch is trying to tell you something. We who are still alive here on this other side of the sea have drunk from a bitter cup, and eaten from soured pots, and survived, and so I scratched and wondered what the message could be other than my wretchedness. I already knew that.
Dropping the calabash in my frenzy, I ripped at the worn denim cloth. But here is the terrible thing: the more I scratched, I found that my hands couldn’t reach at all! Is like my back getting big-big, a hard shell with fluid, and my hands were small gundy pinching aimlessly at the air. I feel two bumps forming there like when mosquitos bite except these mosquitos would be the size of large agoutis, the kind we sometimes catch to eat. These agouti bumps are tearing at my flesh because they are hungry too.
I returned to the cane field before I was missed by the overseer. I worked the rest of the afternoon with that burn in my skin, the sun beating down, the salt of my sweat and the sweet of the sugar cane juice all tormenting me. I dared not cry out. Man on horseback never saw me anyway.
By the time I had picked my share and was heading back at sunset to the cabin, the two bumps were burning anthills tenting the thinning denim cloth. I was faint and could no longer stand. The older women who knew the healing plants gave me stinging nettle and lime leaf tea and rubbed my back with the inside of the single bible plant. Jeanne picked leaves from the jumbie soursop tree just outside of our cabin, and placed them directly on what were now two small humps on my back, poking through the thin fabric of my shift. My brow was mopped, and I was turned on my side so that she could treat my affliction. Through my fever, the conversations of older women seeped through me making my bumps itch even more. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing.
“I wonder is how this happen to she and so young?”
“Is wha’ bite she? Loogaroo or what?”
“Not at all. We ain’t have any night wolves around here for a long, long time. We must wait and see the change in her. What message will she bring?”
“I always thought that she would turn out like she mother Duchess, soucouyant wid she skin in a barrel of fresh water. She ‘fraid salt water for so. Fire woman. Dem does turn bloodsucker when dem ready. You watch and see when she get older. After all, she is a fruit from that tree, oui. The tree may be uprooted but the seed remains!”
***
I was drifting off wondering how I goin’ turn into something else other than what I is right now! I am a woman. I was born here in the West Indies. My mother was brought here en esclavage from Africa, and my father was born in England. They say he t’ief bread and food to feed heself and his family back in London-town, in his cold-water island. He was seized, and he could have died from bad food and bad mind in the house where they lock up people like him when they t’ief, but instead they barbadoes him. Seven years was his sentence. He and the others from those poor houses work cane like we Africans except they have a limit. My mother said his body thin-out, and his skin blistered, and stripped from the sun. When his time of seven years finished, he was still alive. Now he is a blacksmith on another estate. I see him at the marketplace sometimes and when he is hired out to do some work here at Providence. He nods at me.
How I could be anything other than what these two people make, eh? I know all kinda devilment ting does go on here in this place, but I am still a human being. How I goin’ turn into something else like I am a caterpillar?
When we were small, we chil’ren used to catch caterpillars and we would see them go into their little house that they build and turn into butterfly and fly away. So, what? I going to become a butterfly and fly away? Old people say that there are Africans who could fly back home, or who could swim through the sea in the underneath path. Who go’ believe that? What stupidness they talkin’!
I woke up later that night surrounded by the bodies of the older women and the small children, their charges. I could see my comère Madeleine kneeling, and Jeanne, crouched on her haunches, her worn crocus linen jupe tucked between her knees, looking at me intently. Is how allyuh watchin’ me so? I wanted to ask but I sobbed instead. The torment had moved from my blistered, itching skin to my insides, and I bawled for my mother. I did not want to disturb others or bring the overseer to our cabin, but I cried anyway because I could not help myself. To my surprise, though, I was able to reach over my shoulder and finally claw the searing, burning back humps where my shoulder blades attach, gristle and muscle to bone.
I clawed my back feeling skin layers peel away like corn husks. The more I scratched, the better it felt. The itchy-good feeling spread from the humps all the way down to my toes and into my scalp. I felt the thrumming of a multitude of tiny wings beating and stirring heat inside my bones. It was only when I looked at my palette in the soft glow of light that now surrounded me, even though no boul de feu was lit, that I could see that I had indeed shucked my skin clean off. My brown woman skin lay in blistered tatters along with my hair, teeth, and eyes, looking back at me, blinking and gleaming. The long plaits of my hair were all nestled together as I had scraped my whole scalp off. All that was left was a warm, dancing flame, golden with pepper-red and orange edges. It was the me-of-me, still holding my woman shape but filled with fire. Madeleine cried out and then fainted. Jeanne was on her knees looking at me with the same expression on her face like when she makin’ prayers to La Vièrge.
At first, I felt a coolness like the water when it rushes over the rocks at the cascade where Madeleine and I sometimes bathe at night, and then I was ablaze, the warmth spreading and illuminating the cabin. Moving around freely, the earthen floor, wattle and daub walls and all the people floated by as I whirled. No door was needed at all to go outside. Seeping through the mud and dried grasses in the wall, and the small spaces near the ground, my light-self was outside dancing on the goatskin drum of the earth, leaving scorch marks, before I shot upwards into the sky, my orange flames fanned by the evening breeze. At last, I am like my mother Duchess coming to shine her light self.
As I flew, I heard voices on the wind like when we gathered to pray, dance and sing. My fire body flickering quick-quick like Jeanne when she dancing, talking to the drum and circling her skirt and making prayers for Yemaya. And I was the drumbeats and rhythm taking form and burning bright, circling higher and higher, in the air my flame rippling like waves. Then the ground was far beneath me, and I was flying through the night sky, a fiery wheel spiraling over Providence Estate. I could see the cane fields and feel the forest in the distance, below. I felt the spray of the waves, cresting on the beach to the west, where the small boats had already gathered for the loading of the barrels of rum, and sugar, out to the big ships. The ships that took the sugar and rum, were the same ones that had brought so many captives here to this island. As I flew, tiny sparks of my flame passed through the cabins of other people en esclavage. They darted right through the small holes in roofs or entered underneath unmarked doors. Nothing was set ablaze. This spark was a tiny piece of the night sky light like when my mother used to visit me after her first sale. When the people saw the flicker, they stirred their sleep disturbed.
At the big house where the grands blancs lived, I drifted by the windows thinning myself out to a large, soft, hazy glow encasing the entire house and casting light and shadow on their gathering as I hovered outside. They drank the estate’s own rum, candlelight twinkling on ringed fingers. There is plenty of my blood in that old cane juice. Esclavage people in the house waited on them in every way possible. I saw it all from the windows, a sudden and purposeful brightness mistaken for bright and impossible moonlight on a new moon night.
Gathering my fire body into a smoky cloud, I flew over the cane fields to the harbour where the ships had dropped anchor near one of the small out islands. It was a captive ship, the smell and taste of human suffering and the dinge of waste high on the breeze even though the human cargo was still below deck. As The Agatha’s sails flapped, I could hear voices from the hold murmuring and crying out in anguish and desperate pleas for deliverance. Their voices had traveled up from the hold, through the ship’s mast and through the sails. I knew then that I had to complete what my mother had begun on her first flight, on this very same ship.
With force, I hurled myself through the air, crackling as the speed made my flame grow brighter and hotter from orangey red to shimmering, bright blue. When I hit the ship’s top sail, it burst into fire traveling down the mast to the other sails and setting the entire ship ablaze. Sailors on board scrambled to release their precious human cargo onto the ship’s deck. Many captives jumped overboard, their aching limbs hitting the water. Some sank into the waves, an immediate release from their horror. Others were strong enough to swim to the closest out island, Lespérance. It was covered with thick forests and still free from sugar cane plantations. Their bodies were buoyed by a fortuitous current in the rough, salty water enhanced by my overhead flight, their terror, and a slim chance at freedom. Sailors lowered the small boats into the water taking some of the captives with them. They rowed away from Lespérance and the other out islands to the main island Île Marie-Josephine’s shore. Soldiers on the beach, across the bay, saw the ship on fire and set sail to rescue any, and all souls.
I picked up speed as the ship burned, the mast now a large charcoal in the sea. My flame glowed a steady, bright blue. I was a low star in the sky. As large as a ship, I lit the way of the escaped captives, now échappés – the self-liberated — through the sea water until they reached the out island’s shore. The captives were abandoned for dead by the sailors and soldiers. Frightened for their own lives, they turned their small boats around and headed back to shore.
There are stories still told that those who died trying to escape, and those who died trying to capture them, became jumbies haunting the out islands and surrounding waters, especially Lespérance. These tales are still told by some Old Ones to stop people en esclavage from making the long swim in dangerous waters where freedom was thought to be a fool’s lure and death a certainty.
But not everyone died, then, or dies now, and there are still échappés on Lespérance. They are not visible from the main shoreline by day, but they live, eating snails, sea grapes and fish and drinking coconut water. Some say that they see the twinkling lights at night from the out islands and that these lights are the échappés and their descendants. Many believe that The Agatha itself will one day rise from the waters and make a return journey back to Africa. Those en esclavage who were working in the fields and boiler house that night, said that they saw a large ball of blue light traveling over the water. As it traveled through the sky, they smelled burning rum, molasses, lime leaves and sweet flowers in the breeze. The ball spiraled from a thin blue outline with a midnight black centre, into a crescent, half, and full moon as it rolled through the sky and then it became a star over the water. Stella Maris.
***
As morning neared, I could feel my energy waning and I drifted back to shore like an errant cloud floating in the opposite direction of the other clouds in the sky. A silvery shimmer is all that I had become by the time that I floated over the sandy beach, through the town’s streets, taverns, and public houses, and past the church, before I reached the last buildings in town. The stone path continued through the woods to the sugar estates. From there, I propelled myself higher, rustling through thick-leafed trees, parrots scattering in flight, as I flew back to Providence. Tired, I rested in the tall, rum distillery smokestack blending in with the belching, sweet, acrid smoke. Then, I floated to some outbuildings near the plantation big house taking one last look through a top floor window before coming to rest on a storehouse roof.
Drifting down from the rooftop as mist, I flew back to the cabin that I shared with the other women and children. I arrived with the dawn, easing my way under the door and seeping through the tiny holes in the walls. Jeanne waited quietly by my pallet. Madeleine had already left to cut cane with the first gang. I slowed down to people-time, shifting from an orangey-red to a golden glow. I slipped on my woman skin, easy-easy, and my hair and nails and teeth and eyes which awaited me in a rum barrel filled with sweet smelling water. When my body pulled me inside, it knitted all of the parts together. I looked in the water and saw myself again. Whole.
***
I know that the strange case of The Agatha was all the talk of every class of person on the island. I heard it myself. The planters said that it was a slave revolt on deck thwarted and put down by their majesties’ soldiers and brave ship’s crew. They even made up another law to allow all free men to recapture us if we even try to escape. The gens de couleur libre and petits blancs, who were free and living in town, saw it as a sign of big changes to come for the island, which few dared to say out loud, although they sang about in disguised songs. People en esclavage, backs bent by sugar cane, say it was the miracle of the fire woman named Binta, and called Estelle, who fulfilled her mother’s legacy when she led the captives to freedom on Lespérance. For the échappés, Estelle was the mother whose fire and fury blazed their path. I am older now, living under cover with those en esclavage and at other times slipping away for a petit marronage to Lespérance. I have never itched like that first time nor have I flown so high and with so much fire. It was The Agatha, which held a bit of my mother’s blood which drew me out. But I know that it could happen again.
Everyone watches the sky for my return.
Carol B. Duncan is a creative writer and academic of Caribbean heritage. Caribbean folklore, storytelling and patois/creole language are important sources in her writing. Her short stories have appeared in Augur Magazine, Heartlines Spec, PREE Magazine, FIYAH and the anthology African Ghost Short Stories.
