Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (43 page)

Calabash gourds were neatly lined atop the short stone wall that surrounded the yard. Dead leaves were strewn across the ground. A rubbish heap lay at the back, full of banana skins, fat earth grubs, and mango seeds. Under an otaheite apple tree, laden with the pink-red fruit, small statues molded out of dark earth clay stood surrounded by a banquet of food and water and other bits of offerings. There was a barrel of rainwater and pans. All was quiet.

Jooni set her mouth in a mean line and sighed. She waited, checking her irritation. Some days ago, the breadfruit tree had come loose from the ground and leaned to one side, as if it were getting ready to fall. Stones from the low wall had mysteriously slipped out of place and thudded to the ground. And then there was the day the skin on her arms turned to charred flesh, the next moment gone. Just so. It had happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she’d seen right. When it happened again the following day, fright bit her. She’d spent the afternoon sitting in a tub of herbs and rainwater, scrubbing and whimpering.

At first, Jooni thought it was a duppy spirit playing tricks on her, but she didn’t think so anymore. This felt strange. Different. What in heaven’s name could be happening? Jooni stood there in the doorway, counting her breaths. The shadowy hut behind her groaned.

This hut – her refuge – it made many noises, but had been built strong by the freed man that built it shortly after Jamaica had fully emancipated all its slaves five years ago: 1838. She always had to say the year to herself, as if these things – numbers – which Jooni had started learning to read, were magic, as if not saying them would render the freedom absent, hurl her back into that wretched time. As if that time could come into this one – and capture her. 1838. No – Massa Williams wouldn’t catch her.

She’d found the hut about a year ago, abandoned there on the side of the hill above the village, See Them Come, called so because it was founded by ex-slaves who after Emancipation had seized the uninhabited land, and continued to come and come and come. The numbers had swollen to the hundreds.

Jooni had stumbled on the hut desperate and cross, needing to find a quiet place. She was eighteen, nineteen, or maybe twenty years old – she didn’t know what year she was born, not that it mattered. She had found the hut and could feel its barren solitude in the planked walls and echoes. She felt the man and knew he was never coming back for it. Probably left the island with the waves of people that had taken off for Panama to work, or someplace else, shifting and shifting – like ghosts – needing to forget. Jooni had made the hut her home. Hers. Where nobody’s eyes dug into her. Accusing. Judging. Like Tenan, who never failed to remind Jooni how much she owed. For keeping by her after Yaa had died, for minding her, for putting up with her
.
For risking her own livelihood, running from the plantation with her, like some runaway, hiding even though Emancipation had come already. Lord knows what Massa Williams would have done to Jooni for what she done. They hid, working on other estates before finally coming to See Them Come, when the threat of an enraged former Massa had shrunken and confined itself to the nerve and muscle of the body.

Now patches of the brightening sky shone through the trees and made lace patterns of leaves. Jooni continued to count the moments, still waiting. Beyond the yard wall, one could see the sides of the hills. Below all of this, down the path, there was the village, which would be waking at this same hour. Further down, the snake-like path descended, opened out, and led abruptly to where there was glittering sand, a road going to town, almond trees, and the broad, broad sea. Men were already there now, pushing their boats into the water, hunting fish and crab, and anything else in the salty depths that could be eaten or sold. Jooni briefly recalled the sensation of that water flooding all the membranes in her face, her eyes, her nose, filling her throat – the time she had dunked herself in, thinking she would drown. And the sea had foamed and spat and heaved her back onto the shore. A distant memory the taste of salt. Grainy. Jooni leaned slightly and spat into the dirt outside the hut; she pulled the back of her hand across her lips.

A light breeze picked up some dried leaves and blew them across where the ice lay, still shining like small pieces of moon, starting to melt. Jooni did something like a sniffle, and still holding her machete, now glinting in the new morning light, she pulled back into the shadows of the hut and slammed the door.

Jooni’s memories sometimes seemed to have a breath of their own – they were so alive. She could remember so vividly working alongside her mama and the other women on the plantation. Yaa’s presence had been so formidable as she’d swung her cutlass with power and tireless rhythm, slicing through the cane stalks and making them tremble and drop to the ground. Jooni could see her clear clear – her handkerchiefed head, the sweat breaking loose over her skin, her cowrie shell necklace dangling from her neck like the one Jooni also wore.

Jooni had seen how the men and women looked up to the obeah woman, Yaa, feared her even. Depended on her to ease strife, stave off chaos, offer tiny fragments of hope. Yaa stuffed wounds with plant poultices, made concoctions of man piaba bush and devil’s horsewhip. She made fetishes and talismans for small troubles, blessed new babies and guarded their huts from unseen evils, stood over the dying – and afterwards, placated their spirits. She stood ready to brave monsters sealed in myths, and the ones that walked in human form. It was Yaa who taught Jooni the power of incantation, had grabbed her cheeks and gazed into the child’s eyes. She’d said,
Look at me, Jooni. Here. Say after me.
And Jooni followed
: I am not no slave. Never was. Never have been. Never will be. I am no slave to man, nor woman, nor beast. No slave to no mind, no thought, no feeling. I am like iron passing through fire. The sky, the plants, the sea. I am life and nothing will break me. So I think, so I speak – I am.
And Jooni would stare into Mama’s eyes, deep as ocean, and say those words like a spell.

Yes. Mama was magic. And those who knew also knew to be silent about it, would never tell Massa more than he needed to know.

To young Jooni, Yaa might have been a god, indestructible. Sometimes on the plantation death seemed more certain than life, but she did not think Mama could die. Could vaporize in a cloud of smoke.

But she had.

Inside the hut, the floor creaked and grunted with Jooni’s rocking. She hugged her folded legs. And rocked. Back, forward,
swing
, back, forward,
swing
. Creak, groan.
Knock knock
. There. A sound she didn’t make.

Jooni stopped. Reached with her ears. Searched with her senses. Hm. Nothing.

The hut had its own ways.

A rooster crowed from the backyard, a loud
err-ah-err-ah-errrrrr
that echoed into the morning. The rising sun began stealing through the window and touched Jooni’s long face and deep cocoa skin and glistened off the fat dark beauty mole above her lip. It creeped across the floor and glided over a basket, two wicker chairs, and a small table.

Then Damba appeared. Jooni didn’t move, she only watched him.

Sitting on one of the chairs in his oversized pants and torn shirt, swinging his small legs.

He didn’t have his head.

A giggle escaped from a corner behind Jooni, childish and bouncy. Then Damba’s headless body dissolved. Jooni managed a crooked smile at the empty wicker chair.

Damba – the only spirit she hadn’t the will to turn away. She held him once and he’d felt like any other little boy, alive and in flesh, in two pieces, his body curled up in her lap, his head cradled in her arm – his face wet from crying. Feeling him suddenly so real, she had held him with everything inside her, not minding the blood.

Holding Damba had been healing. Jooni had never done that before with no other duppy. They mostly came silently demanding – sad, angry, lost – always asking, begging, needing. Leaving a cavern of hollowness behind each time.

Like a woman duppy that came one time with a tin mask trapped on her head, and who came for days appearing here, there, everywhere, while Jooni had tried not to look – busied herself with yard work, trying, trying hard not to feel, to not understand the inundation of voices in her head, speaking like a swarm of bees, to not heed the tightening pain in her chest, until Jooni one day threw down her pot and screamed, her beauty mole trembling, telling the duppy to go the bumbo to hell.

And it went away.

And left Jooni with a vacuum that made her bawl
.
And the memory of those eyes behind that tin mask – like mirrors; in them Jooni had seen a fracturing that nothing could fill, a fracturing crack-whipped into the mind. It hurt – oh god, it hurt. That duppy had come
needing
and Jooni had sent her away. Yaa would never have done that.

Ah sorry…
Jooni had pleaded.
Ah sorry… you hear me?
But the duppy never came back no matter how Jooni had begged the air, cried into the ground, whispered into the grooves in her hut walls,
please please –
and when all that had failed, screamed again and kicked
over
the frail furniture, screaming for them all to leave her alone. There was no way to fix this broken, brittle world.

And now who’s-it-what’s-it was getting renk.

Throwing down icy stones on her.

Jooni got up. She was tired. Tired of the battling. Tired of sad stories and dogging memories. Tired of the stress, the strife. These damned, rotten ghosts with their sufferations, as if she didn’t have enough of her own. Her own mother’s spirit never even came back to her. Never, not even once. Ever. Why? Because she was gone. Really, really gone. Gone, gone.

She felt the urge to run to her statues – her beautiful statues she’d formed carefully from the dark earth clay and into shapes of people, for those too-sad sufferation times she couldn’t hold or rock away. She wanted to run to them, feed them, bring them drink, and pretty flowers. Make more statues fashioned from clay.

But there was work, always work to do. The chickens needed care, the yard needed raking. With thoughts and memories flying wildly through her mind, Jooni quickly changed her clothes and decided to face the day.

Outside, the sun was already high. The ice had left small dark spots, now fading. She pretended not to notice, ignored the flip-flopping in her belly. Her off-white cotton dress, smeared with dirt stains, gathered at her waist and fell down in skirts to her shins, lightly brushing against her legs as she moved. The cool air breathed on her arms and kissed her scalp where her hair parted into bulbous plaits that curled stiffly under her jaw and down the nape of her neck.

The green things were humming now – a gently trilling, slightly buzzing synergy. Like the way the cane fields used to buzz when Jooni used to help Mama and the other women in the field gang. The whispering stalks sometimes spoke of effort, and tiny struggles, of the uncurling of leaves and the hunger for sun, great growth and quiet changes. Other times they whispered frenzy – of heavy, driving work, of blood spill and loss of innocence. In those times, the cane fields were unbearable to be in.

Jooni took the rake and walked round to the back; the chickens scattered out of her way and then trailed her footsteps. The big cock perched on the wall followed her with his head. She pulled the blankets of dead leaves across the ground, leaving shallow canals in the earth, and worked them into one pile; she would set it afire later. Now she would head down to sea to sell her mangoes. She scattered feed for the chicken, watching them nervously as they scrambled, cluck-cluck-clucking and pecking each other for space. The rooster flew off the wall to join the fussing, a blur of wings.

Jooni walked over to the water barrel to wash the dust and mess off her hands, and sprinkle her face. And that’s when she saw it, in the pool of water like a mirror – holding the light of the sky and shadow shapes of hanging otaheite leaves – she swore she saw another face – her own face, yes, but with blistering scars and pock marks and with eyes so fiery. A face that glowered. Glowered at
her
? Jooni pulled back sharply, reaching up to her face fast, fast, running her fingers up her jaws, over her forehead, down her cheekbones and nose. Nothing. Skin smooth as garden egg.

Her heart flapping, she stepped towards the barrel once more, paused before looking in, and then regarded the still water. In the reflection, her face was soft and sheen from work, supple and long, haloed by thick, scalloped plaits. Her eyebrows now reflected her confusion.

She spun around, glancing across the yard uneasily. Where was her machete? Her fingers began to tremor. Then the leaning breadfruit tree leaned a little more, lifting earth and sending stones to rumble away. Jooni jumped for her mango basket and quickly fled the yard, hot and testy.

On the pathway, down the slope, Jooni balanced the basket on her head and moved swift-like, descending on See Them Come. She would rather not, but she had to pass it on the way to the sea. She stepped past the cabins and shacks on the outskirts of the village, built so rough and fast they seemed to perch precariously on the incline of the hill. Outside of them hung clothes on lines tied to trees.

Jooni wondered if Tenan was home today. Tenan kept her distance, but Jooni visited when she could tolerate it, trying to do her best to comfort an old woman. It was the least she could do.

But today – today was no day to deal with Tenan.

Living with Tenan had been like daily battle. To Tenan, Jooni was a sinner; she said all that seeing spirits and strange dreams and things were devil workings, that Jooni’s strange customs were obeah. And she’d called a crowd of amen-sayers to come sanctify Jooni without knowing that was the worst thing she could have done.

It wasn’t just the crowd that laid their hands on Jooni that drove her away, it was how bad she wanted to hurt Tenan when it was all over.
She wanted to say something.
Fall. Break your hip, old witch.
And she had to fight to hold her lips, while her beauty mole shivered, else it would happen. It would happen, like the other times she’d spoke things and they’d happened. Like how she’d hurt Tenan before. Like what she did to Massa Williams’ favorite horse. Told it to die. And it fell to the ground wheezing that same moment, the veins in its throat bulging. That’s how Massa had found out she was just like her mama. No Emancipation was going to save Jooni’s skin then. Yes, Jooni had to hold her lips.