Rise of the Jumbies

by Tracey Baptiste

  Corinne went to the garden and picked two large, glossy melongenes and brought them into the kitchen.

  “Are we eating?” Bouki asked.

  She washed the purple fruit, sliced and seasoned them, and placed them on a tray in the oven as her papa and Hugo whispered together. Soon the house was filled with the earthy aroma of the melongene. They sat around a flickering oil lamp at the kitchen table and ate their dinner quietly. Even Bouki.

  That night, after Hugo and the boys had gone home, Corinne tossed in bed. She dreamt that a wave had pulled her into the sea, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t swim to the surface. Then there was a rumble beneath her. The surface of the sand scattered like spilled sugar and rocks split apart. One of them moved as if something had pushed it away.

  Corinne awoke drenched in sweat, with the moonlight filtering through the window. The scar on her thigh, which looked like a crooked silver twig, hurt. Every time she rubbed its raised outline, she remembered the day she had gotten the cut, trying to hide from the white witch. The wound had reopened when she climbed the cliff to get her mama’s stone necklace back. The memory of the night she had faced off against the jumbie who called herself Severine came in flashes—pieces of her father’s broken yellow boat swirling in the sea beneath her, the shine of her blood against a rock, the crack of her mama’s stone as she banged it open.

  Months earlier, Corinne had believed that jumbies were only stories that the grown-ups told to make children afraid. Jumbies were too incredible to be real. Who would believe in a creature like the soucouyant, who could shed her skin and turn into a ball of fire? Or the lagahoo, with knife-sharp teeth and clanging chains? Or worst of all, the douen, with its small, strong body and backward-facing feet? And then there was Severine, who was unlike any of the jumbies Corinne had heard of in stories. At first, with her beautifully wrapped hair and long green dress, she looked exactly like the other ladies in town. Then she turned out to be the strongest and most dangerous jumbie of all. But was she strong enough to survive falling from a cliff and being crushed under the rocks that fell with her?

  Corinne grasped her mama’s stone. The leather-wrapped pieces felt both soft and tough, like her father’s fingers twined with her own. They comforted her and she remembered that she was safe on land. She brought the stone to her lips. Severine was gone. “Gone, gone, gone,” Corinne said softly until she began to fall asleep again. But a voice came to her on the wind: “The sea doesn’t keep anything, Corinne.”

  4

  Another Way

  A thin body rose out of the rocks and reached for the surface of the sea. The creature’s eyes shone yellow in the muddy water and caught sight of something—a shadow—far away, across the veil of water. It was shaded the same muddy green as the sea. But it had no eyes. It might have been nothing, a trick of the water or a school of fish moving slowly together. So after a few moments, the thin, twiggy creature from the rocks went carefully toward land. It stayed in the shallows extracting breath from the water, and it began to remember.

  First it thought: There was a plan.

  Then: There was a girl who had stopped it.

  And last: There is always another way.

  5

  The Talk at the Market

  Corinne pushed away the covers and squinted at the sun rising over the cliff. She went to the kitchen and looked out the back window. In the dim morning light, she could make out her papa on shore with the other fishermen. Some of them were working on the boats, others were cleaning up the beach, and a few, mostly women, walked in a line. Corinne’s heart sank. They were still searching for Laurent. Wherever he was, he had spent all night alone.

  She pulled her work clothes on—a pair of her papa’s old pants and a shirt—and ran down to his yellow boat. He was smearing pitch from a metal pail over some cracks, filling them in with shiny black patches. The pitch smelled of sulfur. Corinne covered her nose and mouth with her hand.

  “What is it?” Pierre asked.

  Corinne’s words stuck in her throat. “It’s . . . it’s Severine,” she whispered.

  Pierre glanced at the base of the cliff where the jumbie had fallen. “What about her?”

  “I had a dream about her,” she said. Suddenly, Corinne felt foolish to be worried about a nightmare. But she had already started. “It felt real, like she was nearby and I could hear her. Like she was coming up through the stones and the water.” The wind picked up and Corinne shivered.

  Pierre wrapped an arm around Corinne, still holding the bucket with the other. “It was only a dream, Corinne. Nothing to be afraid of.” He held her until she stopped shaking, then he knelt in front of her on the sand.

  “Sometimes,” Corinne said, “I can hear her talking to me like she did that night on the cliff. I can hear her like she’s in the same room.” She took a deep breath. “You said that the ancestors are always with us. Severine is Mama’s sister . . .”

  “Was,” Pierre said. His face became hard for a moment. “All families are connected, Corinne. It’s true. We don’t get to choose who we share blood with. But we do get to choose how we are with each other. It’s like your plants. You prune the pieces that are withering, and you encourage the ones that will bear fruit. That’s how love works. We can feel the ones we love when they enter a room even before we look up. Those are the connections we encourage. I feel the pull of the sea, not just because I love it, but because this is where your grand-père taught me everything I know. You feel rooted to the earth because that is where your mama taught you to grow things. That’s love.”

  Pierre took one of Corinne’s loosening plaits and rebraided it. “Listen quietly, Corinne. You can hear your mother in the insects buzzing through your garden, and you can hear Grand-père in the waves. These are the ancestors who love you. You are more connected to them than to Severine. She only wanted you because she was greedy.”

  Corinne tried to remember the dream so she could explain it better, but the images had vanished. All that was left was a feeling of dread.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  Corinne saw the concern behind her papa’s smile. “Yes, Papa,” she said. “But what about Laurent?”

  “We will find him. Don’t worry.” He stood up and glanced toward the road. “You’d better go, or all your customers will wonder what happened to the best oranges on the island.”

  • • •

  Corinne gathered oranges from her tree in the front yard before she went on her way. She passed the dry well on her left and the line of orange trees on her right. The trees formed a wall between the road and the mahogany forest, where the jumbies lived. People had long picked the trees bare, but the wood and leaves still smelled of sharp, sweet citrus. She brushed by a blooming hibiscus bush. A couple of hummingbirds darted between its bright pink flowers. Bees droned in the morning sun that beamed through the forest leaves. Corinne began to skip. She went past the full well and the baker’s shop, until she reached the market.

  The first thing she saw there was a crack in the stone wall at the south entrance. It must have broken during the earthquake. She wove her way around the vendors, past wooden crates and colorful cloths spread on the hard ground where sellers displayed their produce. At her usual spot, she opened up her own cloth and began laying her oranges out, but the ruckus of people selling their goods, buyers haggling, and animals bleating and clucking was replaced by a low hum of voices talking about the earthquake.

  “It was a real strong one, eh?” one of her neighbors, with eyes like dark, dull pebbles, said to the woman next to her.

  “Yes, true. Everybody was patching up this morning,” the other woman said. She rubbed her dry elbows, then rearranged the eddoes on her crate.

  A few vendors to the left of them, a dark woman with her head tied in a colorful cloth called out, cutting through the whispers, “Tamarind for sale! Tamarind for juice! Tamarind for s
auce!” But despite her best efforts, no one seemed to be listening.

  Corinne looked around for Dru and her mother. They were usually at the market early to sell the sugarcane from her father’s fields and the peppers from their garden. She left their space clear and scanned the crowd, avoiding looks from both vendors and customers. Over the last few months, Corinne had learned that a slight curve in the lip might mean a cruel thought from one person, a tiny squint signaled suspicion from another, and a stiffness in the muscles meant fear from someone else. These subtle body changes meant Corinne was being judged because of who she was: half-jumbie.

  As she searched the crowd, Corinne locked eyes with the oldest woman in the market—the white witch. She was the only person who had looked at her exactly the same way since the first time they saw each other. The old woman, dark skinned with sparse white braids on her head, sat in the shade of the only tree in the marketplace. A blanket spread out before her bent knees displayed bottles filled with colored liquids and seeds folded inside newsprint. Corinne nodded politely and continued searching the crowd. She waved to Mrs. Chow, who sold fruit preserved in red brine from glass jars. The plums were Corinne’s favorite. When Mrs. Chow caught Corinne’s eye, she dipped a wooden spoon into the plum jar and folded a few of them into a piece of torn brown paper. She sent a little girl with ribbons tied in her sleek black hair over to Corinne.

  “Hi, Marlene,” Corinne said when the girl got near.

  Marlene sucked her thumb and held out the brown paper, which was beginning to soak through with the red brine. Corinne took the plums, and Marlene grabbed two oranges and counted them off on her fingers. Even though it was their usual exchange, Marlene always counted them off. “I like your oranges,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Corinne.

  “You don’t have any customers,” Marlene added. She reached out to the pouch that was tied to Corinne’s waist and tried to jingle it. The sound was dismal. “How come?”

  Corinne shrugged. “No one wants to buy any,” she said.

  “Sometimes I eat too many plums and cherries when I’m helping Mama put them in the jars. And then my stomach hurts and I don’t ever want to see any of those things. But then they smell so good I go and get some more.”

  “Oh,” Corinne said.

  “Just wait. People will want oranges again. Maybe they had too many before.” Marlene took off before Corinne could respond.

  “Careful, girl!” Miss Aileen called out, knocking over her eddoes in the process. “There’s a child gone missing. Get back to your mother quick!”

  “First the earthquake, and then that,” her pebble-eyed friend said, clucking her tongue. “They were talking about it at the river this morning. The mother is going crazy.”

  “Maybe she just wandered off. Children do that.”

  Corinne looked up. “He didn’t wander off.”

  The two women looked down at her, as though they were surprised she was still there.

  “The waves were coming in hard on the beach and it was difficult to run,” Corinne continued. “He probably fell somewhere and got caught in the mess the water brought in.”

  “But what is this child talking about, Evelyn?” Miss Aileen asked, as she scratched at her elbows. She turned back to Corinne. “A little girl went missing at the river this morning when her mother was out washing clothes.”

  “You mean to say another child got lost?” Miss Evelyn asked. Her pebble eyes squinted. In moments the entire market was buzzing about two missing children.

  “And both of them gone missing by the water,” Miss Aileen observed.

  “I wonder,” Miss Evelyn said, taking a sideways glance at Corinne, “if it’s another jumbie.”

  As the word bounced from mouth to mouth, all the eyes in the market looked from Corinne to the white witch and back again.

  6

  The Water’s Song

  The conversations at the market broke against Corinne’s ears like waves. The more people talked, the more certain they were that a jumbie was to blame for the children’s disappearance. Corinne had already started to get used to the stares, the whispers, and the way parents pulled little ones out of her path as she walked by. But she would never get used to how it made her feel. And it wasn’t something she could explain to her papa or her friends. They wouldn’t understand. There was only one person who knew exactly what it felt like to be a half-jumbie. She glanced at the white witch. But they had a complicated history. Corinne tried to stay out of her way.

  Corinne returned her oranges to the basket and wrapped her cloth around its handles so they wouldn’t hurt her palms as she carried the heavy bundle to the bakery.

  “The boys are off gallivanting somewhere,” Hugo said when Corinne walked in. It smelled of flour, butter, sugar, and salt. Uncle Hugo never had to worry about customers. Even though he was the largest man Corinne had ever known, he could make tiny, delicate pastries that melted on your tongue.

  “I wasn’t looking for them, Uncle.” She lifted the basket onto the counter.

  “No customers again today?” he asked.

  Corinne felt something well up in her throat, and she didn’t trust herself to speak. Instead she took out her best oranges for him.

  Hugo held one to his nose and inhaled. “They don’t know what they’re missing,” he said in his booming voice. “But I can always use orange peel, and yours is perfect.” He pulled out five more fruits from the basket and pressed coins into Corinne’s palm. Then he lowered his voice. “Any news about Laurent?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Corinne said.

  Hugo made an attempt at a smile. “They’ll find him.”

  “But there’s someone else missing and everyone at the market thinks it’s because of a jumbie,” Corinne said.

  “Are they going to blame jumbies for everything from now on?” Hugo asked. He leveled an angry look in the direction of the market. “If it wasn’t for you, how many of them would still be alive to say anything at all?”

  From the doorway, someone said, “If it wasn’t for her, none of this would have happened in the first place.”

  Corinne turned to see Mrs. Ramdeen. The woman’s blue cotton dress was clean everywhere but at the hem, where dirt, bits of grass, and burrs clung to it as if she had walked through the forest.

  “Morning, Mrs. Ramdeen,” Hugo said. “What can I get for you today?”

  Mrs. Ramdeen stared at Corinne with eyes like coals. She didn’t move or speak. Corinne stuck to the spot like a fly in a spider’s web. “Careful who you have coming around your bakery, Hugo,” Mrs. Ramdeen said finally. “You never know what anyone is planning.”

  “Stop, Mrs. Ramdeen,” Hugo said. “Corinne hasn’t caused—”

  “Don’t tell me!” Mrs. Ramdeen yelled, stepping farther inside and leaving just enough room for Corinne to slip past her and out the door. Mrs. Ramdeen turned and spat out, “You see how stealthy she is? Just like all the rest of them. Just like every other jumbie.”

  Corinne walked faster.

  “It’s your fault,” Mrs. Ramdeen continued at a high screech. “My Allan disappeared after Severine showed up last All Hallows’ Eve, and now there are more missing children. It’s jumbies that did all of that. Jumbies like you!”

  It wasn’t Corinne’s fault that Allan had been taken by the douens. It was Severine’s. Corinne wasn’t even near when it happened. And hadn’t Corinne gotten rid of Severine by herself in the end? But all the things Corinne might say to defend herself stuck inside, burning her with hurt and shame.

  Dru appeared on the road and slipped between Corinne and Mrs. Ramdeen at the baker’s door. “Corinne is not like Severine,” Dru said. She placed her hands on her hips, her short black hair brushing against her neck in a jagged fringe. Like Corinne, she was wearing pants, but hers were bright pink with a saffron-colored kurta hanging over them past th
e knees.

  Mrs. Ramdeen’s face turned red. “Allan was your friend, Drupatee!” she said. “And if it wasn’t for Corinne—”

  “If it wasn’t for her the whole island would have been taken over by now,” said Bouki, stepping into view from the side of the bakery and hiding something behind his back. Malik joined him. His soft, round eyes looked back and forth from Mrs. Ramdeen to Corinne.

  “How can you defend her?” Mrs. Ramdeen asked, walking out.

  Malik went to Mrs. Ramdeen, putting his hand into hers. She looked down, confused for a moment, then she burst into tears. “He was even smaller than you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Corinne said.

  Mrs. Ramdeen looked up again with fire in her eyes. Before she could say anything, Dru grabbed Corinne’s basket and pulled her friend away. The boys followed.

  “You don’t care that a child was taken again?” Mrs. Ramdeen screamed at Hugo. “What if it was one of these boys? Or don’t you care because you only found them in the street? It would be different if they were your blood.” Corinne felt the last word go straight through her like a needle through cloth. She felt like she had been stitched to family that she didn’t entirely want.

  Dru kept pulling Corinne until they reached the full well. She dropped Corinne’s basket in a patch of long grass and settled against the cool stone wall.

  “She is only upset about Allan,” Dru said. She yanked a handful of grass out of the ground.

  “I know,” Corinne said.

  “My mother practically locked me up in the house when she heard about the girl at the river this morning.” Dru looked at the boys. “They’ll be locking all of us up in our houses soon.”

  “Maybe you. Not us,” Bouki said. “One of the benefits of not having parents,” he added with a smile.

  “Uncle Hugo takes care of you like he’s your father,” Corinne said. “Dru is right. He’ll do the same as everybody else.”