Once upon a time, a real long time ago, one of my two marvellous mothers, the much older one, used to scare the living daylights, dying night-dimmers and all bodily discharges out of me and my friends, often at the same time, by telling us what she would generically and euphemistically term, ‘jumbie stories.”
For a puny, perpetually sick child with a far too vivid imagination, such terrible tales were never a good idea. Yet, I and every other stupidly spiel-smitten simpleton, near and far, would invariably mob and beg the consummate Ms. Nora to torture us some more. Almost every night. Late. For hours.
With no television around, and none in sight, for decades, even remotely, in the poor south Georgetown backstreets I and my varied pals haunted – and the batteries forever low on the radio, on yet another grim blackout night, books few and nigh impossible to read – she would tease us mercilessly, “Allyuh sure?” adding, “Nobody gun pee their bed tonight?”
Assuring her in the negative, as a far too loud, nervous chorus, we would play along until, tired of the opening entreaties, she would gather us into a motley, multi-coloured, innocent heap on the small upper wooden landing and its many steps, or out under the smiling stars in the open cold, concreted yard. Come wet, rainy nights, Ms. Nora would bundle us inside, in the little kitchen, so that the stifling smoke from the seething kerosene oil lamps would spit, twist and curl, into bizarre, disquieting figures, dancing on the ceilings and walls, burning my nostrils and forever searing into my brain.
Born in 1918, my elderly ‘mummy’ was really the childless wife or “chachee” of my father’s oldest brother, or my “chacha” in Bhojpuri Hindi. When my biological parents eventually moved out from the extended family household to another sectioned off house nearby to care for their second born, my baby brother, I, being a delicate, premature case and an endless source of baffling, often expensive ailments, stayed with her.
Aunty or Ms. Nora as she was known to everyone, was born, an only child, in an isolated, heavily wooded area deep down the swarthy Abary-Mahaicony rivers and later moved to the neat little farming village of Cane Grove, so dubbed for the sweet stalks that were cultivated nearby. Her mother was reportedly delivered on the ship crossing the Kala Pani, and named Samaria after the vessel, that may also have ferried her boy father Mangal or Mangar, who became a tailor and died, before her unbelieving eyes, of soft drink poisoning.
“Dis time nah lang time!” she would admonish us scornfully, and we had no doubt that was the whole truth, so help us God. Coming from a strange, shadowy realm replete with jumbies, ol’ higues, churailes, baccoos, fairmaids and sundry slippery ghosts, my mother loved to regale us with one anecdote after another, all personally verified, employing highly effective onomatopoeic sound effects.
There was the infamous Moongazer, tall, white, misty giant, habitually gazing enraptured at the earth’s natural satellite, disturb him to your peril….”Sssssh!” she would fiercely frown at us, and the fidgeting and tittering would instantly cease, as we froze, then became firmly fused with the petrified passengers, racing their car through the wide open legs of the monster straddling the lonely airport road.
One uncle was an infamous mad professor, a purveyor of the paranormal and the occult, who frequently materialised in the Cane Grove cemetery, the corner shop or the closet if he could find an empty one. Decades later, while clearing out, I would stumble across an innocuous bag, left by his daughter, with a distressing daguerreotype of Dr. Danger- piercing eyes, handlebars moustache, a sneering satyr, and some of his blackened books of diagrams with badly burnt edges, an incantation of spells to summon a legion of devils. I took one look at the lot, turned a lighter shade of pale, and with trembling hands tossed the Obeah Orator and his entire package into the black-covered outdoor bin.
Long-haired churailes and ol’higues openly hid in her community, gnarled Guianese human vampires, the latter shedding their skins as darkness descended, to hunt newborn babies, whose mothers carelessly forgot their blue protective pajamas and therefore doomed the tots to mysteriously suffer over time, eventually fading to tissue and bone, and finally death.
“Whoosh! The Fire Rass suddenly went up in de night sky,” she would intone to her spellbound, gasping audience, advising us to leave no less than 99 grains of rice scattered around the cot and outside of our doorways, as well as reeking asafoetida or protective “hing” to deter the dyslexic creature in our troubled future.
If caught at daybreak, there would be whipping and lots of licks, “Pladaap, Bap, Sply, Tscchk, Whoopoosh..” No doubt of Unidentified Flaming Objects (UFOs) here.
This week, I thought of my mom and her riveting recitals when I started to see jumbies of my own. First one popped on my Facebook blog, an old black and white photograph of two of my former Chronicle colleagues, the good-looking Georges with the Great Leader.
I notice him several times again, researching something innocuous for a post. Naturally, I start to worry whether I should hire a gang of ghostbusters, protective counter Trini “moko jumbies” or an exorcist, when I begin looking like Carrie, and speaking in tongues, after a rare, all-inclusive allergy attack.
I quake with alarm when my husband starts shouting Nancy Sinatra’s sinister song, “These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they will do, One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you, You keep lying, when you oughta be truthing” and “you keep saming, when you oughta be a changing….”
Towards the end of her life, my mom’s favourite refrain, was adapted from Jumbie Jamboree, first sung by Lord Intruder in 1953, and she would mournfully mouth “Nora gal, you done dead already.”
ID prays some jumbies would simply stay embalmed and buried. In the meantime she fears being scolded by her mother for telling horrible stories, and has learnt that Nsambi means God in at least 15 associated Bantu languages tonal, while Nsumbi refers to the devil.
