Five Sisters - Part 1

A star, caught in the thundercloud's edge, tripped and fell. 

John Wickham, Theresa.

We do not know why but we live, die and are born again in dreams. We take flight, scale mountains, descend to unknown depths in dreams. Yet even though dreams affect us, stay with us, we often forget that dreams matter. That they can warn us of coming storms or offer a window into our souls. In dreams anxieties manifest, triumphs and failures are relived, reshaped, reformed. A cycle of 'The king is crowned, the king is dead, long live the king', again and again.

We do not usually control dreams and this perhaps is why we either love or fear them. A dream can cut. It can expose hidden away pleasures and pains. We are programmed to avoid monsters at all costs, more so when the monster is ourselves and yet we seek to understand both the dream and the nightmare. To play with the monster but not embody it. To know it but not be of it. To look at how things flow to bring the monster forth, and to see how they ebb after it has gone. A game of seeking out hidden wants and desires. The monster is not just the tiger stalking over the shoulder, it is not only the approach of the unseen gunman. It is the other. It is the self. It is all of these. It is faceless, shapeless, formless. It is a spirit, a ghost, a jumbie. 

So how to catch a jumbie? How to stop it? Jumbies live in the corner of the eye, right where you could see but not perceive. Sometimes you catch the flicker of movement and turn your head only to find, oh, it was just your hair, or, it was a shadow. No, is jumbie. Jumbie is the shadow of the shadow. A shadow need light to live, to exist, but a jumbie live in light or dark and strongest in the dark. And a jumbie have wants and desires, like we have wants and desires. They want to experience pleasure just like us, this is why they possess. By entering a human they can experience sensation and satisfaction, the food, the drink, the sex. But pleasure is only one side of the coin, jumbies can also experience pain. They know heart break, seek revenge, and react to self-preserve. 

We sometimes forget that there is more to life than what we touch, than what we see, hear, taste and smell. We use light to chase away the dark but no longer do we play with shadows. We sleep simply to sleep, but there was a time not too long ago, when we slept to dream. The time of the oracle, griot, sage and shaman. It was a time when life and the afterlife were one. We tried to understand life and afterlife almost exclusively through dreams. If you dream water, it could mean life and death, rebirth and renewal. If you dream you were buried alive, it could mean somewhere in your life you felt trapped. The understanding was that knowing the dream will lead to knowledge of the self, even if the self is a monster, even if the self 'have a jumbie'. The hope was that interpreting the dream would lead you back to the source, to it's causation. And in thinking about the causation of dreams, we wonder too, about the causation of jumbies.

So it have this youthman, Taffy is his name and he don't know it, but Taffy have a jumbie. Before he born Taffy have this jumbie, so before we get into Taffy, let me tell you how he get this jumbie, let me tell you this jumbie's causation.

Taffy people come here free, not as slaves, not as labourers, but free. Free to own land and work it, and to sleep when they want and to dream and have dreams, how they want. They fight for the white man (English), against the white man (American and French), in the War of 1812. The white man (English) lost and left America taking with them 574 free black people. They left places like Chesapeake and Chatanooga for the company villages in Trinidad. They come to these village after backing the wrong white man in the white man war. They had to leave America so the governor here at the time, concerned with populating the entire island, sought to have some of them brought here. Governor Woodford promised full support to these settlers and sixteen acre plots on which they were free to grow anything they liked. So they came. They came with hopes and dreams, broad backs and a Baptist faith.

They bring with them their blackness and their families. This time was to be for better. This time they come off the ship as 'free' men, like if freedom was a thing to be withheld, denied and then granted as reward. They fought to the death for the white man and came with his names and his religion but kept their blackness. Christian last names like Foreman and Jackson and first names too, Nathaniels and Marys. They come here with the white man religion, and their own ancestors surging through their blood and breath. With their children in front of and beside them, to a new land, with new spirits that lived in the soil and fell with the rain. People who died long ago, names they didn't know, but whose essence they felt in the forests and paths, so they pay homage as best they could. They gave libation to blood spilled and yet to be spilled, and to blood spilling on the land before them. 

They came in waves. A first company, fourth and a second, and a fifth and a third and a sixth. They come off the boats and spread over the land, soaking into it, foaming, forming settlement after settlement, clearing away the jungle one tree at a time. They get land, work hard and build houses, build churches and sleep and dream and transform the forest and plant crops, raise ghosts and devils and find salvation. They cut their own roads, too, as best they could, realizing that the governor had no interest in allowing a group of free blacks get easy access to mingle with slaves. Not with Savana Grande and its productive estates so nearby.

A hundred years passed like this.