The old house on Abercromby
Street has long ago become a parking lot. But as a boy, I was taken there to
meet Madame July. My aunt Ameline had said to me, as we climbed the creaky,
dimly lit stairs:
“Be careful what you are
thinking. She will read your thoughts.”
Have you ever tried to think of
nothing?
We met her at the top of the
stairs. She had been expecting us. They spoke quickly in Patois. The sitting
room was almost bare. A large rocker and old couch, a low bench and a small
wooden chest. Mlle. Barth sat on the rocker. Madame July reclined on the couch.
My aunt and I sat on the small wooden chest. They were both very old and
smelled of vertivert and ‘Evening in Paris’.
Mlle Barth, with Madame July’s
murmured encouraging, seemed to fall asleep. The other rocked herself gently. I
thought of nothing. My aunt had gone there to inquire about Maxim Arneaud with
whom she was in love, and had been for years. As it turned out, she married
Charles Loshon and as Amayline Loshon lived a very happy life.
During the 1940s and 1950s, these
two old ladies of Abercromby Street were well known as mediums, voyagers into
the spirit world, who were able to solve love triangles, cure maljoe, and were
credited in aiding the authorities in finding the remains of Mikey Cipriani in
the high mountains of Trinidad’s north coast.
It was while on one of these spiritualistic
missions, that Mlle Barth in fact met her death. It was well known that old
Mrs. Molé of Mayaro was a soucouyant. She didn’t trouble the village, and the
village didn’t trouble her. The problem arose, if you pardon the expression,
with her homeward bound flights. As she grew into her nineties, her sense of
direction began to fail. There was, for example, that embarrassing morning when
she was discovered naked on top of the water tank in the police station
compound. She had put her skin in its protective mortar on the tank. Now her
problem was to get down!
The ladies Barth and July were
called in to exorcise her soucouyant personality, and that was when the trouble
started. Although Mrs. Molé was old and frail, the soucouyant was strong. In
the end, Mlle. Barth was savaged and subsequently died. She had been bitten and
sucked by the creature in the sole of her foot.
It was said, long ago, that
certain French families brought the vampire tradition to Trinidad. These
European vampires intermingled with their enslaved African counterparts, and
out of this the soucouyant emerged. The soucouyant makes a pact with the devil,
and as such can assume any form. Her first undertaking is to go to a cemetery
and dig up a freshly buried corpse and cut out the liver. From this, an oil is
made. When this oil is rubbed all over, she can then slip out of her skin. The
skin is kept in a mortar or hollowed-out trunk of a tree, used to parch coffee
or ferment cocoa beans.
The soucouyant of St. Eau Island
off the north coast, is described as a “ball of flame, along she came, flying
without a wind”. One Monsieur Didier had this to relate:
“One night I was fishing.
Suddenly, I saw a globe of fire which appeared far away at the very extremity
of the beach where I was and which approached me slowly. I remained absolutely
quiet. The globe of fire passed by a few steps away from me, some meters in the
air. In the middle of this globe, I saw the face of a woman whom I recognised
as a negress from the neighbouring village. When it had passed by, I asked my
comrades if they had seen anything. They said they had seen the ball of fire
and the face of the woman which it surrounded.”
Old people in Paramin could tell
you about a soucouyant called Désirée, who on a bet flew to London to steal one
of Queen Victoria’s gold spoons. However, on her way back with the spoon she
“catch a malcadie” over Dent Ma Teteron in the First Bocas, and the spoon fell
from her. The large gold spoon to this day lies on that rock in the middle of
the First Bocas.
A soucouyant doesn’t always suck
you. She could pinch you too, or cuff you, and in the morning you would have
large black and blues that turn a little greenish. After a while, you could
begin to feel bad, weak, thin, frail, mager. By that time, your eye sockets are
sinking in your head, and you are only staring all the time. Then, you die.
Sometimes, she is a bat.
Sometimes, a hog. There was a soucouyant who used to live at the top of Henry
Street. She caused a lot of problems with people coming home late. Ripper Qui
Tang’s father had a shop. He emptied a 100 lb bag of rice in front of Rosary
Church. The next morning, they saw three big hogs eating the rice. There was
another soucouyant who used to live under the washhouse bridge, near to Sony
parlour. She was bad. She used to work the mortuary.
Soucouyants come and look for
people whose hands are dirty. They can pass through a keyhole or under the crack
in the door. The soucouyant would live on the edge of the village. Her old
house was surrounded by tall forest trees. As night came, she would shed her
skin to rise as a ball of flame and go streaking through the sky. By morning,
she would drop through the mists and set the dogs to howling, and as a green
and glowing vapour enter her old room. There, before the mortar, she would
sing: “Skin, skin, skin, come to me!” - The skin would jump and twinge and
wrinkle to her voice. In a leap, it would drop upon her. “Ieeee!” she shrieked,
and flung away her skin that lay upon the ground, a wretched thing. “Skin,
skin, skin, you na no me, you na no me old skin.” But a dreadful thing had
happened. Coarse salt had been put upon her skin. In the distance, she could
hear the tinkle of the bell. Oh, dreadful thing. The priests, the men of the
village, would find her. She could smell the boiling pitch into which they
would throw her. Her end would come at last, to rest in peace. She was old -
she had lived in Maraval for 132 years.
A note on witch tales:
The ‘old woman of the village’ is
a traditional evil character in the folklore of many cultures. Where does it
come from? A socio-historical explanation may be ventured here.
Women naturally live longer than
men, and more often than not a woman lived to great age whereas her husband
would die younger, in war, because of sickness or through an accident. Old
people were more often than not women, not men.
Furthermore, in traditional
cultures, women did not enjoy the same rights as men. There are many accounts
of widows being total outcasts in village life - the people of the village
coveted her land and her possessions for themselves, especially if the woman
had no sons of her own to protect her.
So, the ugly, wrinkled and
lonesome old woman was a burden to village life, just another mouth to feed.
Because she was a woman, nobody was interested in her personal life experience
and wisdom. When she had no protectors, people invented witch stories around
her, and in the end killed her, sharing her possessions, her land, her house
and her livestock amongst themselves.
So take the soucouyant story with
a grain of - coarse - salt!
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