As John and his wife sat at breakfast on their first morning, John said to me that he sensed there was an angry spirit on the island. To this I replied that that must be the volcano, and explained about the tragedy of the nineteen deaths in 1997. He said, no, that he knew about the volcano, but that it was something more than that.
She was just about to continue on to the bathroom, when a tall cadaverous gentleman approached her with his hands held out towards her. In a trance, she stepped into the drawing room and her small hands were lost in his large hands. As she had often done with her grandfather, and as so many children do when dancing with an adult, she put her bare feet on the top of gentleman’s shoes. He spun her around into a whirl of dancing, drawing her further and further into the crowd of partygoers. The music played on.
Instead of being driven away by fear, the opposite was happening to Tinsley. She was being drawn to it. She just needed to know what it was, what it could be. The closer she got to the rock, the brighter the object and surrounding water seemed to glow.
I went into the bathroom, locking the door behind me and sat on the toilet. Suddenly a black snake that had been lying in the corner behind the door uncoiled itself and reared up. I froze. Then I screamed for help, all the while climbing up onto the back of the toilet. Daddy had to break the door in to get at the snake and rescue me!
Another legendary figure in Grenada is “Mama Maladie”, the spirit of an ancient hag who seeks the souls of newborn babies and young children. Today, doctors could explain to distraught mothers about a baby dying as a result of crib death, but that cause of death was not known back in those days. Rather than look for a logical reason, some Grenadian mothers would swear that Mama Maladie had come for their infants.
One day, Granny approached the kitchen to talk to the cook who was preparing lunch. From a distance, she saw the cook seasoning a large pot of stew that was simmering on the stove. Unaware that Granny was watching, the cook took a dark object from the pocket of her apron and began to grate it into the stew. At that point, Granny stepped into the kitchen and asked the cook what she was putting into the stew. Flustered, the cook claimed it was black pepper. In fact, what she was busily adding to the stew was a length of dried stool – her own!
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