At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

As a fact, Obeah is rather to be ranked, it seems to me, with those ancient Eastern mysteries, at once magical and profligate, which troubled society and morals in later Rome, when

‘In Tiberim defluxit Orontes.’

If so, we shall not be surprised to find that a very important, indeed the most practically important element of Obeah, is poisoning.  This habit of poisoning has not (as one might well suppose) sprung up among the slaves desirous of revenge against their white masters.  It has been imported, like the rest of the system, from Africa.  Travellers of late have told us enough—and too much for our comfort of mind—of that prevailing dread of poison as well as of magic which urges the African Negroes to deeds of horrible cruelty; and the fact that these African Negroes, up to the very latest importations, are the special practisers of Obeah, is notorious through the West Indies.  The existence of this trick of poisoning is denied, often enough.  Sometimes Europeans, willing to believe the best of their fellow-men—and who shall blame them?—simply disbelieve it because it is unpleasant to believe.  Sometimes, again, white West Indians will deny it, and the existence of Obeah beside, simply because they believe in it a little too much, and are afraid of the Negroes knowing that they believe in it.  Not two generations ago there might be found, up and down the islands, respectable white men and women who had the same half-belief in the powers of an Obeah-man as our own ancestors, especially in the Highlands and in Devonshire, had in those of witches: while as to poisoning, it was, in some islands, a matter on which the less said the safer.  It was but a few years ago that in a West Indian city an old and faithful free servant, in a family well known to me, astonished her master, on her death-bed, by a voluntary confession of more than a dozen murders.

‘You remember such and such a party, when every one was ill?  Well, I put something in the soup.’

As another instance; a woman who died respectable, a Christian and a communicant, told this to her clergyman:—She had lived from youth, for many years, happily and faithfully with a white gentleman who considered her as his wife.  She saw him pine away and die from slow poison, administered, she knew, by another woman whom he had wronged.  But she dared not speak.  She had not courage enough to be poisoned herself likewise.

It is easy to conceive the terrorism, and the exactions in the shape of fowls, plantains, rum, and so forth, which are at the command of an Obeah practitioner, who is believed by the Negro to be invulnerable himself, while he is both able and willing to destroy them.  Nothing but the strong arm of English law can put down the sorcerer; and that seldom enough, owing to the poor folks’ dread of giving evidence.  Thus a woman, Madame Phyllis by name, ruled in a certain forest-hamlet of Trinidad.  Like Deborah of old, she sat under her own palm-tree, and judged her little Israel—by the Devil’s law instead of God’s.  Her murders (or supposed murders) were notorious: but no evidence could be obtained; Madame Phyllis dealt in poisons, charms, and philtres; and waxed fat on her trade for many a year.  The first shock her reputation received was from a friend of mine, who, in his Government duty, planned out a road which ran somewhat nearer her dwelling than was pleasant or safe for her privacy.  She came out denouncing, threatening.  The coloured workmen dared not proceed.  My friend persevered coolly; and Madame, finding that the Government official considered himself Obeah-proof, tried to bribe him off, with the foolish cunning of a savage, with a present of—bottled beer.  To the horror of his workmen, he accepted—for the day was hot, as usual—a single bottle; and drank it there and then.  The Negroes looked—like the honest Maltese at St. Paul—‘when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly’: but nothing happened; and they went on with their work, secure under a leader whom even Madame Phyllis dared not poison.  But he ran a great risk; and knew it.

‘I took care,’ said he, ‘to see that the cork had not been drawn and put back again; and then, to draw it myself.’

At last Madame Phyllis’s cup was full, and she fell into the snare which she had set for others.  For a certain coloured policeman went off to her one night; and having poured out his love-lorn heart, and the agonies which he endured from the cruelty of a neighbouring fair, he begged for, got, and paid for a philtre to win her affections.  On which, saying with Danton—‘Que mon nom soit flétri, mais que la patrie soit libre,’ he carried the philtre to the magistrate; laid his information; and Madame Phyllis and her male accomplice were sent to gaol as rogues and impostors.

Her coloured victims looked on aghast at the audacity of English lawyers.  But when they found that Madame was actually going to prison, they rose—just as if they had been French Republicans—deposed their despot after she had been taken prisoner, sacked her magic castle, and levelled it with the ground.  Whether they did, or did not, find skeletons of children buried under the floor, or what they found at all, I could not discover; and should be very careful how I believed any statement about the matter.  But what they wanted specially to find was the skeleton of a certain rival Obeah-man, who having, some years before, rashly challenged Madame to a trial of skill, had gone to visit her one night, and never left her cottage again.

The chief centre of this detestable system is St. Vincent, where—so I was told by one who knows that island well—some sort of secret College, or School of the Prophets Diabolic, exists.  Its emissaries spread over the islands, fattening themselves at the expense of their dupes, and exercising no small political authority, which has been ere now, and may be again, dangerous to society.  In Jamaica, I was assured by a Nonconformist missionary who had long lived there, Obeah is by no means on the decrease; and in Hayti it is probably on the increase, and taking—at least until the fall and death of Salnave—shapes which, when made public in the civilised world, will excite more than mere disgust.  But of Hayti I shall be silent; having heard more of the state of society in that unhappy place than it is prudent, for the sake of the few white residents, to tell at present.

The same missionary told me that in Sierra Leone, also, Obeah and poisoning go hand in hand.  Arriving home one night, he said, with two friends, he heard hideous screams from the house of a Portuguese Negro, a known Obeah-man.  Fearing that murder was being done, they burst open his door, and found that he had tied up his wife hand and foot, and was flogging her horribly.  They cut the poor creature down, and placed her in safety.

A day or two after, the missionary’s servant came in at sunrise with a mysterious air.

‘You no go out just now, massa.’

There was something in the road: but what, he would not tell.  My friend went out, of course, in spite of the faithful fellow’s entreaties; and found, as he expected, a bottle containing the usual charms, and round it—sight of horror to all Negroes of the old school—three white cocks’ heads—an old remnant, it is said, of a worship ‘de quo sileat musa’—pointing their beaks, one to his door, one to the door of each of his friends.  He picked them up, laughing, and threw them away, to the horror of his servant.

But the Obeah-man was not so easily beaten.  In a few days the servant came in again with a wise visage.

‘You no drink a milk to-day, massa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, perhaps something bad in it.  You give it a cat.’

‘But I don’t want to poison the cat!’

‘Oh, dere a strange cat in a stable; me give it her.’

He did so; and the cat was dead in half an hour.

Again the fellow tried, watching when the three white men, as was their custom, should dine together, that he might poison them all.  And again the black servant foiled him, though afraid to accuse him openly.  This time it was—‘You no drink a water in a filter.’  And when the filter was searched, it was full of poison-leaves.

A third attempt the rascal made with no more success; and then vanished from Sierra Leone; considering—as the Obeah-men in the West Indies are said to hold of the Catholic priests—that ‘Buccra Padre’s Obeah was too strong for his Obeah.’

I know not how true the prevailing belief is, that some of these Obeah-men carry a drop of snake’s poison under a sharpened finger-nail, a scratch from which is death.  A similar story was told to Humboldt of a tribe of Indians on the Orinoco; and the thing is possible enough.  One story, which seemingly corroborates it, I heard, so curiously illustrative of Negro manners in Trinidad during the last generation, that I shall give it at length.  I owe it—as I do many curious facts—to the kindness of Mr. Lionel Fraser, chief of police of the Port of Spain, to whom it was told, as it here stands, by the late Mr. R–, stipendiary magistrate; himself a Creole and a man of colour:—

‘When I was a lad of about seventeen years of age, I was very frequently on a sugar-estate belonging to a relation of mine; and during crop-time particularly I took good care to be there.

‘Owing to my connection with the owner of the estate, I naturally had some authority with the people; and I did my best to preserve order amongst them, particularly in the boiling-house, where there used to be a good deal of petty theft, especially at night; for we had not then the powerful machinery which enables the planter to commence his grinding late and finish it early.

‘There was one African on the estate who was the terror of the Negroes, owing to his reputed supernatural powers as an Obeah-man.

‘This man, whom I will call Martin, was a tall, powerful Negro, who, even apart from the mysterious powers with which he was supposed to be invested, was a formidable opponent from his mere size and strength.

‘I very soon found that Martin was determined to try his authority and influence against mine; and I resolved to give him the earliest possible opportunity for doing so.

‘I remember the occasion when we first came into contact perfectly well.  It was a Saturday night, and we were boiling off.  The boiling-house was but very dimly lighted by two murky oil-lamps, the rays from which could scarcely penetrate through the dense atmosphere of steam which rose from the seething coppers.  Occasionally a bright glow from the furnace-mouths lighted up the scene for a single instant, only to leave it the next moment darker than ever.

‘It was during one of these flashes of light that I distinctly saw Martin deliberately filling a large tin pan with sugar from one of the coolers.

‘I called out to him to desist; but he never deigned to take the slightest notice of me.  I repeated my order in a louder and more angry tone; whereupon he turned his eyes upon me, and said, in a most contemptuous tone, “Chut, ti bequé: quitté moué tranquille, ou tende sinon malheur ka rivé ou.”  (Pshaw, little white boy: leave me alone, or worse will happen to you.)

‘It was the tone more than the words themselves that enraged me; and without for one moment reflecting on the great disparity between us, I made a spring from the sort of raised platform on which I stood, and snatching the panful of sugar from his hand, I flung it, sugar and all, into the tache, from which I knew nothing short of a miracle could recover it.

‘For a moment only did Martin hesitate; and then, after fumbling for one instant with his right hand in his girdle, he made a rush at me.  Fortunately for me, I was prepared; and springing back to the spot where I had before been standing, I took up a light cutlass, which I always carried about with me, and stood on the defensive.

‘I had, however, no occasion to use the weapon; for, in running towards me, Martin’s foot slipped in some molasses which had been spilt on the ground, and he fell heavily to the floor, striking his head against the corner of one of the large wooden sugar-coolers.

‘The blow stunned him for the time, and before he recovered I had left the boiling-house.

‘The next day, to my surprise, I found him excessively civil, and almost obsequious: but I noticed that he had taken a violent dislike to our head overseer, whom I shall call Jean Marie, and whom he seemed to suspect as the person who had betrayed him to me when stealing the sugar.

‘Things went on pretty quietly for some weeks, till the crop was nearly over.

‘One afternoon Jean Marie told me there was to be a Jumby-dance amongst the Africans on the estate that very night.  Now Jumby-dances were even then becoming less frequent, and I was extremely anxious to see one; and after a good deal of difficulty, I succeeded in persuading Jean Marie to accompany me to the hut wherein it was to be held.

‘It was a miserable kind of an ajoupa near the river-side; and we had some difficulty in making our way to it through the tangled dank grass and brushwood which surrounded it.  Nor was the journey rendered more pleasant by the constant rustling among this undergrowth, that reminded us that there were such things as snakes and other ugly creatures to be met with on our road.

‘Curiosity, however, urged us on; and at length we reached the ajoupa, which was built on a small open space near the river, beneath a gigantic silk-cotton tree.

‘Here we found assembled some thirty Africans, men and women, very scantily dressed, and with necklaces of beads, sharks’ teeth, dried frogs, etc., hung round their necks.  They were all squatted on their haunches outside the hut, apparently waiting for a signal to go in.

‘They did not seem particularly pleased at seeing us; and one of the men said something in African, apparently addressed to some one inside the house; for an instant after the door was flung open, and Martin, almost naked, and with his body painted to represent a skeleton, stalked forth to meet us.

‘He asked us very angrily what we wanted there, and seemed particularly annoyed at seeing Jean Marie.  However, on my repeated assurances that we only came to see what was going on, he at last consented to our remaining to see the dance; only cautioning us that we must keep perfect silence, and that a word, much more a laugh, would entail most serious consequences.

‘As long as I live I shall never forget that scene.  The hut was lighted by some eight or ten candles or lamps; and in the centre, dimly visible, was a Fêtish, somewhat of the appearance of a man, but with the head of a cock.  Everything that the coarsest fancy could invent had been done to make this image horrible; and yet it appeared to be the object of special adoration to the devotees assembled.

‘Jean Marie, to be out of the way, clambered on to one of the cross-beams that supported the roof, whilst I leaned against the side wall, as near as I could get to the aperture that served for a window, to avoid the smells, which were overpowering.

‘Martin took his seat astride of an African tom-tom or drum; and I noticed at the time that Jean Marie’s naked foot hung down from the cross-beam almost directly over Martin’s head.

‘Martin now began to chant a monotonous African song, accompanying with the tom-tom.

‘Gradually he began to quicken the measure; quicker went the words; quicker beat the drum; and suddenly one of the women sprang into the open space in front of the Fêtish.  Round and round she went, keeping admirable time with the music.

‘Quicker still went the drum.  And now the whole of the woman’s body seemed electrified by it; and, as if catching the infection, a man now joined her in the mad dance.  Couple after couple entered the arena, and a true sorcerers’ sabbath began; while light after light was extinguished, till at last but one remained; by whose dim ray I could just perceive the faint outlines of the remaining persons.

‘At this moment, from some cause or other, Jean Marie burst into a loud laugh.

‘Instantly the drum stopped; and I distinctly saw Martin raise his right hand, and, as it appeared to me, seize Jean Marie’s naked foot between his finger and thumb.

‘As he did so, Jean Marie, with a terrible scream, which I shall never forget, fell to the ground in strong convulsions.

‘We succeeded in getting him outside.  But he never spoke again; and died two hours afterwards, his body having swollen up like that of a drowned man.

‘In those days there were no inquests; and but little interest was created by the affair.  Martin himself soon after died.’

But enough of these abominations, of which I am forced to omit the worst.

That day—to go on with my own story—I left the rest of the party to go down to the court-house, while I stayed at the camp, sorry to lose so curious a scene, but too tired to face a crowded tropic court, and an atmosphere of perspiration and perjury.

Moreover, that had befallen me which might never befall me again—I had a chance of being alone in the forests; and into them I would wander, and meditate on them in silence.

So, when all had departed, I lounged awhile in the rocking-chair, watching two Negroes astride on the roof of a shed, on which they were nailing shingles.  Their heads were bare; the sun was intense; the roof on which they sat must have been of the temperature of an average frying-pan on an English fire: but the good fellows worked on, steadily and carefully, though not fast, chattering and singing, evidently enjoying the very act of living, and fattening in the genial heat.  Lucky dogs: who had probably never known hunger, certainly never known cold; never known, possibly, a single animal want which they could not satisfy.  I could not but compare their lot with that of an average English artisan.  Ah, well: there is no use in fruitless comparisons; and it is no reason that one should grudge the Negro what he has, because others, who deserve it certainly as much as he, have it not.  After all, the ancestors of these Negroes have been, for centuries past, so hard-worked, ill-fed, ill-used too—sometimes worse than ill-used—that it is hard if the descendants may not have a holiday, and take the world easy for a generation or two.

The perpetual Saturnalia in which the Negro, in Trinidad at least, lives, will surely give physical strength and health to the body, and something of cheerfulness, self-help, independence to the spirit.  If the Saturnalia be prolonged too far, and run, as they seem inclined to run, into brutality and licence, those stern laws of Nature which men call political economy will pull the Negro up short, and waken him out of his dream, soon enough and sharply enough—a ‘judgment’ by which the wise will profit and be preserved, while the fools only will be destroyed.  And meanwhile, what if in these Saturnalia (as in Rome of old) the new sense of independence manifests itself in somewhat of self-assertion and rudeness, often in insolence, especially disagreeable, because deliberate?  What if ‘You call me black fellow?  I mash you white face in,’ were the first words one heard at St. Thomas’s from a Negro, on being asked, civilly enough, by a sailor to cast off from a boat to which he had no right to be holding on?  What if a Negro now and then addresses you as simple ‘Buccra,’ while he expects you to call him ‘Sir’; or if a Negro woman, on being begged by an English lady to call to another Negro woman, answers at last, after long pretences not to hear, ‘You coloured lady! you hear dis white woman a wanting of you’?  Let it be.  We white people bullied these black people quite enough for three hundred years, to be able to allow them to play (for it is no more) at bullying us.  As long as the Negroes are decently loyal and peaceable, and do not murder their magistrates and drink their brains mixed with rum, nor send delegates to the President of Hayti to ask if he will assist them, in case of a general rising, to exterminate the whites—tricks which the harmless Negroes of Trinidad, to do them justice, never have played, or had a thought of playing—we must remember that we are very seriously in debt to the Negro, and must allow him to take out instalments of his debt, now and then, in his own fashion.  After all, we brought him here, and we have no right to complain of our own work.  If, like Frankenstein, we have tried to make a man, and made him badly; we must, like Frankenstein, pay the penalty.

So much for the Negro.  As for the coloured population—especially the educated and civilised coloured population of the towns—they stand to us in an altogether different relation.  They claim to be, and are, our kinsfolk, on another ground than that of common humanity.  We are bound to them by a tie more sacred, I had almost said more stern, than we are to the mere Negro.  They claim, and justly, to be considered as our kinsfolk and equals; and I believe, from what I have seen of them, that they will prove themselves such, whenever they are treated as they are in Trinidad.  What faults some of them have, proceed mainly from a not dishonourable ambition, mixed with uncertainty of their own position.  Let them be made to feel that they are now not a class; to forget, if possible, that they ever were one.  Let any allusion to the painful past be treated, not merely as an offence against good manners, but as what it practically is, an offence against the British Government; and that Government will find in them, I believe, loyal citizens and able servants.

But to go back to the forest.  I sauntered forth with cutlass and collecting-box, careless whither I went, and careless of what I saw; for everything that I could see would be worth seeing.  I know not that I found many rare or new things that day.  I recollect, amid the endless variety of objects, Film-ferns of various delicate species, some growing in the moss tree-trunks, some clasping the trunk itself by horizontal lateral fronds, while the main rachis climbed straight up many feet, thus embracing the stem in a network of semi-transparent green Guipure lace.  I recollect, too, a coarse low fern 189 on stream-gravel which was remarkable, because its stem was set with thick green prickles.  I recollect, too, a dead giant tree, the ruins of which struck me with awe.  The stump stood some thirty feet high, crumbling into tinder and dust, though its death was so recent that the creepers and parasites had not yet had time to lay hold of it, and around its great spur-roots lay what had been its trunk and head, piled in stacks of rotten wood, over which I scrambled with some caution, for fear my leg, on breaking through, might be saluted from the inside by some deadly snake.  The only sign of animal life, however, I found about the tree, save a few millipedes and land snails, were some lizard-eggs in a crack, about the size of those of a humming-bird.

I scrambled down on gravelly beaches, and gazed up the green avenues of the brooks.  I sat amid the Balisiers and Aroumas, above still blue pools, bridged by huge fallen trunks, or with wild Pines of half a dozen kinds set in rows: I watched the shoals of fish play in and out of the black logs at the bottom: I gave myself up to the simple enjoyment of looking, careless of what I looked at, or what I thought about it all.  There are times when the mind, like the body, had best feed, gorge if you will, and leave the digestion of its food to the unconscious alchemy of nature.  It is as unwise to be always saying to oneself, ‘Into what pigeon-hole of my brain ought I to put this fact, and what conclusion ought I to draw from it?’ as to ask your teeth how they intend to chew, and your gastric juice how it intends to convert your three courses and a dessert into chyle.  Whether on a Scotch moor or in a tropic forest, it is well at times to have full faith in Nature; to resign yourself to her, as a child upon a holiday; to be still and let her speak.  She knows best what to say.

And yet I could not altogether do it that day.  There was one class of objects in the forest which I had set my heart on examining, with all my eyes and soul; and after a while, I scrambled and hewed my way to them, and was well repaid for a quarter of an hour’s very hard work.

I had remarked, from the camp, palms unlike any I had seen before, starring the opposite forest with pale gray-green leaves.  Long and earnestly I had scanned them through the glasses.  Now was the time to see them close, and from beneath.  I soon guessed (and rightly) that I was looking at that Palma de Jagua, 190 which excited—and no wonder—the enthusiasm of the usually unimpassioned Humboldt.  Magnificent as the tree is when its radiating leaves are viewed from above, it is even more magnificent when you stand beneath it.  The stem, like that of the Coconut, usually curves the height of a man ere it rises in a shaft for fifty or sixty feet more.  From the summit of that shaft springs a crown—I had rather say, a fountain—of pinnated leaves; only eight or ten of them; but five-and-twenty feet long each.  For three-fourths of their length they rise at an angle of 45° or more; for the last fourth they fall over, till the point hangs straight down; and each leaflet, which is about two feet and a half long, falls over in a similar curve, completing the likeness of the whole to a fountain of water, or a gush of rockets.  I stood and looked up, watching the innumerable curled leaflets, pale green above and silver-gray below, shiver and rattle amid the denser foliage of the broad-leaved trees; and then went on to another and to another, to stare up again, and enjoy the mere shape of the most beautiful plant I had ever beheld, excepting always the Musa Ensete, from Abyssinia, in the Palm-house at Kew.  Truly spoke Humboldt, of this or a closely allied species, ‘Nature has lavished every beauty of form on the Jagua Palm.’