The Jumbies
by Tracey Baptiste
Algonquin Young Readers,2015
240 Pages
Middle Grade (8-12 and up)
Corinne La Mer’s father goes out to fish each morning. She lost her mother recently, but Corinne remembers her by picking the unnaturally succulent oranges from the tree in her backyard that her mother had planted tended.
A seed is a promise, a guarantee. Plant it and watch it grow.
While she sells these oranges at the market one day, she sees a witch selling love potions, but has no idea the old woman will become very important to her, very soon.
Corinne forms the hub of a group of kids; a timid younger girl named Dru (Drupatee Sarena Rootsingh, who has six older brothers and sisters,) and two boys who have been orphaned and live in a cave in the nearby hills, Bouki and Malik. Malik doesn’t speak much, and their skin is usually colored the red of the mountain clay. Corinne won the friendship of the two rough-and-tumble boys by outsmarting them. With scorpions.
One day a beautiful, exotic woman that no one knows shows up at the small local market, and accosts the witch, asking for special magic. What was her business there? Where did this woman come from? Corinne soon finds out when the woman shows up in her house offering to cook lunch for her father. In fact, the woman, Severine, starts coming around quite often.
It turns out Severine is a jumbie who has disguised herself, the sister of Corinne’s deceased mother, and she wants revenge for her sister being taken away from her. Corinne’s dad is soon enchanted, now under Severine’s control.
Corinne could see there were insects crawling up and around Severine’s body. Hundreds of millipedes and centipedes, cockroaches, and beetles crawled in and out of the crags of her body. They dashed in and out of the fine fur and bored their way through her chest, so that Corinne could see straight through it like an old rotten tree.
Can the rag-tag band of kids figure out how to free her father, Pierre, before the changes Severine makes become permanent? Once Corinne and her father are out of the way, Severine plans to wipe all the humans off her island! Unless… unless Corinne will join her, part of the family of jumbies who hide in the shadows of the forest.
Corrine’s mother had given her a necklace that Severine is afraid to touch. Is it the key to stopping her? Alas, by the time she asks the question, it is too late. Severine is able to steal the amulet and tie it onto a branch off the top of a high cliff that cannot be reached by foot.
When the children go to the witch to beg help, Corrine learns a secret about herself, but the witch cannot aid them in any way. She is sworn not to help either side more than the other, and she has already intervened on behalf of the humans once.
”I’m not like regular people, either,” the witch said. “Will you be trying to get rid of me next?”
When Corinne declines Severine’s request to join her family, Severine begins a nightmarish war against the humans that have invaded her home. Jumbies attack the village at night, stealing away children, killing people. They lived on the island long before people came. It belongs to them. During the fight, the boys are almost taken by a La Diabless, a woman with one hoofed leg. Merciless creatures crowd in from the forest, and there seems no escape.
All four of them stood rooted to the dirt road as the lagahoo panted at them. Big slops of saliva plopped to the ground from its deep-red mouth. Its teeth were the size of kitchen knives, and they gleamed in the light of the rising moon. All at once the creature crouched down, about to pounce.
Baptiste paints a picture of a caribbean island rife with mythic creatures like lagahoos, douens, and soucouyants. A fishing village blessed with sweet orange trees and night-time rituals for the dead where children run about gathering soft candle wax for molding into dolls. Its beauty is as strong as its danger. The sea is recognized as an entity itself, which never keeps anything, but is alive with the spirit of Corinne’s grand-pere. The story reflects how the people and the jumbies, different families or not, are all intertwined as part of nature and the life of the island and the sea.
“Their kind, your kind, is there a difference?”
“They are trying to kill us!” Dru said.
“They belong to this island, child. You cannot get rid of them. They are part of it.”
Related Posts:
The Jumbies
Rise of the Jumbies
The Jumbie God’s Revenge
Interview with Tracey Baptiste
