The Duppy
Part One
“Wanda is a bit of a handful,” Mrs. Beaton warned Melda when she hired her. “We try not to spoil her, but she’s at that difficult age, you understand, just coming into her teens.”
Melda did not understand. In Jamaica she’d been the fourth child out of six, and she’d been working in one way or another since she’d turned eleven. Nobody spoiled her, unless getting an extra sweetsop from her mother when she finished one of her chores early counted as spoiling. But she said nothing to the white lady. The wages Mrs. Beaton offered were higher than she had dared hope for when the agency sent her to the duplex penthouse on Park Avenue, and because she’d have her own room, and eat the same food Rose, the Irish cook, provided for the family, she’d be able to send a good deal of money home to her family every month. Putting up with Wanda, however difficult she was, would not be a problem. If the girl didn’t mind her manners, she’d be very sorry.
Melda was heavyset, but she carried her weight well. She was thirty-three, and unmarried; she’d had her share of admirers in Kingston, but most of them were bad chargies in dreads who smoked ganja all the time and said they were rastas, but didn’t know anything about Haile Selassie or the Rastafarian religion. Melda stayed away from ganja. She didn’t even smoke cigarettes, and she shunned alcohol. She had to keep her body pure and her spirit clear, or her conjuring might go wrong. Of course she told Mrs. Beaton nothing about her real life as a Duppy Conqueror. American tourists who visited Jamaica thought Obeah was a quaint native superstition, and that had been fine with Melda. It had meant she could get on with her true business without arousing suspicion. During her interview with Mrs. Beaton, she learned that the lady had never been to the island, though she said that as a girl, she had loved Harry Belafonte’s calypso songs. Harry was from Trinidad, but Melda didn’t correct her. Why bother? She was a nice white American lady who lived in a nice white American world and had no idea of what went on outside it – or under it. Melda knew there were other worlds. She was of Nigerian descent, an Igbo, and in her conjuring she spoke to the ancient spirits who ruled those worlds.
The apartment had a long hall that led from Rose’s kitchen to the dining room, which was furnished with a polished mahogany table and enough chairs to seat twelve, for Mr. Beaton, a Wall Street financier, often gave parties for his business associates and their families. The Beatons were certainly rich, but there was nothing gaudy about their home. The furniture and carpets were attractive, but a little worn, and there was no expensive decoration. The few pictures on the walls were old black and white prints of horses, and country scenes showing men doing farm chores – carrying buckets of water, hoeing in small gardens, and chopping wood. The men were all white, and wore old-fashioned clothes. One picture showed a man standing in the door to a barn and holding his wide-brimmed hat on with both hands. Melda could barely understand the caption: “Just then a blast o’ Januar’ wind/Blew hinsel’ in on Robin.” Maybe people used to talk that way somewhere in America, but Melda doubted it. It sounded like British country talk, or maybe Scottish. A Scottish family that owned a banana plantation outside Kingston, they talked that way.
There was one thing that seemed out of place in the sparsely decorated apartment. On a table in the anteroom, across from the elevator, there was a glass case about three feet high, which held a miniature knight in armor, mounted on an armored horse and carrying a lance, like one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table in the picture book Melda had read as a child. The armor of the rider and his horse was highly polished, not a speck of rust anywhere, and Melda hoped she wouldn’t be expected to keep it shiny.
Midway down the hall was Melda’s room, small, but perfectly adequate to her needs, with a comfortable bed, a small bathroom, a bureau, a clothes-closet, and a little table with a chair situated under a window that offered a splendid view of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the buildings marching down to the East River like so many tall sentinels keeping guard over the neighborhood’s wealth and privilege.
After Mrs. Beaton explained Melda’s duties and presented her with her maid’s uniform – a crisply-starched gray blouse and matching skirt, and a pair of white shoes with rubber soles, the kind nurses wore – she told her to go into her room and rest for awhile, because Wanda hadn’t gotten back from school yet, and dinner wasn’t until eight. The agency had given Mrs. Beaton Melda’s sizes, and the clothes all fit, even the shoes. She lay down on the bed in her slip for a moment, for she was weary after the bus trip from her neighborhood in Queens to the agency in Manhattan, and the taxi ride to the Beatons’ apartment. She noticed that there was a clock-radio on the bedside table, and she thought of trying to find a station that played reggae. But she didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Beaton, who had looked weary herself. More than weary – the woman seemed haunted by something terrible. She would have been pretty, but there were worry-lines in her forehead and deep grooves beside her mouth which made her look brittle, like a cracked tea cup. And there was a faint blueish-yellow mark on her right cheekbone that might have been an old bruise.
After a few minutes, Melda got up, dressed in her uniform, and unpacked her suitcase. She hung her blouses and skirts on hangers in the closet, and put the rest of her clothes in the bureau. Hidden in the right toe of her best pair of pumps, where it had escaped the snooping of the TSA luggage inspectors, was a small red bag secured to a loop of string. It was made of kente cloth with a pattern whose stitches resembled spiders. The spider was Anansi, called the Trickster because she lured flies into her web. But she was also a duppy-catcher, snagging the malevolent ghosts of people who died untimely to keep them from doing harm to the living. In her conjuring work on the island, Melda had snared many duppies by invoking Anansi, and she kept each one in spider-stitched kente bags until it was time to destroy it by throwing it into a fire she kindled on the first night of the new moon.
But the bag in her shoe held a small, black, dried frog, a powerful mojo that warned her when duppies and other evil spirits were around. She looped the bag around her neck so that it hung between her breasts. It felt warmer that it should have, and it twitched, as if the frog had come alive and started moving. She caught her breath. Somewhere close by there was a duppy, certain sure.
“Anyone home?” The distant voice was a girl’s, but there was an edge to it, as if the girl was mad about something. The bag twitched again, harder. Melda took several deep breaths to stop her heart to stop racing, opened the door of her room, and stepped into the hall.
“Hello?” she sang out, walking toward the kitchen. “Is that Wanda?”
The girl came out of the kitchen. She was tall, and although Melda thought she was too thin for her height, she was beautiful. She had her mother’s creamy complexion, shining black hair that fell to her shoulders, and sea-blue eyes. But her expression was cold.
“Oh,” she said, “you must be the new maid. Fix me a sandwich. It’s Rose’s day off, and I’m starving.”
Melda’s expression went just as cold. “I am Melda Johnson.You will call me Miss Melda. I will make you a sandwich if you say please.” The girl’s mouth fell open. “Close your mouth. You look like a fool.”
“You can’t talk to me like that!” Wanda snapped.
“’Deed I can, and I will go on talkin’ to you in this manner till you stop kickin’ up rumpus.”
“I’ll tell my father how rude you are! He’ll fire you!”
“Go ahead and tell him. True fact, missy, I don’t like you any better than you like me, and I’d rather get another job with a family that doesn’t have a spiteful daughter.”
“I’m not spiteful!” the girl said, and her lower lip began to tremble.
Melda softened her tone. “No, dearie, you’re right. I misspoke. You’re afflicted, and I feel sorry for you. So we’ll talk to your father together. But for now, what kind of sandwich would you like?”
“Peanut butter and jelly, if it isn’t too much trouble, Miss Melda,” Wanda said, chastened. “On whole wheat, if we have any. The bread box is right on the counter there.”
She could have looked in the bread box herself, Melda thought, or even made the sandwich, but the duppy still had charge of her. At least her voice had settled down to a sweet soprano. There was goodness in her, praise Jah. The duppy wasn’t as powerful as Melda had feared.
She made the sandwich, put it on a plate, and poured a glass of milk. Wanda sat down at the kitchen table to eat, and Melda sat across from her with a glass of water. One of the things she found magical about New York was that the water was pure and good right out of the tap.
“What’s it like in Jamaica?” Wanda asked.
“Oh, my, big question!” said Melda, laughing. “Depend on where you are in the island. Kingston’s a big city, got all kinds of people, rich and poor, workin’ in offices, takin’ care of business, drivin’ buses and jitneys, all that kinda thing. In Ocho Rios they make the best rum in the world, been doin’ it since pirate days. Longshore, folks fish, and inland they mostly grow cotton, fruit and vegetables, raise pigs and goats. Up in the mountains, what we call the Cockpit Country, where the Maroons used to live, they say there’s still some bandits, but I think that’s just to scare tourists, because the Cockpit Country be very rough, hard to travel in – who would the bandits rob, eh?”
Wanda finished her sandwich and dabbed her lips daintily with her napkin. She wore red lipstick and heavy black eye-liner, Melda noticed, with a touch of disapproval. “I’d like to go to the Cockpit Country,” she said.
Melda regarded her gravely for a moment. “Yes, happen you would,” she said. “You think you’re a bandit yourself, yah?”
The girl smirked. “I’ve never robbed anybody. But I did take something once. Or rather, I took it back, because it was mine to begin with.” Her eyes went from sea-blue to ebony, and the smirk widened to a sharkish grin. “But that was a long time ago,” she finished, the toothy grin turning back into a smile. “I don’t need to take anything now. My father gives me everything I want. Mummy thinks he spoils me, but I like being spoiled. Isn’t that awful, Miss Melda?”
“Oh, every girl likes being spoiled, Wanda. But mind you, things change in this life. Best to learn to do for yourself, for the time when other people can’t do for you.”
“That’s what Emerson said. I’m studying him in American Literature. He wrote an essay called ‘Self-Reliance.’”
“I’d like to read it,” Melda said.
The girl looked confused. “But you…” she began.
“But I what?”
“I mean, you’re a maid.”
“I know how to read, missy. I graduated from Arden High School in Kingston.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“Of course you did. I work as a maid, I’m black, so I must be ignorant.”
“I’m not a racist!”
“Everybody’s a racist, Wanda. I don’t like white people very much, true fact. But I try to see the good in them, and ignore the bad.”
“Ah, there you are!” came a male voice from the kitchen door. “Hello, princess! And you must be Melda Johnson.”
“Daddy, hi!” Wanda said. “Miss Melda was telling me about the Cockpit Country.”
“Is that where pilots learn to fly?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s in Jamaica, where Miss Melda comes from. It’s full of bandits.”
Simon Beaton was considerably older than his wife, but still very handsome, with silver hair he wore long and swept back from his forehead, a tall, trim body, and a face marked by deep furrows running from his nose to the corners of his thin lips. Not laugh-lines, Melda decided.
“I thought Jamaica was better known for pirates than for bandits,” he said. “There’s a wonderful book, can’t remember the author’s name, called ‘A High Wind In Jamaica.’ It’s about some English children back in the colonial days who get kidnapped by pirates.”
“That book I know, Mr. Beaton. The children are crueler than the pirates.”
Mr. Beaton chuckled. “You’re right. Too bad for the pirates. Children are capable of extraordinary cruelty, especially when they don’t get what they want. Right, Wanda?” He put his arm around the girl and rested his hand, not on her waist, but on her bottom. She shrugged out of the embrace.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Daddy,” she said, reverting to her cold tone. She darted out of the kitchen and down the hall. Melda heard a door open and shut. The girl must have gone up to her room. Bad mischief going on in this family, Melda thought. Not just because of the duppy.