Skin Folk (22 page)

Carmen laughed. “And the soucouyant, don’t forget that. My mother used to tell me that one too.” She smiled a strange smile.
“It didn’t really frighten me, though. I always wondered what it would be like to take your skin off, leave your worries behind,
and fly so free.”

“Well, you sit there so and wonder. I have to keep researching this paper. The back issues come in yet?”

“Right here.” Sighing with the effort of bending over, Carmen reached under the desk and pulled out a stack of slim bound
volumes of
Huracan,
a Caribbean literary journal that was now out of print. A smell of wormwood and age rose from them. In the 1940s,
Huracan
had published a series of issues on folktales. Jacky hoped that these would provide her with more research material.

“Thanks, Carmen.” She picked up the volumes and looked around for somewhere to sit. There was an empty private carrel, but
there was also a free space at one of the large study tables. Terry was sitting there, head bent over a fat textbook. The
navy blue of his shirt suited his skin, made it glow like a newly unwrapped chocolate. Jacky smiled. She went over to the
desk, tapped Terry on the shoulder. “I could sit beside you, Terry?”

Startled, he looked up to see who had interrupted him. His handsome face brightened with welcome. “Uh, sure, no problem. Let
me get…” He leapt to pull out the chair for her, overturning his own in the process. At the crash, everyone in the library
looked up. “Shit.” He bent over to pick up the chair. His glasses fell from his face. Pens and pencils rained from his shirt
pocket.

Jacky giggled. She put her books down, retrieved Terry’s glasses just before he would have stepped on them. “Here.” She put
the spectacles onto his face, let the warmth of her fingertips linger briefly at his temples.

Terry stepped back, sat quickly in the chair, even though it was still at an odd angle from the table. He crossed one leg
over the other. “Sorry,” he muttered bashfully. He bent over, reaching awkwardly for the scattered pens and pencils.

“Don’t fret, Terry. You just collect yourself and come and sit back down next to me.” Jacky glowed with the feeling of triumph.
Half an hour of studying beside him, and she knew she’d have a date for lunch. She sat, opened a copy of Huracan, and read:

SOUCOUYANT/OL’ HIGUE
(Trinidad/Guyana)

Caribbean equivalent of the vampire myth. See also “Azeman.” “Soucouyant,” or “blood-sucker,” derives from the French verb
“sucer,” to suck.“Ol’ Higue” is the Guyanese creole expression for an old hag, or witch woman. The soucouyant is usually an
old, evil-tempered woman who removes her skin at night, hides it, and then changes into a ball of fire. She flies through
the air, searching for homes in which there are babies. She then enters the house through an open window or a keyhole, goes
into the child’s room, and sucks the life from its body. She may visit one child’s bedside a number of times, draining a little
more life each time, as the frantic parents search for a cure, and the child gets progressively weaker and finally dies. Or
she may kill all at once.

The smell of the soup Granny was cooking made Jacky’s mouth water. She sat at Granny’s wobbly old kitchen table, tracing her
fingers along a familiar burn, the one shaped like a handprint. The wooden table had been Granny’s as long as Jacky could
remember. Grandpa had made the table for Granny long before Jacky was born. Diabetes had finally been the death of him. Granny
had brought only the kitchen table and her clothing with her when she moved in with Jacky and her mother.

Granny looked up from the cornmeal and flour dough she was kneading. “Like you idle, doux-doux,” she said. She slid the bowl
of dough over to Jacky. “Make the dumplings then, nuh?”

Jacky took the bowl over to the stove, started pulling off pieces of dough and forming it into little cakes.

“Andrew make this table for me with he own two hand,” Granny said.

“I know. You tell me already.”

Granny ignored her. “Forty-two years we married, and every Sunday, I chop up the cabbage for the salt-fish on this same table.
Forty-two years we eat Sunday morning breakfast right here so. Saltfish and cabbage with a little small-leaf thyme from the
back garden, and fry dumpling and cocoa-tea. I miss he too bad. You grandaddy did full up me life, make me feel young.”

Jacky kept forming the dumplings for the soup. Granny came over to the stove and stirred the large pot with her wooden spoon.
She blew on the spoon, cautiously tasted some of the liquid in it, and carefully floated a whole, ripe Scotch Bonnet pepper
on top of the bubbling mixture. “Jacky, when you put the dumpling-them in, don’t break the pepper, all right? Otherwise this
soup going to make we bawl tonight for pepper.”

“Mm. Ain’t Mummy used to help you make soup like this on a Saturday?”

“Yes, doux-doux. Just like this.” Granny hobbled back to sit at the kitchen table. Tiny, graying braids were escaping the
confinement of her stiff black wig. Her knobby legs looked frail in their too-beige stockings. Like so many of the old women
that Jacky knew, Granny always wore stockings rolled down below the hems of her worn flower print shifts. “I thought you was
going out tonight,” Granny said. “With Terry.”

“We break up,” Jacky replied bitterly. “He say he not ready to settle down.” She dipped the spoon into the soup, raised it
to her mouth, spat it out when it burned her mouth. “Backside!”

Granny watched, frowning. “Greedy puppy does choke. You mother did always taste straight from the hot stove, too. I was forever
telling she to take time. You come in just like she, always in a hurry. Your eyes bigger than your stomach.”

Jacky sucked in an irritable breath. “Granny, Carmen have a baby boy last night. Eight pounds, four ounces. Carmen make she
first baby already. I past thirty years old, and I ain’t find nobody yet.”

“You will find, Jacky. But you can’t hurry people so. Is how long you and Terry did stepping out?”

Jacky didn’t respond.

“Eh, Jacky? How long?”

“Almost a month.”

“Is scarcely two weeks, Jacky, don’t lie to me. The boy barely learn where to find your house, and you was pestering he to
settle down already. Me and your grandfather court for two years before we went to Parson to marry we.”

When Granny started like this, she could go on for hours. Sullenly, Jacky began to drop the raw dumplings one by one into
the fragrant, boiling soup.

“Child, you pretty, you have flirty ways, boys always coming and looking for you. You could pick and choose until you find
the right one. Love will come. But take time. Love your studies, look out for your friends-them. Love your old Granny,” she
ended softly.

Hot tears rolled down Jacky’s cheeks. She watched the dumplings bobbing back to the surface as they cooked; little warm, yellow
suns.

“A new baby,” Granny mused. “I must go and visit Carmen, take she some crab and callaloo to strengthen she blood. Hospital
food does make you weak, oui.”

I need more time, more life. I need a baby breath. Must wait till people sleeping, though. Nobody awake to see a fireball
flying up from the bedroom window.

The skin only confining me. I could feel it getting old, binding me up inside it. Sometimes I does just feel to take it off
and never put it back on again, oui?

Three
A.M.
’Fore day morning. Only me and the duppies going to be out this late. Up from out of the narrow bed, slip off the nightie,
slip off the skin.

Oh, God, I does be so free like this! Hide the skin under the bed, and fly out the jalousie window. The night air cool, and
I flying so high. I know how many people it have in each house, and who sleeping. I could feel them, skin-bag people, breathing
out their life, one-one breath. I know where it have a new one, too: down on Vanderpool Lane. Yes, over here. Feel it, the
new one, the baby. So much life in that little body.

Fly down low now, right against the ground. Every door have a crack, no matter how small.

Right here. Slip into the house. Turn back into a woman. Is a nasty feeling, walking around with no skin, wet flesh dripping
onto the floor, but I get used to it after so many years.

Here. The baby bedroom. Hear the young breath heating up in he lungs, blowing out, wasting away. He ain’t know how to use
it; I go take it.

Nice baby boy, so fat. Drink, soucouyant. Suck in he warm, warm life. God, it sweet. It sweet can’t done. It sweet.

No more? I drink all already? But what a way this baby dead fast!

Childbirth was once a risky thing for both mother and child. Even when they both survived the birth process, there were many
unknown infectious diseases to which newborns were susceptible. Oliphant theorizes that the soucouyant lore was created in
an attempt to explain infant deaths that would have seemed mysterious in more primitive times. Grieving parents could blame
their loss on people who wished them ill.Women tend to have longer life spans than men, but in an even more superstitious
age where life was hard and brief, old women in a community could seem sinister. It must have been easy to believe that the
women were using sorcerous means to prolong their lives, and how better to do that than to steal the lifeblood of those who
were very young?

Dozing, Jacky leaned against Granny’s knees. Outside, the leaves of the julie mango tree rustled and sighed in the evening
breeze. Granny tapped on Jacky’s shoulder, passed her a folded section of newspaper with a column circled.
Births/Deaths.
Granny took a bitter pleasure in keeping track of whom she’d outlived each week. Sleepily, Jacky focused on the words on
the page:

Deceased: Raymond George Lewis, 5 days old, of natural causes. Son of Michael and Carmen, Diego Martin, Port of Spain. Funeral
service 5:00 p.m., November 14, Church of the Holy Redeemer.

“Jesus, Granny. Carmen’s baby! But he was healthy, don’t it?”

“I don’t know, doux-doux. They say he just stop breathing in the night. Just so. What a sad thing. We must go to the funeral,
pay we respects.”