Olga - A Daughter's Tale (10 page)

“
I’m going to turn the tables on her”.

“
Olga, get Cassie. We’re going to see Annie Harvey.”

Annie Harvey’s the woman we go to for herbal remedies sometimes when we were ill. Well, as everyone knows, she also practises Obeah and Mammie wants Annie to work Obeah on Sydney to make him come home.

But I was worried about us going there because the punishment for practising Obeah is very harsh if you are caught by the police. It can be 20 lashes and a prison sentence of six months with hard labour if you are found guilty and even if you’re a woman.

I tried to talk Mammie out of it, but she was determined to go.

Annie Harvey makes quite an impression and is still a very striking woman in her white turban and red cloak. I was surprised when I saw her house, it’s rather nice, with a little white fence and pretty flowers in the garden. The sort of house I’d like myself one day. Anyway, Annie took us out to a shack in the backyard.

Inside it was dark, and it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust before I could see properly. You couldn’t see a single bit of the ceiling because there were dried herbs hanging from it everywhere.

There were wooden shelves on one side of the room with different sized coloured bottles and some were full of liquid, but others only half full. I recognised some zinc powder and ingredients for making a “medicine bath” and poultices. There was also a tin of Epsom salts sitting on one of the shelves, which I thought strange, because we have that at home.

There was another shelf with some pimento leaves and pieces of logwood bark, bird feathers, broken egg shells and some ashes. Cassie told me later she saw a chicken’s foot and a lizard’s tail.

Mammie explained to Annie Harvey that she wanted Sydney to return to the family. He had deserted us in favour of a bad woman who was a danger to him.

“
We wanted to protect him from this evil woman who has cast a spell on him and taken him away from us” said Mammie to Annie.

Annie Harvey left the shack for a minute and when she returned she was holding a bunch of green leaves which she put into a wooden bowl and with a small piece of wood, rounded at the end; then she pounded the leaves together until they turned into a thick green paste.

Then she sprinkled some ashes into the paste and from a small blue bottle around her neck she sprinkled just two drops of a dark brown liquid into the mixture and then mixed it up again. Each time she mixed the paste she talked in a strange language that none of us had heard before. She covered the paste with some muslin cloth and then wrapped it in brown paper and tied it up with string and told Mammie to put it in Sydney’s food and he would come home.

On the way home, Mammie said we were going to stop at the Holy Trinity Cathedral to offer prayers to Jesus to pray for Sydney’s return. When I asked why after having just come from the balm yard, Mammie said she was covering all options.

When we got home Mammie said she was sure Cassie our maid would tell cook that we’d been to Annie Harvey’s balm yard and worked Obeah on him.

“
It won’t be long before Sydney comes homes, but, in the meantime, Olga, you’re going to have to put the paste into Sydney’s food.”. I knew it!

When Annie Harvey gave Mammie the paste, I thought to myself, guess who’s going to have to do that little job Olga”.

“
I can’t do it, I’ll get caught” I told her.

“
Choose your time, when he’s out, make a nice sandwich for him, his favourite, pork with apple and ginger. Spread the paste in between the slices of meat or mix it in with the apples.

“
You can do it Olga”.

“
Mammie, if he catches me I’ll get a whipping”

“
If he catches you, I’ll tell him it’s my fault. Please Olga, we need him”.

So I agreed to do it and, lady luck was on my side.

Sydney was expecting a shipment of bicycles to arrive from London the next day and fortunately for me the paper work was not in order, so he had to spend hours down on the docks sorting it out so by the time he got back to the shop he was ravenously hungry. I produced the sandwiches each filled with thick juicy pieces of pork, sliced apple, ginger and the paste and he just gobbled the sandwiches and, obviously, never tasted anything unusual.

Mammie was so happy when I told her. Oh I do hope it works, with all our wages going into the household pot, we have hardly anything to spend on ourselves and Sydney has a whole heap of money, tons of it, he’s just being nasty by making us all suffer.

******

Olga’s Diary

Dear Diary

Sydney and the Burglar:
It’s the middle of the afternoon and, apart from a young woman and an old man, I’m alone in the Cathedral, the only place I know that is peaceful, quiet, and cool. Half my life’s been spent in this church, going to mass, confession, benediction, the stations of the cross. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, Jesus is very important to me and I come to church because I want to be close to Him, or, when I want to think, like now. I wonder just how long Sydney and cook’s relationship has been going on.

I bet you it started with the robbery that time Sydney was working late in the shop. There was a knock on the door one evening and when Sydney opened it there was a tall black man with a handkerchief around the lower half of his face. He pushed Sydney back and forced his way inside and put a gun to Sydney’s face threatening to shoot him if he said a word. Then another man came into the house and started to ransack the place looking for money which Sydney usually kept on the premises, but he couldn’t find any money and said so to the man holding the gun.

This turned the man with the gun’s attention away from Sydney momentarily, so Sydney tried to grab the gun and there was a struggle when suddenly the gun went off and the robber was shot dead. The second man immediately ran from the shop and Sydney called the police who recognised the dead man as Alphonse Williams and said the other man was probably his brother Didnot.

Didnot was soon picked up by the police and, because he wasn’t wearing a mask, Sydney easily identified him as the second man.

Sydney was charged with the manslaughter of Alphonse but at the end of the trial was found not guilty because the jury said it was self-defence and the law says a man is entitled to protect himself.

And that was that, thought Sydney, although to prevent any further thieving Sydney resorted to Obeah.

I bet that’s where cook came in. He pinned bits of red rag and some bird feathers to the front door of the shop. If any would-be thief saw these items Sydney said it would be enough to deter them from going into the shop.

But then strange things started happening. A fire broke out one Sunday afternoon, behind the main shop, in the workshop where bicycles are repaired. Mrs Clarkson, who lives next door, saw a small blaze in the workshop and raised the alarm. The fire brigade arrived very quickly, put out the blaze so not too much damage was done.

And then something else happened that really scared Sydney.

He told us he was walking home one night when he felt warm air on the back of his neck which he described like someone’s hot breath. This happened more than once and cook said she had found out that Didnot Williams had set a duppy on Sydney and that an Obeah man must have caught his shadow and now the shadow will do whatever the Obeah man demands. According to cook the best way to stop the duppy from following Sydney was to carry a piece of chalk and, whenever he felt the hot breath on the back of his neck, Sydney was to make an x on the ground with the chalk, representing the figure ten.

Cook said duppies can only count up to nine and will spend the rest of the night trying to count to x.

She said duppies are clever, but I wasn’t too sure about that if they can’t count any higher than nine. But she said they are because they can do similar things to living people, like talking, laughing, whistling and singing, even cooking. That made me wonder if cook was a duppy too.

Anyway, believe it or not, putting a cross on the ground worked for a while and Sydney stopped feeling warm air on his neck and he was more confident walking home.

But then one lovely clear moonlit night Sydney and Ruby were walking home together and they saw a big owl sitting in the cotton tree outside Mission House. When cook heard she got everybody worked up again and said that was a very bad sign because the duppy was still on Sydney. She said he had now to find a powerful Obeah man to remove the curse or he would be in serious trouble. Of course, cook knew one and Sydney agreed to go with her but said I had to go with him. I said I’d only go if Dolly could come as well. And reluctantly Dolly agreed.

So off I go again to another balm yard and went into a very dark, smelly room. I remember it only had one window and the light couldn’t get through it was so dirty and grimy. Oh, Lord, was I terrified.

The Obeah man’s name was Ali Acquabar, an old man, with a short sharp looking face. He sat at a table in the middle of the room and beside his chair was a walking stick with the head of a serpent on the top. He told us to sit in the chairs facing him. I noticed a nail with three different size rosaries made out of bloodstained beans hanging from it and there was a mirror on a wall. On the table was a pack of cards and a dark blue piece of cloth with some sulphur, what looked like human hair, small bones and feathers.

By now I just wanted to get out of there but, once again, my courage failed me and I stayed.

There were two other chairs and on one of these he put a glass and filled it with water and put a 1/- piece in the glass and on the other he put a candle which he had taken from a small bag nearby and asked Sydney to light it. Ali then opened a pack of cards, which he separated into four piles.

He selected one and said to Sydney “this is death”; then selected another and said “this is Jesus Christ”;

Then he selected a third and said “this is the Ghost” and with the fourth card he looked Sydney straight in the eye and said

“
Your life is in danger”.

Then he took a bottle of rum off a shelf and threw some of it around the room.

“
I am feeding my ghosts” he chanted and then looked in the magic mirror and turned to Sydney.

“
It is a pity you are not able to see, if you could, you would behold two duppies who are working on the case against you”. My brother is a tough man, you now, and I didn’t think he could scare easily. But, sitting on that chair, he looked very frightened to me.

Ali looked in the glass of water on the other chair and said

“
It is the brother that is after your life. I charge you £5 to take off the ghosts”.

Sydney gave Ali his money and Ali told him they would all have to go to Mission House “to run the duppies out”. Well, we trooped out and walked home.

When we got there Ali told us he would go into the house first and Dolly, cook and I should follow in a few minutes but Sydney was to wait outside until he was called. When we went in Ali had already lit three different colour candles in our hallway and then he took out three bottles – one containing some seeds, one with some kind of powder in it and the third with some dirty looking liquid in it. He threw some of the liquid and some of the powder into a cup which cook had handed him and he struck a match, lit the mixture in the cup and gave it to cook to take outside and bury it at the gateway to the house.

Ali then asked Sydney for a further £5 as the job was now completed. The potion was buried at the gateway and this would ensure that no more duppies bothered anyone who lived in this house.

After that Sydney was more relaxed because one Obeah man had been knocked out by another and the more I think about it the more sure I am that was when things started to happen between the cook and Sydney.

******

Today started with some astonishing news in the newspaper. Several passengers on the train from Kingston to Montego Bay were seriously injured and taken to hospital when the train they were travelling on derailed at high speed. A trackman, who witnessed the accident, said the train was going very fast, so much so that he said to the railman next to him “that the train is moving as fast as an aeroplane.”

Passengers reported that they had to hold on to something when the train went round bends because it was going so fast and the carriages were wobbling badly.

What made this news so startling was that Olga should have been travelling on that train. She had wanted to spend the weekend with Cissie and Dyke but because of the riots in Kingston she didn’t want to leave me and her sisters alone, even though Boysie had promised to look in on us from time to time, assuming, of course, he could get through the mobs uninjured himself. So she didn’t make the journey. Olga has a guardian angel, I’m sure of it.

The rest of the news is still very bad. Industry is in decline and conditions are terrible. Unemployment is high, there is irregular work, wages are low, and there is poor housing, poor nutrition and a high cost of living. This, of course, only applies to the blacks. We middle and the white upper classes still manage to live quite well.