Today, I'd like to welcome Bish Denham to The Warrior Muse!
Thanks for letting me haunt your blogShannon !
Today I’m going to tell you a little bit about jumbies.
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Thanks for letting me haunt your blog
A Jumbie, jumby or jumbee, is a spirit or demon in Caribbean
folklore which has its roots in Africa . In Jamaica
they’re called duppies. Jumbies can be threatening, mischievous, or even
malevolent. In some places they are thought to cause blight on plants or make
the dogs bark at night.
Traditional sayings
When leaving someone’s house at night it was polite to say,
“Don’t let the jumbies get you.”
Ways to avoid a
Jumbie
Leave a pair of shoes outside the door. The jumbie, which
has no feet, will spend the entire night trying to wear the shoes and thus
forget about going into the house.
Upon arriving home late at night, walk backwards into the
house to prevent a jumbie from following you inside.
Jumbies are mentioned in my book, The Bowl and the Stone: A
Haunting Tale from the Virgin Islands . In it,
Sam and her best friend Nick, are being haunted but they don’t know if it’s a
mischievous jumbie or tormented ghost. In this excerpt they encounter the
*ghost* for the first time.
Excerpt
The air is different. There’s a
strange moistness to it. It smells of damp earth after a light rain. And
there’s another odor, faint, as though someone has walked past who hasn’t
bathed in a while. A weight settles on my chest, making it hard to breathe.
“Do you get the feeling we’re
being watched?” Nick asks.
I wrap my arms tightly around
myself and hunch my shoulders. I want it to be a game, but it isn’t. This is
real.
“Yes.” My throat starts to
close, and the word comes out in a hoarse whisper.
We turn at the same moment,
staring down the porch which is shrouded in the deepening gloom of dusk. A huge
black man is there in the blocked doorway. His body fills the space. In the
darkness I can barely make out the tattered pants that are tied at his waist
with a rope. His face is in shadow. As one, without a word, Nick and I slowly
walk towards him. As we approach, he backs up into the thorny tangle of lime
trees and disappears. We race to the blocked entrance, but we can’t get through
the trees, so how could a person of his size manage it?
“Did you see that?” Nick runs
back to the main entrance and the front steps, red cape flapping.
I follow, almost stepping on
his heels. “None of the branches were moving!”
We race outside and around the
front of the house to the lime trees, searching for whoever disappeared into
them, but no one’s there.
We go back to the front steps
and sit.
“How weird….” My heart is
pounding. “But we both saw it, didn’t we? So it has to be real, right? This
isn’t a game, is it?”
“No, it’s not a game. Maybe it
was a jumbie. OOoooooOOooooo.”
I slap Nick’s arm. “Stop it,
that’s not funny.”
Pirates. Explorers. And spooky ghost hunters.
It’s 1962. Sam and her best friend, Nick, have the whole
island of St. John, in the U. S. Virgin Islands, as their playground. They’ve
got 240 year-old sugar plantation ruins to explore, beaches to swim, and trails
to hike.
But when a man disappears like a vapor right in front of
them, they must confront a scary new reality. They’re being haunted. By whom?
And why? He’s even creeping into Nick’s dreams.
They need help, but the one who might be able to give it is
Trumps, a reclusive hunchback who doesn’t like people, especially kids. Are Sam
and Nick brave enough to face him? And if they do, will he listen to
them?
As carefree summer games turn into eerie hauntings, Sam and
Nick learn more about themselves and life than they could ever have imagined.
Available for purchase at:
About the Author: Bish Denham, whose mother’s side of
the family has been in the Caribbean for over one hundred years, was raised in
the U. S. Virgin Islands. She still has lots of family living there whom she
visits regularly.
She says, “Growing up in the islands was
like living inside a history book. Columbus named the islands, Sir Francis
Drake sailed through the area, and Alexander Hamilton was raised on St. Croix.
The ruins of hundreds of sugar plantations, built with the sweat and blood of
slave labor, litter the islands. Then there were the pirates who plied the
waters. It is within this atmosphere of wonder and mystery, that I grew up.
Life for me was magical, and through my writing I hope to pass on some of that
magic.”
The Bowl and the Stone: A Haunting Tale from the Virgin Islands, is her third book and second novel.
You can find Anansi and Company: Retold
Jamaican Tales and A Lizard’s Tail,
at Amazon.com.
To learn more about Bish, you can
visit her blog, Random Thoughts, at www.http:/bish-randomthoughts.blogspot.com.
She can also be found on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BishDenham/Author
Twitter @BishDenham
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6439315.Bish_Denham
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Have you heard of jumbies before? Do you have a similar creature in your neck of the woods? What is it? Would you walk inside backward to keep the jumbies away?
May you find your Muse.
