La Diablesse

I sorry to be late," I said, speaking up.

"You better durn well be sorry. Now drop your frock."

I did as I was told, and Massa ran his hands over the welts on my back, his hard fingers making them hurt so badly I wanted to scream out. I did scream the first time he hit me, wham across the face. Then he hit me again, and I fell, spitting blood and tooth fragments. Massa knelt over me, and I drove my knee upward with all my remaining strength, catching him in the groin.

Massa clutched the front of his britches and gasped for breath. He rolled and moaned loudly, and when he could finally stand up I knew I was in for it. He called Hercules, his massive overseer, to haul me outside and whip me within an inch of my life. I could only remember the first five minutes of that whipping, because I fainted and never recovered.

My spirit, now free, looked on as my mother threw herself upon me, crying and scolding me even as I lay dead. The other slaves had to drag her away from my slippery, bloody corpse so they could bury it.

"Yes, Jesse, I was murdered," I said, biting my lip. "And now I ‘fraid, cause my sister is the new parlor maid."

I crossed my fingers, hoping that Massa would not touch Hera, and he didn’t, for the first month at least. Then one morning I heard a yelp from Hera, and I rushed at Massa. I was unpleasantly surprised when I went right through him, and he went right on stroking Hera’s thigh. Jesse led me away and tried to calm me down.

"You not solid, Anna. You can’t rush at people like that," he said in his soothing voice.

"Well you see what he was doing to Hera. I have to stop him," I shrieked. "I can’t let her die like me. No, Jesse, do something!"

"All right, calm down. I’ll show you how to animate."

"Ani-what?" I asked him.

"Animate. Turn into a beast," Jesse replied. "I always turn into a spider. Maybe you could turn into a big snake and bite Massa foot."

This sounded good, so I decided to try it.

"Would they see me as a snake?" I asked.

"Yes," said Jesse. "They always see animal spirits, but I don’t know why."

I let Jesse chant his African-sounding incantation, and then I wiggled across the floor as a tree boa. Before I made it halfway across the room, Hera spotted me and screamed.

"Snake, snake!" I think she was glad to escape Massa, because she ran across the yard screaming and laughing. Hercules came and chopped off my head, and I was afraid that I would become a snake-spirit. I was elated to find myself as a person spirit once again.

"I don’t want to just bite Massa foot," I confided to Jesse. "I want to kill him."

"Why?" Jesse asked. "What good would that do?"

"It goin’ make me feel good," I said. A spirit has loads of time on its hands. No Massa to harass it and send it hither, thither and yon, no Mamma to yell and scold, no chores, nothing. I used my time to think and remember. I remembered the stories my Mamma told Hera and me about Mamma Maladie, a woman who died in childbirth and who appears on dark nights calling her child. I remembered her stories of Soucouyant, female vampires. And of course I remembered La Diablesse, the she-devil with a cloven hoof that lures men to their deaths. An idea came to me, and I pondered how I could get Jesse to co-operate.