The Jumbies

“At the burial, Corinne had whispered, ‘How long will it take her to grow back, Papa?’ But the look on his face told her that not everything that was put in the ground would give something back. A little orange tree had appeared next to the grave a year later, and had bloomed every year since, but it was not the same as having her mother.”

Corinne learned everything she knows about her favorite pastime, growing things, from her deceased mother, Nicole. In the scene above, at Nicole’s grave on All Hallow’s Eve, Corinne recalls her reaction to her mother’s death. While Nicole does not grow back from being buried in the churchyard, Corinne’s mother nevertheless stays with her in the orange trees and the powerful magic contained in the necklace she gave Corinne.

“As Corinne worked in the garden, the memory of her mama holding the small white orange seed came to her mind. Her mama had told her that the seed was magic. If you take care of it, it will take care of you, she had said as she taught Corinne how deep to plant the seed, and how much water to give it.”

Just before her first trip to the market, Corinne reminisces about the wisdom her mother shared with her when she was little. This line foreshadows Corinne's triumph over Severine, which she achieves by tapping into the magic that she inherited from Nicole. Later in the novel, the white witch reminds Corinne of this phrase and of the magic contained in seeds.

“‘Where are you, Mr. Frog?’ Bouki shouted into the well. He pulled back on his slingshot and let a stone loose down the well. He looked in again. ‘Hiding, eh?’”

Mr. Frog is a small forest frog that the boys captured and imprisoned at the bottom of a dry well. This scene unfolds moments before Bouki and Malik discover, much to their horror, that Corinne has replaced Mr. Frog with a bag full of scorpions. Mr. Frog becomes an important character, in that he represents the voice of the natural world that is powerless against misuse by humans.

“The children floating on the water reminded her of the men who had come to the island long ago on large wooden islands they called ships. The ships had bright cloth that billowed above them like stiff clouds. It was marvelous the way they moved. She remembered how she swam out to greet the sailors but gasped when she realized it was trees they had cut down to create their ships. The sailors had attacked her as she climbed up the hull.”

As Severine watches Corinne and her friends swim in the river, she compares them to the sailors she once attacked. Her initial horror at realizing their ships were made of wood shows the foreignness of the idea of using natural materials to make mechanical instruments. To Severine, this alone showed that humans were the enemies of the natural world, and their attack solidified this idea in her mind.

“The children are just like those men, she thought, perhaps even more fragile.”

Following up on her comparison between the sailors and the children, Severine focuses on the ease with which she can drown the children, just like she drowned the sailors after they attacked her. One of Severine’s character flaws is her all-or-nothing mindset: Since the humans she met in the past were bad, she believes that all humans are bad and refuses to admit that she may be wrong. While the children are innocent and do not deserve to be punished, Severine’s comparison raises the question of whether modern-day people must atone for wrongs committed in the past.

“‘Corinne, this is Severine,’ Pierre said.”

Before being introduced, Corinne at once recognizes the woman from the marketplace and feels suspicious toward her. Pierre, by contrast, is oblivious to Severine’s ulterior motives, introducing her as a woman he met while working at the wharf. This difference in perspectives characterizes Corinne and Pierre’s respective attitudes toward Severine and allows Severine to manipulate the unsuspecting Pierre.

“I heard your daughter’s oranges were the sweetest anyone had ever tasted. There weren’t any left by the time I was ready to buy, […].”

Severine misleads Corinne and Pierre by claiming to have been interested in Corinne’s oranges at the market. Interestingly, at the market, Corinne only tells Mrs. Rootsingh, as Dru stands nearby, that her oranges are the sweetest on the island. The narrator does not explain how Severine came to learn this information.

“The three had dinner by lamplight, and that night, as her father put her to bed, Corinne could see in his face that he was thinking about the evening. She remembered how the creases around his eyes deepened with pleasure when the three of them sat talking.”

Corinne recalls how happy the evening with Severine made Pierre; although she feels unsure about her, Corinne decides to try to like Severine for her father’s sake. Pierre’s attraction to Severine shows his grief over losing Nicole though he never states this outright. Severine takes advantage of his emotional vulnerability and the fact that Corinne wants to see her father happy.

“It hopped once toward them. The douen closest to the frog leaned in. A few licked their lips. Just as one of the douens lunged at it, the frog hopped out of reach.”

In this important, brief scene, the frog rescues Corinne from a menacing band of jumbies. This is the frog Corinne saved from a dry well earlier in the novel. Here, the frog hops between the douens and Corinne, distracting them from attacking her. Some of the douens licking their lips as they look at the frog suggests that jumbies eat forest animals.

“‘Our kind and their kind don’t belong together,’ Corinne said with a nod to Dru.”

Corinne asks the white witch at the market about Severine; Corinne reports this mysterious woman in green visiting her house, and the girls tell her they think Severine is a jumbie who lives in the forest. Corinne nods to Dru because Dru made a similar statement about humans and jumbies not belonging together earlier in the chapter.

“‘Papa!’ Corinne called. She touched her father’s hand. He looked up at her, but he didn’t seem to recognize her. ‘Papa?’ Tears covered her face as she shook him, called to him, and tried to make him answer her.”

Corinne arrives home from the market to find Severine, again cooking a pot of enchanted stew on her stove. This time, however, Pierre sits at the table in a daze. The stew has made Pierre blind to everything except the visions Severine creates; in this scene, Corinne’s father believes a storm is raging outside although the weather is perfectly clear. Pierre can’t see Corinne either, and this foreshadows Pierre coming completely under Severine’s spell when she turns him into a jumbie.

“Bouki and Malik lived in a cave that was in the middle of the red hills, facing away from the sea, and sheltered from the easterly wind. The rock and smooth floor of the cave was reddish brown. When the brothers leaned against the rocks to finish eating, Corinne noticed that their skin and hair was the same red color as their home. Standing still, they looked like statues carved out of the rocks around them, with their hair like kinky mud spirals that pointed in every direction.”

This scene reveals that the boys live in a red dirt cave. Much later in the novel, after Hugo gives the brothers new clothes and a bath, the narrator notes they no longer resemble the rocks of their previous home.

“I had a sister. She pitied people. She went inside the ships and saw that some of the people were chained below. She helped them escape and swim to the island while I dealt with the others. If I had seen what she was doing, I would have stopped her.”

Severine tells a horrified Corinne about her mother Nicole’s jumbie identity, including how Nicole was Severine’s sister. Nicole rescuing the enslaved people inside the ship shows the fundamental difference between her personality and Severine’s: Nicole saw that the enslaved people were being treated unjustly and did not judge them for simply being human. The empathy that Nicole had for the enslaved people recalls Corinne’s sympathy for the frog imprisoned at the bottom of the well.

“In that moment, Severine’s eyes widened with shock, as if she had let something slip, but she took a breath and her face returned to its previous sneer. ‘I will get rid of you if I have to. I don’t care if you are my own sister’s child.’”

The protagonist realizes Severine’s envy and greed for the magical power Corinne has inherited from her mother. As Severine tries to entice Corinne to join her jumbie army against the island’s humans, she accidentally reveals her interest in her niece’s talent with plants, or Forming Magic, which is the core of Corinne’s powers. Severine shows that her greed outweighs her love for her sister, whom she truly misses, by threatening to kill Corinne if she refuses to join her.

“‘You are very much like them,’ Severine said. ‘Ungrateful. My sister saved their kind. She took off their chains and brought them to the island and how did they repay her? By forgetting.’”

Severine refers to Corinne as ungrateful because she has refused Severine’s offer to join the jumbies in battle against the humans. Corinne’s refusal reminds Severine of the island’s first human settlers, because she wishes to remain separate from the jumbies; the settlers segregated themselves from the jumbies, but made their homes on jumbie land. Corinne’s situation is not the same (she is part jumbie), but Severine is correct that the humans severed their ties with the jumbies, and the jumbies have suffered for it.

“She remembered the day her mama had untied the string from her own neck and put it around hers. The string was so long, the stone fell to her stomach. She remembered that her mama had told her to guard it, that it would protect her, but in her memory it wasn’t her mama’s voice that she heard telling it. It was her father’s voice telling her the story.”

Corinne becomes frustrated that she cannot remember her mother’s voice because this means she was too young to remember the actual moment her mother gave her the necklace. Her father kept the memory alive for her by telling her the story, but just when Corinne wants to be connected with her mother, she feels like Nicole is out of reach.

“‘You don’t smell that?’ Bouki asked. As he did, the wind picked up the ends of the jumbie’s long gown and blew them back. There was one sleek brown leg and one hairy cow’s foot.”

The narrator reveals Bouki’s sudden realization that the alluring woman before him is a La Diabless, a female type of jumbie. This jumbie is known for luring men into the forest and killing them; the woman’s cow’s foot, which is a feature of La Diablesses, reveals her identity to him. This passage shows the boys’ ingenuity and quick thinking: Moments after Bouki’s realization, Malik traps the La Diabless, and the boys move on to battle another jumbie.

“The soucouyant lunged toward them both. Victor swung and connected. The ball of fire sailed, hissing through the air. It struck the lagahoo’s fur. The monster roared and screamed in an explosion of flames.”

Victor’s decisive blow was inspired by Bouki, who coordinated his movements with Victor during the attack. Their cooperation shows that the boys take an active interest in the village community though they are not part of it.

“‘They belong to the island, child. You cannot get rid of them. They are part of it. You don’t like when someone moves into your house for an afternoon,’ the witch said to Corinne. ‘How would you like it if someone move it, shove you and your family into the deepest pockets of the island, and refused to leave for a couple hundred years?’”

The passage above is the white witch’s response to Corinne’s plea to help her rid the island of jumbies. The white witch’s response parallels Severine’s observations that humans have pushed the jumbies out of their own territory. For humans and jumbies to coexist, Corinne and the others must accept that jumbies have a right to live on the island.

“They want a bottle. Instant success! Something to drink, to sprinkle, or spill on the ground. They want magic from nothing. Magic doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from somewhere. And it isn’t so extraordinary. It’s just work. It’s just using your head and your heart.”

The witch teaches Corinne and her friends about the reality of magic. Effective magic requires hard work and dedication; it is closely linked to one’s identity and deeply-help beliefs. This is why the witch cautions Corinne against seeing magic as a quick fix, as the witch’s marketplace customers do. Since Corinne can wield magic, she needs to understand the process behind it.

“La Diabless, the lagahoo, the douens, even the soucouyant, they are all her children already. What you are dealing with is much stronger than all of them. She is an ancient. She is their mother. She created all of them, and they make her strong. You can’t get rid of her, especially if she has found a partner to replace her sister.”

The white witch provides Severine’s origin story, revealing that she is not only a powerful jumbie, but the first and only one of her kind. Severine and Nicole being sisters implies that they had parents or were created somehow. However, the witch does not provide any details about where Severine actually came from.

“I wish we had never met. I wish I had never even laid eyes on you!”

After blaming the jumbie attack on Corinne, Dru spouts these hurtful words at Corinne and runs away. However, after the friends’ visit with the white witch, they realize they need each other.

“‘If you’re in the sea, Grand-père, I could use your help tonight,’ she whispered. The only answer was the sound of a gentle splash from the waves. Corinne pushed harder, and the boat pulled free of the sand and began to bob in the waves. Corinne jumped inside and pulled one of the oars out to paddle. But as she got away from land, the wind began to work against her.”

As Corinne sets off toward the base of the cliff, she prays to her late grandfather for help. While he does not respond in this scene, later in her journey, a huge fish redirects Corinne’s boat away from a collision with some jagged rocks. The ambiguity of whether the grandfather helps or not hints that jumbies are not the only source of magic or supernatural powers on the island.