An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

In the rich pan­theon of lo­cal folko­re, it is the fu­sion of French and West-African iden­ti­ties which gave us the colour­ful char­ac­ters which have danced in the sto­ries of our fore­fa­thers, hand­ed down like cher­ished heir­looms from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion.Ear­li­er this year I wrote about how the African gri­ot, or sto­ry­teller, found new ma­te­r­i­al here in the sug­ar plan­ta­tions of the Caribbean where he and his fel­lows were bru­tal­ly en­slaved. Trinidad was to re­ceive an in­fu­sion of French cul­ture from 1783 when Roume de St Lau­rent (with the sup­port of the Span­ish crown) pro­mul­gat­ed the Cedu­la de Pobla­cion which of­fered a land grant to Ro­man Catholic im­mi­grants and their slaves.Hun­dreds of French planters flee­ing the seeds of rev­o­lu­tion and their chat­tels came to the is­land and cre­at­ed a French colony with Span­ish rule, which was lat­er to be re­placed by British do­min­ion in 1797.

The La Di­a­b­lesse looms tall in the an­nals of our mythol­o­gy. She is the dev­il woman, the temptress and se­duc­tress whose wiles would en­trap any man whose ill luck led him in­to her path.

She is both the paragon of wom­an­ly beau­ty and the im­age of de­mon­ic lust.La Di­a­b­lesse is well known to all who cher­ish the sto­ries of yes­ter­year. Al­most every vil­lage in Trinidad (par­tic­u­lar­ly in the ham­lets of the North­ern Range) has a yarn to weave about the beau­ti­ful woman in the Mar­tini­quan dress–vo­lu­mi­nous skirts, head-tie, hat perched jaun­ti­ly on her head–who waits along the lone­ly paths for heed­less men­folk who would di­gress from their cours­es to ac­com­mo­date a pret­ty face.Those skirts veil, how­ev­er, the sin­is­ter fea­ture for which La Di­a­b­lesse is in­fa­mous, name­ly the cloven hoof; the cow-foot which dis­tin­guish­es her from mor­tal women.It is large­ly pos­si­ble that Mar­tinique was the place of ori­gin of the La Di­a­b­lesse, since many French set­tlers came from this is­land, and the dev­il woman her­self al­most al­ways makes an ap­pear­ance clothed in the style which has be­come syn­ony­mous with the French An­tilles.

She ap­pears on the nights when the full moon is the on­ly light that pierces the dark­ness and she waits on those re­moved by­ways where a man is like­ly to pass.The em­i­nent 19th-cen­tu­ry trav­eller and writer Laf­ca­dio Hearn spent two years in the West In­dies in the 1880s and though he vis­it­ed Trinidad, the ma­jor­i­ty of his stay was in Mar­tinique where he doc­u­ment­ed sev­er­al as­pects of the French Cre­ole cul­ture.It was Hearn's mem­oirs of his West In­di­an so­journ that in­tro­duced La Di­a­b­lesse to the wider world.In a quar­ter of the city of St Pierre (which was de­stroyed with mas­sive loss of life by a vol­canic erup­tion in 1902) he wrote: "Most­ly she haunts the moun­tain roads, wind­ing from plan­ta­tion to plan­ta­tion, from ham­let to ham­let.But close to the great towns she some­times walks: she has been seen at mid-day up­on the high­way which over­looks the Ceme­tery of the An­chor­age, be­hind the cathe­dral of St Pierre."

In Mr Hearn's nar­ra­tion, La Di­a­b­lesse is a tall woman of Afro ex­trac­tion, sim­ply but el­e­gant­ly clad and all the men know and fear her.One of the more fool­hardy, Fafa, sees her as she pass­es through his street and falls un­der her charm­ing spell as she croons a be­witch­ing pa­tois rhythm and takes to a pre­cip­i­tous road lead­ing to the heights above St Pierre.Fafa's com­pere Gaboux fol­lows at a dis­tance but af­ter a while turns in hor­ror and flees since he has seen her most ter­ri­ble trait–the cloven hoof that hides be­neath the sweep­ing hem of her madras skirts.On­ward and up­ward Fafa fol­lows the temptress as the crag­gy road­way arch­es away from the last signs of hu­man­i­ty to­wards the gloom of the for­est where the dread fer-de-lance makes his lair.He is now be­gin­ning to feel fear but his in­fat­u­a­tion su­per­sedes this warn­ing.

Now they are on the sum­mit of a moun­tain and she reach­es for his hand. Hers is as cold as ice as she speaks lov­ing words to the spell­bound Fafa.The ac­count writ­ten by Mr Hearn ter­mi­nates thus: "And she, sud­den­ly–turn­ing at once to him and to the last red light, the gob­lin hor­ror of her face trans­formed, shrieks with a burst of hideous laugh­ter: "KISS ME NOW."

For the frac­tion of a mo­ment he knows her name: then, smit­ten to the brain with the sight of her, reels, re­coils, and, back­ward falling, crash­es 2,000 feet down to his death up­on the rocks of a moun­tain tor­rent."