New excerpt from BLOOD OF BELVIDERE: A Grenada Novel Yes, Fédon would admire Gabbard’s style. Gabbard’s great-grandmother had acquainted him with Fédon through her stories. Arthritic and toothless from old age, her mind was sharper than a cutlass. She liked saying ‘sa key tan parlay lutte,’ who hear tell the others. And tell she did, until her last breath. She’d held Gabbard spellbound in the candlelight shadows of her musty shack, whispering Fédon back to life with tales of his cunning. He had outsmarted the British by reversing the shoes on his horses. She walked Gabbard’s imagination back down the agonizing centuries, and sailed him across the unforgiving Atlantic slave passages to where it all began on the West Coast of Africa. There, Fédon’s Yoruba grandmother and her twin sister mastered the powers of manifest destiny from the ancestral spirits that resided in the sacred jungles. Before the gunshots, ropes, and long march in chains that ripped her away from her sister. But deep in the decomposing bowels of the slave ship, the Yoruba powers throbbed in her heart until Martinique’s virgin streams, lakes and Silk Cotton trees welcomed them in ecstatic embrace. When her master forced his lust on the young African girl, she mothered a daughter, to whom she passed along the ways of the ancestors. Now a negresse libre creole, the free daughter married a Frenchman and moved to Grenada, where she raised her family, including Julien Fédon, and made a home for her Yoruba traditions in the mountains around Grand Étang Lake. Gabbard never forgot his first encounter with those powers at the lake, in the shadows of Mount Qua Qua. That full moon night he’d accompanied his great-grandmother on her long and final trek to a lakeshore landing decorated with colorful flags. She and other women danced and sang to drums and rattles. They danced faster and faster, harder and harder, until the spirits overtook their bodies in orgasmic spasms. Strange voices gushed from their mouths, and their eyes rolled white in the moonlight. Young Gabbard learned that night that power one sees is no match for power one feels. Gabbard’s great-grandmother had said Fédon used that power to escape the British, swimming underneath the island from Grand Étang in the middle of the mountains to Black Bay seashores. He still roamed the minds of the people on his white horse, striking fear in all those who carried a single drop of his enemies’ blood. While absolute control over Grenada eluded Fédon, Gabbard intended to fulfill that destiny for them both. Gabbard would use swords and guns like Fédon had, but only when necessary. Gabbard had cleverer means of bending the British to his wishes and trapping the people’s fears. He would control what people did, by controlling their fear.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 14:03:04 +0000
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