Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber

“Look, Tan-Tan!” Ione said, in that poui-bright voice she got when she wanted to please. “It have Brer Monkey in there, chasing Brer Woodpecker for making so much noise. Is a nice costume, ain’t?”

Tan-Tan looked at her present good, but her heart felt like a stone inside her chest. She pressed her lips together hard. She wasn’t even going to crack a smile.

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Your daddy say is for he little Jonkanoo Queen with the voice like honey. You must call he and tell he thanks.”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“You ain’t want to know what I get for you?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

Smiling, Ione reached under Tan-Tan’s bed and pulled out the strangest pair of shoes Tan-Tan had ever seen. They were black jumbie leather carved in the shape of alligators like in the zoo. The toes of the shoes were the alligators’ snouts. They had gleaming red eyes. The shoes were lined inside with jumbie feather fluff. “Try them on, nuh?” Ione urged.

Tan-Tan slid her feet into the shoes. They moulded themselves comfortably round her feet. She stood up. She took a step. As she set her foot down the alligator shoe opened its snout wide and barked. Red sparks flew from its bright white fangs. Tan-Tan gasped and froze where she was. Ione laughed until she looked at Tan-Tan’s face. “Oh doux-doux, is only a joke, a mamaguy. Don’t dig nothing. They only go make noise the first two steps you take.”

To test it, Tan-Tan stamped her next foot. The shoe barked obligingly. She jumped and landed hard on the floor. The shoes remained silent. “Thank you, Mummy.”

“You not even going bust one so-so smile for me, right?”

Tan-Tan looked solemnly at her mother. Ione rolled her eyes impatiently and flounced out of the room.

Tan-Tan waited till she could no longer hear Ione’s footsteps. She went to the door and looked up and down the corridor. No-one. Only then did she try on the Midnight Robber costume. It fit her perfect. She went and stood in front of a bare wall. “Eshu,” she whispered.

The a.i. clicked on in her ear. In her mind’s eye it showed itself as a little skeleton girl, dressed just like her. “Yes, young Mistress?”

“Make a mirror for me.”

Eshu disappeared. The wall silvered to show her reflection. Aces, she looked aces. Her lips wavered into a smile. She pulled one of the cap guns from its holster: “Plai! Plai! Thus the Robber Queen does be avengèd! Allyou make you eye pass me? Take that! Plai!” She swirled round to shoot at the pretend badjack sneaking up behind her. The cape flared out round her shoulders and the new leather of her shoes creaked. It was too sweet.

“Belle Starr…” said the eshu, soft in her ear.

“Who?” It wasn’t lesson time, but the eshu had made her curious.

“Time was, is only men used to play the Robber King masque,” eshu’s voice told her.

“Why?” Tan-Tan asked. What a stupid thing!

“Earth was like that for a long time. Men could only do some things, and women could only do others. In the beginning of Carnival, the early centuries, Midnight Robbers was always men. Except for the woman who take the name Belle Starr, the same name as a cowgirl performer from America. The Trini Belle Starr made she own costume and she uses to play Midnight Robber.”

“What she look like, eshu?”

“No pictures of she in the data banks, young Mistress. Is too long ago. But I have other pictures of Carnival on Earth. You want to see?”

“Yes.”

The mirrored wall opaqued into a viewing screen. The room went dark. Tan-Tan sat on the floor to watch. A huge stage appeared on the screen, with hundreds of people in the audience. Some old-time soca was playing. A masque King costume came out on stage; one mako big construction, supported by one man dancing in its traces. It looked like a spider, or a machine with claws for grasping. It had a sheet of white cotton suspended above its eight wicked-looking pincers. It towered a good three metres above the man who was wearing it, but he danced and pranced as though it weighed next to nothing.

“The Minshall Mancrab,” eshu told Tan-Tan. “Minshall made it to be king of his band ‘The River’ on Earth, Terran calendar 1983.”

“Peter Minshall?” Tan-Tan asked. She had heard a crêche teacher say the name once when reading from Marryshow’s Revelations.

“He same one.”

The sinister Mancrab advanced to the centre of the stage, its sheet billowing. Suddenly the edges of the sheet started to bleed. Tan-Tan heard the audience exclaim. The blood quickly soaked the sheet as the Mancrab opened its menacing pincers wide. People in the audience went wild, clapping and shouting and screaming their approval.

Tan-Tan was mesmerised. “Is scary,” she said.

“Is so headblind machines used to stay,” eshu told her. “Before people make Granny Nanny to rule the machines and give guidance. Look some different images here.”

The eshu showed her more pictures of old-time Earth Carnival: the Jour Ouvert mud masque, the Children’s Masquerades. When Nursie came to fetch her for breakfast, Tan-Tan was tailor-sat on the floor in the dark, still in her Robber Queen costume, staring at the eshu screen and asking it questions from time to time. The eshu answered in a gentle voice. Nursie smiled and had the minder bring Tan-Tan’s breakfast to her on a tray.

For two days straight Tan-Tan insisted on wearing her Robber Queen costume. She slept in it and all. Neither Ione nor Nursie could persuade her to change out of it. But she never called Antonio to thank him. Let him feel bad about boofing her on Jonkanoo Night.

She missed the crêche, missed Crab-back Joey and Vashti, and the brightly coloured minders that would sing and play games of “Brown Girl in the Ring” and “Jane and Louisa” with them. No-one else would play with her, so she talked to the eshu. Not just for her lessons in maths and history and art, but for all the questions the grownups wouldn’t answer for her.

“Why Daddy gone away, eshu?”

“He mad at your mother and Quashee, young Mistress. Them shouldn’t have been hugging up behind Antonio back.”

“He mad at me too?”

The eshu said, “It look so, don’t it? Me can’t calculate no other reason for him to stay away from you. But Nanny say is classic jealousy behaviour, it don’t have to do with you. I tell you true, I don’t always understand people so good. Allyou does do things for different reasons than we. You certain you never do nothing to vex your father, young Mistress?”

Tan-Tan thought back to the day her daddy had left; the time when she’d been playing Robber Queen in the julie-mango tree and talking back so breezily to Daddy. Like slugs squirming in salt, she felt her lips twisting into a sad bow. “Maybe because I ain’t stay up in the tree when he tell me?”

“I not sure. Maybe is that, oui. ’Nuff respect, Mistress, but sometimes you hard ears, you know. You don’t always obey when adults talk to you.”

“No,” Tan-Tan agreed in a small voice.

“You want me to ask Antonio if is that why he vex?”

“No! Don’t tell he nothing!” When she felt like this, Nursie told her she was acting too proud. But she couldn’t bear to let Daddy know how bad she was pining for him.

“Seen,” agreed the eshu. It played a cartoon for her instead. Tan-Tan laughed at Brer Anansi, the cunning little man who could become a spider. Her heart eased for a time.

Jonkanoo Season ended as Old Year’s Night came round. Tan-Tan heard Nursie and Cookie talking about how Ione had scandalized the crowd at the Cannes Brûlées Ball by showing up dressed off in black like a widow (“Except that widows ain’t supposed to show off they chest in all kinda see-through lace,” said Cookie), and hanging on to the arm of a young swaggerboy, even more dressed up than she. But eh-eh! And she married to the mayor!