Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

While Hyacinth and the other hill women and some of its men tried to stay focused on the Lord, Phaedra sat in the church hall with Donna, Chris, and Angelique Ward, who, after the mango-eating incident, had joined their crew. They ate sweetbread Hyacinth made and Phaedra tried to avoid getting her birthday licks by reminding everyone that her birthday was technically almost over. Something about turning eleven in Barbados made the fact of Avril’s death real for Phaedra. This time there was no hope for her mother’s arrival, because Avril was where she would always be now, silent and below the ground. And this fact, rather than saddening Phaedra, settled in beside her, the way that the hill’s red dust filmed her white clothes, the way that sand lined her pockets days and weeks after she’d come home from the beach. It was always there, a reminder of what had come before.

They were all on their third and fourth cups of Fanta and the feeling in the air was one of sugar-fueled giddiness, of sitting on the precipice of the unknown. The children, who were too young to be fearful or resigned about the future, were considering what to do next, when Simone Saveur left her roost at the center of her girlfriends to approach Phaedra and her friends.

“So I hear you have a birthday?” Simone said.

Phaedra nodded.

“Congrats,” she said, and Phaedra knew not to accept at face value either the question or her goodwill. “Wunna tell she already about the fire hag?” Simone asked Donna and Chris and Angelique, as if Bajan were a foreign tongue Phaedra could not understand.

“Oh, don’t start with that nonsense,” Angelique said. Despite having broken off from the clique of Simone Saveur and her henchwomen, Angelique retained her favored status because of her beauty and the trips she took to England each year to see her father. She could brush off Simone with a confidence the others didn’t dare.

“What story?” Phaedra said, leaning forward and directly addressing Simone, which was easier to do now that they’d spent an entire term together in school.

“How old you say you turning again?” Simone asked.

“Eleven,” Phaedra said.

“Well, if I were you, I would be careful walking home tonight. The fire hag does like to take girls on their eleventh birthdays.”

Angelique touched Phaedra’s shoulders, trying to smooth the curves alarm had etched into them. “It’s just an old wife’s tale. They told me the same story to try and scare me on my birthday,” Angelique said breezily.

Donna, a notorious frighten Friday, was edging out of her seat and toward the snack table. Phaedra grabbed Donna by the wrists and pulled her down to her seat.

“I want to hear it,” Phaedra said. She felt for the braids her grandmother had plaited for her, loose like she liked, and tucked under so her neck could stay cool.

“I don’t know why you want to hear that foolishness. All it’s going to do is get you worked up,” Angelique cautioned.

Tanya Tompkins had assumed her place as Simone Saveur’s yes-woman in the power vacuum created by Angelique’s defection. She walked over in her new low-heeled patent leather shoes from her clique’s spot below the cross. “Well, it can’t be total foolishness if everybody says it’s true. My cousin said that she knew a girl who knew a girl who had a friend who had a cousin that it happened to,” Tanya said.

“That certainly sounds believable,” Angelique said, throwing her hair over her right shoulder.

“Nobody ain’t ask you, Angelique. Phaedra, you want to hear the story or not?” Simone said.

“Yes, please,” Phaedra said, and leaned back into the folding chair around which Chris had draped his arm. The smell of his underarms was pleasant to Phaedra. It was funny to Chris, the weird things she liked about him. Her affection for him always came as a surprise, and he cherished it more for the ways in which it was unexpected, peculiarly Phaedra.

“You want to tell it then, Pokie?” Simone asked. Angelique furrowed her lips at the sound of her nickname. The sixth-formers called her Pocahontas because of the two braids that ran thick and glossy down her back. Phaedra looked at Angelique’s hair and wondered at her friend’s confidence in wearing her power openly.

“Fine, then, I’ll tell it,” Angelique said. She stood up and started in a voice that was so smooth it sounded like she’d just drunk her nightly dose of cod-liver oil.

“Back in the old, old times, the Arawaks and the Caribs roamed Barbados. They mostly lived peacefully but occasionally a fight would break out among the tribes and then they would go to war. There was one Arawak woman who was a witch doctor. She was the sole survivor of an attack on her village in which everyone was killed.”

Phaedra looked at the children who sat cross-legged around Angelique, the ones who had just moments before been racing the length of the church hall, running the hems of their shirts out of their pants and unraveling their freshly done hair from its barrettes. When she’d first come to Bird Hill the other children had all seemed the same to her, but she could see them more clearly now. There was Samson, the middle child of seven Rastafarian children, whose locks were wrapped in two mounds the size of footballs at the nape of his neck. There were the identical twins Timothy and Thomas, inveterate nose-pickers despite teasing, and Donna’s cousin, Kaylin, whose seizures had stopped after her mother finally gave in and let Hyacinth see about her. Knowing these children, their families, and their stories made Phaedra feel like she belonged, and being among them made the story feel less scary than it was.

“Once she’d buried the last of her people, the witch doctor was thirsty for revenge. The devil knew that he needed to make a pact with her to stop the war. The fire hag, as she was known, was given three powers. She would live forever. She could shape-shift into any animal or human being. And she could fly in a ball of fire as far as she could imagine, leaving her skin behind her. The fire hag was greedy. And so she asked the devil if there was no blood for her in her new power. The devil agreed that as payment for her people that had been wiped out, she could make her own sacrifices.

“Now people say that the fire hag preys on the night of their eleventh birthdays. If she finds these girls alone, she wraps them up in her ball of fire, takes them back to the cave where she lives in Chalky Mount, and cooks them. People say that when the fog is thick over Chalky Mount, it’s the smoke from girls the fire hag is cooking that you see.” A shriek went up among the younger kids. Angelique paused until they simmered down, and then she continued.

“Once the fire hag has your daughter, there are only two ways that parents can get her back. Both involve going to her cave at night. If she’s taken flight, they can burn the skin that she leaves behind. When the fire hag feels her skin burning, she will return to her cave and give the people’s child back to them. Or, if they find her in her skin, they can drop a bag of rice on the floor. The fire hag has to count every grain, and start again if she drops even one piece. While she’s counting, the parents can rescue their child.”

Angelique turned to Phaedra, whose skin had blanched. “Satisfied?” Angelique asked, and looked around for an answer in the crowd that had gathered.

Phaedra jumped when the door between the sanctuary and the church hall banged open. She fully expected the fire hag, and not her grandmother, to be standing there.

On the walk home, Phaedra turned to Hyacinth. “Granny, did you ever hear the story about the fire hag?”

“Yes, why?”

“They said she comes for girls on the night of their eleventh birthday.”