THE DAY THE MASQUERADE CAME

“The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist’s table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.”

Frantz Fanon

Backra[1] Crossfield's second daughter knew her father missed her mother quite terribly just by the way he'd looked into those small, contraversive, admirable, dark hazel eyes of hers. She was the spitting image of her mother, Mayble, with the same small oval-shaped face and mischievously twisted mouth with a mole on top of the upper lip; her cheeks were fat like golden plums and reddened with rouge, which she crafted using the seeds from the Annotto[2] tree in the yard. And her eyes. Yes, those cat eyes would dissolve your heart into a pool of running blood the second you stared into them, with that certain glare of incognizance, untouched by men. But Mayble had a choleric temper and was somewhat cantankerous by nature. So by the time Phyllis, his second daughter, blossomed at age eight, Dorett, his elder daughter, was already sixteen, and Backra Crossfield felt he had been given another chance to tame his wife. It was around that time Mayble died from consumption, and Backra Crossfield had to raise the girls all by himself. Of course, he had some assistance from the hired help, Ms. Claircide, the woman who replaced Phyllis' mother. Still, Backra Crossfield's rules ran his house.

“I want you to make ‘ladies’ out of my daughters,” he told Ms. Claircide, the helper, the morning she came.

The helper was a woman in her early thirties. She appeared somewhat older because of her matronly disposition, wearing police men's shoes and a loose-fitting, coarse, natural-colored linen dress. She was as “red” in skin color as Mayble. She was a good-looking, well-spoken woman who proclaimed she would not be“speaking none of that broken English nonsense!” She came from the rough terrain of St. Mary, with its voluptuous mountains and freebooting coastlines. She was dependable in every way: stern, strong, and sturdy as they came. Ms. Claircide was the perfect hire for Backra Crossfield in his efforts to mold his girls into whatever he wanted them to become.

“Yes, Sir!” she told him politely, in the comfort of his living room, with her dutiful head tilted sideways, lending a keen ear to listen.

After the interview, the girls were called into the living room to meet the new hire. Phyllis was small, delicate, and timid in spirit, while Dorett stood tall, bold and defiant. She was a teenager and didn't like being ordered around by someone who was not her mother.

“I'd like you girls to meet Ms. Claircide Paulwell, the woman who will look after you while I'm away,” Backra Crossfield introduced to his daughters.

Dorett went over to shake her hand, but little Phyllis ran to her father and hid her face in his broad, hairy chest. He then got up with her in his arms and began to pat her back.

“This is my little Phyllis,” he told Ms. Claircide.

She made a fuss over the girl by tickling the soles of her feet, trying to get her to make eye contact, but Phyllis turned her head aside on her father's shoulder with a thumb in her mouth.

“This one will be tough to win over,” Ms. Claircide told her new employer.

“She'll come around to accepting you,” Backra Crossfield told Ms. Claircide. “But it will take a while. In the meantime, let me show you the rest of the house.”

It was a huge Georgian-style mansion he named Crossfield Hall. The house symbolized the importance of his status as a master of his own destiny. It lay neatly in a desolate valley, unaffected by the curious pedestrians who walked from a distance, seeing only tiny specks of dark silhouettes as they moved in and out of their lives. It was furnished with the comfort of luxury because Backra Crossfield imagined himself as the master of his own domain. Seeing the splendor of Europe during the Second World War had given him the gumption to dream of glory and execute it into reality. He was a man who felt that one had to turn their dreams into realities or else they were fruitless.

“So, here you'll have everything to your liking,” he told Ms. Claircide. “I've created a life with nothing lacking for my girls.”

Ms. Claircide gazed upon the interior of the house, marveled by the elaborate décor in front of her eyes. Its ten rooms of cedar and mahogany trimmings beamed in a way that told Ms. Claircide that her new employer would demand her to clean them every day; its upholstered chairs, couches, and curtains, all made from floral chintz and red gingham, also transmitted to Ms. Claircide that Backra Crossfield was indeed a man of punctiliousness to have kept such splendid order in his busy life. He was a“Backra,” a light brown-skinned colonial, who imitated the desires of the former slave masters, engineering wealth and maintaining it. His success in the district of Blenheim made him feared but respected at the same time.

“Yes, Sir,” said Ms. Claircide. “I see you have done well for yourself, and I'll try my best to obey your rules.”

Across the other side of the valley was a thousand acres of leveled land owned by Backra Crossfield. When he returned from the Second World War in 1950 with a slight limp, he slowly purchased cows to supply meat to the population living in the parish; gradually, as his business expanded, he added other domestic animals. He was an important man in the district. Tall and handsome, he was truly a vision. All the beauties in the village desired to become his second wife, but he remained steadfast in preserving the memory of his cherished and deceased companion. At first, when he returned from the war, the townspeople would see him grumbling to himself each morning. He rose early to do the painstaking labor by himself. He was a young man in his thirties and loved hard labor. He would work shirtless, oblivious to his masculine beauty. His chestnut-bronze skin would gleam in the morning sun, and his torso, all broad and flocculent, was sweet-smelling like cedarwood. Women flocked to watch him work his land, but no woman sent a throbbing sensation into his heart like the ill-tempered Mayble Fairweather had done when he first met her.

As he took Ms. Claircide around his farm, he imagined she was Mayble when she first came snooping around his property, all ruddy and wholesome and scared as a strayed cat, wanting to meet the much lauded stranger in her village. Like Mayble, she was keen to hear the story of his rise to power through hard work and discernment; of his herculean undertaking turning a small and trivial cattle farm into one of renown; of his grappling to find the perfect grass-blend to feed the newly developed Jamaican Hope dairy cow, ensuring the maintenance of its quality milk, and its beef fat, forever savory.

“Raising the other animals wasn't as difficult as the cows because they're less susceptible to diseases,” said Backra Crossfield to his newly hired help.

That was how the helper's task of caring for Backra Crossfield's family began, on his steps of land in the parish of Hanover. Ms. Claircide's tasks were painstaking but not too arduous. She kept the house, dusted the furniture, cooked appetizing dishes, and rebuked and commended the girls whenever needed. Little Phyllis became comfortable enough to crawl out of her skin and would occasionally hug her.

“Mummy, come and look at this!” she'd tell Ms. Claircide excitedly, taking her to a secretive hole behind a huge rock, to show her the crawling worms and the mad ants scampering to their destinations.

“I see you're a nature lover, but not me,” she'd tell little Phyllis, pulling her by the arm to return indoors.

It became rather apparent to Ms. Claircide that Phyllis needed a playmate to run around the fruitful ground with her, climbing trees and bruising their knees. Instead, she got to wear those puffed, princessy, doll-like dresses with matching socks and ribbons.

“I want you to make ladies out of my girls,” were the words Ms. Claircide seemed to remember in her pulsating head.

Dorett stood headstrong against Backra Crossfield's demands. She was adventurous and mendacious, giving him the impression that she was prim and proper as the hibiscus petals. In reality, she was a thorn in Ms. Claircide's uncompromising eyes.

“You're not my mother, so you can't tell me what to do!” she'd toss at the helper, with impenitent stares and hands on her hips in akimbo.

Eventually, Dorett's uncontrollable, peppery fire flared up, reflecting Mayble's temper. She became unbearable, so Mr. Crossfield sent her packing. She was now a student at St. Hilda's Diocesan High School in Brown's Town, St. Ann, only to have the nuns strike her fingers with a ruler to quench the flames.

“They'll tell her what the damned thing to do and she'll have no other alternative but to listen,” Backra Crossfield told Ms. Claircide out of sheer gratitude. “Just keep little Phyllis safe and sound for me.”

The helper intently listened to her employer's wish, knowing he used his money to pave his way through life. The extra shillings he'd throw at the feet of the white, English headmistress and the teachers at St. Hilda's would keep his rebel daughter snuggled until he executed his next scheme to send her away forever.

“Thank you, Sir, that one was hard to tame. Don't worry, I'll keep Phyllis safely by my side until she blossoms into a woman of desire,” said Ms. Claircide after Backra Crossfield had sent Dorett away.

“Sir, I was wondering if you could hire a young man to help me around the yard. The workload has become too heavy for me to handle. I know of a young man called Maxwell in my parish. I’m sure he’d be interested in the position,” suggested Ms. Claricide, as she looked at Phyllis’s disturbing young face that demanded more attention.

But the downpours came after Dorett left, and little Phyllis had to catch the raindrops into the tattered, white enamel bucket left by her deceased mother, Mayble. She had to hide the pail in the closet of her heart. Poor Phyllis. So young, but so trapped. Her regimented life began with her father giving orders while his hired help stood by, listening.

“You must learn to eat with a knife and a fork, not with your hands!” Ms. Claircide would tell the little girl. “Use the serviette to wipe your mouth!”

But the little girl, who had no knowledge of the genteel world, felt the urge to use her animal instinct to crush a chicken bone between her teeth or use her messy hands to rip a mango to shreds.

Phyllis could be seen sitting straight-backed and sullen in front of the huge mahogany dining-room table, dressed in white socks and a puffy, white silk dress. She would have a perturbed look on her face as she held a fork in her left hand and a knife in the other hand, cutting away at the foods she'd rather have eaten with her bare hands.

“Oh, Aunt Claircide, can't I eat with my fingers? The meat is too hard for the fork to cut,” Phyllis would plead, giving the helper those affecting stares as she twisted her head from side to side.

“You know I cannot let you do that. I'm just the hired help,” she'd tell the little girl, who didn't understand what it was like to be a master of one's own destiny. “But hold on tight, little one, because Christmas will be coming soon, and that's when the Jonkunno[3] festival will come to town. There you'll be merry and could whine[4].”

Phyllis began to laugh with the eating utensils in her hand. She could hear the joviality in the helper's tone melting into restricted sounds.

“We aren't at the masquerade yet, so in the meantime, please abide by your father's rules. Eat up, and then let's go into the study hall.”

But the music of the famed procession of convivial revelers had begun to sing and dance in little Phyllis’s head, and she intrinsically moved her entire small body to the rhythm of the African drums, ignoring the straitlaced norms of polite English society. Minutes later, when Backra Crossfield entered the dining room, Phyllis quickly switched from her natural habits, once again becoming his dutiful daughter. He looked at her with absolute pride and achievement, ignoring the fact that he'd failed to abolish the trait of rebellion in his first daughter, Dorett. It was as if little Phyllis looked at him with see-through eyes and could sense his longing to see his first daughter once more but couldn't forgive her for having an insurrectionary heart.

“When is Dorett coming back from school?” Phyllis inquisitively asked Backra Crossfield.

He looked into her expanded hazel eyes staring up at him and replied, “When the semester is over.”

Backra Crossfield then turned to Ms. Claircide and asked if she'd hired the new yard boy, Maxwell Eastwood, to assist with the difficult chores around his property.

“Yes, Sir. He'll be arriving on Thursday evening, in two days.”

“Good,” he replied shrewdly. “He could begin the following day, in the aurora of morn, when the cocks begin to crow.”

Backra Crossfield played the role of the “baasman” in every aspect of his life. He would be seen flinging his diatribe to a group of soot-black, shirtless men, who looked like unschooled boys from a distance. Phyllis and his helper would watch him intensely, often seeing him point his right finger at the faces of his employees. In dismay, the employees would hold down their small, black and berated tamarind-seed-shaped heads. After Backra Crossfield walked away from the men, their heads rose proudly in a reactionary manner, pointing their fingers behind his head as he walked away from the scene.

Phyllis became rather distraught over the scene when she saw those grown men being treated like children. She turned away in embarrassment, trying to forget what she’d seen.

“Look for a moment, Phyllis, because this is a side of your father you wouldn't want to toy with,” the helper told her.

“No, Ms. Claircide,” the girl whispered back with a glimmer of coherence.

She was older now, giving her true insight into the reality of her situation.

“You must try putting those sad thoughts aside and think about the joy the masquerade will bring.”

Phyllis’s countenance would shift when she once again asked Ms. Claircide about the mirthful band of Jonkunnos who came to Lucea every year.

“They will be here a week from Saturday,” revealed the employer.

Some years earlier, when Ms. Claircide took the young girl to the festival, Phyllis got tired and slept on her shoulders most of the time. The soothing sound of the fife had lulled her to sleep like a cradle song.

“Great. The first time you took me three years ago, I couldn't bear to look at the people dancing in costumes because they frightened me. I didn't even get a chance to whine; only the jolly sound of the fife still lingers in my eardrum,” remembered Phyllis.

Ms. Claircide redundantly laughed, throwing her jubilant head backward.

“You might see the masqueraders in a new light this year. But my dear, try not to be afraid. There are only human beings underneath the elaborate clothing,” said Ms. Claircide.

Phyllis wasn't convinced that those grotesqueries who came at her with bestial gestures, some years before, had human forms beneath their clothes. She remembered the devil the most, with his cadaverous eyes and sanguine lips, and how he reached for her heart with the stabbing force of his perditious pitch fork. She fainted on the scene and had to be taken to a nearby pavilion by Ms. Claircide for a whiff of eucalyptus. But the sweet-sounding fife music later renewed her senses just in time to witness the last trace of the satiric revelers.

“I promise not to faint away this time. I know that's why you didn't take me to the masquerade again,” she confided in Ms. Claircide.

“True. But your father also forbade me to take you there again until you were old enough to understand more clearly,” revealed the helper.

“Now do you think I'm old enough to understand?” asked Phyllis.

“Yes. I do, my child. The mysteries of this world are now at your feet,” replied Ms. Claircide before abruptly ending the conversation.

The time eventually came for Dorett to return from boarding school for the summer break only to find a brooding father and his contemptuous, fair-skinned mistress—a woman named Ms. Evelyn, who came from the parish of St. Elizabeth. She'd linger about the place, eating luxuriant beef fat and lazing on the veranda, cooling herself with a peacock feathered fan.

“Make me a jug of lemonade with lots of ice,” she'd demand from Ms. Claircide, who looked down at her with taciturn eyes and indignation while Backra Crossfield was out working at the pen.

Maxwell, the hired hand, bore the brunt of Ms. Evelyn's wrath because he performed the menial tasks around the vast property. She often disrupted his routine; she demanded he bring her open-toe, strappy sandals or lace up a new pair of shoes, which had him muttering foul language under his breath. Matters got worse when Dorett returned from boarding school. She noticed his physical strength and fired ambition to change the course of his beggared existence. The silly boys she’d met at the boarding school during their village dances hadn’t seemed so strong, so confident, but lived in the shadow of their wealthy fathers. Dorett secretly went on to amuse herself with Maxwell, knowing that her father would have a fit if he found out.

“That boy is not of your station, so you shouldn't be looking at him in that manner!” she'd scold Dorett, who had become bewitchingly wicked.

Dorett knew how to cunningly turn on and off the charm before becoming brutally blatant, so when Ms. Evelyn would make such caustic remarks about Maxwell, she'd gently smile, commenting about Backra Crossfield's younger women companions, “the ones with the slim waistlines, widened hips, and prepossessing faces.”

“You go away with your fresh mouth, or you'll be sorry when I tell your father...” Ms. Evelyn retorted while sipping a glass of lemonade, dressed in pristine white linens coated with besmirched threats.

“Let's see if he will take your side when I tell him about your abuse of Phyllis,” Dorett would answer back.

Such comments regarding Phyllis would silence her father's mistress, giving Dorett extra time in the comfort of Maxwell. In the back of her mind, it pained Dorett to realize that her very existence was irrelevant to her father. She didn't matter to Backra Crossfield, and poor, pitiful Ms. Evelyn, who shared the revolving doors of his licentious bed, didn't even realize it. Women of darker hues also shared his bed, leaving behind their scent of peasantry and warmth, unlike the lofty essence of Ms. Evelyn. Still, in her father's game of conquests with women, no one quaked his reminiscent heart like her deceased mother.

She knew that he’d once again send her away at the crack of dawn, like he did his women friends, after he was sick and tired of them.

“You are now a high school graduate, and I've secured a place for you at the Tutorial Secondary and Commercial College, a secretarial school in Kingston,” Backra Crossfield told his elder daughter one early morning while choosing a fat-tailed goat to slaughter for a feast in the making. “Remember to choose a husband wisely when the time comes.”

Meanwhile, behind the dark corners of his mind, he laughed at severing the relationship between his wayward daughter and the barefooted farmhand. No one told him of their clandestine love affair because she was his daughter, and he intrinsically knew the workings of her untamed heart.

Like Backra Crossfield in his youth, Maxwell Eastwood had that glare for ambition in his large perspicacious eyes, but he refused to give the lad a chance to transcend his station in life. He gazed down on him with a jealous streak, as a social climber who would wrestle the accolades right from his charitable hands. He remembered their first encounter, an unassuming meeting at late eve amid a faggot of burning pimento wood. Maxwell stood before him, a shoeless, young man in his late teens, chigger-footed and backward in all ways. He couldn't see beyond the misery in front of his lofty eyes. His wealth had given him a belittling air, an inflated ego.

“Mas[5] Errol, Ms. Claircide's big brotha, send mi to yuh,” he pronounced in the ignorant dialect of his upbringing. “Suh, here mi is.”

His education was obviously lacking, and like the other men and women who came to Backra Crossfield seeking simple employment, Maxwell seemed to lack vision. He felt comfortable in his presence, knowing his lowly attitude would not threaten his established order.

“Yes, baas. De leaves hav' been raked from de grounds..... No baas, fresh wata wasn't put inna de animals troughs but mi will get dem done dis evenin'....”

For Maxwell, a day's work on the farmland would always end in the twilight of reasoning. Whatever lies in darkness always emerges into light, into a new understanding. He realized the insecure nature of his new boss but would play the fool to catch him in his acts of deception. Even though he was a field hand, he was good at selling cattle. So, he took it upon his head to trade two of Backra Crossfield's Jamaica Hope heifers for two Jamaica Brahman bulls, a newly developed beef breed.

“But what the hell do you know about cows?” Backra screamed some hours before Mas Rupert's truck came to pick up the heifers and drop off the bulls. “What does a dutty[6] foot boy like you know about business?”

But in the back of Backra Crossfield's mind, he knew the young lad was smart. He knew that cross-breeding his cows was feasible to increase the quality of his produce. The addition of the Jamaica Brahman cattle, known for their tolerance in surviving temperate climates and tick-borne maladies, would improve the quality of the meat sold and safeguard his investments. He instantly saw the wisdom in increasing his meat supply by selling to the newly-opened hotels around the island and shipping beef to nearby lands. But he discredited the young man's business acumen as something trivial, while in the meantime, he used it to better his business prospects. Maxwell laid low and saved the pittance from his wages, hoping to one day branch out independently.

As time went on, many people attended Backra Crossfield’s parties as he bought more land and expanded the business. Maxwell shrank in size and importance. He humbled himself in silence until one Saturday, some years later, when the masquerade in Lucea square appeared. By then, Phyllis had blossomed into her mid-teens, with a keen understanding of her father’s intentions. He wanted to remove Dorett from the picture so Phyllis could remain at his side as his dutiful daughter. She witnessed him offer her sister's hand to one of her father’s business partners, who brought her much unhappiness. This final straw triggered her questioning the integrity of her father. Firstly, she pined away to know why her father didn't treat their field hand fairly.

“Papa, can't you see Maxwell is young and full of new ideas that could help expand your business ventures,” she'd counsel Backra Crossfield.

“No. I don't,” he'd tell her. “He's an opportunist, on the verge of striking when a chance presents itself.”

“But wasn't it his idea to trade your cows, which added new businesses to your enterprise?” asked Phyllis. “Your milk and beef supply have increased all over the island.”

Phyllis had been observing Maxwell throughout her youth; she noticed how he adjusted to her blossoming growth each year. When he first arrived, he'd play with her roughly like a boy and would sometimes kick away her moving feet just to make her fall. She'd get up and cry, running to Ms. Claircide to have her put a dab of Mercurochrome on her scraped knees. The red antiseptic liquid would make her feel like an invalid, and it stung her raw flesh. Strangely, Maxwell would be there to soothe the pain by gently kissing her forehead. She couldn't understand why he could be mean and kind to her at the same time.

“Treat Ms. Phyllis better for she's not used to such skylarking,” Ms. Claircide would tell Maxwell.

The young girl would then stare at him with sympathetic eyes, glances that proved to Maxwell how she cared for him in ways he didn't wish to understand. But when she became sixteen, they sealed a pack to become secret lovers, as he had been with Dorett, her sister, before she left for school after summer’s end. Not even Ms. Claircide knew of their meetings in the fragrant fern gully, in the knot of reasoning. As twilight descended upon them both, the young lovers would interlock at the edge of the waterfall, at the brink of disapprobation.

“Yuh mus' wait until de masquerade comes to town again, then mi will get yuh,” Maxwell would say teasingly to Phyllis as he watched her long legs make their way up the steps of the slippery, moss-covered rocks.

By the time the revelers emerged at the next Christmas event in Lucea, Phyllis was already seventeen. Backra Crossfield forbade Maxwell from entering the main house to interact with his favorite daughter without Ms. Claircide's knowledge and presence. There, in the spice-filled masala of pungent odors of the kitchen, the teenager stood, in the penumbra of her very existence, not maturing into her own being. Living in the mirror of a deceased mother's face, Phyllis felt strapped to the housekeeper's side. Her existence gave her nothing but the dismal echo of wifery for an accomplished man to enjoy while she burned to experience the spices of life. Being pretty for Phyllis meant having a vacuous mind, yet she would be stuck obeying a wealthy man who would have her hand in marriage. She'd bring no shame to her father's name, and she'd be admired for being a lady of proper decorum, unlike her sister, Dorett, who'd become an errant woman.

Everything changed the day the masquerade came. Earlier that day, Maxwell had packed his belongings and vowed to depart the farmland from which he came in the twilight of reasoning. But first, he had to convince Phyllis to meet him the following year so that they could get married. Phyllis was smart enough to realize that Maxwell was her ticket out of a trite world. Gratitude, though, wasn't love. Still, she would go along with the deal.

He planned to return to his boyhood home and start a cattle business like Backra Crossfield. The lovers vowed to see each other for one last time before the year passed amid the bedlam of hundreds of voices, antics, and conundrums that attacked them from every phantasmal corner of the main square in Lucea.

“Promise mi dat you'll com' away wid mi de followin' year,” he told Phyllis.

“Yes, my love. I will,” she promised before dashing off.

The festivities in Lucea commenced the following noonday with the animated and repetitious sound of the tootling village fife. Phyllis took a discreet spot on the opposite side of the square while Maxwell occupied the other side, a distance above her. They tried to deter suspicion from their love affair, but knowledge could not be kept in obscurity in a small-town village. The streets were lined with people of all sizes and shapes, with hues of bafflement and enlightenment, making their way along the elongated, worn-out cul-de-sac of the square. It was a time of jubilance when the villagers parodied the customs of their European masters. It was their time to resist the work of contract labor and the standstill it brought into their lives. They were rebels against a life of servitude in a colony where an esoteric group of people could transcend their social station, leaving meager chances for others to follow. As the town folks watched the procession in awe and enthusiasm, the military sound of the goat skinned drumbeat blended into the shrill of the fife, causing the passersby to click their fingers and whine their bodies. Later, other instruments like the rattles and the bottle and grater joined the symphony of sounds.

“Ah see dem comin' from dat way!” screamed a mother of two girls, who stood in front of both Phyllis and Ms. Claircide. “Look it's Pitchy Patch!”

They could see the prancing character wearing a formidable mask, brandishing a horsewhip to control the spectators. Dressed in variegated patches flying about the place, he jumped and gyrated his slender hips to the rolling sound of the music.

Phyllis began whining her hips and flaring her arms in a manner of freedom. Pitchy Patch spotted her from a distance and moved towards her, dancing. He loved the look of her small, perky face and how it lit up like a thousand light bulbs to illuminate the already festive atmosphere. Belly Woman and Actor Boy approached the scene in different strides. What a contrast, what a resemblance in this mimicking atmosphere of colonial oppression!

The revelers were men with willowry limbs who danced springily, almost like puppets on a string. Belly Woman moved ahead of Actor Boy, circling her pregnant stomach and wriggling her pronounced buttocks to the crowd of rowdy onlookers. She was the breeder of all slaves, a rented womb who birthed useless lives. Behind her was the verbose Actor Boy, carrying a book of poetry. He was the romantic type, dressed in a Shakespearean-era costume with an elongated, white-washed face as long and ambiguous as the Fang's people death mask. He represented a new type of hope for future generations.

“These characters appear different to me now,” Phyllis told her guardian, Ms. Claircide. “The last time I saw them, I was scared and ran away. Now, I could clearly see the ashen feet of the men who reside in the costumes.”

The young girl on the brink of womanhood had gained a new understanding about a mystery that once taunted her. The day the masquerade came brought light and joy; it enabled Phyllis’s realization that she must find a way to escape the clutches of Backra Crossfield before eventually beginning to wither away.

“Would you like me to get you a glass of lemonade?” asked Ms Claircide. “It is mighty hot, and I'm thirsty.”

“Yes. Please do,” replied Phyllis.

After her guardian departed the scene, Phyllis’s eyes met Maxwell’s with a quick glance from a distance. She surmised that he freely longed to be with her, without their under-the-table meetings at twilight. She missed his presence during the daytime because in their quick moments of passion, they lived vicariously through each other's last embrace. She could see him pointing to the end of the cul-de-sac, insisting that they meet there within an hour. Maxwell watched her shake her head in acceptance. In a short time, Ms. Claircide returned, bringing two cups of lemonade and some fried saltfish cakes.

“There you go,” she said to Phyllis, handing her the fish cakes wrapped in a paper serviette. “Do you want to drink the lemonade now?”

Phyllis smiled in acceptance. At about that time, the other masked characters came onto the scene. She could see the two Set-Girls, lost in the annals of time brought back for one brief minute. When Ms. Claircide spotted the Set Girls, who dressed as proper French Creole ladies, she bawled out.

“Good Lord! I haven't seen those characters since I was a child!” she shouted excitedly. “They usually showed up with a Queen.”

Her trip down memory lane caused Phyllis to take a closer look and try to observe details she hadn't noticed before. She noticed how the Horse Head used his hooves of steel to kick a crying boy before he returned to the crowd, wriggling his body as if nothing happened. Cow Head, with his big blocky skull and circular-shaped horns, caused the children to laugh and run away in fear. The

Policeman, with his baton held high, aimed to keep order by hitting the people in the screaming crowd. All characters patrolled themselves with lilting vigor, admonishing a system of oppression.

Indeed, Phyllis basked in the moment of enlightenment on the day of the masquerade until the Devil came. With his eyes and tongue of red and his teeth of gold, he emerged from the abyss of darkness, a villain of monumental proportion in the tiny village of Blenheim, Hanover. His long, serpentine tail and broad, shirtless body, blackened by engine oil, caused a stir among the unsettling crowd. He was the master of this system of suppression! There was something familiar about the way he jabbed at the crowd with the stabbing force of the pitchfork. “Man, woman, chick an' chile,” gave him air and space to blow his fire of freedom and bondage.

“What a wretched creature to look at!” said Phyllis to Ms. Claircide, turning her face away from the brute, who spotted her from a bevy of other beauties lining the pathways.

Phyllis could see the Devil had singled her out from the other beauties because he danced towards her direction tauntingly, grinding his hips and menacing her with the fork. She couldn't bear to look him in the face. The boundaries between illusion and actuality became blurred, giving new meaning to Phyllis’s cognizance. She bolted from the scene, rather disturbed. As she made her way up to the cul-de-sac where Maxwell signaled her to meet him, her guardian's eyes watched with a sense of foreboding.

“Meet me at the house at four o’clock sharp!” she shouted to Phyllis, as the noise blocked out the doom in her voice.

Ms. Claircide saw something new that day, for when the Devil came near to jab at Phyllis, he wore a duplicitous smile instead of his usual heaving.

“You go away!” she shooed, pressing her clean right hand into the muck of his blackened skin.

Looking at her dirty hands and the patch of darkness it erased from the Devil's skin, she could clearly see specks of familiar brown.

The chanted ritual reflected Phyllis's domestic life, one revolving around her father. It moved on the pulse of formality. In the early mornings, Phyllis would invade her father’s large, mannish bedroom, which was absent of her deceased mother's feminine touch, to look at the hoisting of his mistress’s fair, fat mutton of a thigh thrown across his bare, brown chest, disturbing her immensely.

During his days of supervising the progress on his vast farmland in Hanover, he toiled with the grace of a horse. His horse. His farmhands needn't help him down from the horse that moved about the place, for the beast would tilt its elegant neck, allowing Backra Crossfield’s easy descent. By noon, Ms. Claircide would have his meal ready. Lunchtime was taken seriously. Taking off his wide sun-protective hat, made of straw, he'd sit politely around the huge dining table. His unbent back breathed an air of masterdom, totalitarian and orderly, unlike his secretive lust for the dark. He'd eat only with Phyllis present. Her obeisance to his rigid law made her easily bearable to sit with him around the table. She'd be washed and ready like her mother, waiting for him to take the first morsel of food before he'd genuflect his head in prayer, thanking God for his provision. He was God. Why did he need another to contend with?

Phyllis would remain puzzled about that question. There'd be little to no verbal exchange between the father and his favorite daughter. Phyllis would tolerate these rituals with him, knowing that his formality was his way of reinforcing order in their lives.

Early at dawn, before the sun rose, Maxwell awoke and prepared to leave the farmland where he had struggled for some years without significant progress. From a distance, the sun's rays began to poke out, and he could see Backra Crossfield standing around a pyre, watching it blaze slowly. There was a feeling of defeat in the baasman's backward demeanor: the gentle slant of his neck and the loose grip of his fist that slid into the collapse of his bodily strength. As the fire burned, the young lad could see a pair of blackened, tattered pants, a leather whip, and a long, snakelike object tossed on the flames. The fire rose angrily like the eyes of hell! As Maxwell departed, he held his head down on the desolate trail, knowing that Backra Crossfield was a wrongful man who’d disguised himself to get leverage over people’s lives.

Phyllis's life took on a series of somber shades after his departure. Most of the time, Ms. Claircide would walk her to the village school and back home again.

“Why does he resort to humiliating me so? Am I not seventeen years old?” Phyllis questioned her guardian in a surly tone.

“It's your father. Please ask him why,” she told Phyllis. “He only told me not to let you out of my sight.”

Of course, Phyllis knew the reason why. The following morning after Backra Crossfield realized that Maxwell had departed, she was put on severe interrogation.

“I think you know of his whereabouts,” he menacingly told her. “I know of your shenanigans with him.”

She could see the glint in his small dark eyes before they widened into monstrous torsion, twisting and turning up and down before stopping and starting again.

“But you're wrong this time, Papa. I don't know where Maxwell is!” she managed to blurt out without fear.

The contortion of his eyes ceased, and his chest puffed like a puffer fish, venomous and miscreant.

“You're just like your sister, free-minded and bold. When did you change your spot from being my daughter to becoming someone else?”

Of course, Backra Crossfield didn't recognize this version of Phyllis because he'd conjured the idea of a dutiful daughter in the warped corridors of his psyche. He'd kept her at a great distance, observing her growth into womanhood, admiring the soft curvature of her avocado-shaped body and her mild and feminine disposition. He refused to see the thorns she secretly carried in her bloody and invisible palms. Those lovely hands of warmth had stabbed him over a thousand times, only to see her father rise again in opposition against her productivity.

“Papa, let's change the topic,” whispered Phyllis before walking away.

Even though Phyllis walked away from Backra Crossfield, she couldn't leave his side. He wouldn't allow her to leave like her sister Dorett, who drifted away from him into total darkness. Phyllis was the last link that united him to his deceased wife, with whom he shared strong connubial ties. His years of absence, without a noteworthy woman by his side, were filled with empty spaces, filled by strays who came into his life at dusk and left his bedside by dawn. They left no valuable memories. Backra Crossfield was a lonely man. He lived alone, amid a farmland of some fifty employees, all of whom were strangers to him. He never interacted with people he thought were lesser in value than himself. It was a life of vice as seen through the eyes of his beloved daughter.

Phyllis had packed a little red bag and secretly hid it in a hole down the ravine where she and Maxwell used to rendezvous in the twilight of time. She didn't want her life to be glued to living at a certain time, in a certain place, amid the darkness. She'd been stuck in time since her mother's death, protected by a father whose control inflicted upon her the wounds of closeting and banality. Phyllis couldn't bear them any longer. She wanted to break free. She lived to experience the freedom she felt during the time spent at the masquerade. She'd disappear the next day in the frenzy of it all.

“You've been living in your own little world for some time now, Phyllis,” said Ms. Claircide. “What's going on in your mind?”

The guardian and pupil seldom spoke to each other during Phyllis’s period of illumination. The young girl had retreated into her shell, knowing that Ms. Claircide wasn't a friend but a paid employee of Backra Crossfield. There was no one trustworthy to turn to in her times of need.

“I just have been thinking a lot since I've graduated high school. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

“Never worry that pretty little head of yours. You know that your father always has something up his sleeve. He always has your back!” retorted Ms. Claircide.

“It would be nice if he asked me for a change instead of always choosing for me,” replied Phyllis. ‘Oh, this pretty little head of mine has become a loggerheaded reptile, cold-hearted and vicious’.

She could easily rid herself of her father and bury him under her nose, at a place so bare and desolate, cold and hard like he'd become. But on the day of the masquerade, she would depart, disappearing through the pathway along the line of forested trees that would lead her to the main road. Maxwell had taken her by the hand and showed her the way to freedom when she had met him at the end of the cul-de-sac the previous year.

“Dis is de way yuh will use instead of de main road. Dis trail hasn't been trampled on by too many people. In fact, not many people know 'bout dis path,” he informed her.

Phyllis remembered thinking how backward she was, cooped up in the large prison built by her father for her protection and comfort. She didn't know a thing!

“Never you mind, I'll make my way out and come back to you,” she told him with a vehemence so forceful that he believed her.

By the day the masquerade came again, Phyllis felt apter to beat the devil, with his crimson red eyes, fire-scorching mouth, and swirl of black doom. Within the year of Maxwell's departure, she'd return to the same spot time and time again, going over her great escape plan. But on that day, everything moved by so quickly, without Phyllis even taking notice of the possibility of danger that lurked in the shadows. The jubilant crowd, in its throng of chaos and excitement, caused her to lose her soundness of mind. The carnivalesque characters moved to the sound of the sedative fife and the roll of the drum. Those were the only instruments Phyllis could hear because the other sounds didn't matter like the other characters in the parade. But when the devil arrived, Phyllis took notice. She remembered the lashing of his slimy and sinuous tail and the claw of his malicious hands. This time, however, he took a fancy to her, chasing up to the cul-de-sac while he menacingly moved his grinding hips and tried to jab her with his pitchfork. The crowd jeered at them as they made their way up the pathway.

When they came to the dead end, the creature chased her into the anticipating bushes and pulled out a silvery blade. She tried to run away as fast as she could, but he outsmarted her at every curve. He was her trail of doom!

As the music continued to blast, Phyllis could see the hoisting of the blade as it hovered over her horror-stricken head. She closed her eyes and pretended that Maxwell had returned in the form of a celestial Brown Pelican to lure her to freedom.

“Hallelujah!” she blurted out in rapture while closing her eyes. “I see you've come to release me from this place of hell!

[1]
Backra- an expression used to refer to any white person, particularly one in a position of authority. It also referred to a slave master or slave driver

[2]
Annotto- an orange-red condiment and food coloring derived from the seeds of the achiote tree, native to tropical parts of the Americas. It is often used to impart a yellow to red-orange color to foods, but is also used for its flavor and aroma.

[3]
Jonkunno- a band of masqueraders who usually performed in towns and villages in the Caribbean during Christmas time. It originated during the period of slavery, with its roots dating back to West African traditions and Christmas holiday reprieve granted to enslaved people. It evolved into a unique form of expression and resistance, featuring music, dance, and elaborate costumes. It continues to highlight a significant part of Caribbean identity.

[4]
Whine- to dance with rhythmic gyratory movements of the hips and pelvis; to move the waist, hips, etc.

[5]
Mas- master.

[6]
Dutty- dirty.

S. D. Brown is a postcolonial writer who was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She received a B.A in Liberal Arts from The New School for Social Research in New York City in 1990 and a M.S in Literacy from Adelphi University. Her short stories have appeared in Anthurium, Sargasso, Two Thirds North, The Journal of Post colonial Writing, Adelaide Literary Magazine, the premier issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly and the 34th, 37th and 39th issues of The Caribbean Writer. She's written several volumes of postcolonial short stories and is looking for a publisher. She is a member of International Women’s Writing Guild.