Concerts, Quakes and Voodoo Priests

My friends, Shari, Nicole, Kevin and I are at the Barbados Community College to see a concert headlined by Maxx and Mandy. During the concert, when Maxx is onstage, there is a group of Bajan white girls swooning over the sound of his voice. This one girl in the group said she was so willing to give him what was left of her virginity if he would have her.

I seem to be stage managing the event. I watch them fawn over Maxx from behind the curtains of the wings of stage right, and then I go further backstage to help prepare Mandy for her set. She is holding the microphone and is stingy when it comes to allowing me to hold it, just for a second, as though afraid I’ll steal her light and thunder.

Now the concert is over and Shari, Nicole, Kevin and I are under a wooden and cement tent structure, but with a bunch of other people none of us know, other students from BCC presumably. Suddenly the earth starts to shake and quake. Shari, Nicole and Kevin run directly from under the tent, but I run around it, in search of Maxx and Mandy.

Not seeing them, I rejoin the others on the far side of the tent. I then proceed to jump from one point to another within The Dreaming. First I am on the road of the hill below my Aunt’s house in the country. Then I am in the backyard of the old house, with a white Rastafarian poodle dog and a little calico kitten.

They are my charges. I am being pursued now, but I cannot see and do not know what my pursuers are. I round the corner of the enclosed garage and walk tentatively across the unenclosed driveway towards the road. In the house next to the old house, through the track, through the lane, I see a band of Voodoo Priests, dressed in fine garbs, in dapper robes and regalia of deep golden yellows, contrasting strikingly against their onyx and obsidian skins.

I take my two charges along with my mother, who is forever peering fearfully out at the backyard and later over my shoulder and later behind her back. We walk quietly down the road hoping to slip past the Priests, who are the pursuers, and would have made it had the last Priest, a tall, ebony woman bedecked and adorned in golden garb had not spotted and exposed us to the others.

We have been seen. We run down the road as fast as we can, me with the white Rasta dog and baby cat in my oversized jacket, my mother trailing behind, watching ever fearfully. As we run to the end of the gap, the Voodoo Priests are transformed into Macbethean witches … crusty, mangy, and old. They shrink in size, and grow, and swell and spread in width. Their clothing changes from gold to sickly, sour, sewage green and black and deep purple.

They chase us with intent. Their crooked and bent silhouettes shriek as they float and glide down the road behind us. We turn the corner to the right and run up the road adjacent and identical to the one we just left. As we run up this twin street, I begin to lift, to fly, to soar. My charges are in my coat. My mother is behind me, but whether she is just holding onto my ankle or she is flying too, I cannot tell from my angle.

The witches fall behind us. The time is dusk, and the evening sun is before us now, flaring and shimmering as if made from faerie dust. It is a Faerie sun. I reach out and grab hold of it, and as I grasp it, and as it blazes within my enclosed fist, The Dreaming dims and fades away and I depart from the dream.