Jumbee

In 1764 a Scottish physician who had settled in the Leeward Islands published a long poem about sugar, and stopped partway through the first book to explain a plant. The wild liquorice vine, he wrote, produced a seed about the size of a pigeon pea, almost round, red, with a black speck at one end, and the enslaved people who gathered it called it a jumbee bead. He went on to warn that the seeds worked as an emetic and were violent about it. He was more interested in the purgative than the etymology, and he never troubled to say what a jumbee was. That is the useful part. By the time an English poem was footnoting the flora of the Lesser Antilles, the word was already ordinary speech, and it has stayed ordinary for two and a half centuries since.

It came over on the ships. The root is Kimbundu, the language of west-central Angola, where nzumbi names a spirit of the dead, and the same root surfaces in Brazil as zumbi and in Haiti as zombi. What crossed the Atlantic was not a creature but an idea, and ideas travel better than pantheons do. On the plantations that idea met the spirits already in the land, met Catholic and Protestant ghosts, met the beliefs of indentured labourers who arrived later, and it stretched to cover all of them without breaking.

So a jumbee is not a species. It is a class, and the class is crowded. The soucouyant who sheds her skin, the lagahoo dragging his chain, the douen with its feet on backwards: all of them are jumbees, and so is the shapeless something a man swears walked behind him the whole way home from a wake. Asking what a jumbee looks like is asking the wrong question of the word. The right question is what it means to live somewhere the dead have not entirely left.

The older record answers that better than it answers anatomy. Where the tellings do settle on a shape they contradict each other from one island to the next, and the contradiction is not a gap in the evidence, it is the evidence. What is consistent is location. Jumbees keep to the hours and places that are already in between: the night after a funeral, the bend where two tracks meet, the ground under a very large tree. The silk cotton, the grey ceiba whose buttress roots splay out taller than a man and leave black wedges of shadow between them, is called the jumbie tree from Trinidad to Guyana, and there are very few people willing to put an axe to one.

Montserrat did something braver than avoid them. Into the twentieth century the island kept the jombee dance, a ritual for calling the dead into a room on purpose. A small drum enticed the spirits. Behind it came the African babala drum, a triangle and a concertina, sometimes a mouth organ and a scraper. Over all of it ran the woo woo, which was not an instrument but a technique, the drummer working his fingers across the warm skin of the drum to pull out a low unmusical moan. A table was laid with food for the ancestors. The dancers moved through quadrille figures, and the figure that carried the weight was the turn.

Somewhere in the turning the spirit arrived. A dancer would go over into trance and then speak, and what came out was not a scare. It was information. An evil would be named, a wrong put right, someone sick made well. That was the job.

The colonial state understood the job perfectly and spent two centuries trying to end it. A law of 1736 banned the drum outright, in the interest of plantation security. Obeah was criminalised and stayed criminalised, still sitting on the statute books of Montserrat in laws that never bothered to define what obeah actually was. Police and court records show jumbie dances broken up by raids and punished with floggings, fines and imprisonment, with an arrest recorded as late as 1961. The musicians kept altar candles, rosaries and saints’ medals among their ritual equipment and were also called obeah men, and both of those things were true at the same time, which was never a contradiction anywhere except on paper.

The last known jombee dance was held in 1991, at Sturge Park. It was not staged for a funeral or a feast. Montserrat’s sports teams had been losing badly and somebody decided the ancestors wanted appeasing. Four years later the volcano began, and the drummers, the drum makers and the dancers scattered along with everyone else. Nobody has danced it since.

Guyana kept a different arrangement. In Comfa, the Afro-Guyanese spiritual practice, drumming brings on possession the same way, and the spirits arrive sorted by nation: African, Amerindian, Dutch, English, Spanish, Indian and Chinese, seven streams of the country’s history walking into a single room. A jombie there is something more specific than a ghost. It is a spirit that was called up out of the grave and then never sent back, still wandering because somebody left the door open behind it.

And then there is the jumbee people queue up to see. The moko jumbie crosses Carnival on stilts, head and shoulders above the crowd, and the stilts are the best-dated thing about it: a stilt masquerade is documented in the Eastern Caribbean at St Vincent in 1791. The moko half of the name is genuinely unsettled. There was once a people called Moko in southeastern Nigeria, an ethnic label that has since fallen out of use, and the word has also been read as a spirit, a mocker and a sorcerer. The masquerade’s closest relatives, though, appear to lie further west along the Guinea Coast, from Senegambia down to the Ivory Coast. Only the jumbee half is beyond argument. Whatever the stilt-walker is, it belongs to the dead, and it is the one of them anybody applauds.

What a jumbee can do follows from having no body to be slowed down by. It goes where the living cannot conveniently follow, into a house, into a dream, into a dancer at the turn of a quadrille. Some ride a living person outright and speak through them. Others do nothing at all except stand at the edge of the yard and wait to be noticed, which is worse.

The limits are household knowledge rather than anything written down, which is exactly what you would expect of a spirit people actually live with. A jumbee is undone by counting and by thresholds. Rice or salt or sand tipped out at the doorstep will hold one until morning, because it cannot pass a heap without tallying every grain, and dawn always beats the arithmetic. A rope knotted many times over occupies it the same way. Running water stops it. Shoes left outside the door are said to defeat it on the reasoning that it cannot put them on. Sunrise ends the matter entirely, which is why every one of these stories happens in the dark and not one of them is ever finished.

The word lasted because it never needed defending. It took in the planter’s ghost, the spirit of the bush and the restless dead of four continents without altering, since it had no shape to lose. A jumbee is whatever is still out there once the mourners have gone home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a jumbee?

A jumbee is a spirit of the dead in Caribbean folklore, and the word is a category rather than the name of one creature. Soucouyants, lagahoos, douens and unnamed roadside presences are all jumbees. The term is used across Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Montserrat, the Virgin Islands and the wider anglophone Caribbean.

Where does the word “jumbee” come from?

It descends from the Kimbundu word nzumbi, meaning a spirit of the dead, carried to the Caribbean by enslaved people from west-central Angola. The same root produced zumbi in Brazil and zombi in Haiti. Its earliest written appearance in English is a 1764 footnote in a poem about sugar, glossing the red seeds that enslaved workers called jumbee beads.

What is the jombee dance of Montserrat?

The jombee dance was a Montserratian ritual that called jumbees into a gathering deliberately, using drums, a triangle, a concertina and quadrille figures in which dancers “turned” and went into trance. A possessed dancer would then name an evil, right a wrong or heal someone. Colonial law banned the drum in 1736 and criminalised obeah, and the last known jombee dance took place at Sturge Park in 1991.

Is a moko jumbie the same as a jumbee?

A moko jumbie is a jumbee, but the only one that is celebrated rather than avoided. It appears at Carnival as a stilt-walker towering over the crowd, and stilt masquerades are documented in the Eastern Caribbean from St Vincent in 1791. The origin of the “moko” element is disputed, with a defunct southeastern Nigerian ethnic name and readings such as spirit, mocker and sorcerer all proposed.

How do you keep a jumbee away?

The traditional defences work by compulsion and by boundaries. A heap of rice, salt or sand at the doorstep forces a jumbee to count every grain until sunrise, a many-knotted rope keeps it busy in the same way, shoes left outside cannot be put on, and running water cannot be crossed. Daylight ends any encounter outright.

Related Entries

Soucouyant, Lagahoo, Douen, Moko Jumbie (Mocko Jumbie), Massacooraman, Baccoo, Choorile, Kanaima, Loogaroo, Loup-garou, Ciguapa, Hag, Zombie, Anansi