PHANTOMS OF THE SUGAR CANE

Phantoms of the Cane
by Dr. Sheila Rampersad

From Preface to
THE GREEN FACE MAN
by Professor Rosanne Kanhai
ISBN: 976-620-227-3

    ■ I was born in the cane fields of Central Trinidad and raised on stories of cane.
Among my earliest memories are those of my mother and grandmother cautioning
that, since I had to taxi through the cane fields to get home from school, I was not
to stay out late. After dark, they said, a phantom straddled the cane road; anyone
attempting to pass between his powerful legs was crushed. When the phantom
appeared, pedestrians could not go forward, only backward.

    As if that was not terrifying enough, the soucouyant or the la diablesse herself,
accompanied the phantom. My mother never saw the la diablesse herself, but she
told us of her fear on particular nights when, walking along a dark Central road -
one of those straight access roads that quarter the cane fields - she heard a child
crying in the bushes. She looked and looked, through the stubborn stems and in the
long ditches. She found no child, but felt the presence of the la diablesse.

    The soucouyant, according to my grandmother, was one of our neighbours - an
old woman, Miss L - whose movements were suspiciously brisk for her age. At
nights, she pulled off her own skin in favor of the soucouyant's translucent peel and
flew into village homes to suck people's blood to make her strong and youthful.
Many nights my sisters and I stayed awake, salt in hand, waiting to throw it at the
flying soucouyant. The next morning, according to my grandmother, we would see
the burn marks on Miss L. On those nights Ma stayed awake long after we fell asleep,
and in the morning we would see clumps of salt in a protective ring around the house.

    As I entered my teenage years, book-learning confronted folklore. The cane fields
became a place of literary romance. My favorite literature teacher spoke tenderly of
the Central landscape, preparing me to appreciate Samuel Selvon's world of the
cane as one of nobility, drudgery, and bitterness. When she taught V.S. Naipaul, it
was as if she was in the middle of acres of young cane, spreading her arms into the
dry season wind and claiming every sharp stalk, every light flower, every speck of
soot.

    Cane has inspired the creativity of many Caribbean writers, Samuel Selvon and
V.S. Naipaul entered the belly of cane with literary genius. Feroze and JoJo, the
Adamic Indian and African, have their first encounter in the cane fields of Earl
Lovelace's Salt. Derek Walcott's Saddhu of Couva sits amidst cane, listening to the
Anopheles' drone as that of the sitar.

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