Duppy day out
THE SPIRIT of Christmas is one thing, but the Ghost? The first time I experienced the Ghost of Christmas Past was in A
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It was an angelic and caring spirit and showed the main character, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, scenes from his past hoping they would help him to change his penny-pinching ways.
Nice though this spirit was in spirit, in appearance, it was “now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with 20 legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom they melted away.”
My first Christmas ghost, or duppy, was more like my doppelganger. I did not see him but, whoever or whatever he was, he badly scared the telephone operator in the gloomy basement of Whitehall, the prime minister’s office in Trinidad, in the Christmas of 1970. It was not fatal so much as verging on the faecal.
The desks of the prime minister’s public-relations people, mine included, were in the basement of the old building, dating back to the slavery days some said, and there were stories about typewriters clicking furiously late at night and a carriage flying over the entrance gate and being hitched by a top-hatted coachman to a rail in front of what used to be the stables.
THE CELLAR
The basement office led to the cellar, a dark, dank and gloomy place where books written by Dr Eric Williams, the prime minister, were carelessly strewn and rats lived in total abandon. As a book lover, I was not deterred by the environment and with a cheerful ‘good morning’ headed past the busy telephone operator on her switchboard into the dungeon where, it was said, slaves used to be chained and beaten.
I took almost 30 minutes checking out the books, and as I made my way out, I saw the alarm on the face of the operator who nearly fainted when she saw me. “But didn’t you just pass here?” she asked, her voice highpitched in obvious alarm and befuddlement. “No,” I said. “Not me.” She dropped all the cords and switches and ran out screaming, “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Later, when things settled down with some Limacol, a hint of smelling salts, handkerchiefs and female support, the lady explained that someone who looked exactly like me had come out of the cellar, she had smiled at the person and whoever it was went into my little cubbyhole. It had to be what is known as a doppelganger – a lookalike or double of a living person by a ghostly or paranormal phenomenon. In other words, a duppy.
I have no idea how he reached Antigua in the Christmas season of 2006, and later surmised he might have a part-time job as the Ghost of Christmas Past, but he did arrive there to the utter consternation of my dearly beloved mother. She had spent time with us in Belize without any untoward experiences or appearances but, in Antigua, was confronted by him though not in any way to cause alarm so much as speculation.
Growing up in Trinidad and having lived there for so many years, we were into Christmas in a big way and the spirit was not singular. It was legion. No matter that the spirits were the same ones in which my family and other seekers after spiritual salvation sought solace during the year, but at Christmas, these spirits abounded, multiplied, spilled over even, and in such a celebratory atmosphere, came out of the closets and cupboards and flowed freely.
WATER SHORTAGE
I cannot say “like water”, since rural Trinidad, in which I lived at the time, always had (and still has) serious water shortages. The drought, fortunately, only applied to water and did not affect the spirits of the inhabitants. I still have old photographs of Christmas and our high spirits are captured in black and white, among others. The malignant spirits were given the treatment they deserved.
We beat the Johnnie Walker until it became black, then blue, then green. Long before the imposition of value added tax we were savouring it in spirit. Vat 19 Rum and Vat 69 abounded and keeping up the momentum was taxing enough. The amount of spirits we raised, you could call each Christmas a seance.
But the first Antigua Christmas was different. My mom woke at 1 a.m. on New Year’s Adam (the day before New Year’s Eve, aka Old Year’s Day), went into the kitchen for a glass of water and assumed I had fallen asleep in front of the television set, a skill I shared with my father.
Early on New Year’s Day, she jokingly referred to my falling asleep in the living room. I told her that she was mistaken since Indranie and I had both been asleep since 10. I might be a somniloquist, and even a sompillowquist, but I am not a somnambulist. There was a startled silence. Could it be my father visiting us in Antigua now that his old haunts in Trinidad were no longer ours?
After all, for the first time since his death, we were gathered together, his wife, son, four grandchildren and Indranie. The flesh was more than weak. It had to be non-existent since he was a daddy and not a mummy.
The spirit, however, seems to have been willing, and while the other spirits were not flowing with the accustomed rapidity of the past, his coming late for Christmas meant that, as usual, he had made many fuel stops along the way.
I don’t believe in ghosts, and even though we lived in a hamlet called Longford’s in Antigua, not even in my father’s ghost. But my mother seeing my doppelganger, or my father’s, made me change my opinion. While I do not accept that we had a Christmas spirit, I can truly define a ghost as an invisible object usually seen at night.
I am sure that in the comfort of Heavenly peace, my father and mother, for once, would find one thing on which they could both agree.