The Jumbies

In this succinct chapter, narrative perspective shifts to Dru, as she makes her way toward the forest, clutching the matches she took from home. At the edge of the woods, Dru nervously begins gathering dry twigs and small branches. As she enters the forest, her heart pounds, but Dru presses on. With legs shaking, she moves deeper into the forest: Dru plans to set a small fire that will create enough of a disturbance to distract both the villagers and the jumbies.

Narrative point of view shifts back to Bouki and Malik in this brief chapter. The brothers walk in the forest but do not need to venture too deep into it to enact their plan in assisting Corinne. They plan to quickly run out of the forest, so they stay close to the road.

As the brothers stop to ready themselves, the forest’s uncustomary silence catches them off guard; Bouki feels this is a sign the jumbies are waiting for them to act. The brothers exchange looks as Bouki begins to count on his fingers. At the count of three, they both begin screaming, and the forest awakens.

This short chapter centers Corinne’s narrative perspective. She nervously waits by the shore for Bouki and Malik’s signal, watching the village fishermen pull in their boats and dry their nets. Just as she is about to give up, she hears the boys’ scream, and the fishermen all run toward the sound.

Once all the adults disappear, Corinne runs to her father’s boat and pushes it into the water, whispering to her Grand-père for his help. Luckily, the tide is going back out to sea, so getting the boat on the water is easy. However, as she paddles farther from the beach, the wind begins to work against her, threatening to catch her boat in a nearby shallow. She cries out to her Grand-père a second time—“Please!” (191)—and the wind suddenly changes directions. Corinne follows the glint of her mother’s stone pendant, lodged high on the cliff, which helps her to row directly to the cliff’s base.

In this chapter, the narrator returns to Dru’s perspective. Now deep in the woods, Dru hears Bouki and Malik’s scream far off in the distance. She arranges her bundle of twigs and branches into a pile and, as she has seen her father do in their sugarcane field, clears a circle around it to control the fire she will set. She huddles close to the pile and struggles to set it alight with her matches, which the sweat from her hands have dampened.

She finally successfully lights a match. However, at that moment, Dru glimpses a figure in the dark and hears the rattle of chains. Terrified, she drops a lit match on the forest floor and crawls into the underbrush, realizing she has nowhere to hide. While crouched in the bush, the branches of a stinging nettle hook into her hair and shirt; Dru is trapped. She struggles to free herself, but this only makes the tangle worse.

Above Dru, the moon illuminates a fly, struggling in a spider’s web; the creature and the girl are both unsuccessful in their escape attempts.

Now farther out to sea, Corinne struggles in the choppy water. The choppiness worsens as she gets closer to her destination, and Corinne carefully navigates her father’s small boat around the jagged rocks near the cliff’s base. As the daylight fades and she closes in on the cliff, Corinne shivers and notes the overwhelming height she must climb. She is close to the bottom of the cliff when the chapter ends.

From within the darkened woods, Bouki and Malik run toward the road; they can hear the voices of Hugo and Victor, who are searching for the screaming boys. The brothers burst through the trees and onto the road, Bouki dragging his disguised brother and crying about the douens turning Malik into a jumbie.

Angry villagers appear on the road, brandishing weapons. The boys had not planned for this kind of aggressive response. Bouki grows fearful as the armed adults vow not to lose any more of their children to the jumbies. Bouki pleads with the crowd not to hurt his brother, showing them Malik’s trick sandals; the two boys fall to the ground and cover their eyes, awaiting attack. When no attack ensues, Malik peeks through his fingers to see the crowd of villagers advancing against a band of douens standing behind the boys, at the forest’s edge: The jumbies are also brandishing weapons.

The brothers scurry out from between the villagers and the douens, but a single jumbie violently grabs them, just as they reach the edge of the crowd. With the villagers distracted by their own battle, no one notices the douen dragging the brothers into the forest.

Corinne’s father’s boat begins to take on damage from hitting the rocks; Corinne has become too exhausted to continue avoiding all of them. As the waves toss the tiny boat, she notices she is heading directly for a large, jagged rock, and the vessel is moving too quick for her to avoid the oncoming collision. Corinne screams, and at that moment, she thinks she sees a large fishtail slap the side of her boat, redirecting it away from the rock. Corinne is unsure whether what she saw was real or imaginary, but she thanks her Grand-père for his help.

At the base of the cliff, she struggles to find a foothold to begin her climb. A massive wave hits and damages the boat, but in the receding water, she spies a nook onto which she can grab. Using her broken oar, Corinne scrapes barnacles from the notch and begins her climb, just as her father’s boat shatters on the rocks. She sadly watches it disappear beneath the waves but continues to climb.

As Corinne nears the top, she realizes she must jump away from the cliff to grab its edge, which juts out farther than the rocks on which she is climbing. She knows if she misses this jump, she will die; however, as Pierre, Bouki, Malik, and Dru need her, she sets her mind on the task. The necklace’s pendant blinks in the moonlight and Corinne thinks of her mother. She makes the jump and pulls herself over the top of the cliff, recovering the necklace from the branch where Severine had tied it.

She studies the necklace, trying to figure out how to use its power and why it burned Severine. However, at that moment, an old woman appears from the forest—a soucouyant has cornered Corinne.