Legend of the La Diablesse .a folk lore

Legend of the La Diablesse .a folk lore
Angelo Bissessarsingh



La Diablesse—Oil painting by Rudolph Bissessarsingh '

In the rich pantheon of local folkore, it is the fusion of French and West-African identities which gave us the colourful characters which have danced in the stories of our forefathers, handed down like cherished heirlooms from generation to generation. Earlier this year I wrote about how the African griot, or storyteller, found new material here in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean where he and his fellows were brutally enslaved.

Trinidad was to receive an infusion of French culture from 1783 when Roume de St Laurent (with the support of the Spanish crown) promulgated the Cedula de Poblacion which offered a land grant to Roman Catholic immigrants and their slaves. Hundreds of French planters fleeing the seeds of revolution and their chattels came to the island and created a French colony with Spanish rule, which was later to be replaced by British dominion in 1797.

The La Diablesse looms tall in the annals of our mythology. She is the devil woman, the temptress and seductress whose wiles would entrap any man whose ill luck led him into her path.

She is both the paragon of womanly beauty and the image of demonic lust. La Diablesse is well known to all who cherish the stories of yesteryear. Almost every village in Trinidad (particularly in the hamlets of the Northern Range) has a yarn to weave about the beautiful woman in the Martiniquan dress—voluminous skirts, head-tie, hat perched jauntily on her head—who waits along the lonely paths for heedless menfolk who would digress from their courses to accommodate a pretty face. Those skirts veil, however, the sinister feature for which La Diablesse is infamous, namely the cloven hoof; the cow-foot which distinguishes her from mortal women. It is largely possible that Martinique was the place of origin of the La Diablesse, since many French settlers came from this island, and the devil woman herself almost always makes an appearance clothed in the style which has become synonymous with the French Antilles.

She appears on the nights when the full moon is the only light that pierces the darkness and she waits on those removed byways where a man is likely to pass. The eminent 19th-century traveller and writer Lafcadio Hearn spent two years in the West Indies in the 1880s and though he visited Trinidad, the majority of his stay was in Martinique where he documented several aspects of the French Creole culture.
It was Hearn’s memoirs of his West Indian sojourn that introduced La Diablesse to the wider world. In a quarter of the city of St Pierre (which was destroyed with massive loss of life by a volcanic eruption in 1902) he wrote: “Mostly she haunts the mountain roads, winding from plantation to plantation, from hamlet to hamlet. But close to the great towns she sometimes walks: she has been seen at mid-day upon the highway which overlooks the Cemetery of the Anchorage, behind the cathedral of St Pierre.”

In Mr Hearn’s narration, La Diablesse is a tall woman of Afro extraction, simply but elegantly clad and all the men know and fear her. One of the more foolhardy, Fafa, sees her as she passes through his street and falls under her charming spell as she croons a bewitching patois rhythm and takes to a precipitous road leading to the heights above St Pierre. Fafa’s compere Gaboux follows at a distance but after a while turns in horror and flees since he has seen her most terrible trait—the cloven hoof that hides beneath the sweeping hem of her madras skirts.
Onward and upward Fafa follows the temptress as the craggy roadway arches away from the last signs of humanity towards the gloom of the forest where the dread fer-de-lance makes his lair. He is now beginning to feel fear but his infatuation supersedes this warning.

Now they are on the summit of a mountain and she reaches for his hand. Hers is as cold as ice as she speaks loving words to the spellbound Fafa. The account written by Mr Hearn terminates thus: “And she, suddenly—turning at once to him and to the last red light, the goblin horror of her face transformed, shrieks with a burst of hideous laughter: “KISS ME NOW.”

For the fraction of a moment he knows her name: then, smitten to the brain with the sight of her, reels, recoils, and, backward falling, crashes 2,000 feet down to his death upon the rocks of a mountain torrent.”

The Paranormal»Ghosts & Hauntings
Jumbees of Guyana


In the Caribbean the term jumbee, and its many variations of spelling, is a generic term given to all malevolent entities that are often found in folklore. Whether you call them spirits, demons or devils the general idea behind the term is that 'bad' people who have done wrong are destined to become instruments of evil in death. These are not ghosts, the jumbee is not a whispy, smokey or fog like creature, it casts a much darker, more sinister figure.

A jumbee is a collection of entities and not just one specific one. The name and deeds of the jumbee depend entirely on where in the Caribbean it came from. Different cultures have different concepts of jumbees. The various kinds of jumbies found in Guyanese folklore reflect Guyana’s complex history and rich ethnic mosaic, drawing on African, Amerindian, East Indian, Dutch and English mythologies. Some of the stories from various parts of the Caribbean are similar but the names are different.

Many if not all of the Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and more, have long held traditional folklore that includes the jumbee. And many of the older population still hold a belief in them, particularly in Guyana, where long held superstitions and modern day conveniences like cell phone and internet, live side by side.

Now be honest, how many of you thought it was an animal, fruit or person? I thought it was an animal the first time I heard the term.

Below is one of the Guyanese jumbee.

Mr. Bascom's representation of a Bacoo. One of the finer ones I've seen.


Stories abound all over Guyana of the Bacoos existence. Even in Georgetown the capital city of Guyana, the bacoo was not isolated to remote tribes. It may have African roots as the word 'baku' in many African cultures mean little brother or short man, and its word relative 'bacucu', means banana.

The Bacoo is a mythological figure that closely resembles a leprechaun from Irish folklore. It is a dwarf like entity that rewards its 'owner' with wealth untold or answers wishes once fed with a steady and constant supply of milk and bananas. It behaves a little like a poltergeist by causing trouble and moving items, pelting homes with rocks and causing general mayhem.

Bacoo's are mischievous, intelligent and quite devious. A trickster that can shapeshift, make itself unseen and torment those around him. They are mainly active during nighttime hours.

In Guyanese lore one tale is that a rich man kept his bacoo high on a shelf out of eyesight and used a ladder to reach him nightly to feed him his milk and bananas. On the eve that this man had to go out of town, he instructed his servant to feed the beast but to keep his eyes averted. The owner knew how devious and cruel the bacoo could be. When the servant went to feed it, he naturally looked to see what it was that was kept up high on the shelf. He was greeted by a huge black snake that appeared and servant was so startled he fell off the ladder and broke his neck.

Another popular one talks of a pair of invisible rampaging Bacoos that held a village hostage by raining stones over the houses - breaking windows and injuring residents.

My father in law, who is from the Demerara area, specifically the West Coast, talked of two bacoos named Boya and Boysie. They lived in Stewartville, on the old road. If anyone said anything bad about them or even bacoos in general, they would get upset and bad things would happen to whomever said it. It is said, by the older folk that is, that they have caused objects in a house to start flying around and even once covered a man in feces for bad mouthing them.

So what do you do if you have a bacoo hanging around you or picking on you. It is said they can be trapped inside a bottle but not very easily. First something that attracts them must be put into the bottle. Once the bacoo has gone into the bottle, a cork is jammed into the neck to act like a stopper. Once this is accomplished, the bacoo can not escape. These bacoo bottles are then thrown into the ocean or waterways.

If you're in Guyana and you see a corked bottle bobbing on the surface of the water, might be best to leave it be, legends have it that if it does contain a bacoo and you open the bottle, the bacoo will stay with you and you must feed him milk and bananas or incur his wraith.

Sounds like someone opened the bottle and ketchum came out  ::confused:: ::confused::