Midnight Robber

In this section, the link between the main narrative and the titled anansi tale is made explicit; the stories the house eshu tells the unborn child are ones “exiles and douen people make up to tell about [Tan-Tan’s] life” (197). Her experience of fleeing Junjuh is turned into the Dry Bone story by using characters from folklore.

Both the main narrative and the tale of Dry Bone include singing. The language of the bird-wives of douen men is described as “carolled words” (197), and Tan-Tan sings while waiting for Master Johncrow to come for Dry Bone. The savior of both narratives is a bird; while Benta protects Tan-Tan in the “daddy tree” (179), the buzzard releases Tan-Tan from Dry Bone’s clutches.

Furthermore, packbirds like Benta and Abitefa can code-switch—speak both the bird language that aurally resembles nannysong and the “Anglopatwa” (214) Tan-Tan speaks. For instance, Abitefa “warbled, then switched languages” (191).

Exile is repeated in the flight to Papa Bois; Tan-Tan loses her first home because of Antonio killing Quashee and loses her second home because she kills Antonio in self-defense. She thinks she “had had home torn from her again” (193).

Duppy stories were mentioned in an earlier section, and the Dry Bone tale takes place in Duppy Dead Town. Duppy is a term for a malevolent spirit or ghost in Caribbean folklore, sometimes synonymous with jumbie. The between, or liminal, space of Duppy Dead Town is like the space where narrative becomes myth—between the quotidian lives of people and their supernatural counterparts.

At the end of the Dry Bone tale is a couplet:

“Wire bend

Story end” (212)

This rhyme signals a shift back into the main third-person narrative. Rhymed couplets are present in both poetry and spells.

They are considered magical and are a useful element of orality because rhyming helps orators memorize stories.