Brown Girl in the Ring

“Ti-Jeanne couldn’t see her own death, or Baby’s. She couldn’t see Tony’s death, not anyone close to her.”

Ti-Jeanne’s power as a seer allows her to see everyone’s death but those who are closest to her. It is implied that her power is nascent at this stage in the novel. Her struggle to see herself, including her own death, becomes an important part of her personal and spiritual growth throughout the novel.

“Ti-Jeanne felt the gears slipping between the two worlds.”

When Ti-Jeanne first meets the Jab-Jab, who she will later realize is the Prince of Cemetery’s other form, she experiences dual realities. In one reality, African spirits exist in Toronto, and in another, these spirits are unseen by other humans. This moment foreshadows Ti-Jeanne’s ongoing struggle to navigate her seer gift to summon spirits and reconcile her relationship to both the spiritual and secular world.

“Tony could give sweet, sweet talk. Words so nice, they would charm the money from your pocket, the caution from your heart, the clothes from your body. Words so sweet and soothing, they sounded like love, like let me hold you the way your mama never held you, like come and be my only special one, my doux-doux darling. Words that promised heaven.”

In the beginning of the novel, Ti-Jeanne is completely enamored by Tony and unable to resist his pull. This passage suggests that her attraction to him has to do with her mother’s past neglect and the emotional void that he fills in her life. His affections are a stand-in for her cultural and spiritual connection. Once Ti-Jeanne realizes that her connection to her matrilineal line and cultural traditions outweigh her commitments to Tony, she begins her personal and spiritual growth.

“Something had made her want to keep the little person she was growing all to herself. It would be the one human being who was totally dependent on her and would never leave her.”

Ti-Jeanne wrestles with her connection to Baby because of her mother’s abandonment of her when she was a child. She cannot help but project this experience onto Baby, not realizing that co-dependency is also part of the trauma cycle.

“‘Tell them you’ll refuse the operation unless it’s a human heart. Voters’ll eat it up.’”

With Premier Uttley’s heart failing and polling numbers falling, her campaign adviser, Constantine, proposes a strategy for acquiring her a new heart and voter attention. After the Riots, pig organ farms have become the only means for organ transplants for humans. Since the spreading of the Virus Epsilon from pigs to humans, there have been growing protests of pig organ farms. To appeal to protestors and capitalize off this outrage, Constantine proposes that Uttley receive a human heart and push for a policy that condemns pig organ farms and heralds the return of human organ donations.

“She resented being forced to think about the future, about anything but Tony.”

In the beginning of the novel, Ti-Jeanne stubbornly refuses to acknowledge her seer powers and her family’s healing traditions. While Mami keeps trying to prepare her for the possibility of her absence, she can only think of her immediate desires, which concerns only Tony. Eventually, she will come to realize that her grandmother is preparing her for important life lessons and that Tony will only betray her.

“‘Girl child, you know better than to call it obeah. Stupidness. Is a gift from God Father. Is a good thing, not a evil thing. But child, if you don’t learn how to use it, it will use you, just like it take your mother.’”

In the beginning of the novel, Ti-Jeanne has a limited understanding of her family’s spiritual and healing traditions. Mami scolds her for conflating these traditions with “obeah,” which is a form of voodoo Shamanism practiced by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean that is usually associated with self-interested designs. Mami insists that the spiritual and healing traditions she wants to impart onto Ti-Jeanne differ from this. She warns that the powers that come with these practices will destroy her mental and physical state, as it did her mother, Mi-Jeanne, if she does not learn about them now.

“‘From since slavery days, we people get in the habit of hiding we business from we own children even, in case a child open he mouth and tell somebody story and get them in trouble. Secrecy was survival, oui?’”

Mami’s use of tarot cards to uncover Ti-Jeanne’s fate surprises her granddaughter, who is unaware of the depth and range of her grandmother’s spiritual abilities. Mami explains that these abilities have always been exercised in private ever since the days of enslavement when African slaves had to hide from their overseers and masters. There was danger in being discovered. Mami’s reference to keeping secrets from one’s own children foreshadows the legacy of trauma within her family that Ti-Jeanne uncovers as she deepens her spiritual practice.

“‘Eshu […] the crossroads is you own. Help my granddaughter safe across this one, nuh?’”

Eshu is the African deity that guards figurative and literal crossroads, from physical roads to the boundaries between life and death. Mami prays for his protection over Ti-Jeanne as her granddaughter will not only cross a physical bridge to aid in Tony’s escape, but she will also straddle the lines of life and death in the dangerous process of avoiding Rudy’s posse.

“Ti-Jeanne’s mother, Mi-Jeanne, had never wanted to accompany Mami, and she absolutely refused to let Ti-Jeanne go, so Ti-Jeanne had no idea what happened at these ceremonies. Ti-Jeanne had once asked her mother, who had responded disdainfully, ‘Is one set of clap hand and beat drum and falling down and getting the spirit, oui. Stupidness!’”

Mi-Jeanne has always harbored disdain for Mami’s spiritual and healing practices and has passed that onto Ti-Jeanne. In the beginning of the novel, Ti-Jeanne exhibits resistance to Mami’s attempts to teach her about these traditions, inheriting some of her mother’s early suspicion. Ti-Jeanne is torn between these two matriarchal figures’ designs for her until the novel’s end.

“‘When she close she eyes, she does see death. She belong to me. She is my daughter. You should ’fraid of she.’”

Legbara, or the Prince of Cemetery, an aspect of Eshu, claims Ti-Jeanne as his daughter. As the deity who reigns over the crossroad of life and death, he wields tremendous power over humans. He suggests that by claiming Ti-Jeanne as his own that she too possesses this power over life and death through her seer abilities. He foretells Ti-Jeanne’s growing abilities.

“‘Prince of Cemetery arms getting weary from carrying all Rudy dead across the bitter water to Guinea Land. Tell Gros-Jeanne is time and past time for she to play she part.’”

Ever since Rudy struck a deal with the Prince of Cemetery to gain power over life and death, there have been many casualties. Rudy has had to kill many people to ensure a steady flow of blood in his duppy bowl and to ensure that the duppy he controls will do his bidding. The Prince of Cemetery views this as an abuse of power and has tasked Mami with stopping him. Since Mami has failed in this regard, it is now up to Ti-Jeanne to put an end to Rudy’s corruption and violence.

“‘Remember what he say: he does watch over the crossroads between death and life, too. Dead people precious to he because he does shepherd th5em across one way, but children precious to he because he does shepherd them across the other way.’”

Mami points to the duality between the Prince of Cemetery’s powers. While he may be feared for reigning over death, he also watches over new life being born into the world. Mami emphasizes this duality to express to Ti-Jeanne that her proximity to the Prince of Cemetery does not mean that she is linked to death alone but also to the possibility of new life.

“‘The African powers, child. The spirits. The loas. The orishas. The oldest ancestors. You will hear people from Haiti and Cuba and Brazil and so call them different names. You will even hear some names I ain’t tell you, but we all mean the same thing. Them is the ones who does carry we prayers to God Father, for he too busy to listen to every single one of we on earth talking at he all the time. Each of we have a special one who is we father or mother, and no matter what we call it, whether Shango or Santeria or Voudun or what, we all doing the same thing. Serving the spirits.’”

Mami explains to Ti-Jeanne why there are different deities that they serve as part of their spiritual and cultural traditions in the Caribbean. By describing these traditions as African in origin, Mami gestures to a greater African diaspora that practices variations of these spiritual and cultural traditions. This diaspora, which emerged from enslavement, may be scattered across the world but these spiritual and cultural traditions unite them.

“Nothing in his world had prepared him for this creature from another reality. He was looking at a thing that must have died and never stopped dying, a thing that Rudy would not allow its natural rest, that he kept barely appeased with the blood of the living.”

When Rudy forces Tony to watch him drain Melba into the duppy bowl, Tony comes face to face with the duppy that his boss controls for the first time. The duppy does not share Rudy’s lack of remorse but rather, seems fatigued by its duties. Tony’s observation of the duppy as a reluctant killer foreshadows the later revelation that the creature is Mi-Jeanne, forced to do her father’s bidding.

“In the calabash duppy, regret, hunger, remorse, and anger had merged into one howling need. When it killed, or each time it was fed blood, the essences of terror, pain, blood, and death appeased the hunger for a little while. But whenever it brought sweet death to another, it knew that it did murder, that it would once have abhorred its own actions.”

Rudy traps Mi-Jeanne in a cycle of violence and shame when he forces her to give up her spirit and bodily form to become a duppy. When Mi-Jeanne returns to the bowl, she must reconcile with the loathsome acts of violence her father forces her to do. He knows that she must rely on blood to perform his bidding. As such, she has no choice but to kill to stay satiated. To subsist this way fills her with guilt and remorse, but as she has no autonomy over her spirit or bodily form anymore, and there is nothing she can do.

“‘I is the duppy that Daddy does keep in he calabash. I could only inhabit my own body when Daddy let me out to do he dirty work for he. Is my soul he bind to get he power. Is my sight he twist into obeah, into shadow-catching for he.’”

Mi-Jeanne finds an opportunity to inhabit her human body to warn Ti-Jeanne about Tony. To make Mi-Jeanne into his duppy, Rudy had to separate Mi-Jeanne’s spirit from her body. As a result, Mi-Jeanne’s human form wanders the Burn as the mentally unstable Crazy Betty, who is unrecognizable to Ti-Jeanne at first. Unfortunately, once Mi-Jeanne reaches Ti-Jeanne to warn her, it is too late.

“The Strip was fuelled by outcity money. It was where people from the ’burbs came to feel decadent. The thok-thok sound in the air was the copter limos that bussed people in from the ’burbs to the rooftops of the Strip. From there they would descend staircases that led down inside the buildings. With enough money, you got a taste of the city without ever setting foot on its streets.”

After the Riots, the more affluent people fled to the suburbs while poorer residents remained in the city center. The part of the city known as the Strip offers a voyeuristic way for people from the suburbs to visit the city center without having to confront the poverty that exists there.

“This ruined city was his kingdom. He wasn’t going to let Gros-Jeanne’s brood take it away from him.”

Rudy’s violence revels in reigning over destruction and ensuring that those beneath him never rise in status. Rather than utilize his spiritual power to improve the lot of impoverished people in his city, he leverages his abilities to conjure the spirits to do his selfish bidding. As his power increases, he shows a growing callousness and estrangement from his family, coldly minding his family as “Gros-Jeanne’s brood” rather than his own child and grandchild.

“‘Yes, the first stage for making a zombie. Combine the paralysis and the suggestibility with the right kind of um, indoctrination, and the zombie go do anything me tell it. Sometimes me want little help ’round here, you understand? To keep the place clean and so.’”

Rudy explains to Ti-Jeanne how he uses bufo powder, a mixed form of buff, to manipulate those around him to do his bidding. The drug operates similarly to his spiritual possession of the duppy bowl by removing another person of their autonomy, rendering them completely dependent on him.

“‘Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she, love couldn’t leave she, heart couldn’t hurt she. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.’”

Rudy tries to convince Ti-Jeanne to give up her spirit and her body to become his next duppy. He lies by telling her that when Mi-Jeanne became his duppy, she became powerful, unstoppable, and free. This offer is tempting to Ti-Jeanne, who has felt herself torn between different people’s designs for her throughout her life. Reeling from Tony’s betrayal, her grandmother’s death, and the legacy of violence in her family that now falls on her shoulders, she nearly gives into Rudy’s lies. However, she finds strength to resist him in the end.

“‘I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.’”

Throughout her life, Ti-Jeanne has felt herself pulled in different directions by the people she loves. When Rudy traps her and tries to convince her to become his duppy, she realizes that submitting to him would mean relinquishing agency over her own life. She realizes that becoming autonomous does not mean refusing every influence in her life but making decisions for herself based on her own moral compass.

“And then she was aware again. Her dream body and brain were hers once more, but with a difference. The heart—her heart—was dancing joyfully between her ribs. When she looked down at herself, she could see the blood moving through her body to its beat. In every artery, every vein, every capillary: two distinct streams, intertwined. She had worried for nothing. She was healed, a new woman now. ‘Stupidness,’ she said, chiding herself for her unnecessary fears.”

When Premier Uttley first received Mami’s heart in the operation, it appeared to go smoothly. However, the heart rejects the host body before eventually settling down. The unrest is a sign of Mami fusing with Uttley. After the operation, Uttley’s and Mami’s lives conjoin through the sharing of their physical bodies, which also leads to a shift in Uttley’s outlook on the world and politics as well. It is suggested that by admonishing herself with the phrase, “Stupidness,” a term commonly used by Mami, Uttley not only possesses Mami’s heart but also the woman’s sense of social responsibility to the poor around her.