Ma Clar the village Santiwah by Otancia S Noel, Herbal Brew

                                             

‘…But yuh cyar ketch me,’ the Mighty Sparrow warns his would-be wife Melda in the eponymous calypso, ‘with necromancy. / All you do cyar get thru.’

Doctor Bird’s self-assurance derives from the fact that ‘Papa Neza is my grandfather.’ But had Melda had the good fortune, like me, to be the granddaughter of Ma Clar, Sparrow’s smugness might well have proven to be misplaced. “Ma Clar revered as the village healer, visiting the sick and binding the dead, giving healing baths to the suffering, making soothing balms for those in pain and delivering babies where they were wanted and dispatching them where, they were not. In simple terms, she ran a 24-hour unofficial clinic.

The granddaughter of ex-slaves with Yoruba roots, Clarissa “Ma Clar” Wells, née David, grew up on a cocoa estate in Grenada. At eighteen, she arrived in Trinidad, barefooted, unschooled, armed with an extensive knowledge of herbs and spices and their salutary and culinary properties. This art of traditional healing, referred to as ‘bush medicine’ passed down from her Yoruba ancestors.

She married Conrad ‘Papio’ Wells, son of a white plantation owner and a cocoa payol or mulatto mother Ma Clar worked as a maid, pharmacy help and baby-sitter for a few years in South where the couple had settled. They acquired parcels of estate land in Chaguanas and South: including a 20-acre estate. Ma Clar and her husband raised eight children while running the estate where they grew cocoa, coffee, and citrus and reared livestock. They ran a meat shop, and sent most of their children abroad for formal education without which Ma Clar had been able to ‘make something of mehself.’

 Ma Clar worked in the fields from 4am, by mid-afternoon she moved on to her secondary occupation, bush doctor and rubbing woman, sometimes unkindly called ‘obeah woman.’

            As I walk through the estate grounds with her, there is, it seems, not a single bush whose name she does not know, providing comprehensive and precise explanations of its uses. Exotic names like zebapique and kuzay maho, roll easily off her tongue

‘What is a bush bath?’

‘A bath where herbs and oils are used to combat ailments, in nowadays terms hydrotherapy.’ Also used in cases of spiritual interference, ‘as we say obeah, bad eye or evil eye, envy, bad luck, sickness; mal ju is a term meaning all of these things.’

 The bush bath is also used in cases of skin ailments such as eczema, what we call ‘bobo’ and allergies, known as bad skin or mad blood.

 Some of the items used in these baths are: baking soda, potassium permanganate or conduce crystals, lime, lemon, rosemary, black sage leaves, eucalyptus oil, red lavender oil, manuka, kuzay maho, purple heart, senna leaves, carilye vine, shining bush, blue soap, blue ,sweet broom bush, and Epsom salts.

The bath is usually prepared in an old cast iron tub outside, a pail, a bucket, a half barrel, bathtub or any container; some practitioners have a special container for baths. The bath is warm or cold depending on the situation. The ingredients are left to soak or ‘cusumay’ in the water to extract the beneficial properties. The person baths with some of the water and is then immersed in the remaining water, giving them a good soak in the mixture.

            A bath used for bad eyes, bad luck or to remove bad spirits may consist of sweet broom leaves, red lavender oil, blue soap, blue, lime, Epsom salts and rosemary; sometimes blessed with a prayer or two. Sometimes a sea dip afterwards and or a coceya broom lash; a broom made from the stripped dry leaves of the coconut palm tree. A bath for the deceased consisted of downs leaves, red lavender, eucalyptus oil and coconut oil.

             These days, on weekends, I pick senna leaves and pound them with my mortar and pestle, put these in the half barrel with water outside, along with baking soda, lime, rosemary, black sage leaves, and red lavender. I let it cusumay a few hours in the hot sun; I dunk my squealing granddaughter into the barrel, following up her bath with a good rubdown of oils.

My son laughs and buss a steupps, his lips curling into an o, ‘Mom you and this old bush thing.’

I smile, ‘My grandmother lives on in me.’

About the Author:

Otancia Noel, mother of five, teacher, MFA in Creative Writing Prose Fiction graduate from University of West Indies Trinidad and Tobago. loves reading, writing, researching, cooking, gardening and family time.