bush bath gospel

She stood there­­­—dazed and desperate on the silty shoreline, naked as she born while the old wench slapped her skin from crown to heel with a bunch of bush.

Just a year ago Roseann had mailed a postcard from New York to her daughter, striking a stylish pose in her winter coat outside a brownstone. The picture of perfect health and vitality at the full age of fifty-eight. Now she was on a lonely beach where people went to either smoke marijuana or use as a free hotel room, getting a bush bath by the village bush woman. Mother Doris, as she was called, was busy slapping and brushing her skin with a bunch of vervine, lime and bay leaves while chanting words too low to hear. Roseann didn’t care. She just wanted healing. The cancer was eating away at her body—emitting a black tar that was a bleak reminder that it was consuming her.

She was a Christian woman, but after her prayers went unanswered for so long and with a ticking clock over her head, she moved the goalposts. She tried novenas, chanted psalms, visited healing crusades—braving rain and storm for the megachurch healer visiting her small island to touch her and make her well, as she had seen him do countless times on TV.

Those didn’t work, so she sought other spiritual help. She hired a man who used to work a taxi to head down south to visit the Siparee Mai shrine, with her gold chain in hand as an offering to the mother to make her petition for healing.  When healing still didn’t come, she went to the obeah man. Considered to be so taboo and downright heinous to most, including her chaste Muslim siblings among whom she now lived; off she went under the cover of night by the one who would be least likely to judge or gossip—her son-in-law, with cash in hand, to see if Delilah could rid her womb of the cancer.

The smell that now emanated from her travelled with her—remaining in rooms and proving more potent than the little tree air freshener in his old Mazda 626. She waited to drink the alcoholic concoction Delilah was preparing but it was not intended for her. The spirits needed to be consumed by the obeah woman to invoke the spirit needed for the ritual. Her other materials, also at a charge, were used to lather up Roseann’s petite body.

After the ritual, Roseann’s son-in-law took her to a nearby river to drown the bottle into which the cancer was supposedly transferred, as Delilah instructed. As she and her son-in-law drove back in complete silence, she felt a cool sensation in her stomach and the scent was gone somehow. For a moment she felt something she wanted to feel so badly. Hope.

She awoke the next day, with that tiny sliver of hope snuffed out just as quickly as it had arrived. The feeling of wetness under her and the unmistakable stench she had so despised made her recoil in dread. Her sheets were soaked through with the dark blackish blood of the cancer as she unavailingly fought back the stream of tears and loud sobbing. Her Muslim sister who she was staying with felt sorry for her, but everyone was doing their best. But to someone dying, no one is ever doing enough. The visits, fruit baskets and prayers were not enough. Psalms were not enough. The King James Version of the Bible was not enough. She found in a spiritual store, a copy of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses that she had never heard of before and was convinced it possessed some prayer that would deliver her. There is nothing a person will not try when they are truly desperate.

That’s how she found herself there on that lonely beach. By this point, Roseann started pondering many things. Now far away in her mind, while the lady washed her healing-resistant body, she questioned whether this woman was religious, a witch or a hustler. She didn’t really know. Bush medicine was just one more thing to try. She suddenly felt a punishing wave of shame and guilt for being so far removed from her faith. Now relegated to frantic attempts to reverse a sentence placed upon her that she didn’t ask for. A sentence she didn’t deserve. She didn’t drink or smoke. She hardly ate meat. She was active and in fact still working when she received the diagnosis.

She had a hard life. Married off at thirteen years old to a man who would father her five children. A life punctuated by abuse, infidelity and a car accident that would rob her of one of her eyes and leave her pretty face and fragile ego fractured forever. She kept going in spite of everything. She was always brave and industrious. She did seamstress work, ran a mini mart and in her older years, migrated to New York to work.  She wore thick sunglasses to cover her missing eye and always dressed with flair. She had even converted to Christianity of her own accord even though she was raised Muslim. Not unheard of, but still rare.

Now, here she was, with her back turned against God it seemed. Or was it that God had turned his back on her? I still wonder. In the end, the cancer blazed on. She often described it as an intense burning. A painful heat that made her groan in pain and emit the hot tar. In her last few months she didn’t try any more methods. She just lay there. She would pray with deep sincerity despite her ever-dwindling strength. Her sisters took turns changing her diapers and she would notice them flinch at the smell. She looked away in silence and resignation. She took her last breath as she touched her only son’s head as he cried at her feet.

I was fourteen years old when Grandma died. I stood over her dead body at the house of mourning, studying the small smile the funeral home machinated on her pale, cold face. That little, artificial smile covered up a life of much suffering and an end that didn’t bring any measure of just recompense.  I earnestly hoped her rest would now begin—amidst the unrest of my burgeoning cynicism.

Sherisse Jaisrie is a Trinidad-born writer who moves between the literary and the industrial — spending her days in Health, Safety and Environmental work and her nights excavating memory, folklore and the weight of what West Indian families carry and never say. She holds an M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering from UWI. Professionally, she maps what can go wrong. On the page, she goes there anyway.

Her essays and fiction are preoccupied with West Indian life in all its complexity — the generations-old secrets, the folklore that outlives the people who carried it, the emotional wreckage passed down like heirlooms. Her fiction ranges from the intimate textures of West Indian life to the fully speculative — immersive worlds where imagination has no ceiling and reality is only one of several options. She is currently at work on her debut novel.

She is a creature of ocean water and full moon nights. She sings. She journals. She lives with her husband, two children, a dog named Axel and a parrot named Zazu, all of whom have opinions. She writes on Substack as A Collection of Unravellings.