Midnight Robber

“Private messages! Privacy! The most precious commodity of any Marryshevite.”

One result of the technological advancements on Toussaint—the planet populated by the diasporic Marryshevites—is the omnipresence of Granny Nanny. Privacy is only granted to those who can sing nannysong, the language of the A.I. and world(s) wide web, like the pedicab runners. This surveillance state does not exist on the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree, allowing for more privacy.

“Jonkanoo Season [...] Time to give thanks to Granny Nanny for the Leaving Times, for her care, for life in this land, free from downpression and botheration.”

Granny Nanny is like a deity to the Marryshevites, enabling them to escape the oppression and slavery of old earth. The festival seasons speak to a blending of Catholic and West African spiritual traditions. Jonkanoo references an actual celebration, Junkanoo, focused on freedom from slavery in the Caribbean.

“That is the piece of comess that Tan-Tan had been born into. Two people who loved each other fiercely but had forgotten how to do it without some quarrel between them.”

This describes the relationship between Ione and Antonio, the “love so sweet it hot” (45). Giving birth to Tan-Tan is one way that Ione tries to regain Antonio’s attention, but the daughter ends up replacing the mother in Antonio’s affections. This unhealthy and abusive parenting is mirrored in the relationship between Janisette and Antonio but contrasted by the douen couple Chichibud and Benta.

“Midnight Robber with his black cape, death-cross X of bandoliers slashed across his chest, his hat with its hatband of skulls. The Midnight Robber, the downpressor, the stealer-away of small children who make too much mischief. The man with the golden wooing tongue.”

The first description of the Midnight Robber occurs after Ione uses this Carnival figure to threaten Tan-Tan when she cries too much. Tan-Tan asks the house eshu to teach her about this legend and learns about the male gunslinger image that women later take up and transform into the Robber Queen. The child abduction part of the myth relies on a long tradition of magical men, like the sandman or Pied Piper.

“The Robber King’s stream-of-consciousness speeches always told of escaping the horrors of slavery and making their way into brigandry as a way of surviving in the new and terrible white devils’ land in which they’d found themselves.”

During Carnival on Toussaint, Tan-Tan and Ione encounter a Robber King outside their limo. He performs a “classic tale” (57) but tries to refuse Ione’s money due to her cuckholding of Antonio. This quote develops the theme of escaping slavery and helps inspire Tan-Tan’s Robin Hood-style thievery on New Half-Way Tree.

“He whistled a tune. Her earbug crackled into static, then faded away.”

This describes of how Antonio’s friend Mako, who creates the poison that kills Quashee, can temporarily disable Granny Nanny. Mako is one of the runners who prefer physical labor to technological nannying. His linguistic reprogramming is facilitated by song, which is reflected in the language of the douens and even in Tan-Tan’s Robber Queen rhymes.

“Antonio believes the ‘only way out is through’ and ‘freedom is the thing.’”

After accidentally killing Quashee, Antonio exiles himself and Tan-Tan to New Half-Way Tree. This is his justification for taking them to the world that he might have been sentenced to live on anyway. They are escaping via the dimension veils. Antonio believes making the choice himself, rather than being sentenced by someone else, is “freedom.” 

“You want a story about Tan-Tan, the Robbery Queen; the Midnight Thief with the heart of gold; the woman who had was to save two life for every one she take; the exile on New Half-Way Tree, this prison planet?”

A local storyteller prefaces the first myth about Tan-Tan learning to steal with this passage. Tan-Tan is listening from a distance, all of which is described by the house eshu to Tan-Tan’s unborn child. The multiple levels of narrative pull back the veil on the process of mythmaking and how oral tales are spread. It also introduces the refrain of Tan-Tan’s curse that runs throughout most of the book.

“clean, using him own two hands. What a bring-down for a king!”

This quote is from the myth “How Tan-Tan Learn to Thief” and describes how Antonio loses his moon magic when he and Tan-Tan visit Earth. She wanted to clean the planet, but the lack of magic causes them to be stuck far from home. The mythic Antonio represents the Toussaint ideal of not physically laboring. Magic is also representative of technology, and the lack of magic on mythic Earth foreshadows how the house eshu initially cannot reach Tan-Tan on New Half-Way Tree.

“Douens were children who’d died before they had their naming ceremonies. They came back from the dead as jumbies with their heads on backwards. They lived in the bush.”

The exiles who arrive on New Half-Way Tree give names from folklore to the indigenous species. This quote is the legend that the douen name comes from their goat-like backwards legs. While the douen species is not undead, they are said to possess a kind of magic in their weaving, woodwork, and other crafts.

“Never see a tallpeople pickney climb the half-way tree before. What crime you do […]?”

Tan-Tan’s presence on New Half-Way Tree is unsettling to the douens and humans. Traveling through the dimension veils is more damaging to underdeveloped children. This is ironic because Tan-Tan has perpetrated no crime other than, perhaps, an excessive love of a terrible father.

“With every thread she weave [...] she weave a magic to give warmth to who wear the cloth.”

This quote is a description of Benta’s weaving. Tan-Tan believes she has never met Chichibud’s wife, but Benta is part of the packbirds that visit Junjuh village and Tan-Tan sees regularly. Once she flees Junjuh, she learns that packbirds can fly, speak patwa, and weave.

“She and eshu would have just finished singing a song.”

On New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan misses her house eshu more than Ione, as the A.I. spent more time parenting her than her biological mother. The parental role of the eshu is also seen in the first-person sections. The narrating AI speaking to Tubman is the same eshu that speaks to Tan-Tan. This passage also develops the connection between song and language.

“Taught her how to play Midnight Robber. Quamina had to be the Faithful Tonto and just follow what Tan-Tan did [...]They made up brave deeds for the Midnight Robber.”

Tan-Tan teaches her half-sister about her favorite masque game. Quamina’s development was stunted by her mother traveling to New Half-Way Tree while pregnant, but she enjoys playing in any way she can. The douens help heal her; eventually she grows intellectually, but she is always behind her half-sister. “Faithful Tonto” also alludes to the Lone Ranger, an American radio character from the 1930s, and references how hybrid the Midnight Robber myth and Toussaint culture are.

“Bois Papa had sent her the story she’d woven into it. ‘Is the story of your life, doux-doux.’”

This is another moment when Benta’s identity is still secret, but even while hidden, she is a more supportive parent to Tan-Tan than Ione or Janisette. Chichibud speaks for Benta about this present—a yellow skirt with black weaving—for Tan-Tan’s 16th birthday. One of the many variations of the name for Father Tree, Bois Papa, appears in this quote, emphasizing masquerade and hidden identity in relation to the female douen.

“It must have been the Robber Queen who pulled out the knife [...] It must have been the Robber Queen, the outlaw woman, who quick like a snake got the knife braced at her breastbone just as Antonio slammed his heavy body right onto the blade.”

When Antonio rapes Tan-Tan on her 16th birthday, she feels like she is possessed by the Robber Queen, who enacts her self-defense. The diction here—”brac[ing]” a knife rather than inserting or stabbing it—emphasizes how Antonio would not have died if he was not forcing himself onto Tan-Tan. This type of spirit possession also alludes to Orisha riding their devotees in Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, which is a healing and/or protective practice in many cases.

“When you take one life, you must give back two.”

Chichibud has Tan-Tan swear to keep the douens’ secrets; he is taking her to their hidden daddy tree to escape persecution for killing Antonio. The price of her action is to save two lives—which end up being hers and her child’s. Chichibud and his family hiding Tan-Tan is like conductors on the Underground Railroad hiding runaway slaves.

“She used to love to play masque Robber Queen when she was a girl-pickney, how she could roll pretty words around in she mouth like marble, and make up any kind of story. She had a talent for the Robber Queen patter.”

Within the Dry Bone myth, Tan-Tan thinks back on childhood games. She convinces the skeletal Dry Bone to sit outside using “Robber Queen patter,” which is how Master Johncrow saves her. Being saved by a bird reflects being flown to the douen village by Benta. The interwoven narratives are a way to explore how myths are made.

“Is like a spirit take her. A vengeance had come upon her, it was shining out from her eyes strong as justice.”

This is the first time Tan-Tan uses her Robber Queen possession to help someone else—the first step on the path that makes her a figure of myth. She aids a man named Al in a village called Chigger Bite who is being abused by his mother. Alongside developing the theme of masquerade, this quote is another moment of spiritual possession, tying the act of ritual with performance.

“Words welled up in the somebody’s mouth like water. Somebody spoke her words the way the Carnival Robber Kings wove their tales, talk as much nonsense as sense, fancy words spinning out from their mouths like thread from a spider’s behind: silken shit strong as story.”

An example of the weaving motif, Tan-Tan makes a verbal tapestry in Chigger Bite. The Anansi spider story is alluded to as well as this being the stuff of anansi tales in general. Hopkinson uses heavy alliteration with the s sound being an aural representation of weaving words together.

“She tried to imagine what tallpeople saw when they looked at her, that they would describe her as duppy and ratbat and ravener. Was she? Mad? A scary thing from a anansi story? Or just herself? She ain’t know.”

This passage contrasts rumor and mythmaking with internal identity. Tan-Tan hears about her acts, retold and embellished, as if they are fiction. Like the indigenous species of the planet, humans try to understand her using the framework of spirituality, casting her as a spirit and essentially not human. Tan-Tan does not necessarily categorize herself as supernatural or insane, but she is figuring out who she is underneath the weight of her trauma.

“What a thing those Tan-Tan stories had become, oui! Canto and cariso, crick-crack Anansi back; they had grown out of her and had become more than her [...] Anansi the trickster himself couldn’t have woven webs of lies so fine.”

When she arrives in Sweet Pone, Tan-Tan has heard even more stories about her Robber Queen acts of charity. The larger-than-life quality of myth shows how a person can become a legend—mythmaking transforms the everyday into the fantastic. Even the descriptions of the tales include oral elements, like the internal rhyme of “crack” and “back.”

“She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself.”

During Carnival on New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan dresses up as the Robber Queen. This develops the theme of masquerade; identity is often an external performance, and playacting is one way to align internal conceptions of the self with external perceptions. Tan-Tan’s fractured identity is eventually reconstructed and unified by masquerade.