Midnight Robber

Tan-Tan’s mother is “no good at being a baby-mother” (48). She hands Tan-Tan off to the care of servants and the house eshu, though she also uses her as a pawn in her relationship with Antonio. While Ione’s infidelity initiates the narrative, it juxtaposes Antonio’s and is revealed to be both serial and emotionally inconsequential.

Ione is left behind on Toussaint when Antonio and Tan-Tan flee. She is never mentioned again except as justification for Antonio’s rapes and as a mythic figure who serves Tan-Tan on the “moon” (78) of legends.

Antonio’s second wife acts as both the evil stepmother in a fairy tale and a foil to the absent Ione. Like Ione, she is devoutly jealous of Antonio’s affections toward Tan-Tan, even to the point of blaming the girl for being a victim of Antonio’s abuse. This culminates in her quest for vengeance, pitting her as the primary antagonist for most of the novel. Her first confrontation with Tan-Tan at the daddy tree makes this explicit.

Janisette also acts as the externalization of Tan-Tan’s guilt, reiterating that her stepdaughter is responsible for both her father’s death and being the target of his abuse in the first place. When confronted with her own acquiescence to this harm because she knew about the abuse, but did not prevent it, Janisette crumbles “like a passionfruit that get suck dry” (326) and gives up her vendetta.

The first douen and native to New Half-Way Tree that Tan-Tan meets, Chichibud is a far more positive and heroic model of fatherhood; he acts as Antonio’s foil. A “leggobeast goat man” (105), Chichibud is a small lizard person with backwards knees (like a goat’s), named for a traditional Carib ghost whose feet are reversed. While Antonio’s martial accomplishments are tinged with jealousy and deceit, Chichibud vanquishes villains, including a massive bird mauling an inebriated Antonio and a wrathful Janisette, for no reason but altruism.

Chichibud is also far more cunning than he lets on; he knows all languages spoken by human transplants to New Half-Way Tree, “Anglopatwa, Francopatwa, Hispanopatwa, and Papiamento” (95), and is shown to be part of a douen effort to develop metallurgy.

Benta appears in the work well before she is named. The douens keep their sexual dimorphism very secret from the humans of New Half-Way Tree, leaving Junjuh villagers to believe that the large avians are pack animals, rather than female douens. Benta acts as a foil to the duality of Janisette and Ione. Rather than tolerating or condoning the ongoing horror of Tan-Tan’s life, Benta flies her to safety, willing taking on the “trouble” of “picking [her] up” (212).

Benta’s nonhuman body and bird-like speech make her far less obviously romantic than human women like Ione or Janisette. This is belied by her longest patwa speech in the book: “Kret jealous. Can’t live good with nestmates. Ain’t have no woman to take he flying. No man to share a frog with he, for he friendship always bitter. From time back, him always jealous of Chichibud, of me” (197). This demonstrates that her fierce reserve does not demand the same kind of performative drama as Ione and Janisette’s affections.