Douens: The Children at the Edge of the Forest

The light at ten degrees north does not fade so much as it is taken. One moment the hills are green and particular, every immortelle distinct against the ridge, and then they have closed into a single dark shape and the bats are out. There is a window of maybe eleven minutes. Anyone who has lived under those hills knows it, and knows too that this is the hour when a woman on her step, calling her children in from the yard, will do it without using their names.

Come. Come now. Inside. Never the name.

Ask why and the answer comes plain, without embarrassment, from people who would not describe themselves as superstitious about anything else at all: because the douens are listening, and a name is all they need.

A Name Is a Door

They are small, the douens, the size of the children they used to be. They wear enormous straw hats, the wide-brimmed kind that a field worker wears, and the hats are not decorative. Under the brim there is no face. A mouth, some say. Otherwise a smoothness, like the inside of an egg.

Their feet are on backward. Heel to the front, toes behind, so that the prints they leave in the mud of a track lead confidently in the direction they did not go. You can follow a douen all afternoon and arrive precisely where it began.

What they want is company. They gather a child's name from the air, from a mother who forgot herself at dusk, and then they call in that mother's own voice from somewhere past the last house. The voice is described as high, thin, a little wrong, but by the time you notice it is wrong you are already in the bush and the eleven minutes are gone. They are not, in most tellings, malicious. That is the part of the story that stays with me. They are lonely, and they are trying to solve it the only way they know.

The old protections were domestic and small. Do not call a child's name in an open place after dark. Turn the child's shoes backward beside the bed, heel out, so the douen following the scent of the day finds itself pointed away from the door. It is a folk logic of mirrors: to confuse a creature that walks in reverse, reverse something of your own.

What the Story Is Carrying

Here is where the douen stops being a scary thing and becomes something harder.

They are said to be the spirits of children who died before baptism. Under the Catholicism that came to Trinidad with the Spanish and thickened with the French planters, such a child could not be buried in consecrated ground, could not be prayed into heaven, could not be given the ordinary machinery of grief. So the island built other ground for them. Not hell. The forest, the river edge, the hour between day and night. Somewhere to go.

The word itself has traveled. Most trace it to the Spanish duende, the household goblin, arriving through French Creole into the Trinidadian mouth as douen or dwen, a name it still answers to in St. Lucia. Its cousins run the whole length of the French and Spanish Caribbean, and there is a Mayan relative, Tata Duende, with the same appetite for children and the same trouble with his feet. But the shape of the telling in Trinidad is African at its foundation, layered over with French, Spanish, Amerindian and English, which is only to say it was made the way everything on that island was made.

Doh call the child name in the open after dark.

I think the douen is one of the most merciful monsters I know of. A church says a child has no place. A village disagrees, quietly, and gives it one, and then gives it a straw hat and a voice and something to want. That is not superstition doing its work. That is grief refusing an instruction.

The Print That Lies

Trinidadian artists have kept the figure moving. Since 2013 a collective of writers, designers, musicians and photographers has published under the name Douen Islands, taking the backward footprint as a working method, a way of moving that leaves an unreliable trail. It is the right image to borrow. Anyone who has left an island and tried to describe it afterward understands the print that points one way and travels another.

I no longer live under those hills. In Miami the light goes down slowly and negotiably, the way it does in a city with too much of it, and no one here stands on a step at dusk withholding a name. But I catch myself at that hour. Something in the body still marks it, the way the body marks a stair that used to be there.

The children are still out at the edge of the forest, faceless under their hats, waiting for someone to say a name out loud. I find I don't mind them. What I mind is the century of small coffins that had to go somewhere, and the fact that the island, having nowhere to put them, made somewhere.