By Tony Deyal
NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration) told us that what we were going to see earlier this week, on Monday night, was a “full moon which was a Supermoon Blue Moon.” What made it worse for me was talk about the “full” moon and “half” moon at the same time on the same day. Worse, one newspaper claimed that “it happens once in a blue moon.” Then it got worse. I read that “A Blue Moon is not necessarily any bigger or brighter. The original correct meaning of Blue Moon was when we had four Full Moons in a three…”
That had me up a gum tree and it got worse when I read what Mark Twain, the American writer and humourist, believed, “Everyone is a Moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” That was enough to make me want a bottle of moonshine, not the fish named Joshua, but what my friends drink and say, “Nearer my cod to thee!”
At this point, I called one of my friends from the early days and asked, “You remember Moon?” He laughed, “Which Moon? The one in the sky, or the lady who was your Auntie?” The fact is that I had an “Auntie Moon” who was my father’s sister and from her I learnt more about moonshine, especially when the full “Moon” came home late in the night, singing and making noise. She, her mother (my grandmother known as ‘Ma’), and my father, his brother we called “Uncle Jacket”, and we children, all five of us, lived in a little dirt and board house in a sugarcane area of Trinidad.
It is she, Auntie Moon, who followed in Ma’s footsteps and told all of us about what happened when the real full Moon was in the sky. It is true. As the writer Tiara Jade Chutkan wrote: “For many of us, the skin crawling stories of jumbies, duppies and many different figures were told as we sat in circles with aunt and uncles, cousins, and grandparents…”
The one I heard most about was the “La Diabless.” She supposedly made a deal with the devil and became a half-woman, half-demon seductress who came out on nights when there was a full moon. I’m not sure what NASA would say to that, but I know what all of us kids did. Hide, mostly under a blanket and holding on tightly to Ma or Moon. There were many stories about the La Diabless. She used to seduce men, and because she was beautiful and did not show her “cow foot” until she caught them.
Then, after getting what she wanted from them, she either threw them into the sea, or to the wild animals, as “snacks”. I heard a lot of stories about how men, my father and uncle included, were able to “get away” from the La Diabless. In those days there was no streetlamp. People like my father, coming home from the rum shop, work or hanging out with friends, rode home on their bicycles. The stories were almost always the same: “Well, as I reach just by the cemetery, this really pretty lady, well dressed up, asked me for a ride to her house which was just before ours.
So, I put her on the frame, and I put my hands around her so she could be safe you understand, and that way I could also manage the bike. She started to lean up on me and then she said: ‘Stop the bike and let us go under the silk cotton tree. I will show you a thing or two!” I was willing, but then, as she came down from the bike, I saw her cow foot, big and ugly. Man, I jumped on the bike and took off until I reached home. I promise, ‘Never me again’.”
There was another called a “Lagahoo.” He was someone who sold his soul to the devil and became a ‘shapeshifter’- an ordinary man in the day but at night, especially on full-moon nights, he could be anything from a headless man to a pit bulldog. You would see him dragging a coffin behind him, and chains on his body. He used to eat people and drink their blood. In our village, every old man living by himself in a run-down shack was a Lagahoo, and every time we saw him coming towards us, we ran bawling and shouting, “Help, help Tanty Moon! Tanty Moon! It trying to kill us!”
The one that probably ran the Monday night show was the “Moongazer.” He was only seen during a full moon, He was supposed to be a very tall, muscular white or dark person, straddling a road in the forested area, and if you passed under him, he closed his legs and both you and your car got [totally] crushed. That is why when I lived in Barbados, I didn’t go outside to look at the celestial bodies involved in an eclipse. I drank mine in the bar, or in the house. It was a rum thing to do. However, no other, in any part of the world, can eclipse the Barbadian Eclipse.
Even the Russians. The big boss Putin had boasted that he was planning to build a massive base on the moon, not my aunt or even the Supermoon Blue Moon. He made it clear to the astronauts that they would live there permanently. When a journalist asked them if they really wanted to spend the rest of their lives in a barren, lifeless, empty landscape, the Russians said, “No. That’s why we want to go to the moon.” In fact, there are a lot of names for the Moon. November is a Beaver Moon. There is a Harvest Moon which includes Corn, Hay and Nut Moons, and food for growing things like Egg Moon. Inevitably, though, we always end up where we started, a Black Moon which is red and is a month’s second new moon. In fact, nothing affects the moon. Super or micro, black or blue, it keeps circling around the Earth, sweeping further and closer, again and again, regardless of what name we call it.
Les Dawson, the British Comedian, must have been the only person to shake it up when he said, “In awe, I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang, for ever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this, I thought … I must put a roof on this toilet.” Tyronn Lue, the very tough American basketball coach, made it clear to one of his younger players, “If I tell you there’s cheese on the moon, bring the crackers!” I prefer the simple approach like the astronauts when they got tired of watching the moon. They called it a day. In fact, getting back to why Aunty Moon split up with a man known as Sunny Boy or Sun, it was because he never wanted to go out with her at night.
*Tony Deyal was last seen reminding his readers, “There are three things that cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth” and so, don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the Moon.
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