Ça qui pa té eonnaitt Yé?... Who is there in all Martinique who never
heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault
under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the
biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number of
children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.
_Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?_... Who is there in all Martinique who never
heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault
under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was
the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number[54] of
children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger.
Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat.
And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so
tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to
give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,--at no great
distance. He went to see what it was,--hiding himself behind the big
trees as he got nearer to it.
All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great
fire burning there,--and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The
Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard
was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very
old;--he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a
good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found
out that the old Devil was quite blind.
--The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full of _feroce_,--that is
to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos
(_épi en pile piment_),--just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And
the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down
his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him
so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to
steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil
without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil
would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into
the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look
puzzled;--he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself
that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more
courage;--he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;--he
ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one
little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,--and
all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was
so frightened he could not even cry out, _Aïe-yaïe_. The Devil finished
the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible
voice:--"_Atò, saff!--ou c'est ta moin!_" (I've got you now, you
glutton;--you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great
ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:---"Carry me to
your cabin,--and walk fast!"
... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their
papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread
or vegetables or perhaps a _régime_ of bananas,--for it was getting
dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their
teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to
eat!--papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near
enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to
hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two
hands for horror.
When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to
Yé:--"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the
corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He
seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at
him.
But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure
something for the children to eat,--just some bread-fruit and yams,--the
old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:--
--"_Manman mò!--papa mò!--touttt yche mò!_" (Mamma dead!--papa
dead!--all the children dead!)
And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they
were dead--_raidi-cadave!_. Then the Devil ate up everything there was
on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt,
and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:--
--"_Toutt moune lévé!_" (Everybody get up!)
Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full
of dirt, and said to them:--[55]
--"_Gobe-moin ça!_"
And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them.
After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was
cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and
the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time.
Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only
a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go
and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go
myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great
morne."
So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day,
and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked
and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.[56]
Then he knocked at the sky as loud as he could till the Good-God put his
head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:--
--"_Eh bien!--ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?_"