106 pages • 3 hours read
Tracey BaptisteThe Jumbies
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context: The Jumbies Series
Baptiste’s supernatural series for middle-grade readers includes three titles: The Jumbies (2015), Rise of the Jumbies (2017), and The Jumbie God’s Revenge (2019). The series’ first novel unfolds on an unspecified Caribbean Island, where supernatural creatures live side-by-side, in an uneasy truce, with humans and wildlife.
Corinne La Mer, the series’ protagonist, is a young part jumbie girl who plays a central role in preserving her island from supernatural wrath. The Jumbies exemplifies this when Corinne harnesses her mother’s magic and saves the island from Severine. Severine is “the mother” (166) of the island’s jumbies, and is therefore an ancient, powerful creature. She returns in the series’ third title, The Jumbie God’s Revenge, amid a deepened literary mythos and higher-level supernatural conflicts.
The series’ second installment, Rise of the Jumbies, further develops Corinne’s key role in the protection and preservation of her island, when she undertakes a deep-sea adventure to save some lost children. This arc is extended in The Jumbie God’s Revenge, in which Corinne faces down an ancient, jumbie god named Huracan to save her island. As the series progresses, Corinne fully discovers her true jumbie identity and the depth of her magical powers. The theme of The Importance of Self-Acceptance thus plays a prominent role throughout the series. Her steadfast friends, Dru, Bouki, and Malik, introduced in the first novel, stay close by Corinne’s side throughout the installments, also growing and changing alongside the protagonist.
Cultural Context: Jumbies in Caribbean Folklore
According to Baptiste’s companion booklet, Jumbies: A Field Guide—How to Recognize, Trick, and Outmaneuver Them (2014), jumbies are spiritual creatures that exist in the folklore of the Caribbean islands. There are many kinds of jumbies, and the types vary across the islands. Some people believe they are demons, while others believe they are the spirits of the dead. In some cases, people believe they are the spirits of babies who die before baptism; in other cases, jumbies could be anyone’s spirit, as many also believe everyone is at risk of becoming a jumbie after death.
The novel offers readers creative ways to face the Caribbean’s past, which includes the slave trade and the exploitation of human and natural resources. The novel’s jumbies, for example, stand for the ecological threats posed by the establishment of human settlements. Severine’s story about the island’s first human settlements’ takes place sometime during the slave trade, i.e., the late 15th to 19th centuries. In reality, Indigenous communities populated the Caribbean long before white colonizers arrived with enslaved Africans. For the purposes of the novel, Corinne’s unnamed island was originally uninhabited by people, making the moral about humans and jumbies living together more straightforward. This theme is evident when Severine directs her grievances against the first settlers toward the islands’ present-day residents for the jumbies’ loss of land.
