Delilah's Daughter

Delilah’s Daughter

The pink poui blossoms wined in the Caribbean wind, petals gyrating rhythmically across the yard. Delilah Brown sat on the low stone wall, her bare feet brushing the earth, eyes fixed on the distant hills. A picture of John, the boy she loved, wavering in her mind. Pa’s cough echoed from inside, reminding her of the weight she carried even at sixteen. In this world, a girl carried more than herself; she carried family, survival, expectation.

The biggest ball of the year would come in a fortnight. Every daughter of the town’s quadroon families would be polished, perfumed, and paraded. Every white man of means would come seeking the prize: a placage—a union that promised wealth, stability, and sometimes, if a girl was lucky – love. Delilah had no delusions. She was the eldest, her future mapped. The sharp appetites of white men, kings of this island were waiting…

She stirred the dirt with a stick, thinking of what Mama said that morning.

“Girl, you mind yuh step in dis life.”

Delilah did not reply. Words had a way of making truth a burdensome load.

*

The Dubois carriage arrived, Sam Dubois alighted first, hat in hand, chest broad beneath a suit that gleamed like polished ivory. He smiled at the crowd with the ease of one who had never been refused anything. His eyes, however, were already searching, gossip of the day was about, the sitter, the prettiest girl at the ball who was refusing every suitor. Sam loved a challenge, and this one opened his appetite. He was hungry for the girl who sat apart.

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Madame Dubois, powdered in lace and pearls, followed, her voice soft but commanding, French words slipping between her English.

“Mon cher fils, see the girls… toutes si jolies. Choose wisely.”

Sam’s grin widened.

“Mother, don’t I always.”

The Dubios clan was in danger. Sam’s brother produced no heir; it was up to him to save the Dubios.

Delilah watched from the corner of the ballroom. Mothers hissed advice into daughters’ ears, nudging them like mares teaching their fillies to walk. Bow, smile, pose. Delilah remained still, her gaze lowered, her heart secretly rebellious. She had learned early: silence could be a weapon, a shield.

Her silence didn’t stop Madame Browne’s pestering. “Girl your Pa sick, you don’t have a choice. Is how your sister and them go live eh?”

Hum interesting, he thought as he eavesdropped on the conversation; it was more of a monologue because the sitter didn’t say a word as her mother went on.

Sam approached with a calculated nonchalance, a glass of punch in hand. He bowed before Madame Brown with exaggerated courtesy.

“Madam Brown, may I offer you refreshment?”

She accepted, pride lighting her face like a bulb. He offered another to Delilah herself.

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The girl regarded him with cool suspicion. “I ain’t thirsty,” she said, her voice steady, carrying the cadences of the land—rolling vowels and clipped consonants.

“Ah,” he said with a mock bow, “but perhaps you are thirsty for intrigue?”

She looked at him as if he was the devil reincarnate. Her mouth twitched, almost a smile or maybe not. He noted it.

The first dance began. Sam swept a different girl onto the floor, laughing easily, but his eyes never left Delilah. When the set ended, he moved, precise as a predator, towards the balcony where she lingered with her mother. Again, he heard the mother raging while her charge stood still, a foreboding statue.

“Delilah, yuh cayr continue with this!”

“Madam Brown,” he said, bowing again, “may I escort Mademoiselle Delilah to the floor?”

Delilah’s mother shoved her daughter into Sam’s chest. “Child, Dance.”

Delilah pulse raced. She could feel the scrutiny of every mother, every cousin, every predatory eye in the room. Yet, in that pause, she also felt a flicker of power. She could walk away. She could refuse. But she did not.

Sam guided her across the polished floor. Her gown, simple and elegant, nothing like the pomp and frill that drowned the other girls. Sam’s practiced eye catalogued every detail: curves that spoke of health and resilience, the taper of her waist, the strength in her limbs, the large purplish amber pools framed by dark lashes in a neat pixie shaped face. Two tendrils of wispy natural curls fell down her back to the junction of her spinal frame.

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He smiled inwardly—this was a girl who understood herself too well.

“Delilah,” he murmured, “a pleasure.”

She remained silent, letting the music carry her. Her silence was not fear; it was a statement.

After the dance, Sam linked his arm firmly into hers, leading her back to the balcony. The stars were pale, the moon a silver lantern. Sam leaned close.

“My dear, I have a proposal.”

Delilah looked at him sharply.

Sam chuckled, charmed by her fire. “Consider it… an arrangement of mutual benefit. You give me an heir; I secure comfort for your family. I see you understand the terms already.”

Delilah’s heart sank, but her lips did not move. She studied the way his shadow fell across the floor, the subtle arrogance in the set of his shoulders, the certainty that he was used to getting everything he wanted.

She extracted herself from his grip and walked back inside, leaving him grinning at the audacity of her composure.

He went in search of Madam Brown, who, of course happened to be right behind his shadow.

Madame Brown’s eyes shone with triumph. The decision was made. Delilah’s fate was decided.

*

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The year passed in a slow, grinding rhythm. measured by the steady drip of Sam’s demands and the quiet compliance of Delilah’s life. She bore a child within a year—a son, Jules, his cries the only music that threaded through the corridors of the Dubois estate. The first grandchild of the Dubois line in fifteen years. For two years, he was her joy, her redemption. Jules looked all Dubois from skin to marrow. He resembled the portrait hanging in the music room of the first Dubois -Louis Jules Dubois- who landed on this island shore eons ago from the bowels of France. Before Louis tainted the Dubois bloodline with the souls of the African maidens that he devoured.

The christening was a spectacle, a grand affair by island standards. Fifteen rams roasted over coals, boars basted with rum, cush-cush yams heaped on carved platters. The Dubois clan gathered, resplendent, murmuring French prayers while the Creole pastor sprinkled holy water with solemn precision. Sam’s smile stretched across the room, proud as any man who had seen his bloodline renewed.

The celebrations could not shield them from the shadow. The pond lay beyond the courtyard, the pink poui stretching its blooming limbs over the water. Delilah sometimes caught sight of it from the music room window and felt a cold tremor along her spine. The tree had witnessed generations, she thought—witnessed joys and sorrows too heavy to measure. She had heard the whispers of douens in the night, the footsteps of ancestors walking unseen across the compound, murmuring warnings she could almost understand. Pastor Black collapsed before finishing the baptism, Delilah was worried. Sam had scoffed at the old superstition that unbaptised children might be stolen by douens.

“Get another pastor, please.” Delilah pleaded with Sam.

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“We’ll finish it another time.” Sam waved her away.

Jules grew quickly. Eyes bright and curious, laughter like the Caribbean sunshine in the morning light. Sam worshipped him, rode her like a stallion hoping for another child. Delilah braved through the four miscarriages, the upturned noses, the white French Creole faces staring darkly into her soul. The longing for the man that she loved. She endured, as she had learned. She endured for Jules, for her Pa’s memory, for the fragile sense of dignity she could claim within the gilded cage of the esta

The shadow fell in the third year. Delilah called to Jules as she arranges flowers in the salon.

“Jude, mon petit chou, my sweetheart. Kisses for Mama.”

“Stop smothering the boy in pansy kisses. Viens voir papa mon fils- come to papa, my son.” Sam sputtered with righteous male indignation and took Jules outside.

“Oui papa, let’s go play. ROARR!”

After a romp with Jules, Sam rested in the hammock, drink in hand, lulled by the afternoon heat. Jules chased a cat across the yard, following it toward the duck pond beneath the pink poui. When they finally realized Jules had disappeared, panic tore through the household like a hurricane.

“Jules! Jules!” Sam shouted, stumbling from the hammock. He ran into the house.

“I, I dozed off… did he come inside?”

Delilah’s heart leapt. “He was … with you!” she cried, her words sharp as flint.

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They searched the house, the courtyard, the garden, calling until their throats burned. Finally, beneath the blossomed branches of the poui, Jules lay still, wreaths of pink poui blossoms floating around his slumbering body. The pond held him in its unyielding embrace.

Delilah clutched his small body, feeling the cold bite of death against her fingers. Sam knelt beside her, powerless. The shadows of the poui gathered thick and suffocating.

Jules’ ghost lingered, suffocating them all. Sam withdrew into himself, wandering the estate like a ghost, while Delilah felt her soul leave her body in pieces. Papa Dubois died soon after. Mama Dubois withdrew from society. Delilah could only weep beneath the pink blooms, her sorrow as heavy as the tree itself.

Sam and Delilah circled each other in grief until one night she burst:

“You killed my son!”

Without a word, Sam stormed out.

Grief and ghost became friends and walked the dusty corridors for months.

In the years that followed, Delilah withdrew from Sam entirely. She moved to a small cottage within the compound, her body and spirit wished for the friendship of Death. Sam, for his part, fathered three illegitimate sons with women of convenient status. Sam brought his children to the house- for his mother’s sake. He left Delilah in the shadow of her grief.

*

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By the fifth year, Delilah felt - the result of one of Sam’s sparse visits doing somersaults in her stomach. Fleur came into her life on a raging stormy night. Unlike her brothers, Fleur was christened, protected by ritual and Church authority. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Jules—not in appearance alone, but in spirit. It was almost as if Jules had met Fleur on his travel to the other side and passed on something of himself. Her movement was almost spectral.

Yet Fleur carried mysteries. One of her feet twisted at an unnatural angle, her left foot turned slightly backward. They thought she wouldn’t be able to walk. Fleur also spoke to a friend no one else could see, an imaginary friend whose language was a curious, ancient gibberish.

The twisted foot made neighbours murmur and whisper. “She can’t walk proper,” they said. But Fleur moved as though the earth itself bent to her will. Her three brothers followed her in play but never challenged her; she led them with an uncanny authority.

The pink poui tree remained central to their lives. It had been fenced, fortified, and consecrated after Jules’ death. But its blossoms always found a way to spill over the wooden fence like spirits escaping to another world. Fleur would linger around the fence for hours, speaking softly, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes both, her voice catching the wind in ways no one could fully understand. Delilah swore she had overheard Fleur whispering, “Jules,” in one of her conversations with her imaginary friend.

The name struck her like a blade. Jules.

On that same day, the pastor dropped by for a lunchtime visit. He heard Fleur out in the garden.

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“Oh… Where did she ever learn that?”

“What? Her make up gibberish”, Sam laughed.”

“Or…, sounded like very old Latin. Must be the way the wind carried her voice.”

Delilah could see the Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallowed nothing.

As Fleur entered the house, he remembered that he had another. The pastor left without having lunch.

Delilah’s gaze followed him. Fright she told herself.

And yet, Delilah herself felt the weight of the unseen. Sometimes she would catch the glimmer of a shadow moving among the petals, hear the faint ripple of water where the pond once claimed Jules. She called it memory not superstition.

Delilah watched Fleur. “Sam, yuh see dis talkin’ to nobody, thing... it frightening people.”

Sam laughed, “You worry too much. She is playing like all children do.”

But Delilah knew better. There was a gravity to Fleur’s play, a deliberate rhythm that did not belong to childhood alone. The words she spoke carried an ancient tone, a tune foreign and old as the wind that shook the pink poui blossoms.

On the eve of Jude’s birthday, the pink poui tree loomed again in their lives, pink poui blossoms twisting, turning and twirling down to earth. Scattering petals like confetti across the land. The children played alongside the reinforced fence that surrounded the poui tree and their brother’s grave. Suddenly, the lock on the little wooden gate in the fence broke. The gate groaned and swung open.

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Fleur, ever drawn to the tree, slipped inside the fence. She wandered in, calling softly to her imaginary friend.

“Jules.”

Her brothers followed, but none could see what she did.

“Fleur, Boys!” Sam shouted as he looked for his children.

Petals caught in her hair, laughing with a laughter that belonged in another world Fleur saw her father.

“Daddy, Jules, said hello, he played with us, and they wanted to go with him.”

She pointed to her wet sleeping brothers. A blanket of pink blossoms was covering them.

Sam had a stroke. A stroke that left him drooling, half paralyzed, helpless. Sam, once a man of pride and power, fell into decline under Delilah’s care.

*

Years passed. Delilah became a woman who carried both power and grief with equal measure. She had amassed wealth quietly, shrewdly—lands, houses, and influence she managed from the courtyard. The estate remained under Sam’s name, but her intelligence, patience, and endurance had made her the true matriarch.

Sam, meanwhile, deteriorated. His body betrayed him. His speech a slurry of grunts and occasional French words. Fleur, by contrast, grew taller, stronger, with an uncanny presence.

10

She grew into an adolescence of strange precision, extremely intelligent, her gait both deliberate and whimsical, her eyes often fixed on things unseen. Pastors, doctors, and tutors visited, all found her to be a very strange creature. In her bedroom, she would still whisper to her invisible friend. Delilah sent her abroad for schooling and for surgery to correct her foot

One day, Fleur returned from school abroad. Delilah met her at the docks. Fleur walked down the gangplank, her small foot corrected, her voice precise and eerily still.

“Mama,” she said, her tone neither childlike nor adult, “I have come home.”

Delilah felt a shiver along her spine, remembering Jules, remembering the pond, remembering the pink poui.

Fleur’s presence seemed to reconcile the living and the dead. She still wandered the yard, conversing softly as though in communion.

Even Sam, broken and drooling, watched her, a flicker of recognition or fear—or perhaps remorse—passing across his face.

*

A storm was brewing off the Atlantic. At midnight, the pink poui tree swayed violently in the wind, its blossoms cascading like petals of blood and light as the lightening zipped across heavy skies. Fleur, drawn to the tree, approached the gate that had been reinforced to protect the graves of her brothers. She opened the lock and entered the sacred space without fear. The pond, now shallow, shimmered under the moonlight. Fleur called softly, she called her brothers to play again. They appeared: pale, luminous, laughing, small and perfect.

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Fleur’s lips curved in a smile that would have chilled the heart of anyone watching from the shadows. Sam died that morning. For two weeks the poui blossoms ravished the yard and every night until she left Fleur came out at midnight to summon her brothers.

Fleur built her life abroad, completing her schooling and mastering languages. She returned every year on the eve of Jule’s birthday.

Delilah lived to see her ninety-fifth year. The wealthiest woman in the town, a matriarch respected and feared. Even in old age, Delilah wondered about Fleur, the uncanny resemblance to Jules, the gait, the quiet authority, the strange whispers in the evening wind—all pointed to something beyond the realm of this world.

When Delilah finally passed, it was quietly, in her sleep, leaving behind a legacy of wealth, endurance, and the haunted, luminous presence of her daughter Fleur.

The estate remained, silent in its beauty, the poui tree flowering year after year, petals drifting like whispers, a reminder of grief, resilience, and the uncanny bonds that tie generations together…

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