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published
in anthology, Entering the Tapestry, 2003
Enitharmon,
ISBN 1-900564-48-3
Tantie Diablesse's elegy on Betty Stiven
Let me make it clear,
this wasn’t my fault.
She
begged for my help, so I gave her
some
bush tea, like all the other times.
But
suddenly she let go, and just went quiet.
Her
eyes couldn’t close.
They
laid the child on her belly, then
it
stopped breathing too.
When
he got the news, he howled like a dog
at
the moon. He even bent down,
with
us, to put the two of them in the ground,
and
had a master mason carve a tomb
from
marble, imported from Italy.
To
this day I can feel the calluses on her hand
when
she grabbed me in pain.
I
wasn’t supposed to look into his eyes, much less
spit
on him. When they threw seawater
on
my back, I didn’t scream.
Her
memory alone is worth ten lashes.
Fawzia Kane
Note:
There is a grave in a small churchyard outside Plymouth, Tobago
with the inscription: “Within these walls are deposited the
bodies of Betty Stiven and her child. She was the beloved wife
of Alex Stiven who to the end of his days will deplore her death,
which happened on the 25th day of November 1783 in the 23rd
year of her life.
What
was remarkable of her was she was a mother without knowing it,
and a wife without letting her husband know it, except by her
kind indulgences to him.”. No other known records of Betty Stiven
exists.
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