Angeline

**Also available on iBooks and Kobo!**

“Angeline” is a riveting, portrait a Jamaican ex-slave introduced in For the Love of Livian the second book of the Jim Hawkins Series. Angeline is the bold, feisty, and resourceful 18–old daughter of Dominique, the ex-mistress of a Jamaican rebellion leader.

Schooled in the three R’s by her once Scottish Jamaican owners, Angeline is a free woman: literate, strong, and determined to have control over her destiny. Transported to England, she and her mother work tirelessly weaving cotton sheets for the Haslar Royal Naval hospital.

Angeline’s life is forever altered by vicious attacks, and her courageous battle against Portsmouth’s racism, power hierarchy, duplicity, deception, and murder. Her fearlessness surprises everyone, especially the Jamaican ex-slaves who toil at the docks and shipyards, bonded in superstition to an evil witch doctor.

In page after page until a dramatic ending, Angeline discovers her internal strengths and fights for justice and respect in the 1772 streets of Portsmouth, England.

Excerpt from the book:

Chapter 1

Portsmouth, England Summer of 1772. A tobacco and cotton warehouse.

Around a circle twenty-feet in diameter on the warehouse’s dirt floor, six male drummers pounded out a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Each drummer was accompanied by a woman shaking a bean filled gourd with one hand and rattling a handmade tambourine with the other. Synced in with the drumbeats, the combination of these crude instruments created a simple, Jamaican beat that aroused the primeval needs of a hundred intoxicated “worshipers”.

Many danced mildly as the gentle, relaxing music relieved their pain and grief. Some danced more wildly as if they had a demon that needed to be exorcised. For many of the men and women assembled, their response to the ceaseless drumming depended on the amount of hallucinogenic herb-soaked rum that each had ingested.

The mesmerizing slapping of these African-Jamaican gumbe drums continued without pause throughout the late afternoon and into the evening, and helped create an altered, trance-like state among the crowd. These drum beats were their connection to their ancient African culture and religion. Some members of the crowd murmured African and Jamaican-Creole single words while others cheered with exclamations of joy as they attempted to contact their personal version of a spiritual dimension.

These Jamaican dockworkers, shipbuilders, charwomen, maids and ordinary laborers were seeking emotional healing at this once-a month assembly. Each of them sought the escapist trance they received gladly from the effects of the Salvia hallucinogen herbs that had been mixed with the rum. It was ladled from large common bowls in the middle of the circle next to a small fire, a fire kept small to prevent ignition of remnants of the cotton and tobacco often stored in the warehouse. The line at the bowls was congested as participants slurped up the drug filled liquid and took a spot back in the circle.
More of the salvia, harvested from the Farlington marshlands area northeast of Portsmouth, was passed around mixed with blunts of tobacco. The harvested drug had its intended effect as the early evening wore on creating zombie like men and women chanting and thinking they were having an out-of-body experience. The Obeah man had planned the entire ritual.
Known as Sobadu, the Obeah man, well-experienced in herbs, knew the effects of the salvia were short-lived. It produced hallucinations for about thirty minutes where the poor Jamaicans would see things that weren’t really there. He expected them to have changes in vision, a visceral body sensation, and radical emotional swings. He expected them to lose contact with reality. It was because of this short lasting high that he had prepared blunts of the drug to reinforce the high through the night.

As the drums kept sounding their deer-skinned thump-a thump thump…. thump-a thump thump…. thump-a thump thump….two or three Jamaicans starting yelling out

Papa Legba!
Papa Legba!
Papa Legba! Oyey Baye Pou Mwen!

Other men started yelling from deep within their souls as if they were trying to bridge the ethereal distance between themselves and their ancestral past. Others in the crowd chanted loudly over and over:

Obi-loa- Oh ……ANA-LEA-MAH
Obi-loa- Oh ……ANA-LEA-MAH
Obi-loa- Oh ……ANA-LEA-MAH
Obi-loa- Oh ……ANA-LEA-MAH

The laborers were well into an hour of drumming, chanting and drinking the drug-laced concoction. Watching soberly out of sight as the crowd’s chanting raised the emotional temperature in the room, Sobadu and his henchman Slash nodded to each other in agreement that the time was right for the Obeah man’s grand entrance into the middle of the circle.