1st Place Winner of the 2025 Fall Short Story & Fiction Contest: ADELINE'S SACRIFICE - Scarlet Ibis James

Adeline cradled her infant son against her chest, humming softly as she stirred the mixture of ginger, wild herbs, and seventeen scotch bonnet peppers. For three moons, she had been preparing the sacred concoction, just as the ancestors had instructed during her laboring hours. Their voices had come to her between contractions, whispering ancient wisdom from across the ocean.

"When the child reaches ninety days, feed him the fire of our homeland," they had told her. "The heat will make him light enough to cross the waters, to return to where we dance free.”

Today marked the ninetieth day since her boy had traded the refuge of her womb for this cursed world of chains. Adeline's hands trembled as she added the last ingredients - peppers so fiery they made her eyes water. Her grandmother smuggled the seeds in her hair when they left the motherland, preserving them through the horrors of the Middle Passage.

"This mixture will burn away the weight that would keep you bound to this soil," she whispered to her son, who gazed up at her with eyes that seemed to hold centuries of knowing. "The ancestors promised you will fly back to warn our people of what happens here, to tell them to send no more across these waters.”

When the plantation bell signaled midday, Adeline slipped away to the shade of the old silk cotton tree. She tilted her child's head back, his tiny mouth opening like that of a bird awaiting nourishment. As the fiery mixture touched his tongue, his eyes widened in surprise before she poured the remainder down his gullet.

The wail that erupted from the infant shattered the humid air—a sound unlike any human cry.

From the big house came the master-father, hands clasped over his ears. Blood ran down his cheeks as he shut his eyes tight. The baby's cry pierced him like a blade, each note proclaiming the child's spirit was free. No longer tied to the man who sent his own to the fields if they were dark and cast them as overseers if they were born a few shades lighter. The man who considered the many children of his taking, less than human and deserving of subjugation, was being attacked by forces beyond his comprehension.

Adeline, too, felt a searing pain behind her eyes. The ancestral magic demanded a price - her sight for her son's freedom. Darkness descended like a veil, but she kept her face turned skyward, sensing her child rising above her. Adeline watched him ascend with eyes that could no longer see, her heart breaking and soaring. His transformed body, illuminated by the moonlight that blocked the sun and dissolved into the indigo sky, was the last vision she would ever hold of her son.

A few days later, in a trance, Adeline fled toward the rough waters where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea.

Simmons squinted against the harsh island sun, tracking her from the edge of the sugarcane field. Her figure darted between the tall stalks like a shadow at midday. Her escape attempt did not surprise him.

After twenty years as overseer at various plantations, he could sense when one of them was about to break. He would spot the subtle changes in posture and gaze that signaled a yearning for flight. He had been watching Adeline since her child was born. He noticed her quiet talks, the roots and herbs she gathered, and the hot fruit she picked. He saw how she gazed beyond the horizon toward Africa while her newborn squirmed against her back, snug in the wrap that held him close.

Two years ago, she was twelve, and the master picked her. Her dark skin shone like polished rosewood. Her strong thighs looked like braided roots of a mangrove near the banks of the river. She was the kind they called "valuable breeding stock" when discussing prospects. He remembered that she tried to resist the master at first, earning brutal lashes across her back that left permanent keloids in their wake. Soon, though, Simmons saw the master ravage her. Each time she climbed the steps to the plantation house, her youthful fire dimmed. In the end, resignation was all that remained. Then, he watched as her belly grew round until she was too far along to be easily taken, so the master sent her away from the great house to the fields.

Simmons thought Adeline's son's birth went as all slave births go, except, as he reported to the master, "The baby is fair-skinned."

"Hmm. Lighter than you?"

The words struck the overseer like lightning. Simmons' carefully constructed walls crumbled, leaving him exposed to the raw, agonizing pain of his memories escaping their mental confines.

He was eight in the sweltering kitchen, his mother's hands working dough. At nine, watching his father's quill scratch across parchment that separated him from the quarters. His mother's whispered warning: "You got his nose, baby. His light eyes. De massa's wife can't stand looking at what she know to be true." By ten, he trailed behind an overseer who pressed a whip into his small hands. At twelve, he learned the terrible mathematics of power when rawhide met flesh. By fifteen, he was numb to the pain he inflicted on the darkies.

The plantation bell, signaling the end of the workday, crashed him back to the present and his standing in the slave business hierarchy.

"Simmons! Did you hear me?”

"Yes, sah. Fairer than me by half."

"How is the girl? Is she ready to return to the house?"

"Adeline ready when you ready, sah." Later, he would wonder why he said this. It was wrong, and he knew it.

Then, three days ago, an eclipse darkened the island, and something incomprehensible happened with Adeline's infant son. The other slaves wouldn't speak of it directly, only murmuring about "old Asante juju" and "the ancestors' call." The plantation doctor had found no body, and Master Ellwood was in a fury about the loss of potential property.

Simmons heightened his surveillance. And now it was happening. Today, on the island's northeastern coast, the heady mix of lantana and ocean air masked something he couldn't foresee. What he knew for sure was that Adeline was making a straight line to the bridge.

The Devil's Bridge wasn't a bridge at all - just a narrow coral outcropping that jutted over the violent sea, where waves had carved through rock long before men measured time. Sixty feet down to jagged reef and water that churned like jumbies at midnight. Those who jumped didn't return to the cane fields the next day.

Five had gone that way since he'd assumed the overseer position at this plantation. Five souls who'd chosen the unknown terror of a watery death over the familiar terrors of the brutal plantation. Master Ellwood had taken the cost of each one out of Simmons' pay, as if they were sacks of sugar lost to the sea rather than people who had finally broken free.

Through the gathering darkness, he could see her more clearly now.

She ran with a grace that defied exhaustion, her bare feet barely disturbing the earth beneath them, her breathing controlled and purposeful.

Beautiful, Simmons thought.

She hadn't taken the main path but seemed drawn to her destination like a compass needle finding north. The enslaved always found ways to share their secrets, maps written in song and story rather than paper and ink - pathways to freedom, or in this case, to an escape of another kind.

Simmons quickened his pace. The scent of ginger, bitter greens and hot peppers hung in the air around her trail, so strong it made his eyes water. Strange, that smell. It followed her these days, like her own personal atmosphere.

She paused at the edge of a small clearing. For a moment, Simmons thought she had heard him. But her head was tilted skyward, as if listening to voices carried on the evening breeze. Then she was running again, faster now, with a determination that sent a chill down his spine despite the humid air.

Ahead, through a break in the immortelle trees with their flaming red blossoms, the first stars of evening glinted off the pale stones of the Devil's Bridge. The space between them yawned like the distance from the great house to the negro quarters - close enough to command, far enough for defiance to take root.

"Adeline!" he shouted, his voice carrying the authority that usually stilled even the most rebellious slave.

This time, it only seemed to fuel her resolve. She was twenty yards from the bridge now, then fifteen, her simple white dress billowing behind her like wings about to take flight.

Simmons crashed through the underbrush, razor grass incising his hands as he intercepted her path. Ten yards from the bridge now, he could see the chasm beyond and hear the ancient song of water crashing against coral. He'd never been comfortable so close to the edge. Something about the pull of it, the whispered invitation to step forward into vast waters that roiled like tormented souls.

Five yards.

He lunged, catching her around the waist and bringing them both crashing to the ground. She fought with a strength he wouldn't have believed possible from someone her size, her hands finding his face not to claw but to press against his eyes, as if forcing him to see something invisible to his ordinary senses.

"Lemme go!" she cried, her voice carrying an authority that momentarily made him loosen his grip. "He callin' me! Dey waitin' for me!”

"Ent nothing across that water but Africa, and you ent never getting there," he grunted, managing to pin her arms. "The massa want you back."

She went eerily still beneath him, as if her spirit had suddenly released her body.

"My son flies now. He cross de water on wings of fire and blood. I sen' him to warn our people on de Gold Coast. And—I—will—follow.”

Simmons noticed what should have been immediately apparent - her eyes were unseeing. How could she be blind and run so sure through the thick bush?

For the first time, Simmons questioned if the slaves' whispers about Obeah and soul flight were just superstition.

As they walked back, Adeline turned to look toward the bridge one last time, and something in her eyes looking past him made Simmons take an involuntary step back.

"I’m coming baby. Ah have something to do first, then ah coming fer yuh."

Something about Adeline was different now. As he took her away, he thought he heard wings flapping in the darkness. Was that the chilling shriek of a soucouyant piercing the night air?

"She's blind?" The master-father asked when Simmons returned her. His maggot-pale fingers traced her unseeing eyes, and Adeline's face contracted in revulsion at his touch.

“Move her things to the small room behind my chambers. I'll have use for her, yet.”

The master-father meant to confine her. What he did not understand was that she was never truly present. Her soul had leapt over Devil's Bridge. Her body and spirit lingered. And he did not know her ancestors had chosen his overseer to keep watch until she fulfilled her mission.

The space that held Adeline's body called to Simmons. It was a siren's song to the desperate, gnawing guilt that haunted him. Night after night, he found himself leaning against the great house wall, underneath her barricaded window.

That first night when the master pounded her, Simmons walked the perimeter until dawn, unable to bear the sounds resounding within. On the third day, he listened to her voice drift through the wooden slats as she told the women tending to her about mixing peppers. On the fifth night, he heard her speak prayers in languages the masters tried to erase. During the seventh night, he heard her laugh with joy when she spoke of her son—the pale child with burning eyes who visited her dreams.

At first, Simmons told himself he was watching for signs of rebellion. But with each nightfall, a seismic shift was taking place within him. The mulatto overseer began to remember what it felt like to be human. Adeline's voice became his teacher, her psalms his scripture.

She never acknowledged his presence. Until today.

When the second eclipse descended in as many weeks, casting the plantations midday into twilight, Simmons' blood ran cold. The first eclipse had marked the day her son vanished. This one could only mean something terrible was about to happen. He ran to Adeline's room.

“Simmons!"

His name on her lips made him stop in his tracks, heart hammering. Slowly, he took a careful step toward the window.

"How you know is me?" His voice came out small and uncertain, stripped of all authority.

"The same way I know you were sitting under this window for seven nights, learning to be human again."

Adeline pressed her palm flat against the weathered boards of her barred window. Moved by something sacred, Simmons closed his eyes and matched her gesture on the other side, his larger hand spanning the width of hers. He felt the warmth of her skin seep through the wood, felt the steady rhythm of her pulse through the grain. Seven nights of careful distance collapsed into something tender and electric.

"You feel that?" she whispered, her voice carrying the soft wonder of a woman who never knew she could be touched with gentleness.

"I feel everything," he breathed. "All these nights, listening to you… you been the only real thing in my life.”

"And I felt your heart heal and bloom," she said. "This thing we share has been growing in the spaces between words. Sweet and quiet, like morning glory climbing toward light."

"I had a vision," she continued, her palm still pressed to the wood. "Soon I will cross the waters at last—not as cargo, but as spirit borne on Atlantic winds. My son is over there, waiting."

Simmons dared not speak. But her words seem to squeeze his heart. Tears escaped his eyes and carved a path down his cheeks.

"But first," her voice took on a deeper timbre, "justice must balance the scales. The master will pay for what he has taken. Tonight, the ancestors will speak through these old walls.

"You must bear witness here, Simmons. You must tell my people—our people.”

She paused, closed her eyes, and her voice fell low and thick with emotion. "My living shall not be in vain."

That night, as if summoned by Adeline's prophecy, a fever took hold of the master. He thrashed in his bed, crying out about burning eyes that followed him, about small hands that clawed at his throat.

The morning after, they found Adeline's small room empty, the door still locked from the outside. Simmons knew she had simply chosen her moment to complete the journey he had preempted days ago at Devil's Bridge.

As for the master, his fever burned through his body for seven days and seven nights. When it finally broke, his hair had turned white as cotton, and his mind had cracked like drought-parched earth.

They found him babbling about debts unpaid and children stolen, his body bent and aged beyond his years. The plantation oracle whispered, "De massa aged a year for every child he had sold, every woman he had violated." His body became too weak to hold a whip, his mind too fractured to give coherent orders.

The plantation crumbled around its broken master. In fear, the man's son freed all the slaves and burned the plantation house. The freed slaves whispered of hearing her joyful laugh echo through the crackling blaze, sweet as vindication.

Years later, when Simmons's hair had turned white and his hands trembled with age, he would remember Adeline's joyful laugh. He only heard it that one night, but it stayed with him and brought him joy. He would sit before semicircles of wide-eyed children who gathered around him like flowers turning toward the sun.

"Gather 'round, little ones. I'm gon' tell you the story - one that tiptoes on the edge of shadow and truth, whispered only when the moon is high.

"Long ago, across the great water, in a village by the sea where drums once called down the ships of strangers, something unusual happened. A boy came out of nowhere - skin pale as crushed seashells, eyes deep like old sorrow. He looked like a child, but when he stared at you, it was like all the ancestors were staring too.

"His mama had tried to save him, mixed up something special so he could escape the chains. But, rootwork always comes at a price. The potion that gave him wings also gave him a wicked thirst.

"By day, he sleeps. But when night comes, he rises. He only feeds on the wicked - the ones who sell their kin, who help the ships return laden with black bodies. He drinks just enough to leave a mark and take the greed right out of them. The next morning, they woke up changed forever.

"Some call him monster. Others, guardian. I say he's both - living proof of a mother's love turned to magic."

"What about his mudda?" asked a little girl.

Simmons smiled. "She was the girl whose body stayed behind, but her spirit learned to fly. She freed her boy to pass over the waters and save many from the scourge of slavery. Because of her sacrifice and communion with our ancestors, a plantation owner received his due, and this wicked overseer became a griot. Her name was Adeline. And her living was not in vain.”

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SCARLET IBIS JAMES brings worlds to life where African spirits commune with their diasporic descendants, weaving Caribbean legacy with modern truths. Born in Trinidad and now based in New York City, she crafts stories that bridge islands and boroughs, generations and cultures. When not writing, James can be found dining with her family all over New York City, hunting for the perfect roti in Queens, collecting stories on subway rides, or tending to her beloved Aglaonema Wishes plant, Rosie, in her Harlem apartment. Visit her at www.scarletibisjames.com.