Ticky-Ticky's Quest: Search for Anansi the Spider-Man: Ticky-Ticky's Quest, #1

By Michael Auld

Ticky-Ticky is a twelve-year-old with a secret: He is the youngest son of the infamous trickster Anansi the Spider-man. Hiding in the human world, Ticky-Ticky fears his father’s enemies will recognize and punish him for being the butt of Anansi’s embarrassing pranks.

Now, the joke’s on Ticky-Ticky.  A school incident forces him to follow his missing father’s footsteps on a dangerous quest across time and reality. Riding a magical ghost-bat canoe with a dog of the dead as his guide, Ticky-Ticky encounters Anansi’s folkloric foes out for revenge. After a lifetime of avoiding his father’s legacy, can Ticky-Ticky find his father before he loses his life or even worse: becomes just like him?

This is part one of a trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TemRose Publishing
• Release date: Dec 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540183231

Book preview

Introduction

The stories about Kweku Anansi the Spider-man are timeless. He is a small trickster and a hero who has used his brains to survive many adventures. He also has a family whose members are sometimes featured in his famous Anansi Stories, or Anansesem, as the Asanti of Ghana, West Africa call them. Taken against his will to the Americas a long time ago, he has continued to go on many adventures. This story is about one of his sons, Intikuma Anansi, or Ticky-Ticky.

Ticky-Ticky, a Jamaican schoolboy, becomes concerned when his father, Anansi, goes missing. This is the first part of a sequel that takes Ticky-Ticky on a long journey. On his quest he encounters some folkloric characters, their family members, and other spider characters in the Americas. Ticky-Ticky interacts with a vudoo or obiah-man, the Caribbean God of the Dead, travels with the Dog of the Afterlife, and visits the fabled Taíno Indian Island of Women called Matinino (Without Fathers). Matinino is the sister island to Guanin, the Island of Gold, a story twice told to Christopher Columbus upon his arrival in the Caribbean. Each place reveals clues while on the search for Kweku Anansi. The question is: Did Anansi come by here?

CHARACTERS IN THE THREE-PART SERIES

Ticky-Ticky: He is Intikuma Anansi, a mixed spider-boy, who is the youngest son of Aso and Kweku Anansi.

Kweku Anansi: Originated in Ghana, West Africa. He was once a man who disrespected his father, N'yame the Great Sky God, and was turned into a spider-man by him. He is a trickster-hero whose timeless folkloric stories travelled to the Americas with some enslaved West Africans and their descendants.

Osebo the Leopard (a.k.a. Bra' Tiger): Osebo has the typical personality of a leopard and is the main villain in traditional Anansi trickster stories. He is always portrayed as vicious and unscrupulous.

Cuffy the Obeah-Man: In Jamaica, obeah is an African practice similar to Haitian voodoo, voudo, or voudon. Also in Jamaica, the Ghanaian Asanti (Ashanti) day-name, Kofi (for Friday) was changed by island-born enslaved Africans to Cuffy, a newly arrived person from the African continent, considered a person without class.

Guayaba Maquetaurie (gwa-yah-bah mah-keh-taw-ree-eh): The 16th-century Spanish pronunciation for the Taíno God of the Afterlife. These Caribbean indigenous people believed that he was the Lord of Coabey (the house and home of the dead). He was the Lord of the Dead, Master of Sweetness and Delight, symbol of the guayaba or guava berry (whose juice produced a black body paint which symbolized death). The belief was that spirits in the form of local fruit bats hunted for the sweet guava berry at night.

Opiyel, a.k.a. Opiyelguobirán (opee-el-goo-oh-bee-rang): Opiy = spirit of those absent, i.e. the dead, while the suffix el means son. He was a Taíno dog whose bark could only be heard by opias, spirits of the dead. He was one of the twins who assisted Maquetaurie Guayaba. Opiyelguobirán as Guardian of the Dead and Master of Privacy and Felicity was the twin of Corocote, Guardian of Romance and Spontaneity. Opiyelguobirán was a mischievous spirit and discoverer of the first wild bee honey.

Oginimínogowan (her name in Algonquian means Rose): The daughter of the North American Algonquian Supreme Being, Michabo the Great Hare. Her father was thought to be the main Algonquian culture hero, who was the representation of life and the creator of the world. He was reputed to possess not only the power to live but also to create life in others. He was sometimes called the Great Light, the Spirit of Light, or the Great White One. He was the loyal friend and patron of the human race.

Ictomi (ik-toe-me) a.k.a. Uktomi: The Lakota/Dakota/Nakota [Also known as the Sioux]. He was the son of the Thunderbird and the brother of Iya the Storm, the evil monster who also spreads disease. Iktomi the spider is a shape shifter and trickster whose actions provide moral lessons, especially for young people.

Spider Woman: She is the folkloric heroine of the Hopi of northeastern Arizona who live on Black Mesa. Hopi means good, peaceful, or wise. The web is her symbol that reflects the colors that were present at the time of the creation of the universe. 

Grandmother Spider: Is from the Cherokee and Choctaw of the Southern United States. She stole fire of the sun from the East and brought it to the first people.

Chapter One

Ticky-Ticky's Cruel Fate

Ticky-Ticky sat at his desk staring out of the window. Raindrops sounded like small pebbles as they rhythmically struck the glass. Although he could not hear it, he could sense when the wind picked up in short gusts. Watery pellets from the black sky smacked every object in their path, creating empty maraca shake-shake sounds, rat-a-tats on a discarded soda can, backed up by a dull reggae bass note from an empty cardboard box. The music from the rainfall lulled him deeper into thought and fired up his imagination. The dreary melody drifted him further away and created the sad feeling of the deep loss of a parent. He nervously folded the second pair of four legs under the oversized shirt that he had asked his mother to make. Ticky-Ticky was embarrassed by having extra legs, so in moments of self-doubt he chose to hide the fact that he was quarter-spider living in the world of full-blooded humans.

In his island home, some folks had an attitude toward racial mixing. These race-sensitive African majority people would refer to islanders who were mixed with minorities as if they were mathematical fractions. For example, persons mixed with a minority would be referred to as half or quarter Chinese, Indian, or Syrian. Syrians were really 19th-century Christian immigrants from Lebanon. If Ticky-Ticky's friends knew that his father was a spider-man and his mother was a woman, internally turned into a spider, they would refer to him as that quarter-spider boy.

A sudden sharp crack of a twelve-inch wooden ruler against his desk jolted him back to reality. Ticky-Ticky jumped. As quickly as yellow lightning slashing a path across a black Boina-snake sky, he jerked his arm an inch away from where the teacher had slapped the desk.

Wake up, Mr. Anansi! Ms. Jellywoman shouted in an annoyed Scottish accent. The class roared with laughter.

Be quiet! the immigrant teacher commanded as she spun around to face the rest of the students. Laughter stopped abruptly. A few of Ticky-Ticky's friends found it hard to stop snickering.

Iggi! Ms. Jellywoman grunted sharply as her face turned the hue of her red hair. She focused her attention on Ignatius Iggi Iguana. Iggi, the class clown, was a locally born full-blooded iguana. He, however, did not appear to be lizard-like, since, in order to fit in, his mom made him drink a prickly pear potion each morning before school. The secret potion had to be made from a turn fruit of the wild cactus plant. In the island lingo, a green, tart turn fruit was the same as fit, or just before turning ripe for eating. This potion only lasted eight hours and would make Iggi appear to be a Taíno boy. The potion had to be prepared by the village bohuti or shaman who also knew the secret to making bad people into zombies. Although the practice of zombie-ism was lost to the Jamaican islanders, the next-door island of Haiti was where this ancient Amerindian art had been discovered, still in use. 

Ticky-Ticky was being educated in a Jamaican high school for boys called Coromanti. The school's British Baptist founders named the institution for a place in West Africa. Centuries earlier, Coromanti was a notorious slave port in West Africa's Gold Coast whose dominant nation became the Asanti or Ashanti Confederation. The Jamaican school was a typical British Colonial-style educational institution where the First Form had students who, on average, started high school education at ten years old. Before the island's independence from Britain, the school's classes went up to the sixth form, which was equivalent to the freshman year at an American university. The youngest student admitted to the school was the son of a local meat magnate who had introduced commercial chicken farming to the island. The young lad was one of Ticky-Ticky's first-form classmates who, at eight years old, had passed the entrance exam to Coromanti High School. Now in the second form, Ticky-Ticky had graduated to wearing long khaki pants, a sign of maturity. 

Most of the fellows in class at Coromanti had nicknames. Ticky-Ticky was the pet name for Intikuma Anansi, the youngest son of Kweku and Aso Anansi. His mother sometimes fondly called him Ticky-Ticky after the tiny mosquito-lava-eating, guppy-like fish that populated the irrigation canals on some of the island's sugarcane plantations. On his first day at Coromanti, when he had just turned ten, some other first-form boys had overheard his mother using the name when she had said goodbye. The