Dublin was once a slave-trading port (also Bristol, York, and even London). This had nothing to do with the early modern Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas; the traders were Norse Vikings and the people boarding ships to nowhere were Celtic Irish, Welsh, Saxons, and Scots.1 We know this from the sagas and the Icelandic Book of Settlements.

“Erp's mother was Myrgiol, the daughter of Gliomal, king of the Irish. Earl Sigurd had taken them in the spoils of war, and made them slaves. Myrgiol was the bondwoman of the earl's wife, and served her faithfully. She knew many things. She preserved her mistress's unborn child while she was in the bath. After that Aud bought her for a high price, and promised her freedom if she served Thurid, the wife of Thorstein the Red, as she had served her mistress. Then Myrgiol and her son Erp sailed with Aud to Iceland.” 2

“Irish slaves taken to Iceland by Ketil Gufa, son of Orlyg, son of Bodvar, son of Vigsterk, from western piracy " late in the settling time " (870-900), rebelled and perished (Landnamabok, c. 97). Their names may be noted : " One was called Thormod, another Floki ; Kori, and Svart, and two Skorris."3

“Leif sailed upon a western expedition. He harried in Ireland, and found there a great house underground : he went in, and it was quite dark there till [he came to a place] where there was light from a weapon which a man was holding. Leif killed the man and took the sword, and much other treasure. Thereafter he was called Hior-leif. Hiorleif harried far in Ireland, and took much spoil there. He took there ten slaves, named Dubthach, and Geirrod, Skaldbiorn, Halldor, and Drafdrit ; more are not named.”4

I grew up thinking of the Vikings as seafaring berserkers who fearlessly raided up and down the coasts of Ireland, Great Britain, France, and the Low Countries, pillaging towns, villages, and wealthy monasteries, loading their sleek clinker-built dragon ships to the gunwales with loot. Now I know those ships were also stacked with human beings destined not just for the new colonies in Iceland but also for sale along a vast sea and river network stretching from Newfoundland to Baghdad and beyond.

Yes, one of the huts at the famous L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site in Newfoundland housed Leif Erikson’s slaves.

Studying graves on Iceland, archaeologists discovered that over half the women in the early Viking settlement were from the British Isles, that is, they were concubines and slaves torn from their homeland, never to return.

I think the fact that I didn’t know any of this had to do with the place (Canada) and the time (1950s and early 1960s). Slavery was a bad thing safely tucked away in the past and in the American South.

The Norse at home lived mostly on small farmsteads and had little use for slave labor, but owning a slave conferred social status and slave trading made them wealthy. I have seen estimates that slaves made up as much as 25% of the population of Sweden at the time I am talking about.

The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan is notorious for his (lurid) description of a high status Viking funeral somewhere along the Volga River in present day Russia (the original Rus were Vikings). The dead man’s slave women were polled to see who would volunteer to accompany him on his trip to the afterlife. The chosen woman was made drunk, sent from tent to tent having intercourse with the dead man’s friends, then helped aboard the funeral ship.

I saw that the girl did not know what she was doing. She wanted to enter the pavilion, but she put [her head] between it and the boat. Then the old woman seized her head, made her enter the pavilion and went in with her. The men began to bang on their shields with staves, to drown her cries, so that the other slave girls [would not be frightened] and try to avoid dying with their masters.

Then she was raped again inside a tent next to the corpse and strangled to death.

I tell you this not to shock you, but to try to nudge the contemporary Western mindset that focuses on the Atlantic slave trade and tends to diminish or even forget slavery in other forms and at other times. This focus is legitimate for the people involved and their descendants, but if you lift the horizon, other worlds of shame and horror emerge. The truth is that humans are inhuman and always have been, especially if there is money to be made. We should all be more depressed about this than we are.

Slavery goes back as far as records can reach. The Code of Hammurabi dealt with slaves, including a bit about how, if your slave developed epilepsy within a month of purchase, you could return him or her for a full refund (much like Amazon).

Long before the Portuguese invented sugar estates on the Canary Islands, there were slave-worked plantations in what is now Iraq, also in ancient Rome (they were called latifundia), and in Arabic North Africa. I don’t speak here of the Far East; my reading hasn’t gotten me there yet.

The Arab slave trade in North Africa across the Sahara and down the Nile River began in the eighth century (same as the Vikings) with the spread of Islam and lasted into the 20th century; in the war torn Sahel, it continues to this day in one form or another, e.g. the rape of women and the forced conscription of boy soldiers. In comparison, the Atlantic slave trade lasted only about 400 years. James Walvin, author of The Atlas of Slavery, gives estimates of between three and a half million and seven million people who made that sorrowful passage.

One of the ironies of history: the use of the word “assimilation” and the practice of slavery and slave trading by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Arabs, and the Turks (the list goes on) indicate that over time these events lose their capacity to trigger moral outrage. They become old stories. Yet they are dense with the half-life of ancient memories of murder, children and women ripped from their homes, transportation to foreign lands, rape, forced labor, never going home. All this safely subsumed and sanitized under the word “assimilation.”

Over time, the original British (who themselves weren’t the original population) retreated to Wales, Brittany, and Scotland, or were simply assimilated by the Saxons and Vikings. Then the Normans came and made everyone French. Slice it any way you want, there have been more than enough tears shed, languages lost, and families destroyed. At least history is consistent.

There is a line of thought that New World chattel slavery and the trade in African people were categorically different and worse than any previous form of slavery. This is an argument from sheer numbers, the efficiently business-like organization of the European slave trade (the new techniques of joint stock capitalization helped), and the racialization of slavery.

I find this argument Eurocentric, white people claiming pride of place once again. Not only are they the best, they are also the worst; always superlative, always the center of attention. The British are particularly good at spinning this argument and making themselves the hero because they stopped the Atlantic slave trade (1807-8) and freed their slaves (in agonizing stages, between 1834 and 1838). But of course they were also the most successful and business-like of the western slavers.

The Atlantic slave trade continued after the British stopped it (yes, you read that right), though in a diminished form. Brazil was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery (1888). But the slave trade to North Africa and the Middle East continued into the 20th century. There are slave markets today in war-torn Sudan, Darfur, and South Sudan, just as there are other forms of slavery elsewhere in the world. According to Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People, New Slavery in the Global Economy,5 it is cheaper to buy a human being today than at any time in world history.

As a social institution slavery is protean. Yet, though there are variant customs and practices, it seems invidious to argue one is worse (or better) than another. They all amount to someone being stolen or sold from home and forced to work (sex work included) for free. Can you really imagine a little girl kidnapped from her village in present day Nigeria taking stock and thinking, well, on the whole I am better off than if I had been put on a ship and sent to Virginia or Jamaica in 1802?

Here’s a description of how a slaving expedition would go in late 19th century Sudan from Samuel White Baker’s book In the Heart of Africa6 (the book was published in 1886 but describes events beginning in 1862). The expedition would be financed on spec in Khartoum and led by an Arab trader/investor. (I’m afraid I am using the term “Arab” too loosely; in these sub-Saharan territories, much trading was done by Arab businessmen but also by converted Africans; in West Africa, these were called “slatees,” according to Mungo Park.)7

…on arrival at the desired locality the party disembark and proceed into the interior, until they arrive at the village of some negro chief, with whom they establish an intimacy.

Charmed with his new friends, the power of whose weapons he acknowledges, the negro chief does not neglect the opportunity of seeking their alliance to attack a hostile neighbor. Marching throughout the night, guided by their negro hosts, they bivouac within an hour's march of the unsuspecting village doomed to an attack about half an hour before break of day. The time arrives, and, quietly surrounding the village while its occupants are still sleeping, they fire the grass huts in all directions and pour volleys of musketry through the flaming thatch. Panic-stricken, the unfortunate victims rush from their burning dwellings, and the men are shot down like pheasants in a battue, while the women and children, bewildered in the danger and confusion, are kidnapped and secured. The herds of cattle, still within their kraal or "zareeba," are easily disposed of, and are driven off with great rejoicing, as the prize of victory. The women and children are then fastened together, and the former secured in an instrument called a sheba, made of a forked pole, the neck of the prisoner fitting into the fork, and secured by a cross-piece lashed behind, while the wrists, brought together in advance of the body, are tied to the pole. The children are then fastened by their necks with a rope attached to the women, and thus form a living chain, in which order they are marched to the head-quarters in company with the captured herds.

This is the commencement of business. Should there be ivory in any of the huts not destroyed by the fire, it is appropriated. A general plunder takes place. The trader's party dig up the floors of the huts to search for iron hoes, which are generally thus concealed, as the greatest treasure of the negroes; the granaries are overturned and wantonly destroyed, and the hands are cut off the bodies of the slain, the more easily to detach the copper or iron bracelets that are usually worn. With this booty the traders return to their negro ally. They have thrashed and discomfited his enemy, which delights him; they present him with thirty or forty head of cattle, which intoxicates him with joy, and a present of a pretty little captive girl of about fourteen completes his happiness.

An attack or razzia, such as described, generally leads to a quarrel with the negro ally, who in his turn is murdered and plundered by the trader—his women and children naturally becoming slaves.

A good season for a party of a hundred and fifty men should produce about two hundred cantars (20,000 lbs.) of ivory, valued at Khartoum at 4,000 pounds. The men being paid in slaves, the wages should be nil, and there should be a surplus of four or five hundred slaves for the trader's own profit—worth on an average five to six pounds each.

Lest you think this is an old story (see above), the video below gives details of contemporary slave raiding in South Sudan. I should warn you that the practice presented here of foreign aid groups buying slaves to free them has been criticized for ultimately encouraging the slavers. Nevertheless the video of actual slaves, actual slave traders, the horrific aftermath of a slave raid, and interviews with victims is stunning. As you watch, try to imagine these people 200 or 400 years ago on the Atlantic coast bound for the Americas, their horror and sadness. Please pause and attend to the faces of the women who have been raped, mutilated, seen their husbands murdered, and lost children.

Then, for the sake of argument, turn back to those Vikings. The slaves they purchased in Dublin were brought to the coast by inland chiefs, first obtained as a result of internal Irish wars, captured warriors, women, and children (an eerie parallel with the Atlantic slave trade which thrived on wars between African states in the interior of the continent).

What particularly caught my eye reading about the Viking slave trade were stories of a high value boys (especially boys kidnapped from monasteries, who could read and write) destined to be castrated and enslaved as eunuchs. There were two classes of eunuch, ones who had only their testicles removed and the so-called clean eunuchs who had their penises removed as well. Naturally, given the lack of antibiotics and anesthetics, very few boys survived this operation, which made them even more valuable. Most eunuchs were castrated as children.

Lest you think this dazzlingly brutal practice was rare, read this from Mary A. Valente’s essay “Castrating Monks: Vikings, Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs”:

The large number of eunuchs at the court of one Caliph, al-Muqtadir (AD 908–32), is recorded in a number of sources. The tenth/eleventh-century writer Hilal al-Sabi’ states that ‘It is generally believed that in the days of al-Muqtadir bi-allah [...] the residence contained 11,000 eunuchs: 7,000 blacks and 4,000 white Slavs; 4,000 free and slave girls and thousands of chamber servants’. Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir, a late thirteenth-century writer, claims that when Saladin conquered the Fatamids he found 12,000 people living there, but the only non-eunuchs were the Fatimid caliph himself and his immediate relatives.8

And just to be clear and not always beating up on Arabs — the Romans kept eunuchs, the eastern Roman empire of Byzantium kept eunuchs, the Greeks kept eunuchs, and afterwards, the Turkish empire employed huge numbers of eunuchs. In general, Islam is against castrating boys and men, especially if they are Muslims; they depended on foreign middlemen along the fringes of their zones of influence to provide boys and do the surgery (in practice, a competent operator could slice everything off with a single stroke of the blade). But, as Mary Valente observes,9 “only the Christian West was very much in the business of creating eunuchs on a large scale for export.”

As it happens, the Vikings were quick to adapt to this market. Adult male slaves, only good for labor, were less valuable than female slaves, and tended not to be traded on (traveling down the Dnieper River, it was easier to capture men along the way, the so-called Slavs). Young females of higher value were fed into the trading system that saw them trafficked through the Mediterranean or across the Baltic and thence along the Russian river systems to the Middle East. Boys, with the highest added value, were taken by either route, processing through the so-called castration houses — Venice was perhaps the most prominent, but there were other ports that provided such services.

I grew up learning that the Vikings raided monasteries for their wealth (gold and silver religious objects, etc.), but my history books, as I have said, failed to mention slavery. Now a case can be made that the Norse raided monasteries to procure educated boys for the eunuch trade (as a general principle, as you research slavery, it always gets worse).

There were a lot of little boys in monasteries and churches. So-called child oblation, parents donating their sons and, yes, daughters to the church to be raised as monks and nuns, was a commonly accepted practice in the early Middle Ages. There was, of course (there always is) a Biblical precedent for this; see 1 Samuel, 24-28, where Hannah dedicates her son Samuel to God’s service.

²⁴ And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the Lord in Shiloh: and the child was young.

²⁵ And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.

²⁶ And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the Lord.

²⁷ For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him:

²⁸ Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshipped the Lord there.

That line, “the child was young,” makes a person cringe.

It wasn’t until the late 11th century that opinion began to turn against the practice of child oblation based on irrevocability and non-consent.

In any case, now you get the picture: the Vikings raiding up and down the coasts of Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe or setting up slave trading ports, internal wars spinning off captives, monasteries dotting the coasts acting as collection points for high grade boy slaves, and an international network of trade routes leading to far-flung markets.

Again, Mary Valente:

Given the increasing demand for eunuchs, especially literate and educated eunuchs, in the Byzantine and especially Arab world from the ninth century onwards, Viking raids on western monasteries must be seen in a new light. Monasteries were indeed repositories of great treasure, and men and women could and were captured and sold to Iceland and Scandinavia. But the only way to explain the massive drive for captives is to understand the economics of the long-distance slave trade of the Viking Age. The added value of young, literate boys and teens and the fact that Venice castration houses needed a near endless supply of exactly such captives fill in another piece of the puzzle of the economics of the Northern Arc of the slave trade. As long as there was a demand for castrated young boys and teens, whether from Slavic or western European lands, whether pagan or Christian, there would be a supply.”10

I tell you this, yes, to shock you. Now I admit it. To remind you of things done but elided in the awful forgiveness of history.

Humans are flat-out amazing at inventing forms of cruelty. It is a consistent and defining trait.

A Tale of Two Sisters

The unconscious bias of history is that racial purity is the norm, whereas in fact genetic mixing is universal. We are all mongrels. Race is a social construct. Identity is less a fact than a matter of discourse, performance, and the chance of birth.

The planters in the British West Indies followed the pattern, taking purity as the baseline. They had a more or less standard terminology for various degrees and vectors of genetic mixing, mulatto, mustee, mustefino, cabre, etc. There are several instances of mulattos and mulattresses on the estates I have been studying (Anse la Roche and Industry on Carriacou and Mount Rich on Grenada), but two in particular loom darkly out of the mist of time, sinister and sad, but with startlingly divergent outcomes.

Among the people enslaved at Mount Rich in 1817, the year the British government began requiring annual plantation censuses, there were two young women, Betsy, who was 20, and Jeannie, who was 22. They were likely born on the estate, Jeannie in 1795, Betsy in 1797. The absentee owner at that time was a Scot named Henry Davidson, but the estate for many years was managed by another Scottish family named Junor who lived in the great house. Both Betsy and Jeannie were mixed race, what were called mulattos, which meant they had white fathers and black mothers. Calculating the probabilities, I suspect that Jeannie and Betsy were sisters. They may have had the same mother and father.

Also in 1817, the Mount Rich slave register included two “mustees,” two-year-old Anne and five-month-old William. On the planter color scale, mustees (sometimes called mustifs or mustives) were the children of a mulatto and a white parent (the word is a clipped version of the Spanish “mestizo” derived from the same root as the Canadian word “métis”). The births of Anne and William preceded the introduction of annual slave censuses, so I can't name their mothers with any certainty; but probably they were Jeannie and/or Betsy, since they were the only mixed-race women of child-bearing age on Mount Rich at the time.

Anne died in 1818 of "dropsy" at the age of three. Dropsy is an old diagnostic term for edema of various kinds, that is, with various etiologies, in this case possibly a version of beriberi which stems from a Thiamine (Vitamin B1) deficiency. William died a year later, at the age of two, of “fever & dropsy.”

In 1821, both women gave birth, and both babies were similarly classed as mustees. Jeannie named her daughter Peggy; the little girl only lived five months, dying of “fever & marasmus.” Betsy named her daughter Diana. She survived infancy, only to succumb to marasmus at the age of ten.

Marasmus is a disease of malnutrition characterized by wasting, alarming common among the children of the plantations. When I say malnutrition, I need to be careful. The planters did not intentionally starve their workers to death, but what was supplied in bulk likely did not provide a full panel of nutrients necessary for good health. Corn, especially, is a deceptive food and was commonly supplied to the people on the plantations. Corn-based diets, notably across the American South where pellagra was once common, are notorious for deficiency problems.

In 1822, Jeannie had another mustee daughter, Jean, who died of convulsions after 26 days.

The fact that all these children were mustees suggests there were one or perhaps two white men involved. Perhaps each woman had a white partner (one can only guess at the emotional nature of these relationships).

In 1825, both women had babies again. Jeannie bore another daughter she named Margaret little, also a mustee, the child of a white father. (The diminutive “little” or “petit” was often added to names usually to signify that there was an older person around with the same name. It’s not a surname.) Betsy's daughter was called Christiana. She was a mulatto, which means her father was possibly another mulatto. This suggests that after having two children with the same man, Betsy’s relationship was broken off. Either her white lover died, left the plantation, or spurned her, after which she partnered with a new man, probably another slave. Betsy delivered a son in 1829, this time with yet another lover. Unusually, the boy was given a full English name including surname, Alexander Taylor, and categorized as a "cabre," which means his father was black.

During my research, I chanced upon a notice on an Ancestry.com message board that opened up some intriguing if nebulous possibilities. It seems there was a Scot named James Taylor working at Mount Rich in the early 1800s. He had a Scottish wife who bore him nine children. At least one son, John Taylor (1800-1819), was born at Mount Rich. His other children are only given as a list, but among them is a boy named Alexander. For some reason Betsy picked this name for her own child, but since he was a cabre, his father could not have been white, could not have been one of the Taylor men. Perhaps she had some special affection for this white Alexander Taylor, perhaps she had cared for him as a domestic servant. Of course, this is only speculation.

Together the two women had at least eight children, with a mortality rate that exceeded 50% — the children died of dropsy (two), marasmus (two), and convulsions. One died at 26 days, the others at five months, two years, three years, and ten years. This conforms to a pattern, typical of West Indian sugar estates, where malnutrition was endemic and children struggled to survive through infancy. Yet most of the child deaths were not caused directly by malnutrition. At Mount Rich two of the biggest child killers were whooping cough (an epidemic in 1830) and tetanus (called jawfall, probably caused by unhygienic birthing practice).

Betsy was 36 in 1834 when Britain emancipated the slaves. Along with her surviving children, Christiana and Alexander Taylor, she was still listed on the estate books. To be clear, she wasn’t exactly made free in 1834. She would spend the next four years as a so-called “apprentice” still attached to Mount Rich, only a small step up from slavery.

Her sister Jeannie’s life course bent in an astonishingly different way. In 1827 seven years prior to the general emancipation, Jeannie and her surviving mustee daughter Margaret were set free. I can find no reason in the record, just the word “manumitted” next to their names. Their freedom cost £148 10, but I have no idea who might have paid for it. The most likely explanation is that the white man who fathered her child had raised the money. But it is possible that Jeannie was intelligent and industrious enough to earn the money herself. This happened on the islands, but rarely.

In moments of revery I think of Jeannie and Betsy on the model of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. Jeannie was more measured and steady in her approach to life. She seems to have had a long standing relationship with one white man and gave birth to two (or three) children with him, fostering a relationship that led her to freedom.

Betsy was younger, more impulsive. She had children of three different color combinations — mustee, mulatto, and cabre — which means she had sexual relationships with at least three different men. Betsy’s relationship inconsistency probably prevented her from amassing the social capital inherent in the idea of family, social capital she might have leveraged, as her sister did, to win her freedom. She remained a slave until emancipation.

But Jeannie was also just lucky at a crucial junctures in her life. Luck is not something one usually associates with a slave’s life. Her story offers a little light, a tiny variation on the relentless desperation of the general fate.

And I should be careful not to judge Betsy’s choice of lovers. Perhaps she was headstrong and rebellious, perhaps her partner choices were dictated by an aversion to white men. I have the same feeling about Jane Austen’s novel; why are we led to admire the prudent, restrained, careful sister, whose main contribution to the plot for most of the book is to retrain herself? Betsy had different lovers, white, mulatto, and black — I really should not read more into her life than the bare facts.

But I keep writing Betsy and Jeannie stories in my head.

After 1834, the record books go blank. When the slaves were no longer a valuable commodity, no one bothered to keep accurate records of their existence. It took a generation or two for many of their descendants to adopt surnames and begin to appear as individuals on church and civil registries. So their is a gap that makes it difficult to connect these women and their children with present day families.

Betsy and Jeannie came up in research for the book I am working on. They attracted me because suddenly, out of the wall of historical noise, a little human tale appeared, ever so faint, intimate and innocent. We don’t mean to forget enslaved people, but often in our attempts to develop grand theories and apportion blame we overlook the fact that they had, well, lives. They conceived and bore children, felt joy and sorrow, suffered the deaths of loved ones, and sometimes won small victories. (That the sex was coerced is a possibility. At the very least, there would have been a power differential that cannot be ignored.)

I have just the faintest hope that in publishing this little story, I might inspire a glimmer of recognition in some family genealogist with ancestors on Grenada. I would love to know what happened to these people, where their descendants ended up.

Full moon, silent the guns along the line, now and then the milky flashes of alien death rays, the hollow thump of a bursting body, but nothing like the usual cacophony of desperate engagement when the armored War Clads hover overhead — the unspeakable chattering of their guns, and the waves of alien warriors leaping toward us, wanton, careless of death, warriors who resembled us in every human way except for the glittering coil…

Commentary

I called the “clads” without thinking about it, not even realizing what the word meant, thinking I might have made it up. I just liked the sound. Then I looked it up and remembered, of course, that it’s a verb meaning dressed or clothed as in “My mistress Hedwig met me at the door naked, clad in light.” Then there is cladding, a construction term for material used to cover external walls. The coverings for cricket batting pads are called clads as in “clads 4 pads” (don’t you wish you had written that?).

As often happens in cases like this I can work backward from clads 4 pads to war clads, which, if you want to be reductive and literal, are auto-levitating armored (clad) vehicles crewed by alien warriors (or bots) dressed up (clad) to look like humans — except for that telltale glittering coil. I can imagine some earnest academic critic of a certain sort working out this derivation and thinking this is what I meant. But, as I said, at the beginning, I just heard the word in my brain. It sounded eerie and ominous, especially in conjunction with the word “war.” My mind leaped from the phrase to the image of waves of war clads racing towards the few remaining lost-cause humans in their redoubts.

The fact that the alien warriors remain undescribed (except for the you know what) is part of the special horror of the situation and reflects my general experience of other people. But the aliens I meet don’t even have a glittering coil to reveal their true identity. So you can read this story as thinly disguised autobiography.

But I digress.

This makes me wonder what other people make of the word “clads” or “war clads” when they read that first sentence. Because obviously most people don’t have the same catastrophic upbringing that I did. My mother WOULD come to watch my school softball games clad in riding jodhpurs — I had managed to repress this embarrassing fact until a classmate reminded me when I was in my 40s (Freud called this the return of the repressed, that is, when you remember things you’d be happier not remembering — forgetting is one of God’s blessings).

The image of the last battle, humans dying before the alien hordes, is a favorite of mine when I am in that dreamy state of primary invention. See also “Some things cannot be put right…”1 and “Zombie Attack.”2 Obviously I have a barely concealed yearning to write science fiction, which, I think is an aspect of aging. I can’t write realistic fiction anymore because I haven’t mastered texting yet let alone swiped anyone for a date or taken any of the latest apex party drugs — large swathes of contemporary society reside in an alternate universe more real than the fantasy niche where I live where you can still find telephone booths on street corners.

The Signs

Beatrice is the new palliative care nurse, very eccentric, with half her head shaved and tattoos that disappear inside her clothing like animals going into hiding. Faint metallic tinkling sounds, like muffled wind chimes, emanate mysteriously when she moves. I find that sound intimate and erotic. She's very young, I would say twenty-six going on twelve. I have seen her in the street dressed in black combat boots and zippered parachute pants. But she is a comfort to the dying, which has always surprised me. She has a forthrightness they find oddly reassuring.

Patient: Am I dying?

Beatrice: Looks like it to me.

Patient: You see this enough you know the signs?

Beatrice: I know the signs.

Patient: How long do you think?

Beatrice: Tonight. I think you'll go tonight.

Patient: I feel alone. Lonely.

Beatrice: If I were in your shoes, I'd feel the same.

Commentary

I admire young women with bravado. Bravado, eccentricity, and panache. If I get to come back in another life, I want to be Beatrice.

Not much chance, I imagine.

This story boiled up in me out of a true moment. This was years ago. My elderly aunt was dying in a hospital in Toronto. I was far away and unaware that she was dying. She was lingering as far as I could tell, and her life was not all that great. She was in her 80s, her husband had died rather horribly of prostate cancer a couple of years earlier, and before that, their only son had died of AIDS in Berlin, alone and uncared for. In my mind, I used to call my uncle and aunt “the dead zone” because they were so dour and judgmental, always sitting together at family gatherings and looking glum.

I was young and not very sympathetic, otherwise I might have read the signs. They were depressed and lonely. And there was a wall of silence around the secret of their son’s gayness. Even after his death (the story was that he had fallen down a flight of stairs). The question we all asked when they were not in earshot was whether or not they even knew he was gay. My aunt would look at a photo of her son with yet another male friend (long before, he had fled to Europe to live his own life) and sigh and say, “I wish he’d find a nice girl and settle down.” And my uncle was notorious for his casual homophobia. He called them “fairies.”

When she died and my aunt’s things were being divided up, I said I didn’t care about money or furniture, but if it were at all possible, I’d like to inherit papers and books, anything the family could spare. Months later, a truck pulled up in my mother’s driveway and suddenly the garage was full of boxes of books, photographs, and letters. My mother did the first sort, and I remember the day she called me. “They knew,” she said. “They knew all along that he was gay. They even knew he had AIDS.” And then we were both silent, mulling over the implications, their crushing loneliness, being unable, as they were, to share basic emotional truths about their lives.

My aunt was suffering from congestive heart failure. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant (story of my life). But this one night I phoned her, as I did now and then, and we chatted. We shared an interest in family genealogy and she liked to tell me stories about my father and growing up on the farm. But I was tired of small talk after a while and I knew that things were closing in for her (though she spoke easily and seemed not to be suffering). We never spoke of feelings, but this time I asked her what she was feeling, my words loaded, as she lay in the hospital bed. It was late at night, dark outside. We were both in darkness. She paused, then whispered, “I feel alone. Lonely.”

I’ve never forgotten those words or the tone of her voice. And she died the next day.

Whatever I said in response (and, mercifully, like Joe Biden, I forget), it was inadequate. And I have often wondered what the best response might be. So this little story is an experiment in writing that conversation. I think Beatrice is on the right track. Unsentimental, honest, but, above all, there and in the moment with the dying patient. I want to be Beatrice, and I want Beatrice with me at the end. She would tell me things I didn’t know and while away the waiting hours.

Also, this has to be funny — my defense against the corruption of sentimentality.

One of my projects during my Grenada trip in the fall was to locate a small, land-locked cotton plantation called Industry on Carriacou. It doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps it has not existed since 1823, the year of the last data recorded at The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery database. In 1823, there were ten women and five men living on the estate. As far as I can tell, they were all moved to Mount Rich, a sugar plantation on Grenada1, the following year, the land possibly absorbed into a neighboring estate.

There are no ruins marked on maps, the name is forgotten, and the town of Hillsborough has expanded upward toward the island spine obliterating whatever was once there in the way of buildings and fields. Not only that but the landscape is muffled under as blanket of coral vine or Mexican creeper, as it is sometimes called, an aggressive invasive species with distinctive bright pinkish-orange flowers that clings to trees, shrubs, stone ruins, and grave stones alike, making it very difficult to imagine what the place might have looked like when the land was under cultivation. The taxi driver who picked me up at the ferry terminal at Tyrrell Bay couldn’t remember the name but opined that the only way to kill it was to pave it over with concrete.

There is a 1756 census for Carriacou, when the island was still French, but I can’t match planter names to plantations. On Fenner’s map, thirty years later, Industry’s owner is marked as John Boyce. In a 1790 agricultural census, Boyce’s 56 enslaved people (with one white overseer) produced 7,000 pounds of cotton, or 125 pounds per slave. In comparison, the 554-acre Dumfries Estate, with 275 enslaved, produced 96,000 pounds of cotton, or 349 pounds per slave. Fenner’s 1784 map shows three buildings, an estate house and two other buildings for processing and storing cotton.2 The slave quarters have not been marked, it seems. The Fenner map also shows one of the island cart roads leading inland from Hillsborough, cutting straight across Brunswick Estate, then angling right (south) across a corner of Industry, and thence over the spine of the island to Dumfries and the Atlantic.

It has always seemed important that I pay attention to where these people lived and worked, that I be able at least to stand where they had stood and look out at the land the way they must have done, not just let them fade from memory.

On the other hand, my naivete always astounds me and I clearly didn’t anticipate the trouble I would have matching old maps to modern urban landscapes. In the end the only landscape marker I had was a curve in a road. As Alfred Korzybski famously observed, “The map is not the territory.” How could I forget that?

My first day on Carriacou, armed with the Fenner map, I stopped at the Museum (in an old cotton gin building, managed by a woman named Clemensia) on Patterson Street and asked what they thought of the lost Industry Estate. Straight up Patterson, I was told. Easy. I got distracted right away by some boys practicing soccer at the Hillsborough Recreation Ground. I sat in the bleachers and watched. They were the Hillsborough Secondary School team, preparing for a game against their snooty, better dressed rivals at the Bishops College Secondary School. What I thought about the kids I met along the way — always cheerful, open, delightful. Very much in the moment.

I kept studying the map and MapCarta on my phone and thinking that the shape of Patterson Street, where it angled to the right, matched the shape of the cart track on the 1784 map. I thought that angle must be the corner of Industry and that if I kept on going straight (there was a Y-junction) instead of turning, I would be walking along the southern boundary of the plantation. I convinced myself of this.

I followed to street (unnamed as far as I can tell), then took the first left and hiked over to the GRENLEC Power Plant. Very quiet along these roads except for stray goats and dogs. I spotted a man with tattoos working under his car. I said hi and by the way have you ever seen any ruins around here. My usual way of greeting people. He waved to the trash field next door and said the ruins were over there. He didn’t know what they were. He followed me into the brush, pointing out a crumbling wall, a broken lintel, and stone foundations disappearing under the coral vine.

The ruins of Industry, I told myself. Very pleased at my superior map-reading skills and archaeological intuition. I took videos of the coral vine and goat pastures, while congratulating myself on my success.

The next day I hiked north to Anse la Roche, putting Industry out of my mind temporarily, then the day after that I pushed up to the ridge that forms the spine of the island and walked along a dirt lane to Six Roads and thence to Dumfries, which was my goal for the day. But along the way I passed Dreddz Empire Bar and Garage3, stopped for a drink, and met Dredd, a.k.a. Andy Joseph, who also had a copy of the Fenner map tacked to the front of his bar. We crouched to examine his map, speculating on old roads and landscape shapes. Dredd thought I was wrong to assume that Patterson Street was the old cart track on the Fenner map. The cart track had obviously become Brunswick Road not Patterson Street. As soon as he said it, I knew he was right.

It seems obvious now, but when you’re standing on the ground, one curving bit of road looks much the same as another. The map is not the territory.

Hiking back to Hillsborough from Dumfries along the Brunswick Road, I watched the way the land changed. What was missing on the Fenner map were contour lines and elevations. The most striking landscape feature coming down from Six Roads corner into Hillsborough is the steep knob where the cemetery rises from the road with Christ the King Anglican Church behind.

It occurred to me that I ought to find the Anglican Rectory and inquire about real estate history. The Anglican Rectory was a secondary goal of my explorations. It figured prominently in the island’s history in the first two decades of the 19th century (and, yes, the resident clergyman owned slaves). There’s a phone number painted on a sign outside the church. It would have been easy to call, too easy for a man like me. I had seen the rectory marked on an oldish map on the main road leading north from Hillsborough, and the next day I walked over to investigate.

My diary notes read:

Started out a little after 9am up the road to the Anglican Rectory (which has some other name). Over-staffed, self-important place, with blue water jugs and stacks of toilet paper piled in a corner of the entry hall. I was sent downstairs to agriculture but went to the PR office by mistake. Nice guy who looked at my maps with me. Then he sent me to the permanent under-secretary or some such title who made me wait and then couldn’t help me. He said the old Anglican rectory was gone. It was over there — he pointed next door. Sent me to agriculture who didn’t know anything and agriculture sent me to town to the ratepayers office.

So bent was I on my mission that it did not occur to me until much later that this was not the Anglican Rectory, modern or otherwise. It was in the right location, but I had misread the sign outside.

Welcome to the Ministry of Carriacou & Petite Martinique Affairs.

Apparently, I am sometimes not so good at reading maps or signs. It is amazing I have managed to navigate life as far as I have.

I did walk over to the site of the old rectory building, now a gravel lot for cars and road maintenance equipment. I watched two iguanas, beautiful crested creatures, chasing each other in the sunlight.

But inflicting myself on the poor unsuspecting civil servants at the ministry (what a deceptive word, don’t you think?) gave me a chance to re-examine the map. If you look at a modern map there is a road — 2nd Avenue — cutting across near the boundary, dare one hope, of the Todd property and Brunswick Estate.

My last morning on Carriacou I took a final stab at pinpointing Industry. I turned up Church Street, just by the Tourism Office, all the way up to the junction with 2nd Avenue, the big hill in front of me and Christ the King Church just to my right. Then I swung right, past the church and over a spur, dropping down to Brunswick Road by the cemetery. Taking Brunswick east, I headed toward the landmark curve, the bright green mangroves of L’Esterre below and the serried gravestones marching up the knob on my left. I was now crossing the old Brunswick Estate.

When I reached the point at which Brunswick angles to the right, I was standing on Industry.

I took a photo of the eastern edge of the cemetery, a fence with a grassy lane going up, which I now take to be the actual boundary of the old Industry Estate.

I veered left at the Y-junction and followed Patterson Street, which circles around the knob and back to the Museum and the Hillsborough beach, quite sure that I was walking up the middle of Industry in a trough between the cemetery knob on my left and Top Hill and the island spine going up to my right. Overgrown fields climbed up the semi-forested hill but with some open pasture near the peak. All these trees must have been cut down when the plantations were in operation. And I noticed some small stone ruins, draped with coral vine, impossible to identify.

Okay, a bit OCD. Probably I am still wrong. And, for sure, I have no idea where the other boundaries might be drawn. It ought to be easy another time to find the Dumfries property line. I am calling that hill Cemetery Knob. I don’t know its real name. All my research has this ambivalent and haphazard character, though other plantations have been easier to find and explore. Industry is the one that fades even as I try to bring it back into focus.

But I look at the map now and think: In 1790, 56 enslaved people lived on this land growing cotton for John Boyce. In 1823, there were 15. Cotton linked these people and this land with the great textile mills of Manchester and the elegant English and Scottish country houses, all the thundering power of the Industrial Revolution and the elegant beneficiaries who thought very little of the source of their wealth.

Demon Lover

Friedl should have known. The young man at the door was selling encyclopedias, which no one had heard of for decades. He wore a black t-shirt, ragged around the neck, that said FREE THE PEOPLE in white letters. Two knobby little scarlet horns erupted from his forehead just below the hairline, about an inch and a half long; also he had a tail, you couldn't miss it, with a dragon spike at the tip. The tail coiled and swished excitedly as if it had a life of its own. But Friedl ignored the oddities because the boy was so cute otherwise, quick and lean, with an open, inviting smile and sparkling eyes.

Commentary

What can I say? A universal story. We all fall for inappropriate people. Against our better judgment.

What happens next? Catastrophe.

Okay, perhaps not everyone. Maybe just me. Maybe this story is ever so slightly autobiographical, with the genders switched to protect the innocent. This is an interpretation I only thought of today. Now it seems blazingly obvious, much to my chagrin.

But enough of that.

The demon lover is, of course, an old folkloric theme. So this story uses the shadow text technique; it references and feeds off a prior literary form as part of its structure. I must have read that medieval ballad when I was in high school. “The Daemon Lover” by the prolific yet little known poet Anonymous. (There are many variants.)

The demon lover returns after a seven-year absence to redeem promises a young woman once made to him, only, in the meantime, she has married someone else and has a son.

‘Where have you been, my long lost lover,
This seven long years and more?’
‘I've been seeking gold for thee, my love,
And riches of great store.

‘Now I'm come for the vows you promised me,
You promised me long ago;’
‘My former vows you must forgive,
For I'm a wedded wife.’

Nevertheless, she acquiesces to his charms, kisses her son goodbye, and off they go. The poem ends.

He took her up to the topmast high,
To see what she could see;
He sunk the ship in a flash of fire,
To the bottom of the sea.

Exactly.

One version of this poem was called “A Warning for Married Women,” which is a bit sexist.

Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” switches genders, same theme. He might have called it “A Warning for Young Men Wandering about in Full Armor.”

She took me to her Elfin grot,
       And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
       With kisses four.

No doubt there is something Jungian on the way these stories haunt me.

Both Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson have written short stories based on the demon lover theme (click on their names to see the stories). At one time, the dark Elizabeth Bowen was near the top of my list. Novel after novel seems to climax in suicide. I was going to write an essay, “Great Suicides in Literature.” Demon lovers and suicide.

There is something deeper to think about. The demon lover is haunting because it speaks to the danger of fantasy when we fall in love. You never truly know the other person, your vision is mystified by eros and old wounds. Fantasy and need blind you to the horns and tail. Those mischievous, bright eyes, possibly a sign of a violent personality disorder, bedazzle you.

I wrote an aphorism in one of my short stories: Love is an erotic accident prolonged to disaster.

Of course, being me, I have to make a joke of this. And there is irony in brevity. “Search parties failed to turn up any sign of human remains” has always seemed like a perfect short story to me.

How many of you have encountered a demon lover? Please answer in the comment box. How catastrophic was the experience? Give it a rating from one to ten, ten being an 80 kiloton nuclear explosion of the heart.

February 9 2024

Much later. Readers helped with the mystery of Pirner’s actual 1893 Daemon Lover painting.

Hannah Grant sent me this.

This is a Wikimedia image. Link here. I am not sure but it seems to be one of Pirner’s contributions to a small book of poetry and paintings called Démon láska (1893) by Pirner and a Czech poet Jaroslav Vrchlický. Thirteen illustrations by Pirner. A narrative poem by Vrchlický.

Here’s another.

And another.

Larry Bole (see his comment below) found a link to this picture, which seems to be from the same sequence of illustrations (and makes me think of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights).

Larry also corrects the “Demon Lover” title to “Demon Love,” which changes the balance and torque of the tale in a fascinating way.

So I am working on this book, endless, endless.

One part of the project is experimenting with what I can learn about the lives of slaves on Grenada and Carriacou from reading the Slave Registries. This is another way of filling in the landscape of those islands.

The Slave Registries were annual censuses required by the Colonial Office in London from 1817 to 1834 (the first date varies among the West Indian dependencies). You’ll recall that Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. In 1834, slavery itself was abolished (July 31, to be exact). But between times, the Colonial Office wanted to get a handle on the numbers and treatment of enslaved people as part of a response to anti-slavery politics in Britain. Also, as most people realized the end of slavery was coming and that there would be some form of indemnity paid out to slave owners, the censuses provided a way of pinning down the extent of that payout. The planters used the last censuses to validate their indemnity claims.

A side effect of this data collection was that an amazing amount of information about the enslaved people is now available for anyone persistent enough to scroll through page after page of handwritten lists. For example, not only did they collect brute population data, but annual Increase and Decrease reports recorded births (and mothers’ names) and deaths (with brief medical diagnoses), also sales, rentals, and transfers.

I will tell you that the first time I looked at a page of the Slave Registries, with the planter’s name at the top and then name after name after name of enslaved persons, my heart did drop. I mean it — what I felt — my blood pressure must have dropped from dread and truth. Nothing had ever made the concept of slavery so real to me.

The Slave Registries are actually available to anyone with a computer and a paid Ancestry.com account. They are basically account books, with lined columns — name, age, color (the people were color-coded: black, mulatto, mustee, cabre, mustefino, etc. depending on parentage), place of origin (whether they were born in Africa or one of the islands, hence the phrase “creole of Carriacou” means born on Carriacou), and identifying features (most often “country marks in the face” which was the planter way of indicating ritual scarification, but also “afflicted by sores,” “a leper,” “lame left leg,” etc.). Each page is a separate image file.

A lot of things make using these registries difficult. First, as far as I can tell, they are incomplete. I collected as many as I could for my purposes but still found years missing for particular estates. Thus people would go missing from the record and it wasn’t just because someone forgot about them. The handwriting is very hard to read, clerk’s hand, very flamboyant sometimes and the ink runs and suddenly you don’t know if the name is Soossah, Looshuh, or what. And then the clerk might spell a name differently from one year to the next, or the names might simply morph — Suzy to Susie to Susy to Susie 3rd. And there were a lot of people with very simple names like Bob, Mary, Louisa, and it could be nearly impossible to disentangle them.

I was working on the Marys, as I called them, the other day. In the 1834 Mount Rich report, you get five Marys — Mary 1st, Mary 2nd, Mary 3rd, Mary 4th, and Mary5th. I thought I had tracked two women in particular named Mary, one had two children and the other had three, but I could only find one Mary in 1817 and one Mary in 1834 that fit the chronology. Finally, I decided they must just be the same woman who had a remarkable five babies between 1817 and 1834. At least that was the simplest model. But that was an executive decision of sorts. There were crucial Increase and Decrease reports missing that would have added the missing link.

And there are still at least three Marys I have not fully figured out.

The Registries are indexed and searchable up to a point. This is extremely helpful. You can filter by name (which might, of course, be misspelled), by birth year (if you know it, and, my goodness, those clerks played fast and loose with birth years), and by owner’s name (which might also be misspelled or miscopied). But in the end this only helps narrow things down a bit. I still had to spend hours and hours jumping back and forth between images and search queries, scanning line after line of names.

But over time and laboriously I did manage to evolve some information, life stories almost, for some of the people who lived on Carriacou and Grenada between 1817 and 1834. I had the best success with women who had babies because they showed up by name on the Increase reports. So I can say when Sue, who was 19 in 1817 and living at the cotton, corn, and cattle estate of Anse la Roche on Carriacou, had her first baby. When she was moved to Industry Estate. When she and her babies were sold to Mount Rich on Grenada. And so on. By the color of the child, I can tell if the father was white, black, or mixed race. Occasionally, I could cluster people together as they were sold between estates and make a good guess as to who might be a father. This was rare. Babies died, mothers died, sometimes people were sold or freed. These things were noted down (except, of course, in years when the reports are missing).

Some plantations reported the jobs the various enslaved people performed. I was unlucky in that the plantations I am interested in did not.

Most of the brief lives I discovered were very brief indeed. Brief and sad.

Born at Mount Rich, John Paul is one year old in 1817. Two years later, he dies of marasmus, age three.

Joseph 2nd little is 13 and living at Mount Rich in 1817. He dies in 1833 of "Effusion in the brain."

African born Mary Rose is the youngest saltwater slave I found. She was 18 in 1817, living at Mount Rich, which means she would have been nine years old or younger when she endured the Middle Passage. She dies at Mount Rich in 1823, age 24, in childbirth.

Others not so sad, but brief for lack of detail. What surprised me is the number of people who actually survived slavery and reached the magic year of 1834 alive. (Not so magic, of course, since they just kicked over into that apprenticeship program for four years.) A lot of entries read like this.

Kitty is an African woman, 30 years old and living at Mount Rich in 1817. She has country marks on her face. She makes it to 1834, age 46.

In 1817, Lockerby is five years old and living at Anse la Roche. In 1824, he is sold to Mount Rich. He makes it to 1834, age 21.

Or this one, for a girl named Mary (of course — Marys are my obsession today), who is mysteriously set free at the age of six.

Mary is first listed at Mount Rich in 1817, age three, one of the mulatto (white father, black mother) children. In 1820, age six, she is sold from Mount Rich to a Dr. Alexander Richard who immediately sets her free. A very surprising story. Richard was a Scottish doctor who arrived in Grenada sometime before 1817 to manage an estate his wife had inherited from her father. Several children are listed in his biography on the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of Slave Ownership database site but the language of the entry is such as to imply that all these children may not have been born to his wife. Mary is not on this list, nonetheless the fact that he bought her and freed her suggests that she may have been his daughter. Of course, after she is freed, she disappears.

They all disappeared after they became free because the powers that be lost interest in them when they were no longer a valuable commodity, an income stream, or a political issue. Most of them didn’t even have last names in 1834. Most of them simply went on working as apprentices at the plantations where they had been enslaved. It took a generation or two for surnames to take hold. After 1838, they began to earn pay for the work they did, very low pay, as you would expect. Because the land remained tied up in these old estates, there was precious little opportunity for the former slaves to better themselves. This is why there are so many expatriate communities in Canada, the U.S., and Britain. It wasn’t until the 1950s, until the general strike of 1951 and the “red sky” days when so many old plantations were burned, that meaningful land reform began.

These brief lives (I have hundreds, actually) are part of my book. I hope readers will see them as a work in progress that they might themselves extend and correct. My fondest hope is that a reader might remember an ancestor, an old family story, that will connect to someone I have written about, connect the present with the past.

Reading the runes (kind of a pun)

On the advice of Angus Martin, who until last June was the executive director of the Grenada National Museum (indeed, his name is still listed as such on the museum’s web site), I took a day to visit the Dunfermline Estate ruins, now abandoned, and River Antoine Rum Distillery, still in production and very much a tourist attraction, to give me a better sense of the grammar of a sugar estate. Even now, three months after my trip to Grenada, I am still learning to read the runes of the plantation landscapes. In September, I didn’t know what I was seeing or even what I was looking for, but it’s amazing what my photographs reveal after the fact.

Plantation ruins have a structure I am beginning to recognize. I had read the books and pored over historic drawings and paintings, but there is nothing like actually standing amidst the crumbling walls and rusting machines to render the patterns visible. I know now to look for markers, read the system.

Sugar estates were large farms, very profitable due to the free labor supplied by enslaved people. The works were the focus for large spreads of fields, gardens, pastures, and woodland that fed the system. The landscape of Grenada today is often overgrown with bush and tree orchards gone more or less wild; in earlier times, more of the land was cultivated, with dirt paths and laneways skirting the fields and connecting them to the processing plant. When I was exploring Mount Rich, I found many of these old pathways still in existence. They wound uphill from the plantation ruins by the contemporary cricket ground. In places, the trees opened up to reveal a field under cultivation, freshly cared for and irrigated. But much of what I saw was overgrown cocoa orchards.

In terms of large categories, the sugar system is much like other farms. You grow the product and then you add value with some post-harvest processing before selling it on. I grew up with a similar process on our tobacco farm in Ontario: grow the tobacco, dry the leaves in oil (wood in the old days, now gas) fired kilns, store them in the pack barn, then steam them (to soften the leaves), grade them, and pack them in bales for shipment to auction barns. The infrastructure consisted of fields, drying kilns, pack barn (for storage), and a steam room and grading room (in one corner of the pack barn). Also a greenhouse for growing tobacco seedlings before planting, a driveshed for machinery (tractors, planters, harvesters, sprayers, various bit of cultivating equipment, irrigation pipes and pump), a sharegrower’s house, and a tenant house for a hired man. Early on we still used horses during harvest. Thus we also needed a stable and a pasture. We also excavated an irrigation pond to supply water.

Cane is just a tall grass, very sweet to chew (which the enslaved people often did surreptitiously, as a supplement to their normal diet — it was commonly known that the mood, energy, and health of the plantation population improved during harvest, despite the hard work). Before it becomes white table sugar, it has to go through a series of post-production refinements starting at the plantation. The basic sugar estate post-production infrastructure consisted of a crushing mill, a boiling house, and often a rum distillery. The crushing mill was a machine with heavy iron rollers to squeeze juice out of the cane stalks. The power required to turn the rollers came from a water wheel or sometimes a windmill or even a mill turned by cattle (oxen). The crushed cane juice ran through pipes to a boiling house where it was boiled in a sequence of open pans stirred by attendants, reducing the amount of liquid and allowing the sugar to crystallize. The crystallized sugar was separated from the remaining liquid and packed into wooden hogsheads for shipment to Britain (where it was refined again into white table sugar). The liquid left over from the boiling was molasses, which, early on, was sometimes fed to the enslaved people. But then the planters learned how to make rum out of molasses in pot stills and a second profitable industry developed.

For the most part, the plantation buildings or works were built of stone with wooden superstructures. The parts made of wood have disappeared, including the thatched hut villages where the enslaved people lived, the yards, as they were called. The whereabouts of these yards and their graveyards remains a haunting mystery at most of the ruined plantations. Archaeology could help fill in the blanks, but motivation and money seem to be lacking. I do know from reading documents that the yard at Mount Rich was located where the cricket ground is today. Of course, nothing remains of those buildings. Many planters set aside “provision grounds,” garden plots where the enslaved people could grow their own food. There would also be barns and pens for cattle, chickens, hogs, goats, and horses, as well as machine sheds and workshops for joinery, masonry, cooperage, furniture, wagon production, smithing, etc.

So when you find a set of ruins you start to figure out the layout based on these key bits of infrastructure. When I first visited the estates at Carriere and Mount Rich, I had only vaguest notion of what I was looking for. In fact, I expected to find nothing. These are not well known tourist destinations. A bit of wall, a stone piled on a stone would have been remarkable even if I didn’t know what it was. But now looking back I can see how this bit of rock wall related to that pile of rocks over there, and I can imagine the bustle of the gangs of workers and their overseers (mostly enslaved themselves, as I say).

Dunfermline

On the third day of my stay on Grenada, I walked to the Dunfermline Estate, which is said to have some of the best preserved ruins on the island. It wasn’t far from where I was staying opposite Ben Jones Drive in Moya to Dunfermline. But as usual — pleasant little adventures along the way. Two men in a yard by the road, one up a ladder in a tree, the other beneath. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Breadfruit,” he said (though in the nature of most of my communications in Grenada, he had to say this five times before I understood). A large green orb thunked to the ground. I had never really looked at a breadfruit before. We chatted. Another came down. He picked it up and handed it to me. Beads of juice dripped from its sides like sweat. Did I want to take one with me? he asked, reminding me how kind and generous people are in Grenada.

Dunfermline looks abandoned, derelict. There is no one to watch the place. At first, I was disappointed. It looked like a piles of rubble with a couple of buildings still standing, though they looked empty and forlorn. But then I started picking out the details. The water wheel is still in place, amazingly enough. The remnants of the crushing machinery stand next to it, the actual mill house gone, just rusting cogs and rollers. I took a lot of pictures and only now, after working with the photos, zooming in, cropping, and brightening them, can I see what I saw clearly, concealed in the bush behind the wheel, a beautiful stretch of wall that dammed a reservoir and a stretch of masonry aqueduct running from the reservoir to the wheel.

A few yards away loomed the boiling house, with its tall chimney, now almost hidden in trees that have grown up. It was stunning to push open shattered door and step inside what was something like a dilapidated cathedral or an airplane hanger (take your pick). The walls were broken, in places the stone replaced with concrete blocks. Light filtered through the gaps and broken windows. But down one wall were the boiling troughs, a series of circular depressions which once contained the “coppers” where the juice was reduced. These depressions decrease in size. Along the opposite wall a series of rectangular emplacements for the reducing pans, where the crystallizing sugar went after the series of coppers. I had seen paintings and drawings of just this building on other islands or at other times, the steam billowing up to the rafters, workers with long spoon-like ladles stirring the coppers, skimming the sugar scum from the top to the next and smaller copper.

It’s an assembly line, at the end of which you have casks of brown sugar and liquid molasses separate. Often, the molasses was further processed into rum, much more valuable and easier to transport. There was another large building next to the boiling house at Dunfermline, but it was full of bats and the floor was flooded. I could not explore the layout or figure out exactly what it was used for. I am guessing it may have been a distillery or something to do with downstream sugar refining of another sort.

River Antoine Rum Distillery

Then, for comparison’s sake, I took a bus to La Poterie (pronounced something like “poetry”) and then walked to the River Antoine Rum Distillery where sugar cane is still being grown and processed today. The signage was unhelpful and the large restaurant by the road was closed, so naturally I missed the turn up the lane to the works and ended up at the River Antoine beach, totally empty except for a small family by a parked car about a quarter of a mile away. I thought I might swim, but then I remembered how in Merle Collins’s novel The Colour of Forgetting people were being swept away by the undertow or perhaps water demons. I was a bit tired and alone and not in the mood for encountering water demons. It was startlingly beautiful though, and strange, strange because humans generally find a beach like that ripe for commercial exploitation. Where was the usual line of multi-story hotels? I wondered.

The contemporary crushing mill-boiling house-distillery complex is easy to see, one building flowing into the next, the fields of sugar cane stretching toward the beach where the Atlantic rollers landed. A dam and waterwheel power the crushing rollers, which are outside under a canopy. A lengthy conveyor belt carries the crushed cane detritus away from mill. Huge piles of shredded cane lie yellowing at the edge of the building complex.

A pipe runs from the crusher into the boiling house, which was closed when I visited. Then next to the boiling house was a distillery, the huge pot stills also out in the open, two men making repairs while I watched, piles of scrap wood and lumber next to the boilers. Then ancillary buildings, storage spaces with stacked wooden casks, office space, and so on.

Carriere & Mount Rich

As I say, there is a huge difference between what I saw in September and what I see now in photos and in my mind’s eye. I read the landscape better.

One is not likely to find a waterwheel in most places, but I can now recognize the foundations where the wheel once sat. Here is the wheel foundation at Carriere. The crushing mill would have been on the left in a building repurposed as a joinery shop. Filled in with trash and rubble, it was at first every difficult for me to imagine what it once might have looked like.

And the dam and reservoir and aqueduct were equally hard to discern. I saw a pile of rocks, some cut and shaped, and a ruined arch, but the rest of the waterway had disappeared when the ground was leveled for a cricket ground. I could also make a length of suspiciously symmetrical hillside that must have been manmade (now that I think about it). At first, I walked all along this feature without realizing what it was.

And here is what I think was the waterwheel foundation at Mount Rich. I couldn’t find a reservoir, but on an 1869 plan a canal runs right to this spot. Another time I will go back and try to trace the canal and find its source.

When I took the picture, I really didn’t have a theory about what this was, just a mysteriously narrow shaft between two walls. And it was difficult to get a decent shot because the area was so entangled with vines and bushes. It only grew on me over time that this might be where the waterwheel was. There is nothing left of the canal itself except a filled in ditch depression aligned with the wheel foundation. I would need to go back and look again to try to identify the boiling house, which must have been quite near the waterwheel. When I visited in September, as I say, I was a neophyte, looking but not seeing.

Dunfermline, Carriere, and Mount Rich all had foundations and bits of ironwork that I could identify as part of a cocoa operation as well. Cocoa was always produced on the island but became more prevalent as sugar declined in the 19th century. Much of the surrounding landscape at Mount Rich and Carriere was overgrown cocoa orchards, still harvested but no longer pruned or otherwise maintained. At least that is how it seemed to me.

Why I obsess on small things

This all might seem tedious. Why am I going on about piles of rock and twisted masses of rusted machinery? It’s mostly because I want to understand slavery beyond the abstract concept, the statistics, and the horrific stories. It’s awfully easy to condemn history and feel good about oneself. I want to take a step into that distant past and try to see the enslaved people as people. Pretty preposterous for a white guy living in Vermont. But still I ask, because it interests me, what did they do with their days?

One very common mistake is to imagine all enslaved people as either field hands or house servants. In fact, the trained sugar makers including boilers and distillers were slaves. And many more were highly skilled tradesmen, coopers, carpenters, masons, cooks, nurses, midwives, and seamstresses. Others would become specialists in animal husbandry and dairy management. Others still had places in what you might call middle management such as gang leaders, drivers, and overseers. At Mount Rich, six men were for years rented out as soldiers and slave hunters to the Colony Rangers. In other words, the plantation had the air of a small village of that era with all the occupations represented, and almost the entire population was black, either African or descended from Africans, with a few mixed-race individuals.

It is difficult for us today to imagine what it might have been like to live at Mount Rich or Carriere in, say, 1820. But by understanding the landscape, the system of the plantation buildings and the sorts of work that took place inside them, I am trying to better imagine just how the people moved through that landscape, the shape of their lives.

We have a tendency to generalize from horrific examples of brutal plantation owners, or we like to think that all enslaved people were actively plotting rebellion and constantly sabotaging the works. But if we try to correct our vision back toward the center, we might arrive at a somewhat more nuanced and plausible idea of slave life.

Be clear: I am not taking the Ron DeSantis line that slavery was good for slaves and prepared them to take productive roles in modern life. This is a repulsive idea. Horrific things occurred; the threat of random violence, sexual abuse, and forced removal and family separation hung over everyone, without any legal recourse. I have studied the Slave Registries from which it’s easy to see that diseases of malnutrition were endemic. Yet within the terrible constraints of chattel slavery, these people found ways to live meaningful lives, raise families, advance themselves by learning skills or by marketing produce from their gardens, engaging in religious and cultural activities, some remembered from Africa, some hybridized from their colonial experiences. The daily heroism of an enslaved person is something we often overlook. It’s something I thought about often as I wandered amid the ruins.

If you think about it, Grenada today, especially away from the cities and tourist areas, feels like this. It’s a religious, somewhat conservative culture. The people are decent, kindly, and entrepreneurial on a small scale. Families cook and sell food along the roadside where there are frequent makeshift bars, corner stores, and bakeries. There is always music blaring from this or that bar. Since the 1950s much of the land has been split up into small holdings reminiscent of the provision grounds. Many people I talked to owned patches of ground out in the woods where they gardened. Grenadians seem fanatical about their gardens. The lone man in rubber boots with a cutlass in his hand and a sack over his shoulder was a common sight once I got off the roads into the woods.

That’s why I puzzle over these ruins, that sense of the continuity of things, people, sentiments, human relations.

Imagined people, whisps of memory, objects once handled by slaves, presences crowding in.

Some things cannot be put right

I write this as a diary. It is the 87th of Walrup, the year of Alred's ascension, the sun has not set for twelve cycles, the dreaded Ape-Things have broken down the wall gate, there are flames in the valley, we cannot ho—

A little commentary (can be ignored, possibly annoying, at best pointless)

Apparently, I took a break from writing Out & Back posts. This crept up on me, as things will. A week off, then another, then a month had slipped by. Then another, even. It was an avalanche gaining momentum as it slid down a mountainside, sweeping up my best intentions along with skiers, backcountry hikers, small dogs, children, entire villages as it churned relentlessly forward. I was in the middle of writing another post about my trip to Grenada when I stopped.

I have experience with this. The other day I was leash-walking Pancho on Gonyeau Road, when he stopped, refusing to go another step forward (going home was okay with him). It was not in his makeup to carry on as we had done day after day prior to this. He was done.

In Pancho’s case, I put this down to moral decay consonant upon too much easy living, everything handed to him on a platter, treats galore, doors opened to answer his whims, someone (not to be named) letting him under the covers at night, and overpraise for his one trick.

In my case? Well, yes, probably the same.

I just read this bit by Paul Keegan in a back issue of the London Review of Books.

It seems true that short stories are often less easy to summarise than novels, with no need to tidy loose ends, or even any obligation to end, and that their content often communicates something other than their subject, as if, at certain levels of compression, brevity starts to tell its own story.

In this little story, I wanted evoke a feeling of horror, menace, and endings, of a world overwhelmed, of bravery, despair, and hopelessness. I showed it to Melissa who threw up her hands and said, “That’s it. That’s exactly how I feel today. That’s the way the world is.”

There are certainly places in the world where people are experiencing this right now, and not metaphorically.

But it’s a feeling not a reference to a specific event, that feeling of the wave coming over, of submersion. The bad is coming. No escape.

I might just be in a cranky mood. Or I just had a birthday. Or I am starting to get the annual tax prep notices from my accountant.

But there is irony. It’s a joke. I use popular sci-fi memes to set up the situation. We’ve all seen the movies, read the books. You just need about three words to signal the reader that we are not in this world. Walrup? It’s not even a word, but you get it.

So you don’t have to feel too sad. The darkness is at arm’s length. That’s the way we get through.

Awful, darkness, horror, Ape-Things in the front yard, future bleak.

Back to the Mount Rich Estate on Grenada

For this trip to Grenada, I had both too much and too little information. I am still untangling the strands of what I thought before I arrived on the island, what I saw, what I thought I saw, what I had known before (from research and books), and what I had already forgotten. My intention for the trip was just to be there, to stand and smell the air, and see how the land rose and fell around me, the shape of the hills and the vegetation, see the people, listen to their voices. I did all that, but mostly this put me in a state of overload. I was constantly trying to register, write down, and assimilate impressions, comparing them with what I remembered from the books I had read. Sometimes they came together nicely; sometimes there were vast gaps.

A case in point: Bushwhacking up the cocoa-shaded hill above the estate ruins at Mount Rich, I found a gorgeous geological bowl, symmetrical and flat-bottomed, filled with more cocoa. I wandered around inside, then followed a path along the rim above. I met a man up there, in uniform (rubber boots, sack over his shoulder, cutlass in his hand), who told me the bowl was called “the lick” by the elderly people, that he could remember that in rainy season it would fill with water over his head, that there were stories of a tunnel that carried water out of the bowl (somewhere). It was only later, just now, that I looked at a map provided by MYCEDO (The Mt. Rich Youth, Cultural, and Environmental Development Organization) and saw where they had this feature on their village tour. They call it the Punch Bowl. I had forgotten about this map. Now, of course, I have to go back; I have 89 questions to ask.

Part of the reason I forgot this map was because I was thinking all the while of yet another half-remembered map from my research. This one showed an “estate house” located somewhere up that hill behind the estate works. Very vague. But I had intended to walk up the hill and wander back and forth, quartering the ground so to speak, and perhaps stumble on some ruins. That memory map got in front of the other memory map. And, I console myself, the whole idea of being there was just to experience it, to gain that sort of knowledge, fumbling, immediate, impressionistic, complex and multiple.

Another case in point: All of Mount Rich, the village and the old sugar estate, sits in a much larger volcanic bowl, subdivided by the St Patrick River, which separates the contemporary village proper from the estate ruins and modern cricket ground (which, according to land sale documents from the 1960s, was the location of the former slave village — the actual term used in those documents is inappropriate these days). The main road leads down to the village from the former Hermitage Estate to the south and then north toward Sauteurs on the coast. The vegetation is dense jungle-like with vines, brilliant flowers, palms, mango, and lots of cocoa and nutmeg.

I had looked at (and mostly misremembered) old maps with now disappeared roads. There is a modern concrete road that leads up from the main road, past the Kent House, and then up along a ridge, the height land, before stopping after perhaps a mile or so. I thought there was a ghost road that led from this concrete road, across country and back to Hermitage and set off to find it. It was a wonderful hike. I am not sure I have ever felt so safe as I did in Grenada. I was completely alone on these bush trails (not hiking trails), the sun was hot, but up along the ridges there was always a slight breeze off the ocean to the east. Along the way, there were patches of cultivated ground (not machine cultivated, but gardened) interspersed with overgrown patches and woods (which mostly were overgrown cocoa plantations).

In any event I was completely wrong about where I thought I was and where I thought I was going. Such a pleasure to be lost and blissfully uncaring, because everything I looked at was new and exciting anyway. Eventually, I came to the end of the path I was on, the edge of a bluff. I have a video of the moment. I was puzzled and disappointed of my intention, but knew there would be other days. Now, weeks later, I can look at the map and see where I actually got to (thanks to GPS location data on my photos). I was totally wrong about getting to Hermitage. I was actually on my way to another former estate called Mt. Rose. And the truth is I almost got there. Had I nosed around I am sure I would have found a trail going down to the east and would soon have hit the outskirts of that village.

I suppose some might find my map myopia and confusion ridiculous, but the truth was I enjoyed it immensely. After all the months and years of research, I was actually in situ, confused because there were trees all around and partial views, nothing like the clearly marked abstractions of road, rivers, and contour lines. I was figuring things out by feel and not by reading (not that I am against reading — I very clearly had a sense of what I was looking for and that helped me make sense (gradually) of what I was seeing. The process was like thought itself. I could feel the thinking taking place as I ran out of trail and tried to remember what the maps said.

The Carib Stones

Enough about me wandering around. One of my secondary objectives in visiting Mt Rich was to see the famous Carib Stone. Secondary because it predates the era of slavery, which begins with the French arrival in 1649. The islands were inhabited by indigenous people rather late. You know the story. People crossed the Bering Sea (next to Alaska) from Siberia to North America between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago (there are contested archaeological sites that push occupation back even farther — contested as in they are still going through the process of dating and debate that eventually discounts or authenticates a scientific observation). Within the last couple of thousand years, adventurous sea-going people began to shoot out of the vast Orinoco River delta on the shoulder of South America and explore the arc of islands from Trinidad to Cuba. Archaeology keeps evolving different narratives and sequences of occupation. And different population waves coming at different times represented different peoples and cultures. Columbus, the first European to arrive, confused everything by calling the people he met Caribs, who, he decided, were cannibals and best dealt with by turning them into slaves or killing them.

They weren’t Caribs. They were probably not just one people. The people who came mostly to be identified as Caribs called themselves Kalinago (with a branch called the Kalina). Both Kalinago and Kalina were living on Grenada when the French arrived. The French, beginning with their first settlement at St. George’s in the south, gradually pushed the Kalinago off the island. There is a famous story about the last of the Carib warriors jumping off a cliff at Sauteurs (Leapers) in the north to escape approaching French soldiers. This is folklore, though probably there was a skirmish and massacre, one of many. The expulsion of the Kalinago didn’t depend on one dramatic (and romantic) event. But eventually they were gone (the ones who could are thought to have escaped to other islands), though some Grenadians still claim genetic links. By the time the British took the island in 1763, the place had been ethnically cleansed for decades.

But the indigenes left evidence of their material culture. The climate is not conducive to preserving biological remains, wood, textiles, and bodies. As in many places in the Americas, archaeologists depend on stone tools and pottery to identify peoples and cultural horizons. Most of the productive excavations on Grenada are located around the coastal rim where the people fished, farmed, and traded with other islands. In the case of the older settlements, it doesn’t quite make sense to say they were Kalinago (just as a modern English woman or man is not a Celt or an Angle or a Viking). But people were continuously resident, whoever they were, and the most spectacular things they left behind are their petroglyphs, carved stones that dot the islands.

Mount Rich is unusual if not unique in being so far inland and in having both petroglyphs and a native village site, only recently excavated (superficially). I tried to visit the archaeological site. It is out on the Mt Reuil Road, a road heading north from the village toward a neighbouring plantation. This meant asking people in their houses if they remembered where any recent digging had taken place. One man pointed to the lot adjacent to his house and said they had dug in his garden. I went to look and found, yes, his garden. So much for the glory of archaeology.

I did find the main Carib Stone. I walked out along the road to Sauteurs, beside the ravine where the tiny St Patrick River trickles, until I came to the diminutive interpretation center and overlook. This was closed, but I could peek over the edge of the ravine and see the stone below. Not very satisfying.

I walked back to the village, crossed the bridge, and stopped to reflect. There was no way I could climb down the cliff behind the official overlook (about 30 or 40 feet), but the opposite bank looked doable. I decided to strike off through the woods, but right away discovered a little used path that ran to an equally disused old plantation road (it seemed to have been cobbled with stone at one time) that skirted the edge of the ravine and ran uphill at a slight angle. This in itself was exciting (and I am kicking myself now for not exploring it to the end).

I was able to scramble down the ravine from this road, little anoles rustling everywhere in the leaves at my feet. Once I grabbed a vine to steady myself and briefly caught the tail of one of these delightful creatures, much to our mutual surprise.

The main stone, the Carib Stone, though it is unlikely the historical Kalinago carved it, is as big as a tank, not easy to climb on to take pictures (so I didn’t try, not wishing to damage the strange, ghostly pictograms). They are a mix of faces, triangular designs (that look like star plots to me), and anthropoid creatures. One is a cat figure, the only one of its kind in the Caribbean — thought to be a memory drawing, recalling cats that lived in the Orinoco jungle where the ancestors of the people came from. They are eery, ghostly (partly because they are fading), reminding a person of a human intellect unlike our own.

There are theories but no conclusions about what these creatures are. Ghosts of ancestors, sacred animals, dreams, images of spirit travels, maps of an unknown universe. Nearby there are so-called workstones, covered with scooped out bowls, possibly for mixing shamanic potions (or something else entirely). These people left no stone structures, no other monuments (their wooden and thatch dwellings long gone). Even the location of the stones is ambiguous. It is fairly clear that the ones at the ravine bottom must have slid down from the hillside above at some point in the past. Indeed, Valerie Benjamin, the person who today owns the Mount Rich ruins and the land along the east bank of the river showed me an unpublicized stone in the woods along the lost road. It is smaller and far less worked than the stones in the river, and I could find only one clear face (even so, fading into the lichen). But I was touched as Valerie reminisced about coming here over the years by herself to sit, just sit, and watch that face.

And that made me think of the enslaved people who lived and worked just yards away, some of whose descendents no doubt still live here. How many little girls and boys had snuck off to look at the stones, climb over them exclaiming. Had those images from another world infected their brains, had they dreamed the dreams of those lost people, too?

Slave Old Man — fusing the dreams

All the while I was looking at the Carib Stones, I was also thinking of a beautiful novel called Slave Old Man (1997) by the Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau. An elderly slave wakes up of a morning and in a moment of inspiration simply walks away into the woods, escaping, turning maroon. He is decrepit but determined. The master hunts him with a dog, a huge mastiff (the original French edition is called L'Esclave vieil homem et le molosse (The Old Slave and the Hound — or “big fierce dog,” according to the Collins dictionary). I won’t summarize. The chase is fierce and exciting and you will have to read the book yourselves to discover the incandescent moment when the dog and the slave collide. But the novel ends with a gorgeous prolepsis, a leap into the future, and the author (or authorial subject, the narrator) being informed of the discovery of a pile of ancient human bones at the foot of a Carib stone.

A volcanic rock. Imagining it astonishing. Covered with Amerindian signs. Guapoïdes. Saladoïdes. Calviny. Cayo. Suazey. Galibis. Every epoch jostling there together. I would have come upon it in some surprise. I had seen one in the forest of Montravail, in the commune of Sainte-Luce, but this one was doubtless in no way comparable. The Stone was supposedly in a deep ravine, way off on its own. Doubtless a ceremonial site. The vieux-nègre-bois spoke (to me or I don’t know whom) of another discovery. He had looked carefully around the Stone, doubtless seeking some of those treasures that harass our dreams. And he had found bones. Human bones. He showed me a sliver wrapped in oiled paper along with an old rosary. I saw it. I looked at it. I touched it in spite of his warnings about evil spells. He himself said he didn’t know why he was keeping that bone splinter. He had promoted it to a garde-corps de chance, a good-luck bodyguard. A relic to ward off misfortune.

I often went back to be near that stone. In dreams. Above those bones. In dreams. After distressing days my dreams go marooning. In these dreams, I lean back against the Stone. I contemplate the jumbled heap of bones. Who could that have been? A Carib. Doubtless. A Carib shaman who would have lived there, who would have engraved his memorial accounts and sunk himself into old age. Or the bones of a man wounded in initiatory fervor come to die in the sanctuary. My mind drifted like that around the Caribs. I imagined the bones. I saw them as eerie. Fossilized. No skull. A femur.

And then, after a few lines in which the author-narrator makes a leap, connecting the bones with the Old Man Slave, the runaway who disappeared into the bush and was chased by a dog, this finale.

The old slave had left me his bones, meaning: cartload of memories-histories-stories and eras gathered together. I imagined his last struggle, his ultimate huh of effort. That broken leg had dispelled his illusion about his run, pointing out (with a fearsome point) the clearing of his mind. They were warrior’s bones, says my so-genial brother. Of a warrior unconcerned with conquest or domination. Who would have been on the run toward another life. Of sharing and transformative exchanges. Of the world’s humanization in its wholeness. Doubtless possible. But my good fellow could also have quite simply run. A lovely run, completely meaningful in its very simple beauty, and thus open when touched by infinity. Very often, with the dream of that stone, musing on that tibia, I free myself from my militant concerns. I take the measure of the matter of bones. Neither dream, nor delirium, nor fanciful fiction: a vast detour that goes even to extremes to return to the combats of my age, bearing the unknown tablets of a new poetry. Brother, I shouldn’t have, but I touched the bones.

More about my trip to Grenada. Probably you’re tired of this, or thought I wouldn’t have anything more to say. This post is mostly photos but also about a man I met named Dredd, who shares my passion for the history of the place, the sad disrepair of graveyards, various animal encounters — just what happens when you wander around Carriacou on your feet.

Day 8. September 20. I was staying at John’s Unique Resort at the edge of Hillsborough on Carriacou (I recommend it). My plan was to walk across the island to the old Dumfries Estate avoiding the main roads (ie Brunswick Road up from Hillsborough to the Six Roads intersection). Carriacou has a central spine of hills rising from Tyrell1 Bay to Chapeau Carre, then Top Hill all the way to High North before dropping back down to the ocean at Petit Carenage. I walked up toward Top Hill, quickly leaving the houses and paved streets behind, then angling south toward (inevitably) Six Roads, since that was where I would pick up the Dumfries Road.

As you’re crossing the ridge line you get amazing views of Paradise Beach and the mangroves of L’Esterre on the Hillsborough side and Saline Island on the Dumfries shore with Chapeau Carre rising in front.

It was about 90F, sun beating down, excellent hiking weather for camels. What was important for me was being in the landscape, getting a subjective feel for the land, weather, sea, and sky. It was important to walk as much as I could, talking to people (and donkeys and dogs) along the way, not to miss a thing speeding by in a car. The heat is brutal, but you quickly learn the relief of finding the ocean breezes or a spot of shade under a tree. In a place where everyone sweats all the time, you don’t notice body odour. The first time I got on a crowded bus I was shocked; it smelled like nutmeg. There is something green and beautiful everywhere you look, and always, out there beyond, the sea, the horizon, clouds blowing up in the distance over other lands.

At Six Roads corner I took the Dumfries Road, which drops down to the ocean and then leads along the coast to Sabazan and beyond. But just there, not far from the intersection, I found Dreddz Empire Bar and Grill (used to be Dreddz Empire Bar and Garage, and it looks as if there is still a garage attached), a most welcoming oasis with no other customers.

I really liked the homophonic substitution sequence — dreads, Dredd’s, and Dreddz. In Grenada, nicknames seem important. You see them inscribed even on gravestones. Something of historical significance there. Many oral cultures have parallel naming schemes. A person might have an official name or a sacred — even secret — name but in day to day life go by a nickname that might reflect some special character trait or life event. Most enslaved Africans were given slave names by their owners; you can just imagine how in private they found opportunities to name themselves in ways that fit their sense of personal identity. Even after emancipation, it took a generation, perhaps more, for them to adopt surnames, and this was often so that they could get married or appear correctly on a baptismal certificate. All these officially acquired names made them ripe for parallel self-naming. So Dredd.

At Dreddz Empire Bar, I was already within the former plantation borders. Dumfries use to be a very large estate (by Carriacou standards), 554 acres on William Fenner’s 1784 map (see above). Once it was planted with cotton and corn, then sugar (I think), but in living memory, as happened with other Carriacou estates such as Craigston, it was converted to growing and processing limes.

Just past the bar, I was a bit surprised to come upon a vast open landfill and transfer station, dusty and tawdry with wind-blown trash. I suppose they have to dispose of the trash somewhere, and there might be something unseemly about making a fetish of preserving the ground where enslaved people once toiled, but this seemed a bit ugly to stick right next to something the island marks as a tourist attraction.

The estate ruins are in an isosceles-shaped field with a modern house in the middle and a winsome donkey tangled around a bush at the main (locked) gate.

All fenced in and closed to the public with dirt roads going around. The government closed the property about two years ago, according to Dredd (whose real name is Andy Joseph — affable, slim, mid-thirties, with dreads, of course, and an ever so slightly grizzled beard on his chin). I walked along, taking photos, hoping to find an open entrance, but there wasn’t one. I’ve seen old photos of the Great House taken in 1910 when it was already a ruined shell, two stories high. The house ruin in the field above the lime works was not that Great House, much less imposing. Dredd said there used to be a windmill made of iron, probably cut down and sold or stolen for scrap.

At this point I left the main Dumfries Road and took a lane that quickly curled down toward a stone well, a rare thing on the island, and next to it, up a slight rise, the remnants of a plantation graveyard, the broken and eroded stones scattered amid cactus and acacia, uncared for and abandoned.

This graveyard just kept on going, extending down towards the shore line. At certain point I realized the road had been cut through the cemetery, perhaps quite recently. Near the beach I found a pile of gravestones bulldozed together and left, highly incongrous since, only a few yards away, there were a few relatively fresh, contemporary graves. I reflected here on impermanence and our sad little human illusion about dignified burial and immemorial memorials. (My own resolve is to be cremated, ashes tossed into the air on a windy day — no one will bulldoze up my bones or build condos on top of me or resurrect me as an archaeological data point.)

Beautiful beach, though, approached through a stretch of sparse mangrove and glutinous mud that stuck to my shoes like tar. No one on the beach but a herd of donkeys who first hid (ineffectively) behind a bush, but then ventured forth to watch me.

Then back to Dreddz (I can’t bear to type “Dredd’s) after encountering a cattle stampede in the lane (one poor thing decided to stumble down the bank into the woods and ended up inside the landfill fence, lowing sadly as the others walked along with me).

This time Dredd and I talked. He had a copy of Fenner’s 1784 map tacked to the front of the bar, and we got down to examine it together and exchange information, mostly trying to figure out how the old estate lines fit within the geography of contemporary Carriacou.

Dumfries was one of the few large plantations to survive as a unit well into the 20th century. Indeed it stayed in the hands of a single Scottish family until the Gairy land reforms of the 1950s. There are photos of the estate2, taken and labeled in 1910, with rows of workers seated before already ruined buildings. They are called “tenants and cottars,” old Scottish terms dating back to the land management practices in the Highlands when the lairds owned vast acreages, which they leased out cheaply to clansmen in return for military service. There was a heirarchy of tenancy beginning with tacksmen at the top, then various sub-tenantry down to cottars, the poorest people with a small, stone-walled thatched house and possibly a bit of land for a garden.

The Dumfries system of tenants and cottars seems reminiscent of that ancient Highland system. And this, in turn, was similar to metayage (a form of share-cropping) that was one of the strategies plantation owners elsewhere on Grenada used to keep their land in production after slavery. After the government takeover in the 50s, some glitch prevented the Dumfries land from being completely distributed in small parcels as had been the intention, which is why the land, at least some of it, is still publicly owned and can be turned into a landfill or fenced off to prevent the curious from poking around.

This is me on Dreddz Facebook page3 (Vermont cap, Nova Scotia shirt, very cosmopolitan).

After reviving at Dreddz, I pushed on over the spine of the island again, this time winding down the main road, Brunswick Road, to Hillsborough. Brunswick Road is named for another former plantation that used to be tucked in behind Hillsborough (see the map above). There are no ruins there. I think the town cemetery and the Anglican Church are within the old Brunswick estate boundaries.

I made it to the beach at Hillsborough in time for sunset and takeout under the avocado tree, which is also the best place to sit and sip mango juice first thing in the morning.

I’m just back from two weeks in Grenada and its smaller dependency Carriacou. This was a research trip meant to put the finishing touches on a book I have been writing. I won’t burden you with book details. Someday it will be published in all its glory. For now, let me just three highlights of the trip.

Grenada is small, just over 124,0001 people, about 21 miles from one end to the other. Think of it as a kite with the capital, St. George’s, in the tail at the bottom, Sauteurs in the north at the top, and Grenville and Gouyave, two towns on the right and left coasts. In the middle is a spine of jagged peaks, all formed from volcanoes, misty, rain-foresty, cut by fast-flowing streams and waterfalls. Once the land of the Kalinago, it was settled by the French starting in 1649. The British took it over, except for one brief stretch, in 1763 (same treaty that gave them Canada). Independence came in 1974. Then revolution and an American invasion in 1983. During the colonial era it was divided into plantations that used enslaved Africans for labor. Slavery ended nominally in 1834, replaced by a so-called apprenticeship program that was abolished in 1838 when everyone became free finally and officially.

Carriacou is even smaller, tiny. You’d have to run laps around the island to make up a marathon. It has a cordillera of hills, too, but they aren’t massive enough to drive the clouds up to rain-making altitude and thus the island is arid, home to cacti and acacia bushes that made hamburger of my legs when I was bushwacking. Every roof has a system of gutters, pipes, and storage tanks. On both islands, goats roam free, cows, too. On the former Dumfries Estate on Carriacou, there is a herd of donkeys running around. There are no substantial wild animals, just opossums (manicou) and, on Grenada, some monkeys native to Africa (descended, according to Angus Martin, former director of the national museum, from one pregnant female probably brought on a slave ship). You see little lizards, anoles and geckos, and occasional iguanas. There are endangered tortoises, but I saw only (several) red-legged tortoises in the bush.

Both islands depend on agriculture and, recently, tourism. Over time, much of the plantation land has been broken up into parcels and sold or otherwise distributed to small holders. Parcels vary, but 10 or 15 acres is a lot, and many are much smaller. Economists call this a peasant economy, which sounds slightly disagreeable but is not meant to be. Small parcels seem to suit the people and, in some way, must hark back to the days of slavery when the people were allowed “provision grounds.” I met any number of men in rubber boots with cutlasses (machetes) in their hands and a bag over their shoulder cheerfully walking to or from their patch. Even these small operations can produce useful amounts of tree fruit (bananas of various sorts, mangoes, cocoa, nutmeg, sour sop, breadfruit) and vegetables. You see vast amounts of this stuff in the market at St. George’s or Hillsborough or in makeshift shacks along the road. Also many people manufacture jams, jellies, sprays, and tinctures, which they also sell in the market.

Carriere Estate

I was on the island with a mission to explore particular plantations that I have been studying. I didn’t go near the tourist beaches. I went straight from the airport, over the mountains at Grand Etang, to a village called Moya north of Grenville. One of the curious things about Grenada is that there are no street addresses. The apartment I rented in Moya was known only as “the concrete house opposite Ben Jones’s house on Pearls Main Road.” Ben Jones, now dead, was once prime minister, which somewhat helped the cause. But I was also told to go and meet “the old woman who lives by the pasture.” And the place I stayed in St. George’s is called the Priory, no other designation. (Another local custom: no one goes up to the door and knocks. You stand outside and shout the person’s name until he or she comes to the door. The first couple of times this happened, I was alarmed and sheepish. I could never bring myself to shout very loudly.)

I hiked up the road from Moya to where the Carriere Estate used to be. This in itself was alarming. Grenadians drive on the British side of the road. There are no sidewalks. They race along beeping their horns at turns, slowing now and then for the occasional massive speed bump. I was warned sternly to watch the traffic. That first night, when I arrived and got out of the taxi, my landlady had to sprint across the road and push me out of the way.

Carriere had disappeared as far as my research could tell me. Modern maps occasionally slap the name down in a vague way, but there is no village called Carriere and no estate lines. No one mentioned any ruins. When I got to something like the right place, I asked a guy by the road if he knew of any ruins. Oh sure, he said (he was speaking with a Grenadian accent of which I could understand perhaps 60% on a good day — the patois is French-based, not English). He waved his hand. Just go up there and take the path on the right to the cricket ground. Of course, there was no path, really, and what he called the community cricket ground was a pasture occupied by two cows, half-a-dozen goats, and a cattle egret. But as I cut between two houses, I glanced to my right and was shocked to see this stone structure, what my dreams were made of.

I had found the Carriere ruins.

I think this was the base for a windmill, but I am a neophyte at interpreting plantation ruins. I wandered around and found a wall that proved to be the dam for a water reservoir used to power a waterwheel. I found the stone-walled channel for the waterwheel and the ruins of the mill house.

The guy who had directed me in the road, Augustus Charles, caught up with me at this point. In fact, he owned the old mill and used it as a joinery shop. He pointed out where the plantation smokestack had once stood, then took me deep into the woods (overgrown cocoa plantation) to a lone grave with a wrought-iron fence and smashed gate lock.

I had an introduction to a man named Peters who lived in what was billed to me as the former estate house. So we went there and Augustus embarrassed the hell out of me by walking around the house shouting “Vince! Vince!” in what seemed like an aggressive manner. But then Vincent Peters came out, in his sixties, a bit frail and coughing, on the phone with his daughter in Canada. You could see the Atlantic and feel the cool ocean breeze from his porch. His parents were buried in the side yard near the cocoa drying rails. And, no, it wasn’t the estate house. That was somewhere higher up — he waved his hand vaguely. I asked him to show me. He looked at me dubiously. Perhaps we should wait for another day when his brother had returned his car, he suggested (remember, I am only understanding some of this). But I convinced him I could hike whatever it took. He changed into the uniform (long pants, rubber boots, cutlass) and off we went.

Three thin dogs came with us. Two were Vince’s and one, the emaciated black one, belonged somewhere else. It was the black one who seemed most protective of Vince. After a while, I asked Vince if he let his dogs into the house at night to sleep. No. I asked if he fed his dogs. No. Then I asked, “Well, if you don’t feed them or let them into the house, how do they know they are your dogs?” which made him burst into laughter. (Further to the point: I saw no fixed male dogs in Grenada; I saw two three-legged dogs.)

It took more than an hour winding up through the cocoa plantations (crisscrossed with rows of massive mango trees for windbreaks) on a path that even he lost now and then (we would stop other lone men with cutlasses and rubber boots to get our bearings) to reach the plantation house, if it was the plantation house. It had clearly been rebuilt, but it was in roughly the right place, high up and facing the ocean, free from mosquitoes and fronted with huge palms (according to Angus Martin, the estate houses were usually a distance from the works and planted with palms). Vince wouldn’t let me go near because the owner was not there (his truck was gone) and there were dogs milling about.

Mount Rich

Mount Rich was an old sugar estate, another three miles or so along the road past Carriere (shorter by the road through Tivoli). It’s sunk deep in a valley (volcanic caldera) with a river (creek) running through. Once again, I was not hopeful about ruins. I could never find any mentioned in my research, except that everyone did mention the old damaged estate house (and slave pen) up on the hill east of the village. This estate house is modern (if in ruins). It was built by the Kent family who bought the plantation in the 1870s, 35 or more years after the end of slavery. The so-called slave pen is a storage building. The family graves are in the back yard.

Naturally, when I asked about Mount Rich ruins, someone named Dexter offered to show me the Kent house for $20. I did not think that much of a deal since I could very well see the house from the road where I stood. In the end, Dexter disappeared and a guy named Roy walked up with me. He was affable and quite knowledgeable about the agriculture (showed me cocoa pods and nutmeg and mace and melons planted all around the old house by the locals). He did not try to tell me the stone storage unit was a slave pen. He said he thought they kept machinery there. His grandmother had worked for the Kents, and he remembered coming up to the house with her after the Kents had gone and it had been converted into an Anglican church.

But this wasn’t what I had hoped for. I knew from the paperwork I had that the old village where the enslaved people lived had been down in the valley on land where the town cricket ground stands (modern and well kept, not a cattle pasture). I wandered back down there and spotted a yellow sand road going off behind the cricket ground and a school (full of sweet little kids, all spic and span in white shirts with khaki pants and skirts — they were singing the itsy-bitsy spider song as I walked by). Within 50 yards, I started to see the ruins overgrown with vines and bushes, a long roofless stone building with iron bars on the windows (everyone puts bars on their windows in Grenada).

I scrambled around. There were old cocoa rails in the back, also a small shaft for a possible water wheel (on my 1869 plot of the estate there is a canal drawn in), several other structures, and a strange pair of parallel walls with stepped ends. The research I had done had never mentioned the existence of these ruins. As with Carriere, I had been resigned to finding nothing. But now that I have seen them, I can actually spot them on Google maps.

Over two days, I rambled all over the place and up into the hills behind, either bushwhacking or strolling along beautifully peaceful dirt pathways with nary another soul in sight. Just a couple of hundred yards away in a ravine where the river runs there is the famous Carib stone, a huge boulder bigger than an Abrams tank with eerie faces and strange triangular designs, like star plots, chipped into it. It was not easy to get down to the stone and when I sat on another rock in the creek to rest and look, I discovered more designs carved into it.

Behind the ruins up the steep hill, you find yourself dropping down into a bowl, an ancient caldera, the locals call “the lick.” A solitary walker (boots and cutlass) said it would fill up with water in the rain, but mostly it was full of cocoa trees. Far up, the road swung out along a narrow spiny ridge, dropping down precipitously on either side. I had an introduction to a woman named Valerie Benjamin who lived at the end of the road, deep in the bush. I had phoned her, but she never answered. I met a man named Henry (rubber boots, cutlass) who said I should just barge in. He would take me but he was on his way to work in his patch of land. Watch out for the dogs, though.

I am a shy person. Barging in is not my thing. But I had only one chance at this. The road ended at Valerie’s compound at the tip of the ridge, overlooking the Atlantic in the distance. There were maybe a dozen dogs, all on long leads staked strategically around the property. You couldn’t get past them to the house, it seemed. They were intent on mayhem. I stopped and told them my business, which didn’t at all deter their joyful outcry (I was the most entertaining thing to happen in days, it seemed). Finally, Valerie appeared and laughed and waved me in. The dogs were her security system.

It turned out that Valerie actually owns the ruins I had been looking at, inherited from her late husband. She owns the land on the riverbank next to the Carib stone, too. Her house is an old plantation house, expanded and rebuilt, but still showing the ancient stonework. She has her own cocoa operation, rails and drying pans, and a boucan with fermenting bins and wooden shovels for turning the cocoa beans. She also has goats, pigs, and chickens, a cistern, mutiple garden plots, a lovely open outdoor patio surrounded by palms and flowering vines. All of this up in the sky as it were. This was a delight to see, and an object lesson in how the layout of a plantation might have worked in the old days in miniature. We tend to think of them as monocultures (sugar, cocoa, cotton), but every indication I have seen shows them to have diverse agricultural operations going on simultaneously.

Anse la Roche, Carriacou

L’Anse la Roche2 on Carriacou is in the northwest corner of that little island. I hiked up from John’s Unique Resort where I was staying in Hillsborough. They were having a heat wave, everyone told me. You can’t walk that far. Also it’s very hard to find the ruins. Actually, it was difficult to find the ruins. Nobody could give me directions that made sense, and where the estate had been is completely overgrown with forest and dryland bush. After a little place called Bogles, the road becomes a track that leads along a contour line straight north to the tip of the island where it joins the road to Windward. The way is shaded with tamarinds and, in one place, a poisonous manchineel tree. There is a faint path at one point that leads down steeply to Anse la Roche beach, which is touted as gorgeous but best reached by boat. I hiked up past the beach trail and thinking I had overshot the ruins turned down toward the beach along what might have once been a path but was sort of a wide dry grass track with acacias on either side that sometimes spread out on either side into a meadow. After a while I could hear the breakers. I had not intended to visit the beach, but I was clearly going to find the beach before I found the ruins. So on I went.

Several sail boats at anchor. Union Island in the offing. One person swimming. Beach perfect, a gem, ripe for development and ruin. I realized I now had to go swimming. So I went down to where the man was snorkeling and got his attention and asked if it was safe (Merle Collins’s novel The Colour of Forgetting mentions rip tides and deaths by drowning and had put the fear of God in me). The man was an Australian named Mark, a former media person and journalist, who sailed around with his wife Marjory (I met her later in the water where we floated around talking) and apparently did nothing else. I told him I was looking for ruins. He knew where some ruins were, pointing up to a steep point at southern tip of the bay. He had been trapped at Anse la Roche during COVID, he explained — he had done “a lot of hiking” to pass the time. He’d found the cannon emplacement at the top of the point (marked on my old maps) and maybe half-a-dozen curious stone structures. It had never occurred to him that it was a farm. He had thought it was all a military base. Much of this he explained to me while we were out floating in the bay, water warm as a bath, heaving with a gentle yet powerful swell, clear as window glass.

With Mark’s instructions in mind (go up the path until it jogs to the left, then look for a faint game trail on the right and follow it, then bushwhack) , I started up the beach trail and immediately got lost (there were faint cattle trails everywhere). But I knew that I would find the cannon and such if I just climbed to the top of the ridge. So I bushwhacked and scrambled and there they were. I had seen a YouTube video of these ruins, produced by Rina Mills who works in the tourism office in Hillsborough. And my friend Philip Thorne, whose cousins still own two parcels of estate land, can remember his grandmother baking in what’s left of an old stone oven when he was a boy. They were not so mysterious as the lost structures of Carriere or the false ruins of the Kent House at Mount Rich. But it was exciting to stumble upon the cannon and then work my way back along the ridge, finding stone wall after stone wall. I took photos with geotagging, which I’ll send to Angus and Rina, so no one will ever have trouble finding them again.

[Trigger Warning: At the risk of inviting universal ridicule, here is a short video of me wandering amongst the ruins. I am alone, talking to myself, totally humiliating, especially when I start talking to the hermit crabs. So you may want to turn off the sound to prevent secondhand embarrassment.]

I knew from the old estate papers I had (not much) that there was cotton and corn grown here, and cattle grazed on the upper slopes. No doubt they also raised pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens. I found a house-like structure with stone partition and an oven at one end. The oven extended beyond the outer wall where there would have been a chimney. I doubt this was the estate house, more like an large kitchen building. Though, again, I am only learning to interpret. Next door, up a flight of three steps, was something too ruined to read (except for the jawbone of a horse and some other large animal bones strewn about) and then a large sunken paddock (stone walls all around). I doubt the estate house would have been that near to the animals.

The cacti and acacia, as I say, turned my legs into hamburger (I should have worn long pants and boots and carried a cutlass — how I longed for a cutlass). But this place fascinated me so much that I came back a second time to scramble around and try to make sense of what I was seeing. For an age, I sat on a ruined wall and tried to imagine what it had once been like with a couple of hundred enslaved people and a planter and overseer, dogs barking, roosters crowing, all that life and sadness. I remembered the voices singing The Itsy Bitsy Spider at Mount Rich and thought of the children here, born into slavery.

Grenada does not take terribly good care of its past. The national museum in St. George’s is closed. The national library hasn’t been open since 2011. I went through the national archives, where the ceiling is collapsing from water leaks. All the ruins I visited are unmarked, ruins of ruins where people are free to wander and mine for cut stone and bits of iron, which they do. In one place on Carriacou, I saw old gravestones bulldozed up into a pile and left. So it felt important to me that I go and see where the terrible past lies hidden, where enslaved people walked and suffered and yet survived, made love, bore children (for who else are the people here but descendents of those children?). I felt such a terrible sadness now and then. Yes. But now that I am home I keep hearing those happy children in the schoolyard at Mount Rich, singing.

I will have more to say on this in another substack post.

Prefatory Remarks

Then I’m taking the ferry to Carriacou (apparently, one is sure to be seasick) to look at L’Anse la Roche, where the estate ruins can still be found in the woods. Also an estate called Industry, which, I think, is now completely forgotten. These were cotton plantations 200 years ago. Carriacou is tiny, with lots of stone ruins, cisterns, foundations, and such. You can walk everywhere.

This is off season or the tail end of rainy season (or the middle of hurricane season). Looking ahead, it’s going to be over 90F every day, down to 81 at night. Since I am going to out of the way places, none of my lodgings are more than $50 a night, a fact which my parsimonious soul enjoys immensely.

For reading, I am taking along R. P. Devas’s The History of the Island of Grenada and his hiking book Up Hill and Down Dale in Grenada. Devas (1887-1975) was the parish priest on Grenada and Carriacou beginning in 1923. His books are perhaps out of date but strangely charming. Also I have a copy of Kevin McGrath’s lovely essay “Walking to Windward” about his Carriacou peregrinations.

One small and illuminating detail: I am renting an entire house in Moya for about $45 a night. I asked for the address, you know, so I could find the place (so my cab driver could find the place). My landlady wrote back: “Pearls Main Road, the concrete house opposite Ben Jones’s house.”

Okay, but to give you something more meaty, here’s another little story, a piece of whimsy, but, you know, autobiographical up to a point. That song “Home on the Range” was one we sang school when I was a kid. It stuck, a bit of a brain worm, erupting now and then into my head. Then one day the line “where the deer and the cantaloupe play” appeared. I liked it, but it ruined the brain worm for me. I can’t sing the song with the same nostalgic heft any longer. Yet the comedy of the line and the way it illustrates something about the relationship of sound and sign fascinated me. Antelope/cantaloupe. It’s not quite a homophone, and the words (sounds) mean quite different things. But there is poetry in the rhyme. Goofy poetry. And madness when the brain begins to play with the sounds and they slip away from meaning.

Harry’s Version

That morning Harry broke into song, an old favourite of his. “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam / Where the deer and the cantaloupe play / Where seldom is heard, a discouragin' word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.” “It's antelope, you ding-dong," said his wife Marjorie, as she went for him with a carving knife. In court, she claimed diminished responsibility due to years of spousal abuse because of that song. It had clouded the days of her marriage, not the least because Harry couldn't hold a tune and would always shake his head and give a snuffling chortle after. "It's antelope, not cantaloupe," he would say under his breath. "You idiot!" It pleased him no end, and since he hadn't stopped in 13 years, she was compelled, she said in court, to turn him off. The case was universally celebrated, a topic for internet badinage and late night talk shows. A popular comedian made a popular recording of Harry’s version. In the street, young men and boys followed her, singing, "Home, home on the range, / Where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" They would stand outside her house at night, serenading her lustily, boozily, thinking they were great wits, as young men will.

At night she dreamed of herds of cantaloupe grazing on the western prairie. They had short stubby legs like clothes pins and no heads nor tails. But antlers like oak twigs. Mountain lions stalked the cantaloupes of her dreams. They had orange blood. To her, they seemed uncanny and terrifying. One day, Penelope Garthwaite, an old family friend, no doubt well-meaning, brought her a fruit platter with slices of cantaloupe layered around the edge. Marjorie slew Penelope Garthwait with the cheese cutter and poured sliced fruit over her body. Then she took the AR-15 she had purchased online and began to shoot singing boys from her upstairs bedroom. In court, she claimed to be suffering from PTSD and viral persecution; she portrayed herself as the victim of a mass outbreak of media-induced hysteria. She could not possibly be held responsible for the 31 dead people outside her window. They all looked like Harry, she said.

In court, someone behind her began to hum the tune. Her mind supplied the words. "—where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" In the midst of a defence motion for dismissal, she began to chortle snuffily. Chortle, chortle, chortle. Somewhere deep in her mind, she heard the words. She heard Harry singing the words, but his voice was distant as if he were singing from the bottom of a deep well. Her public defender, a recent law school graduate named Nellie Bellows, stopped speaking and turned to Marjorie with an interrogative look. The entire courtroom stared at her, interrogatively. Chortle, chortle. While she had everyone's attention, Marjorie thought it might be entertaining to strip. The bailiffs were coming for her. Overweight gentlemen who resembled cantaloupes. Marjorie went for Nellie Bellows, her knobbly fingers around the young woman's ethereal throat. Half-naked now. The right half. Whispering the song lyrics. "Where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" Cantaloupe did sound better than antelope, the concrete consonant like a hammer striking an anvil at the beginning of the word. It scanned just the same, but more definitively.

She was remanded for observation as there was now some doubt, croaked Nellie Bellows (with her throat bandaged), as to whether Marjorie was fit to stand trial. Perhaps she would improve with peace and quiet. But there was no peace and quiet for Marjorie. Harry climbed out of the well. Snuffle, chortle. And began to sing. And someone thought it would be a good idea to serve cantaloupe slices with her eggs every morning. Marjorie began to be very quiet. Listening, with a curious half-smile on her face, to music no one else could hear. Though still considered violently dangerous to anyone who came near (there were rumours of late night visits to the ER), she has lived like this for many years now without hope of recovery.

Stormy Weather

IT’S TRUE. THE WRITER BENTINCK, afterwards known as Lord Bentinck, the Blue Asphodel, visited our town once. He forced the girl Eva, the mayor’s daughter, whose mother adored his work and would gladly have given herself to him instead. But he chose Eva, betrothed at the time to the school teacher Mandelbrot, who hung himself from shame and disappointment. Eva bore a child called Boris, known as Uncle for his manner, from infancy, of nodding sagely at anything that was said in his presence. Eva gave Boris up to her sister Rhea, who was divorced, childless, and insecure, afterwards abandoning herself to a life of debauchery. She spent her days and nights in the bodegas at X_____, engaging in intense, drunken colloquies on literary subjects and accidental castration. Her favourite lover was the town coroner, a morphine addict, who often slept on a slab at his place of employment. His name was Ramon Toblerone. He had once had a wife and son, but they too had died. It had been his duty to perform their autopsies. When she heard Ramon’s story, Eva made up her mind to dedicate herself to relieving his unbearable sorrow. One day they took morphine together and shut themselves up in the mortuary freezer, where the coroner’s assistant, a man named Petal, found them a week later seated across from one another, as if in conversation, on two crates of embalming fluid. The surprising thing is that Eva’s son Boris, commonly known as Uncle, grew up to be a perfectly unexceptional, well adjusted chartered accountant with a Shih Tzu named Albertine and a 4chan channel devoted to collecting Hummel child figurines, especially the series called Stormy Weather.

Commentary

Another microstory. I may have mentioned that I am working on a long non-fiction project and my fiction-writing is being frustrated and constrained by that circumstance. So my flights into the imaginary tend to be brief and enigmatic, even to me.

This one came out of nowhere except that my friend Rob Gray was coming for a visit with his two Shih Tzus. Probably the whole story comes from that. Also my penchant for ironic melodrama and fictional places.

There’s an interesting narrative I tell myself about these made-up places. I used to write, like most people, about particular places, often infusing them with a sense of concrete history. See, for example, my story “The Obituary Writer.”

This is in Saint John on the Bay of Fundy, with its Loyalist graveyard in the centre of the city, moss covering the bone-white stones under the dark elms. City of exiles dreaming of lost Edens, it carries its past like a baited hook in its entrails. The O’Reillys, the Shaheens and the Pyes are descendants of Irish immigrants, survivors of the Potato Famine and cholera ships; Earl Delamare is the grandchild of American slaves. Beneath the throughway bridges, on a swampy waste next to the port, lie the ruins of Fort LaTour, scene of an even earlier betrayal. It’s no wonder these people see themselves endlessly as victims.

The place where we live, Sgt. Pye’s ageing apartment house on Germain Street in the South End, lies between the dry dock and the sugar refinery. We can hear the boat sounds, bell-buoys and foghorns in the night. When a fog blows in, as they often do, the streetlights look like paper lanterns hanging before the houses. Afternoons, when I finish work, I sometimes climb to the rocky summit of Fort Howe to watch the mist nose up through the port, threading the streets of the city like an animal trying to find its way in a maze.

Best of all is springtime, when the freshets swell the river, flooding Indian Town and Spar Cove above the falls. Television cameras mounted in chartered helicopters transmit aerial shots of a strange, watery landscape upriver. When the land dries, children set grass fires in railway cuts and vacant lots. Saint John is a wooden city, rebuilt hastily by ships’ carpenters after an earlier fire. So this is always dangerous; the whole place could go up. These are the brilliant spring days after the freshets, when I take my position on high ground and watch smoke drifting over the sagging, pastel-coloured houses and hear sirens snaking through the streets and dream that everything man-made is being scorched clean, reabsorbed into rock and air. (From my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour.)

I could go on quoting passages like this. But at some point I lost my taste for anchoring texts in reality. Perhaps I just got bored or I needed to get out of myself in some obscure way. I wrote a short story called “Story Carved in Stone.” You know how it starts. “I thought my wife had left me, but she is back. What she has been doing the last two years, I have no idea.” When I wrote those lines, I had no idea what the story was about or where it took place. Eventually, I dreamed up a fictional town called Ragged Point, Alabama. On the Gulf coast. No such place exists. I have never been to Alabama. I got the named Ragged Point from a map of New Brunswick. I have since written three more stories and part of a novel set in Ragged Point. Rance’s Menswear on Water Street, Sheriff Buck, the sewage lagoon, the marina, the AME church, the high school gym where Soledad Bay danced before losing her virginity, the coffee shop — the entire place is as familiar to me as my hometown.

Not satisfied with made-up but real-ish places, I have a latterly launched into invented non-places that float (no better word) on some literary-geographical cloud above the real world. “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree,” for example, takes place in an unnamed, vaguely middle-European location with nearby salt marshes and dikes with cows walking on them (borrowed from the Tantramar Marshes in New Brunswick). It’s also a place out of time with flirting references to historical events but also internet banking. A salad, in other words, of time and place. Quite fun, actually. And it relieves me, as a writer, from having to create plausible externals while focusing on the characters and their relationships (so the story has something like 18 active characters with plots).

This microstory, besides alluding to Rob’s Shih Tzus, is a spark struck from Uncle Boris. It takes place in an unnamed town in an unnamed country with a vaguely antiqu-ish feel to the language (“Lord Bentinck,” the town of “X_____”), European names, and no whiff of the contemporary world of social media and pop-therapeutic discourse (except that Eva’s sister is “insecure”). It’s the kind of country where they would nickname a famous writer The Blue Asphodel. Morphine is a word you hardly ever see anymore; we have moved on to other drugs. And the place is so small and backward that there is no one to sub for the coroner when his own wife and child turn up on the slab. And yet it’s a world where 4chan and chartered accountants also exist.

I think of this as pure story. The textual stuff beyond the characters and plot isn’t used to ground the action, to render it plausible. Instead, it becomes an arena for irony, obscure implication, and allusion. The name Albertine brings in Proust. Ramon Toblerone is a Swiss chocolate kind of town coroner (so a joke, but what a lovely word sound). The Blue Asphodel is a predatory visiting writer, beloved and famous. Of course. But my favourite is the Hummel figurines, brought in right at the end and meant to hang like a picture over the entire text. Stormy Weather.

Hangs ominously, of course. The story will go on. New evil written in the blood of innocents. How could you ever trust a so-called well-adjusted chartered accountant who haunts 4chan and obsesses on a particular line of Hummel figurines that look like this?

I have a brand new short story out today online at the estimable UK magazine Minor Literature[s]. Story called “Angle of List” (you can read the entire story here). This is an event because mostly I am writing nonfiction these days.

Here’s a taste, the opening paragraphs. A bit of commentary follows.

Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. The dog scratched urgently to get out. Wind buffeted the windows. The house shook, tilting like a ship at sea. He had forgotten who he was.

There were books stacked beside the bed, a spiral bound notepad on top open to the first page. “Moss, Your schedule for today. Don’t skip ahead. Please cross each item off when completed (yesterday you phoned the funeral home 16 times).” Followed by a bullet point list.

The house trembled and heeled like a ship at sea. The dog scratched furiously to be let out. In the distance there was a regular metallic thumping like the sound of an industrial anvil. Sometimes it would stop only to resume a few moments later. The blankets felt like concrete slabs. Moss couldn’t move. He had forgotten when today was.

The red book just beneath the notepad caught his eye. He reached for it but then forgot what it was he had wanted.

There was a red book just by his hand now. Curious, he picked it up.

Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. He knew it was 6am because there was a clock next to the bed. It always said 6am, which puzzled him a little. The dog scratched insanely at the door to be let out. The wind shrieked against the window panes. There was an insistent metallic pounding in the distance. He had a red book in his hand.

He felt like a man in a box. He had a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. “You need to pee. The bathroom is straight ahead when you go out the door. Put on your slippers. It’s cold. Keep the notepad with you.” The handwriting was exuberant, plunging descenders, extravagant ascenders, generous vowels like small breasts, tiny hearts for dots and periods. But the tone was imperative, even mildly coercive. “Don’t turn off into any of the other bedrooms or you’ll get lost again.”

A man named Moss wakes up at 6am with the wind blowing outside and a dog scratching at the door. He has a notebook in his hand with a list of instructions. He keeps waking up at 6am, over and over, relentlessly, forgetting everything that’s happened before he wakes up, trying to decipher his life from the enigmatic (to him) notes and a red book at his side. The book is called Angle of List. List refers to the tilt of a ship at sea, its deviation from the perpendicular. Angle of list is the angle of deviation from the perpendicular. If the angle of list is too great, the ship capsizes. Because of the wind buffeting his house, Moss has the idea (over and over) that he is on a ship at sea.

For me, the writer, the entire story takes place in the study where I work. We’re on a high ridge in Vermont. The wind hits this house like a hammer sometimes, ripping off shingles and shrieking in the windows. I often think it’s like being in a sailing ship on the ocean. It has such a dramatic effect on my mind that I thought I should do something with it.

The dog also is mine. And, yes, the bathroom is down the hall from my study with bedroom doors leading off (though, unlike Moss, I have not gotten lost on the way — so far).

So the story is very much assembled out of bits and pieces of my day to day life, but the assemblage seems decidedly surreal.

The story is governed by recursion. Everything repeats and Moss has no memory. So, technically, it has no plot — because time doesn’t flow (only repeats), nothing happens. Here and there, tantalizing hints of another reality emerge from the text, but nothing conclusive until the end when there is a point of view shift and another character takes over (similarly stopped in time, waiting for something to happen).

There are plenty of comic (and disturbing) surprises and reversals, plus a subterranean erotic component — Moss keeps thinking the letter O in the handwritten notes looks like a breast, pages full of breasts, and there is a mysterious female presence in the kitchen below. Someone keeps coming to the door.

There is a sense in which language is both his enemy and his only ally. He vainly tries to replicate memory by keeping notes (think: Freud’s “Mystic Writing-Pad”), but written down the words become enigmatic clues that he has trouble deciphering. The written words assault him with contradiction and sexual innuendo. Real things, like the female presence hovering outside the door, terrify him. The words imply everything he does not know; language inspires paranoia (as it should). Besides the words, he has no self, and the words are mostly written by someone else. His life is governed by a literary technique.

Story of my life…

Eldon & Shannon

Eldon Teflon, the sheep rancher, won his wife Shannon in a card game, and she went along with it mainly because her then husband Wade Marsh was not what she'd expected when they got married on impulse in Tonopah, Nevada, after they met in the all night diner where she worked and he showed her a fan of bills he had scored robbing a medical marijuana dispensary in Boulder the day before. As it turned out, the medical marijuana dispensary robbery was the peak of Wade's trajectory in the armed felony business. He was only eighteen, and things went mainly downhill after that. He had lost Shannon five times in card games before Eldon Teflon showed up and she decided enough was enough. I should add that this was in 2015 and betting your wife in a card game was at that time a highly unusual exercise of your conjugal rights, but Shannon and Wade were largely ignorant of the popular social currents of their age.

Commentary

I dunno. I have a thing for names that sound suggestive or have an eccentric rhythm. I have mentioned this before. They sound good to me, and thus fit seamlessly into a story as it unscrolls from my head. They create ambience, what I call aesthetic space.

Tonopah, Nevada, is a real place and also a place in my imagination. I like the whole name—“Tonopah, Nevada”—two words of three syllables. I have no idea how Tonopah is really pronounced and I don’t care what the place is really like (I could have looked it up). And Nevada itself is just plain suggestive. I think this has something to do with a character named Nevada Smith in a Harold Robbins novel The Carpetbaggers, which was big when I was a teenager and which I bought from a carousel in a cornerstore on the beach at Turkey Point one summer. The Carpetbaggers was made into a movie and then a sequel called Nevada Smith came out in 1966 just when I was at an impressionable age. Steve McQueen played Nevada Smith. I can still recall pretty vividly a couple of the sex scenes from the novel. Such are the literary antecedents of this story. (While all my illustrious colleagues were reading Proust and George Eliot when they were thirteen, I was reading Harold Robbins—I don’t know what this says about me.)

Tonopah, Nevada came in earlier in my writing career in a story called “Heartsick” about an 89-year-old nymphomaniac in an old folks home in Austria, who once owned a brothel in Tonopah called the Everready. This is just a throwaway in the story but somehow the key to everything that follows. “Heartsick” was first published in The Iowa Review and then in my story collection Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon.

I am fairly certain Nevada is a lovely, god-fearing, civilized state and nothing like the hair-raisingly chaotic country of my imagination. So I do apologize for that.

Eldon and Shannon are a rhyming pair. Eldon has an awkward flavour I like, but I couple it with the named Teflon. Eldon Teflon. Teflon is just one of my favourite words ever. I have a bank of names with Teflon as a surname or given name. Nothing sticks to Teflon, neither sin nor idea. Eldon, the name, is awkwardly old-fashioned and conventional; but Eldon Teflon is an empty skillet. And a sheep rancher. Once again, I have nothing against real shepherds. But I have negative associations with sheep that I then attach with anyone dealing with sheep on a regular basis.

I don’t want to digress too much, but I recall doing long distance running workouts in the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh when we would come upon sheep that had fallen on their backs and could not figure out how to get upright again (this necessitated having to go look for the farmer). Once in a dense fog I was driving through Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, inching along, only to suddenly discover a flock of the park sheep congregating suicidally on the ring road (as sheep will).

That’s enough about sheep.

Wade Marsh is obvious, right? But he is the main character in the story, the chaotic force driving what plot there is. The betting his wife in card games motif, of course, comes by osmosis and imaginative transformation from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, the half-remembered scene where Michael Henchard auctions off his wife and daughter. He is 21 and drunk and a “hay-trusser.”

I might go on about hay-trussing, but I won’t—suffice it to say I grew up on a farm and was once ultra-familiar with hay and straw, though we had machines to do the trussing.

Shannon, Wade’s wife, is the sharpest tack in the story, the one who eventually breaks the mechanical repetition of Wade’s gambling habit by changing the meaning of his lost bet. Before, when he lost her, she seems somehow to have returned, the marriage remaining intact. But finally she chooses to take the game seriously and trades up for a husband with a fortune in wool.

One technical thing to notice: I have a standard rule-of-thumb regarding stories about dissolving relationships. Marriages sometimes go south, for one reason or another, and the couples end up disliking one another. But to portray just that moment, the moment of hatred, is to lie about the relationship. You have to do justice to the lives of these people by portraying the entire scope and story of their marriage. They were in love once, thought well of one another, wanted to spend every waking moment in each other’s arms, etc. So in a very brief space (it’s a microstory, right?), I had tell you how Eldon and Shannon got together in the first place. It’s not romantic, but there he was preening with success, a fan of bills in his hand, eighteen and with all his life of crime before him—that’s the man Shannon fell in love with. And now you know the whole story.

How Samuel Baker met his wife

I’ve been lost in reading — this time a gem called In the Heart of Africa by Samuel White Baker first published in the 1880s but describing his explorations in Egypt, Sudan, and Uganda in search of the source of the Nile River in 1861-64. Actually, the English explorers Speke and Grant had already discovered the source of the Nile (Baker ran into them on their way home), but they had skipped Lake Albert, and Baker cheerfully went off to fill in the missing bits on the map while annihilating as much of the local wildlife as he could manage. For this he received a knighthood.

Thus far, he seems like any other imperial explorer of his era, a white man with money and a gun, pretending that all the local inhabitants had no idea where they were living until he found them.

If you read the book the way Baker intended it to be read, it’s pompous and a bore, reeking of racial superiority, testosterone, condescension, blood, and slaughtered beauty (he calls one of his guns “baby,” but he will go on at length about the beauty of the animals he has just shot to death, some of which are now nearly extinct). But, of course, this isn’t the way to read the book.

When reading any historical document, you have to triangulate. First, you must set your contemporary point of view, biases, and scruples to one side (without losing sight of them). Then you have to analyze the author’s point of view, biases, and scruples, using the document to come at some sense of who the author was, what he thought he was doing, and the culture-world that made him. And finally, having bracketed all this subjectivity (always a good exercise), you try to see what is fresh and interesting in the document, usually something the author did not intend to reveal, something off-center, in the wings, or just out of focus.

For me, the first astonishing thing about In the Heart of Africa is that Baker brought his wife with him (actually, it sounds as though she simply refused to stay home), and though he often seems to mention her only in passing, it gradually becomes clear that she was a remarkably brave, intelligent, feisty, and loyal woman. African exploration by Europeans was a men’s club activity. Florence Baker’s presence on the expedition amazes and delights. Not only that, but she saved Baker’s project (and possibly his life) multiple times. On one occasion in particular, she intervened when Baker’s Arab staff (porters, guards, camel and donkey drivers) mutineed and threatened to shoot him.

I did not wait for the arrival of my men, but mounting our horses, my wife and I rode down the hillside with lighter spirits than we had enjoyed for some time past. I gave her the entire credit of the "ruse." Had I been alone I should have been too proud to have sought the friendship of the sullen trader, and the moment on which success depended would leave been lost.

To read this aspect of the book properly you have to do a little research. Then the full marvel of the thing begins to blossom. Mrs. Baker, later Lady Baker (after that knighthood), was a Hungarian woman, Florence Barbara Szazs, notably blonde, blue-eyed, and handsome (in all her pictures she looks calm and resolute). She was born in Transylvania in 1841, then orphaned at the age of eight in 1849 when Romanian raiders massacred her family. She ended up a slave sold to a Turkish official at an auction at a place called Vidin in Bulgaria in 1859. Baker who happened to be in town on a hunting expedition (basically, what he did most of his life) caught sight of her, fell for her, and helped her escape (or he bought her, the stories vary). She was 18, he was a 37-year-old widower with considerable inherited wealth, educated as an engineer (he built bridges and invented a hunting rifle with two barrels). After meeting in Vidin, they seem never to have parted.

As I write this, I am hoping you are as surprised as I was at this astonishingly dramatic story, not just because of the Hollywood romance aspect. We are so used to the history of slavery in the American South and the evils of the Atlantic slave trade. And we know that serfdom in eastern Europe and Russia was similar in certain ways to chattel slavery. But it’s still a shock to realize that slavery was practiced on the Turkish marches of Europe long after Britain had outlawed it (1834). Also that it was not race-based slavery, at least not race-based in the way we have come to understand it. Orphan Florence Szasz was bound for a harem when Baker first saw her.

In his book, Baker doesn’t mention anything about his wife’s past. But rumors spread ahead of them. Even after Sir Samuel Baker was knighted, Queen Victoria refused to allow Florence Baker to appear in court, suspecting that they may have slept together before marriage. Tsk, tsk.

Of slaves and slave-trading

Florence’s stint as a slave in Bulgaria segues naturally into Baker’s brutal descriptions of the slavery and slave-hunting in Sudan and what is now Uganda in In the Heart of Africa. At the time of his journey, Sudan was ruled by Egypt.

Upon existing conditions the Soudan is worthless, having neither natural capabilities nor political importance; but there is, nevertheless, a reason that first prompted its occupation by the Egyptians, and that is, THE SOUDAN SUPPLIES SLAVES.

Once again, the American (and British) history with slavery tends to mask from us the ancient spread of slavery in other directions. Long before the Portuguese invented the Atlantic slave trade, Arab slave traders had been shuffling Africans across the Sahara and down the Nile to Egypt. Baker and his wife saw how this worked during the years they spent in Sudan hunting, exploring, and prepping for their great expedition up the White Nile.

Arab traders, under the guise of dealing in ivory, would mount huge, well-armed expeditions into the Nile hinterlands. These expeditions were financed on credit, payable in ivory on their return. The African villages and small tribal chiefdoms were not armed with modern weapons nor able to form any kind of mutual defense associations. The slave traders would cajole and threaten one village into joining them and together they would surround the target village. They would set fire to the huts, shoot the men as they came out to fight, and round up the women and children to be sold later. The village cattle would go as a bribe to the cooperating villagers. And the traders would dig up the hut floors for valuables and caches of ivory, which they used to repay their creditors. The slaves were pure profit.

Charmed with his new friends, the power of whose weapons he acknowledges, the negro chief does not neglect the opportunity of seeking their alliance to attack a hostile neighbor. Marching throughout the night, guided by their negro hosts, they bivouac within an hour's march of the unsuspecting village doomed to an attack about half an hour before break of day. The time arrives, and, quietly surrounding the village while its occupants are still sleeping, they fire the grass huts in all directions and pour volleys of musketry through the flaming thatch. Panic-stricken, the unfortunate victims rush from their burning dwellings, and the men are shot down like pheasants in a battue, while the women and children, bewildered in the danger and confusion, are kidnapped and secured. The herds of cattle, still within their kraal or "zareeba," are easily disposed of, and are driven off with great rejoicing, as the prize of victory. The women and children are then fastened together, and the former secured in an instrument called a sheba, made of a forked pole, the neck of the prisoner fitting into the fork, and secured by a cross-piece lashed behind, while the wrists, brought together in advance of the body, are tied to the pole. The children are then fastened by their necks with a rope attached to the women, and thus form a living chain…

This is the situation in the early 1860s. The slave trade, with the ivory trade as a front, was in full swing. In fact, the slave traders were so apprehensive that Baker was out to interfere with their business that they plotted to disrupt his expedition, subborned his workers, and even incited them to murder him. (This is where Florence’s advice and brave interventions came in handy.)

Again, to get the full effect of this passage, you have to read beyond the book. Just four years after the explorations described in In the Heart of Africa, Baker and Florence returned to Sudan in 1869 at the behest of the Kedhive of Egypt to lead a military expedition to suppress the Nile slave trade. As far as I can tell, it was only partly successful, but Baker got another book out of it (good lord, he was prolific; Florence helped), Ismaila, A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.

Hunting elephants with swords

The 1861 expedition took four years. Baker and his wife were patient. Among other things, they taught themselves Arabic while they were hanging around. But Baker spent much of his time hunting wild animals, Big Game. He pens amazing descriptions of the chase, exciting, bloody, and to many contemporary minds redolent of that rapacious exploitation of what were thought to be infinite resources that still characterizes modern capitalism. Seven elephants in one day! Albeit, the fat was boiled down and packaged to ship back to Khartoum, the hides were dried to make shields, and the ivory harvested.

But Baker’s singular attention to local hunting practises is, to me, revelatory, in particular the so-called sword hunters of Hamran. These are men who hunted elephants and rhinos on horse and on foot, not with guns, arrows, or spears, but with swords. I have often wondered how our Ice Age Neanderthal cousins and early homo sapiens hunted the huge, lumbering mammoths and aurochs and cave bears. Baker gives us a clue and a picture.

On one occasion, he hunted elephants with a party of Arabs, close friends and brothers. One had been crippled by an elephant in an earlier hunt. He was small in stature, his left arm shriveled into something like a hook. He would ride a horse with the reins looped over the hook and a sword in his right hand. He was the bait. It was his job to challenge the elephant, taunt and enrage it, then, whirling around, make it chase him. He had to let the elephant follow close enough to stay interested while not allowing himself to be caught. At the same time, his companions would race up behind the elephant, and, dismounting, hack at the animal’s tendons with their swords, dashing out of the way if the animal turned. The result was gruesome. Baker describes an elephant stopped in mid-charge with its feet hanging off its legs like loose boots, suddenly immobilized and helpless. In one case, a sword cut severed a leg artery. Baker offered to shoot the elephant, but the hunters said no, the animal would shortly bleed out painlessly. No need to add to its terror.

This is gruesome for sure, but a glimpse into some ancient way of life, it seems to me, men hunting as a team, someone quick and brave acting as the bait. A strategy, not just a bunch of people standing around poking animals with spears. Tragic, insanely dangerous, with the strange, melancholy beauty of a bull fight.

The Bakers eventually retired to an estate in England. Sir Samuel died in 1893 at the age of 70. Florence died in 1916. Her diary of the expedition to suppress slavery was published in 1972.

I make no excuse for the grim subject matter. I always write like this when it’s raining and I have to take the dogs for a walk. It soothes my soul to imagine exploding bodies and desperate last battles against horrifying creatures (story of my life).

I call the current zeitgeist “the waning of the world.” There are too many people. Everything costs more. We’re at a weird stage where we think that replacing poisonous gas-burning cars with cars that run on batteries that use poisonous rare minerals mined by very poor people in far away countries is a good thing. Covering my favourite landscapes with industrial windmills is thought to be an improvement in the quality of my life. Banning books and attacking libraries is the new wave. (My gut tells me that this is only a sign of its inverse — that fewer and fewer people see books and libraries as worth defending.)

The worst thing is that the New York Times yesterday recommended Jerry McGuire as a good, much-lauded romantic comedy, one of the 50 best movies on Netflix (admittedly a low bar). On the Times’ say-so I wasted two hours of my life on that over-acted, stereotyping drivel. So much for the value of mainstream media.

So here are two little stories that reflect the current mood.

Body Parts

Rochelle Ann came back from the clinic the second time with just one eye and $80 New Currency. She had one eye, and I still had one eye, and we both still wore the surgical patches, though we knew from watching others that the surgical patches would eventually get dirty and drop off, and there would be nothing there but the eye socket stitched shut. It was the new look, and like all the new looks before this, you got used to it. Gens with Lotto money bought colourful eye patches or invented other more decorative ways of concealing the damage. I saw a woman once who had tattooed an eye over her sewed up eyelid. It seemed eery to me, disturbing. Rochelle Ann said we were lucky we had the $80 plus what was left from my surgery, which meant we could still pay the rent and buy food. And, of course, the health care we received when we entered the HPP (Harvesting of Parts Program) was second to none except for that available to HGOs (High Government Officials) and WGs (“Dub-Gens,” short for Wealthy Gens) who lived in the tower tops. We also lived tax free in subsidized housing, courtesy of the program. In other words, we were still MC (Middle Class).

Zombie Attack

Traisch hefted his trusty Russian-made neutron grenade launcher and did a 360 check noticing only a figure down the cul de sac by the Simpsons’ driveway. The Zs generally attacked at nightfall. It was twilight, not yet fully dark. He had eight neutron grenades left, seven for the Zs and the last for himself. Generally, the Zs could not turn human particulate into another Z. Atomized, he would be safe from the Lazarus Effect. He would be dead but impossible to reanimate.

Just over a year ago I wrote a substack newsletter on my impressions of a wonderful novel called The Colour of Forgetting by the Grenadian novelist and poet Merle Collins. It was called “Consoling Ghosts” and you can read it if you like by clicking the title. The Colour of Forgetting was published in 1995 and, despite its brilliance, was allowed to go out of print while other Collins titles, notably her first novel Angel, remained in the public eye. This is an object lesson in how bad critics and bad readers can stymie even the best work. Angel is a notable first novel, but it is not a patch on the dynamic structural complexity, the incantatory verve, and the vision of The Colour of Forgetting.

I wrote “Consoling Ghosts” very fast, in a rush of pleasure and inspiration. I get very excited by complex, innovative books that look like they have been written by clairvoyant geniuses who understand everything and can make it into a story (or a dozen stories). As it happens, my newsletter came to the attention of the publisher, Peepal Tree House in England, just as they were getting ready to bring The Colour of Forgetting back into print (after 30 years). Peepal Tree Press specializes in new and classic Caribbean literature. It’s a wonderful and important institution. The publisher asked me to turn my newsletter into an introduction for the novel, which I did, though it was oddly difficult to do. (If you are really daft, you can read the newsletter and the actual introduction side-by-side and imagine how much rewriting I did to get from one version to the other. Answer: A LOT.)

The more I read and reread the novel, the more I admired its condensation (350 years of island history in a 170 pages), its use of imagery, prophecy, and myth to encompass the effects of slavery and the after-decades of colonial exploitation, its gentle, witty female characters, and its marvelous use of island patois. You should go online and buy this book. It has just been published in the UK. I don’t know when it will be for sale on Amazon or in bookstores on this side of the Atlantic. I would have sent you all to the Book Depository except that just this week it announced that it was shutting down (Amazon bought it in 2011; no doubt its days were numbered back then). But there is an excellent competing UK site called Blackwell’s (as in, the famous bookstore and publishing house in Oxford), which, like the Book Depository, sells books at reasonable prices and delivers FREE most everywhere (and the U.S.).

To encourage you, here is my introduction.

Confusion in the Blood

On Merle Collins's The Colour of Forgetting

Douglas Glover

Confusion in the Blood

West Indian novels are often notable for their formal inventiveness. This fits with the history of the islands. Colonial outposts of feral capitalism during the era of slavery, populated mostly by the descendants of Africans transposed by force from their natal lands and subsequently abandoned to the tender mercies of globalization and neo-liberalism (another form of feral capitalism), they have long suffered under the despotism of other people’s definitions. The people on the islands find that authority from afar has rarely served them well.

Conventional literary forms are Eurocentric, snobbish, and steeped in colonial bias. West Indians have been forced by history to define themselves, to create themselves; it is an ongoing project. But in the process they have given the world some profoundly influential thinkers. To name just a couple: Eric Williams of Trinidad who wrote the monumental Capitalism and Slavery and turned Western economic history on its head by suggesting that the Industrial Revolution had less to do with British technical innovation than with the capital raised off the backs of enslaved Africans; and Frantz Fanon of Martinique whose Wretched of the Earth revolutionized the way we think about oppression and the social construction of the self. But the list of writers and thinkers and their influence is far out of proportion to the geographic size of the island archipelago between Florida and Venezuela. Nothing inspires the mind as much as figuring out how to escape someone else’s categories.

The Colour of Forgetting (1995) by Grenadian novelist Merle Collins is a uniquely inventive novel that fits the West Indian mold, that is, it fits no mold. On an obvious level, it presents as a multi-generational novel that covers the history of Grenada from the French colonial period beginning in the 1650s to the decade following the American invasion in 1983. It focuses on a family named Malheureuse, descendants of a French carpenter who murdered a slave named John Bull and whose children had children with enslaved women. The Malheureuse family thus inherits the blood of both murderer and victim, European colonist and enslaved African.

This admixture, through the generations, causes “confusion,” confusion being an oft-repeated thematic tag. "The Malheureuse blood pass on to the slave women generation that Boss-man Malheureuse breed. To John Bull nation. Mixture in the blood of the story." Collins's characters, the Malheureuse descendants, experience a sinister pattern of intimate betrayal and self-harm because of this forked filiation, which comes down through the generations as fate. "It is a hard thing to accept that it happen, but is like we working against weself from time." The family itself becomes a metonym for the people of the Grenada.

A Mosaic of Stories

The Colour of Forgetting is short, just over 170 pages of text, divided into 18 chapters, though it covers 350 years of island history. The novel's concision is made possible by Collins's genius for orchestration, the intricate construction of its parts—rhyming actions, thematic motifs, word tags, and imagery. The structure is more musical than prosaic. Conventional plotting, the pulsing forward movement of motive and resistance, is deprecated in favour of multiple story lines that run parallel, weave together, then apart again, creating a mosaic effect.

The first thing to notice is the novel's irreality, its insistence on the co-presence, along with the merely human, of ghosts, demons, and vexed gods. It has an uncanny quality, an eerie otherworldliness. One never knows if the little girl walking out of the bush is a needy orphan or Ajakbe, daughter of Lajabless, the demoness with a cow's foot. Prophecy and compulsion displace history. Ordinary men and women going about their novel business share white space with the weird; the effect is like reading Greek tragedies or watching Macbeth. "It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood: / Stones have been known to move and trees to speak..."

The second thing to notice is how Collins distances her novel from the actual Grenada by setting it in a fictional island nation called Paz, with a capital called Paz City (St. George's) and a sister island called Eden (Carriacou). Not Grenada, but quite like Grenada in important ways. The throw of history is roughly the same, but with some events re-imagined or left out entirely. This gives the novel a flickering quality best described as irony, with the reader's eye ever shifting between Paz and the real Grenada.

The novel is framed by two chapters, setup and coda, that feature the island prophet, a half-mad sybil named Carib, possibly descended from the vanished indigenes. She is the one with the gift; she can see the demons and foretell the future. She issues the blood prophecy that drives the novel toward its gaudy conclusion. “Blood in the north, blood to come in the south, and the blue crying red in between.” Though, like Cassandra of Troy, she is mostly derided and disregarded. The emotional climax of the novel is yet another Carib chapter, third from the end, a visionary walkabout amongst the old slave yards and abandoned sugar works where she communes with the souls of the long dead and rails against the islanders' habit of forgetting. The remaining chapters divide in half, each half something of a structural mirror of the other, like butterfly wings. (One cannot over-emphasize how nicely structured this novel is.)

The first half of the book deals with the Malheureuse back story, John Bull's bloody murder and a family conflict over property. A wily third generation Malheureuse manages to secure a 15-acre mountainside tract that he subdivides for his children, then the descendants struggle among themselves over these split up inheritances. Uncle Son-Son cheats his nephew Ti-Moun (Little Man) Malheureuse out of his share of the family tract, then beats him to death when he refuses to leave. The second half of the book presses forward with the story of Ti-Moun's daughter Willive Malheureuse who yearns to retrieve her lost patrimony. Willive and her husband, a Paz City bellhop named Ned Janvier, are desperately poor, which makes it all but impossible that she could realize her dream. They have a son nicknamed Thunder because of his abnormal fear of thunder, thunder being a weather tag linked to the ancestral murder of John Bull. Like the Malheureuse family, the Janviers descend from an ancestral murder (rhyming action), the flogging death of an enslaved man in the market square in Eden. "Just like you mother talk about somebody call John Bull that they beat and kill in she family."

Willive's great ambition, aside from getting Ti-Moun's land back, is to see Thunder educated so as to escape the trap of low-wage manual labour and persistent poverty endured by his parents (and most Grenadians of that era). She wins on both counts when Thunder returns from accounting school in England and finds work at the Ministry of Tourism; after considerable argument, he agrees to back her loan, and she is finally able to buy the land.

This family land story weaves alongside parallel political conflicts over land reform; family land confusion becomes a nation's land confusion, culminating in a bloody riot in Paz City and an invasion by an unnamed Great Country. This spasm of public violence corresponds roughly with the 1983 overthrow of Grenada's government and subsequent American intervention. Where the first half of the novel climaxes with eviction and Ti-Moun's beating death, the second climaxes with that murderous riot in Paz City, both acts rooted in land confusion, which is in turn rooted in a confusion of blood.

Carib's Blood Prophecy

Carib is the medium, the go-between, a shaman figure. She sees and hears things that don't exist for other people. She herself calls the world she inhabits a real dream. "Is day or is night? Is dream or is real? Oh I forget. What I asking? Is real dream." To Mamag Malheureuse, "this woman Carib was like another country. A new country. Always saying something strange and new and mixed-up and exciting-sounding and frightening." To children raised on stories of loupgarous and Lajabless, she seems "to inhabit the same kind of space as these other creatures. But she was the one they could see." When Thunder dreams of her, red words stream out of her mouth and shoot up into the sky. She transforms into a carrion bird. "Her toenails became sharp and curved and gripped the gravestones on Leapers' Hill." And he wakes, screaming, "Thunder! Thunder, Mama, thunder."

Carib's prophecy collapses time, compassing the island's history in a single sentence. It's also a warning and a mnemonic, reminding the people of Paz of trouble to come if they persist in forgetting (denying) past evils. The prophecy repeats, again and again, throughout, another stream of text running alongside the story mosaic, creating poetry, suspense, and premonitory horror. “Blood in the north, blood to come in the south, and the blue crying red in between.”

It's meant to be mysterious and enigmatic, a question searching for an answer, but Collins gives helpful commentary. Blood in the north marks the suicide of a band of Carib warriors (recently, the custom has been to call them Kalinago), cornered by French colonial troops on a cliff called Leapers' Hill. This corresponds to an actual event on Grenada in 1651 at a place called Sauteurs. Up on Leapers' Hill, where Carib often preaches, she can see the warriors leaping to their deaths. "Look at them. Running and jumping. Jumping and screaming."

Blood in the south is the prediction, and like all such predictions, a moving target. When Uncle Son-Son's thugs beat Ti-Moun to death, people think Carib's prophecy has come true. But they say the same thing later, when a revolution shakes Paz City (corresponding to the 1979 overthrow of the Gairy regime in Grenada). They're wrong. Aside from the fact that there wasn't much blood, Carib keeps playing the same song with even more urgency. Another four years pass, and confusion provokes that fatal riot in the market square, blood in the south again.

They had never found a way back from the quarrel about the land, especially since the government had crashed around that confusion. Around the blood in the market. People believed that those in the government who had different views about the land business had used the market to settle scores. That brother had ordered the killing of brother to ensure support a land policy... "Blood in the south," as Carib had shouted.

The red tears of Carib's prophecy—"the blue crying red in between"—are a transmutation of the rainwater mixing with John Bull's blood. "...the red on his face is like the rain make the red more thick instead of washing it away. Like the blue was crying red." Blue crying red is a tag for mourning. But "blood" and "red," the words themselves, flood the book.

In the opening chapter, Carib “stood there in her red dress and red headtie, looking up at the blue sky and down toward the blue of the sea." Thunder who is watching her, later dreams the scene and her "red words." Folk watching her atop the red rock outcrops surrounding Paz City, dressed in red, see her has an embodiment of the prophecy—"And she, Carib, the red tears wept from the blue above, poised to drop into the blue below."

After the riot in the market square, something strange happens. Carib begins to preach a variant. The prophecy has come to pass, but the people have failed to learn the lesson. In the novel's final chapter, as she returns to Paz a decade later in the tourist boat, the seas heave, a baby dressed in red chokes to death, and Carib's cries reach a peak of hysterical urgency. "It happen already. You don't see it? But we still don't know nothing yet. Blood come in the north, blood reach in the south, but we still not building a stone for weself. The spirits still vex, yes. Red. Red."

The Confusion Theme

The novel's confusion theme, the inherited curse of slavery, works itself out on four levels—the individual, the family, the national, and the prophetic.

Our family is one example of how the prophecy does fulfil...Was land confusion, you see. Confusion right inside the family.

Blood in the land! And warning the people to be careful. A nation divided against itself, she used to preach in those times, shall not stand.

Land is significant in the West Indies in a unique way. Before emancipation, planters often allowed slaves their own gardens on marginal land, so-called provision grounds, where they could grow food to augment their rations and make a little money at Sunday markets. But these small plots grew to have an importance out of proportion to their size, and after emancipation, freed slaves longing for a piece of their own land settled on these very small properties. "You whole family history tell you what land mean," says Ned Janvier.

With the advent of Marxist economics under a revolutionary government, then in the era of neo-liberalism and globalization, Willive and Ned must contend with external forces—ideologies, eonomists, global corporations—trying to deny them their piece of land. Thus Ti-Moun's little garden becomes a second metonym, signifying a desire the emancipated slaves felt but which is always being refused them.

Thunder's fear of thunder is his own brand of confusion. It turns out to be a "memory" of the thunderstorm that accompanied John Bull's murder. Notice in the following passage how Collins uses the words “connection” and “cross” to render her structure explicit.

That is the connection. And that is where your story and the Malheureuse story cross. Is that he remembering. You know that. Lord have is mercy! One kill the other and so now Thunder have murderer and victim inside his head.

This is an aesthetic memory, a design element and not a claim for verisimilitude (compare it, say, with the way Vronsky and Anna share the same dream in Anna Karenina). But it also fits with the general irreality of the novel, the spirit world running alongside the human world. It is also part of a beautiful thunder-blood-red-rain pattern. "Thunder. Thunder in the night. Thunder in his head. Night of thunder and rain. Oh, God, blood on his face. Blood! Blood! Blood in the north."

John Bull's murder is echoed when Ned Janvier relates the story of his own ancestral trauma. But it also reappears, in a different key, when Uncle Son-Son murders Ti-Moun over the family land. Note how carefully Collins stitches Ti-Moun's beating into the larger patterns with the key words "Carib talk," "land confusion," and "blood" twining together the prophecy, the ancestral murder, and the Malheureuse family story.

"Look at that, eh," people said. "Grow up here hearing Carib talk about land confusion and about blood to come. Never thought I would see it in this Attaseat here."

It reverberates one more time when the politics of land reform drives the nation of Paz to riot and mayhem in the market square (the reader is meant to remember that John Bull's murder took place in the market square). Brother against brother; a nation divided against itself.

When the major confusion subsided, Paz City was a mess of broken shop windows. Bodies of the wounded and the dead lay inside of the market square. Two of the government representatives and four members of the public lay dead. Several people were wounded. One or two of the walking wounded limped toward Hospital Hill, every so often looking behind, as if afraid the confusion might be following.

Significantly, in that last sentence, it is not bullets the survivors fear as they peer over their shoulders, but confusion.

The Colour of Forgetting

Walking back is the second great theme of the novel, the antidote to confusion, walking back being Carib's metaphor for remembering. Mamag walks back the Malheureuse stories and the story of her father's murder for the child Willive. Willive walks the stories back for Thunder. Ned walks back the Janvier stories. And, in a lovely grace note late in the novel, Willive encourages Ned to tell his story to his granddaughter Nehanda, Thunder's abandoned child. It's just two lines, but a testament to the intentionality behind the novel's design.

Carib’s cure, her restorative counsel, is that recalling and mourning historical trauma will free a person (or family, or nation) from confusion. In the first chapter of the novel, Thunder’s mother Willive and her aunt Mamag take him to see Carib in her capacity as a psychic healer. Carib says not to worry. The boy will be the saving of his people as long as his mother takes care to instill in him the Malheureuse story, the ancestral murder and the (con)fusion of blood. This quite elegantly motivates the chapters to follow, the telling of the story.

You could only help by telling him everything you know. But is all right…. Mightn’t even be in your time, Mamag, but you will know. He going to be all right. Walk back with him over the Malheureuse story.

At the end of the book, Thunder is no longer terrified of thunder, but he has failed to become the hero that was predicted. Saving a people divided against itself by history by saviours who are themselves divided and confused is perhaps an endless project. And yet, "Oh, it will help if we remember? Well, sprinkle holy water. We will sprinkle some rum. Some cane juice. Some remembrance. Some peace."

In the novel's system of imagery, blue is the colour of forgetting (and denial), also the colour of sea, sky, and water. "The sea is blue peace, the colour of forgetting. No one thinks to knock wood." This is especially interesting in a book that puts such a premium on remembering. Carib's prophecy is a endless effort to kickstart the islanders' memories, which might save them from confusion. But all around them is the peaceful, lulling blue.

Blue. "The colour of forgetting" a woman call it one time, yes. Was the sea in Paz City she was watching. You hear the word? Forgetting. Not for who know. Walk back. And remember. Is red mud on the hill. Walk back. You never hear about John Bull? Colour of forgetting?

Thunder's favourite days are bright and sunny "with the sky blue, blue and clean, clean." He is less afraid of the thunderclaps of memory. But on grey days, cloudy days, he hates to be alone and runs to the nutmeg station to be close to his mother. Collins integrates the grey/blue pattern with various stages in Thunder's life. The skies are grey in Paz City during the era of Black Power demonstrations when Thunder is twelve. In one passage, she uses the grey sky/thunder pattern to link ideology, family stories, John Bull's murder, and the coming political violence.

For Thunder, there were lots of grey days in Paz City, the ones that the weather made grey and the ones that were filled with demonstrations about Black Power. Thunder joined these demonstrations sometimes, at first because his friends were going, and then because he started to link the Black Power idea with all that he knew about Da and Mamag and his grandfather. But sometimes, too, the demonstrations made him hear thunder roaring inside his head and he just went to the place where he was boarding and lay down in his room.

The colour scheme functions something like the colour-codes governments use to indicate terrorist threat levels, green through red. Blue-grey-thunder. Grey being the in-between state of confusion, depression, and doubt. The worst days for Thunder are during his time in London, when the grey days drive him into himself,

...listening only to the thunder in his head, too depressed to write home....He walked with his shoulders hunched and tense, waiting for the sound of thunder. It seemed to him that thunder was always there, and his hands always jumping to his face.

The memory/forgetting theme is also linked throughout with the word "monument," Carib always bemoaning the lack of a monument to the enslaved Africans, to "weself." This pattern begins on the second page of the book when it is noted that the Caribs "who had given the island such a proud memory had on the spot no monument to their bravery, but the voice of a woman called Carib..." "Carib liked to preach at the location of monuments"; but all the monuments honour external achievements: the war dead, Caribbean federation, and the "Great Country which had intervened to grant monetary support for a land-reform..." "...yes, monument sprouting like peas all over the place, but not one for them."

Near the end of The Colour of Forgetting, in a typically novelistic gathering of motifs, a little girl, Thunder's daughter Nehanda, standing next to the Great County plaque in the market square, asks Willive, "Gran, it go be something, eh, if John Bull name was there, and Ned name was there and if we had a monument for the Carib people and things like that?" But in the final chapter hope is once again deferred. "Blood come in the north, blood reach in the south, but we still not building a stone for we self."

The Volcano and the Dead Baby

In the novel's closing chapter, ten years after the bloody riot in the market square, Carib returns to Paz from its sister island Eden on a tourist boat. The tourists scoff at legends of an undersea volcano, the sea roils beneath them, and a baby dies, possibly choking on its own vomit. Amid the terrified passengers, Carib's voice rises to a hysterical crescendo, uttering a vision of "vexed" spirits and the island drenched in blood.

This operatic scene, with the vexed volcano and the sacrificial infant, is another conscious design on the part of the author, explicitly prefigured back in the first chapter.

...she was talking about the Caribs. The Amerindian people, who, long ago, had escaped their French pursuers by jumping off the cliff into the sea. Since then, legend had it, the sea in that part of the island was particularly angry sometimes, churning up with remembering. At times, on the calmest of days, there would be a shout when some not particularly enterprising swimmer went just a little beyond the shallows, and disappeared. Often it would be days before the body was recovered.

Also repeated later from a different angle.

The Mon Repos beach. Once, a school friend of Thunder's had disappeared there. Water peaceful and greyish blue right up to the beach and then, a few feet out, rumbling water, tugging and pulling with the rocks. A shark ate the boy, people said, but Thunder could never get rid of the idea that the rocks had eaten him. Reached out and pulled him when no one was looking.

And again, a little jingle Carib hears in the night: "I'm going away / In a sailing boat / And if I don't come back / Throw away the damn baby. / Brownskin girl..."

I give you these quotations at length because the great beauty of this novel is in its coordination of repetition and convergence. In this case, these three texts turn out to be a slow-burning fuse that ignites in that last, breathtaking chapter.

There is in fact an undersea volcano between Carriacou and Grenada. It's called Kick 'em Jenny. In the novel, Collins renames it Kick-em-Ginny. In the novel, the volcano (of course, unseen, beneath the surface) becomes yet another metaphor for forgotten trauma; like the repressed trauma of a neurotic, what you deny will erupt in your waking life when you least expect it (causing confusion and worse). In the passage below, Collins links the forgotten volcano with the forgotten riot in the market square, the fall of the government, and by association, all the neglected history of slavery.

But no one talks about it after a time. The older heads return to dust. And come again forgetting. And by and by Kick-em-Ginny disappears. People bury it and forget it, they think. For ten years they have tried, too, to forget events that brought death and confusion to the market square in Paz City. But now Carib is talking again about blood. About the killing and destruction that fulfilled her prophecy.

From here, the scene advances, first gradually, then gathering momentum. You can almost hear the theme music from Jaws. The sea heaves, the boat rocks slightly. Passengers scoff and make jokes about seasickness. The captain looks at the waves. "All-you laughing? Take care you don't tempt the spirit of the water." More scoffing. "Kick-em-Ginny dead, man, Skipper. That is backwardness. Superstition." The passengers trade chit-chat and enjoy the sun. A spout of seaspray splashes over the rail. A sleeping baby wakes and wails. "The sea's belly growls." The baby screams. But then the waves grow calm again.

Suddenly, a woman cries, "Brace yourself." Carib stares at the sea and shouts, "Kick-em-Ginny!" The boat heaves, once, twice, seems to balance on the peak of wave. People grab anything they can reach. Some vomit over the gunwhales. The incident triggers something in Carib who sets up a continuous howl. Meantime, the boat settles again. Passengers lie on the deck moaning. The sea is "forget-me-not-blue," which, when you read the words, makes you smile for Collins's fine wit.

Carib's howls turn to prophecy. She stares up at the fort above Paz City harbor (this would be Fort George, if we were in Grenada and not in a novel). "She points. 'Red,' she says. 'Red. You see it? The fort dripping red. Both sides of the wall, the two faces. You see it? Red. Always dripping red.'" Then she links the baby into the oracle. "'Is like the colour the baby wearing,' she says. 'You don't see it? It bleeding. The rock bleeding.'" Some of the passengers remember who Carib is; they remember the prophecy and the blood spilled in the market square. "Not only today. But from slavery times to today."

The text is approaching a moment of maximum density of crisscrossing reference in which blood, ancestral murders, prophecy, political violence, the backsliding denial of the people culminate in that image of blood dripping from the walls of the fort. Carib segues into a riff on blue, now transformed into a spirit self, vexed and waiting—a threat hangs in the word.

"The blue still taking," Carib says in a quiet voice. "The blue still waiting. The blue still taking. Until we remember. But it happen already. It happening all time. The blue still waiting."

Next line, the baby's mother shrieks for help. "Oh God Oh God Oh God!" Someone tries first aid, but the baby is already gone. An old woman begins a prayer. Carib mutters her vision. The last line of the novel: "White birds circle the red rock."

— Douglas Glover “Confusion in the Blood, On Merle Collins's The Colour of Forgetting” Introduction, The Colour of Forgetting, Merle Collins, Peepal Tree Press, Leeds UK, 2013.

Another of my microstories1.

I doubt many of you have read enough of my work to notice how weird my character names can be. I find a lot of energy in names. This is a bit odd because early on I had such a terrible time finding names for my poor characters. One occasion especially was a nightmare. I wrote my novel Precious calling my main character Barry Johnson, which was the name of the real person who inspired the character, a former colleague of mine when I worked the overnight desk at the Montreal Star (in the good old days when the Montreal Star still existed). Barry was a great and inspirational character, a man with a huge personality, well worth basing a novel on. But, good Lord, when the time came to publish the book, I had to change his name. I remember interminable days scouring phone books, writing out name after name, looking for rhythm, for something slightly unusual but not fake sounding. No name I came up with matched the aura with which I had invested “Barry Johnson” mainly, I suppose, because he was real and I liked him. Eventually, I called my fiction character Moss Elliot. Then I stuck Claude in the middle. Moss Claude Elliot. A name I could make jokes with, but also rhythmic, slightly unusual, but not too distracting. Whatever name I picked was going to feel artificial and fake to me because, well, it was fake. But I reasoned that no one else would ever know about Barry Johnson. They would come at Moss Elliot fresh. He would seem real to every other reader except me.2

After that I began to invest a lot more energy and more of my unconscious in the production of names. Any time I see an evocative name, I write it down. But most of them now I dream up in those idle moments when I am not thinking of anything in particular. I often think of names before I think up stories to go with them. My naming impulse is a bit Dickensian. I like the names to be dramatic, slightly extravagant, with an interesting sound. I like to think that the names might be a short story in themselves.

Just recall the names in the stories that I’ve featured here on Out & Back. Max and Yolanda Blender. And in the story “And This, With Wings”: Finbar Hanlon (the plagiarizing creative writing teacher), Hydrangea Fenwood (the brilliant victim student), and Spence (the agent). In “Teeth,” Hackenfeller (the bombastic dentist; I have at least two other unfinished stories with a character named Hackenfeller), Alve Olar, Redonda, Fuchs, and Vickie Wonderlight (a name I have been trying to get into a story for 30 years).

I have lists of names, often in pairs.

One day I wrote down the names Peludis and Radames. They just floated up. I have no idea if they are real names or from what land they might derive. I had no idea for a story to go with them. But Peludis had a vaguely naughty sound. Pe-lewd-is. And some time in that era I was reading about Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the amazing archaeological discoveries therein: beautiful wall paintings in domestic living rooms, brothels with graffiti on the walls, fast food joints, and, of course, the mysterious casts of human bodies caught fleeing the eruption. I was fascinated by the idea of this vibrant, ordinary urban life, rich and poor, young and old, bubbling along in sight of the smoking volcano, paying no heed, and then suddenly caught in the hyper-blast of heat and ash. Life obliterated and entombed in concrete in an instant. A thousand stories ending abruptly.

And so this little microstory was born. Peludis is naughty. He and his friend Radames are in love with the same young man, a kitchen slave. (I was thinking of the brothel wall graffiti.) I could have made this a conflict between the two friends over their mutual lover, but that, of course, was too easy, trite and uninteresting. So actually they get along and share the slave, swingers before they were invented, only to discover that their erotic complacency has hidden the real action, Melenctha and Denudo (both invented names; Denudo, De-nude-o, is my 12-year-old unconscious self making dirty jokes). Melenctha steals Denudo, who remains a slave (Melenctha is pragmatic, not so much a romantic). And that’s all, except, of course, for the smoking mountain outside Melenctha’s window. That image is like a window out of the story, a window that let’s the reader know what’s going to happen next. In effect, there are two sudden alterations of expectation: Peludis and Radames think they have Denudo’s charms all to themselves, when suddenly he is whisked away from them. And then, all of them are about to have their little loves, schemes, and pleasures extinguished by the volcano.

A lesson to us all: we have our little lives, meanwhile, reality grinds on in the wings, just out of sight, waiting to pounce and puncture our dreams.

That wasn’t quite enough for me. Denudo had remained a quiet little manikin throughout, a perfect slave sex object. I hadn’t made him come alive. I hadn’t given him a chance, as a character, to have a self. So I ended the story with him, the mystery (and comedy) of his tattoos. In the end, we see the little kitchen slave better than any of the other characters. He is the one with personality.

Like many of these microstories, despite its paucity of text, this one contains a front story and a mostly concealed under story. It also has two reversals of expectation (one written in the story, one implied) and multiple story lines (Radames, Peludis and Denudo; Melenctha and Denudo; and Denudo alone, the slave cook with his mysterious tattoos). These microstories are also funny, a virtue not to be discounted in this world of woe.

Peludis & Radames

Peludis and Redames were both in love with the same boy, the kitchen slave Denudo, owned by Procurator Syrax. Of course, the two men were old friends from school and the army, so they never quarreled and managed to share Denudo’s favors amicably until the day Melenctha, Peludis's older sister, went to Procurator Syrax and bought the boy for herself. Apparently, she had been in love with Denudo, too, and together they had plotted his escape. Now he was second pastry cook in Melenctha's kitchen where he was very happy. Nights he slipped up to Melenctha's bedroom, the one with the satyrs and naiads cavorting to drums and flutes around the walls. From her windows they could see the glowing cone of Mount Vesuvius, looking, in the distance, like the hump of a sleeping bullock.

That's all you need to know as the story begins, except for one curious fact: at some point, Denudo had been tattooed. He could not remember when. Across his chest was the word "Always" and across his back "Never," both in Greek.