Land of Love and Drowning

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by Tiphanie Yanique


  Anette sees him coming and doesn’t move toward him. She only watches him approach. After all these years she still loves the way the tall sandman walks. Like a mangrove moving, she thinks.

  “Nettie,” he says, when he is close and can see all the features in her face.

  “Yes, it’s me. Why you ain wearing your glasses?”

  “This is for you.” He hands her the flower. On his long golden arm there are fine silver hairs, sparkling in the new sun like glints of light. Anette wishes she could put the flower in her hair, but her hair is thin and the flower might slip out. Instead she holds the anthurium in her hand as he sits beside her, his long mangrove legs stretching forward. She passes him the bag of stewed cherries. He thanks her by grazing her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. Together they read their daughter’s letter, as is their ritual.

  She will be the first to leave that morning. It is her right; he had left her first so long ago. She will get up silently and walk to the phone booth and ask her friend Gertie to leave off nursing Hamilton and pick her up.

  Some minutes after, Jacob will climb into his smooth car, push play on his cassette player for the old Irving Berlin tune, this version sung by Sarah Vaughan because Jacob likes to hear it from a woman.

  They will go back to the homes with their spouses.

  Jacob will kiss his wife’s forehead before slipping back in beside her. He will close his eyes and see Anette’s silver hairline where the red has faded and imagine he had kissed Nettie instead. Anette will go home to Franky who will be up tending to his papaya trees. She will start breakfast. She will fry his eggs with the right amount of pepper sauce that he likes. He will ask how Gertie is holding up with her husband’s illness and Anette will nod, fine, fine. While the eggs are sizzling in their pool of butter, Anette will think to herself that she doen’t even know how Jacob Esau likes his eggs.

  But for now, Jacob is with Anette, and they are reading a letter from the child they made together. Just two people who have been in love a long time sitting on a bench with their daughter’s words swimming before them. And now Jacob and Anette are pressed together as the cool comes in from the ocean.

  Author’s Note

  This novel is, in some part, a response to Herman Wouk’s novel Don’t Stop the Carnival, which also features the Gull Reef Club and the characters Sheila and Hippolyte. In my novel the club is where Girls Are for Loving is filmed. While all of that is fiction, the film is not. Girls Are for Loving was filmed in the Virgin Islands and came out in 1973. It stars Cheri Caffaro.

  I first knew about both the Wouk novel and the Caffaro film from my grandmother. I rented the film long after I’d written my scenes set at the club, but my sentiment still feels accurate to me. The film is soft porn, but the locals participating in the movie were unaware of the sexual element. The scene in my novel never actually happens in the movie, and there is no native couple in the advertising. In my fictionalization I have also changed the date of the filming, making it more than a decade earlier, in order to keep the desired chronology.

  Both the Caffaro film and the Wouk book were early, and lasting, portrayals of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

  —

  I have taken some great liberties with names and times. Characters’ names are drawn from names that would have been common in the Virgin Islands at the time, but they are not meant to be connected to any particular person or family present in the V.I. then or now.

  Gertie’s American beau and eventual husband is based on Hamilton Cochran, a U.S. diplomat who lived in the V.I. during the early 1900s.

  Frenchtown, called so now, would have been called Carenage at the time. Nowadays Frenchtown is also spelled French Town.

  Lindbergh Bay (often spelled “Limberg” or “Lindberg”) during Anette and Jacob’s time may still have been called Mosquito Bay. It slowly lost its former name after the aviator Charles Lindbergh landed on the island during his 1928 goodwill tour.

  Eve Youme’s name is borrowed from the author, illustrator, and all-around cool human Youme Landowne.

  The reference in the opening chapter to rain having legs comes from the poem “Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador,” by Aracelis Girmay.

  The herbal abortion techniques that Rebekah offers Antoinette are made up. These things do, of course, exist, but I am not privy to them.

  Formal schooling in the U.S. Virgin Islands was started by the Moravian Church and then contined by the Anglican/Episcopal Church. Other church schools and the public schools followed. My telling of Anette’s and her compatriots’ schooling is fabrication for the sake of simplicity and is not meant to reflect our history.

  Part of the University of the Virgin Islands sits on land that was once St. Thomas’s major golf course. Golfers still practice on the Herman E. Moore Golf Course land there, which is close to but not across from Brewer’s Bay (also spelled Brewers Bay), as I suggest in this novel. UVI is, in a way, bordered by two beaches. Brewer’s Bay to the west (near where Franky tries to teach Eeona how to drive) and Lindbergh Bay to the south (where Anette and Jacob first make love). The course might be more accurately described as being across from Lindbergh Bay. In the novel, I avoid explaining the geography in detail so as not to distract the reader.

  The Anegada protest mentioned briefly on page 260 actually occurred two decades before this conversation at the lighthouse.

  The Positive Action Movement, a political and cultural organization in the V.I., is somewhat the guide for the BOMB.

  The Free Beach Act won by the BOMB really does exist. Officially it is called the Virgin Islands Open Shorelines Act.

  My great-uncle Sigurd Petersen, Sr., was stationed in New Orleans while serving in the Army. His story inspired sections of this book, though my story of the V.I. men in New Orleans has been passed down to me from numerous retired military men of Port Companies 872 and 873. In this fictional telling I use the number 875 to signal that it is neither the real 872 nor the real 873.

  —

  David A. Melford’s words come from a pamphlet, “Ninety Wrecks on Anegada, 1643–1853,” warning visitors to the Caribbean. Melford has since updated his research to now include 134 wrecks . . . and counting. Many estimates of the number of submerged ships on the Anegada reefs bring the account to six hundred or more.

  The Alton Adams lyrics are from the “Virgin Islands March,” considered our national or territorial anthem. Adams, a native of the Virgin Islands, was the first bandmaster of African descent in the U.S. Navy.

  Derek Walcott is quoted from his October 11, 2012, lecture at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. This was the entirety of his response to the question: What makes Caribbean literature unique?

  The eponymous protest song “LaBega Carousel” from which I quote is in the quelbe tradition of my fictional Markie and the Pick-up Men. In the Virgin Islands the song is sung by local musicians such as Stanley and the Sleepness Nights, Jamesie, Lashing Dogs, and others. It tells the story of an early-twentieth-century protest that arose because a carousel owner, Mr. LaBega, paid his workers only a very small wage. In response, people boycotted the carousel by finding other opportunities for revelry—walking around the town and drinking rum. The song is generally credited as having no one single author.

  Habib Tiwoni’s verses are from the poem “Al-Habib” in his collection Islands of My Mind.

  I am indebted to too many texts to mention here. The following, however, were indispensable: Rum War: The U.S. Coast Guard and Prohibition by Donald L. Canney; These Are the Virgin Islands by Hamilton Cochran; Take Me to My Paradise: Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands by Colleen Ballerino Cohen; Time Gone by Lynda Wesley McLaughlin; The Men of the 872nd Port Company and Other Stories by Richard A. Schrader, Sr.; St. John Backtime: Eyewitness Accounts from 1718 to 1956, compiled by Ruth Hull Low and Rafael Valls; and Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the
Pea Island Lifesavers by David Wright and David Zoby. I owe much to the painting of Camille Pissarro.

  —

  Here’s some personal history: My great-grandfather was a ship captain. His ship, the Fancy Me, went down off the coast of what was then called Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). As was the tradition, he refused to abandon his ship until everyone else was saved. He drowned with his wreck. Families across the V.I. were affected, and the sinking of the Fancy Me is a major historical moment in the V.I.—our Titanic. My grandmother was the captain’s youngest child. After her father died, her mother left for America, but she returned sick and died soon after. My grandmother was raised by her eldest sister. Eventually, my grandmother married, had her first child, and divorced. Then she had my mother. My biological grandfather was a young man who would eventually become a doctor, a well-known radiologist in the Virgin Islands, though originally he’d wanted to be an obstetrician. His mother, my great-grandmother, taught piano.

  When my mother was very young, my grandmother married a fireman. Along with my grandmother, this man (my grandfather in all ways except the biological) raised me.

  My grandmother’s family is originally from Anegada. When she was in her eighties, I took her there as a gift to her. She had never been there, but she had always heard about that beautiful place. While there we visited Flash of Beauty and found my grandmother’s grandmother’s grave.

  My grandmother was a children’s librarian. A large part of her job was telling stories, which she did with us (her children and grandchildren) often. Most of the historical facts in this novel were initially gathered from her.

  The rest is magic and myth—fiction, as we call it.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Penny Feuerzeig, Beulah Harrigan, Gretchen Heyer, Keith Jardin, Amanda Nowlin, Monica Parle, and Gemini Wahaj, who read the earliest drafts. Thank you to Cassandra Francis for the resources. Thanks to Jericho Brown, Kathy Cambor, Amber Dermont, Nina McConigley, Keya Mitra, Emily Pérez, and Giuseppe Taurino, who always challenged and supported this project. Thanks to Hosam Abu-Ela, Vincent Cooper, Claudia Rankine, and Lois Zamora, who asked all the hard questions that led me to the harder questions. Thanks to Chitra Divakaruni, my thesis chair, who has supported me in all the ways a writing mentor can. Thank you to Patrick Freeman, Laura Jo Hess, Paige Cohen, Andrès Cruciani, and Gilmarie Brioso, whose time gave me time. Thank you to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (most especially Michael, Jen, and Noreen) and The New School (especially Helen Schulman, Robert Polito, David Scobey, Luis Jaramillo, and my amazing students) for being supportive and inspiring communities. Thank you to the Enid M. Baa Public Library of St. Thomas, the Anegada Community Library, and the French Heritage Museum of Frenchtown, St. Thomas, where I did research. Thank you to Elise Capron and Sandra Dijkstra, who are always encouraging and fierce. Thanks to Sarah McGrath and Sarah Stein, who said yes to what needed yes, and no to what really, really didn’t. Thank you, Riverhead! You’ve been my dream! I am in awe of the copy editor, David Hough, who patiently worked with me through all the complexities of language this book explores. Thanks to Eddie Bryan, Norma Bryan, Judy Bryan, and Judy Petersen Rabsatt for the conversations. Thank you to the late Dr. Andre Galiber, Sr., for vignettes of his youth. Thank you to my mother and my aunts, who read the manuscript and then decided to love me despite, or support me because. Thank you to my brother and my son—my solstice boys who have been patient. My heart’s gratitude to Moses Djeli, who is my partner in all things.

  My life, much less this book, would not have been possible without my grandmother Beulah Smith Harrigan.

 

 

 


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