The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  On March 31, 1917, in simultaneous ceremonies on Saint Thomas and Saint Croix, the Danish flag, the Dannebrog, was lowered and the Stars and Stripes went up. (Transfer Day is still a holiday there, but as Ronnie grumbled to me, “Some years, the government don’t do nothin’ to celebrate it.”) The USA rechristened its new acquisition the Virgin Islands of the United States, after the broader island group, which Christopher Columbus had named during his Caribbean forays in 1492 and 1493.§ In Charlotte Amalie, the United States Marines’ first acts included rolling two fifteen-ton cannons up to the top of a hill overlooking the harbor and arresting the owner of the Hamburg-American Line and then marching him to the brig at Fort Christian, in the center of town.

  Precisely six days later, the United States entered World War I.

  FORT CHRISTIAN was all shuttered up, the tomato-red paint on its walls starting to peel, its crenellations seeming to sag. It hadn’t been open to visitors for years, aside from the occasional school group (though local officials hoped to restore the fort and reopen it in time for the centennial of the territory’s transfer to the USA).

  “What’s that?” I heard an American tourist ask his wife one morning. “Is it, like, important?”

  She shrugged and they wandered off to join the crowds heading toward Main Street.

  Charlotte Amalie is one of the planet’s busiest cruise ports, welcoming more than five hundred ships each year. Right now, there were six in the harbor, including the Oasis of the Seas, the second-largest cruise ship in the world (missing the top spot by just two inches), a skyscraper tipped on its side and compelled to float, carrying around two thousand crew members and some six thousand passengers. The other ships brought many thousands more. The city’s population of 18,500 had more than doubled since daybreak.

  Most of the newcomers were headed to Main Street, narrow and lovely and lined with pastel-painted or brick buildings with small balconies and arched windows and sturdy, brightly colored shutters. It was a cacophony of conspicuous consumption. Dapper jewelry salesmen waved tourists into their stores. Jovial crowds compared bulging shopping bags with the logos of Cruzan rum and Tiffany & Co. and Mr. Tablecloth, a fine-linen boutique. The road was jammed with pedestrians and inching-along minibuses, known as safaris—essentially, modified pickup trucks with benches in the back, many with elaborate paint jobs featuring slogans like MR. WONDERFUL and POSITIVE IS HOW I LIVE.¶

  After a few minutes, I’d seen enough—I had no pressing need for a new Rolex or a pallet of rum—and made my way to Veterans Drive, the main drag on the waterfront, hoping to catch one of the safaris that follows a set route around Saint Thomas, serving as public transit. There were a handful of Virgin Islanders at the stop (“Good morning! How you doin’?”), and soon a safari approached. We stepped to the curb in unison, but it chugged past us, packed with cruisers. Every few minutes, more would-be riders appeared—a man carrying a folding table, a woman with a toddler son shyly holding her hand—and more safaris passed us by. I kept checking my watch: ten minutes, fifteen, twenty.

  Aside from me, everyone waiting at the stop was black, and aside from a handful, every tourist on the safaris was white—wasn’t this what Elridge was getting at? Tourism as leisure-class colonialism, taking away resources from locals?

  By the half-hour mark, I was feeling a touch guilty by tourist-association. But the general mood was shoulder-shrugging resignation and a certain we’re-all-in-this-together humor.

  “Why they so busy?” one woman said to no one in particular.

  The man with the folding table replied, “It’s all them Caucasian tourists. The Yankee Taxi!”

  Everyone chuckled. “You a comedian!” the woman with the toddler said.

  “And you a good audience!” said the man. A moment later, he waved lightly at a passing safari driver. “Johnny’s busy today. Good for him.”

  After an hour, I gave up and wandered to a marketplace at the end of Main Street, with twenty or thirty tents and vendors hawking beach towels and shell necklaces and smoothies. A Rasta selling Bob Marley T-shirts patiently told an American customer that, yes, he accepted dollars—only dollars, in fact; “You still in the USA”—which reminded me of Ronnie’s tales of tourists shocked they could watch CBS here, buy a Snickers bar, communicate in English.

  Just past the marketplace was Emancipation Garden, tranquillity with a front-row view of tourist frenzy. I sat on a bench near a middle-aged woman dressed for the office and eating her lunch from a plastic container. She looked bemused and slightly perturbed by the scene around her—behind her rimless glasses, her expression said, “Who are you people?”

  IN THE MIDDLE of Emancipation Garden was a bust of King Christian. To one side was a replica of the Liberty Bell. Nearby was a bronze bust of a slave named Buddhoe blowing a conch shell, starting the rebellion that led to emancipation in 1848.

  I was finally starting to understand the palimpsests of colonialism and globalization, now that I’d dug into my books—principally William Boyer’s America’s Virgin Islands and Isaac Dookhan’s A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States—and talked to some locals and been corrected, at length, by Anne the Dane. The statues weren’t musty relics but potent cultural symbols whose legacies were embedded in the everyday life around me: the Danish architecture, the local residents descended from slaves, the overlay of American culture everywhere from the dollars trading hands to the hip-hop blasting from a safari painted with the words TRUST IN GOD.

  It’s a rollicking history. Christopher Columbus landed at Salt River in Saint Croix in 1493, whereupon the indigenous Caribs attacked, the first recorded instance of armed conflict between Europeans and Native Americans. European colonization started just over a hundred years later and, in turn, led to the enslavement and then total annihilation of the Caribs and their local counterparts, the Taínos, in just a few decades.

  The first major contingent of European settlers on Saint Thomas were Dutch; they founded Charlotte Amalie, though they originally called it Tap Huis—Tap House. The Dutch, English, French, and Danish played a sort of musical-chairs colonialism, here and in the other Virgin Islands. Over on Saint Croix, the Dutch and English both arrived around 1625 and squabbled incessantly—in 1645, the Dutch governor killed the English governor(!), which sparked a battle in which the Dutch governor was himself mortally wounded. The Dutch fled, leaving the Brits in charge until 1650, when five Spanish ships sailed into Saint Croix at night. Then some French Knights of Malta in nearby Saint Kitts noticed the action (“Zut alors, action!”), so they invaded and drove out the Spaniards. The Danes took over Saint Thomas and Saint John in the 1670s (and Saint Croix in 1733) and platted Charlotte Amalie in 1681, naming the city after the Queen of Denmark, Charlotte Amalia, whose name was misspelled by a mapmaker. (The city’s name is still pronounced “Charlotte Amalia.”)

  The Danes also brought the transatlantic slave trade here, in 1673. Sugar was the world’s hottest commodity, shaping the global economy as cotton would in the 1800s and oil would in the 1900s, and the Caribbean was the hot spot for cultivation. Hundreds of sugar plantations dotted the Danish West Indies, and by 1800 they were home to more than thirty-five thousand slaves, more than 75 percent of the islands’ overall population. The slaves built the local economy while enduring all the horrifying details of the “peculiar institution.” By decree of the governor, runaway slaves were to be hung “unless the owner pardon him with the loss of one leg”; a slave who didn’t step aside when meeting a white person was to be flogged; various other infractions would result in branding or having an ear or hand cut off. Even Anne made no attempts to gloss over the history.

  For Americans, it’s easy to think of colonialism in these history-book terms, misdeeds carried out long ago by other people in exotic places. Europeans arrive in pith helmets and jodhpurs, subjugate/annihilate indigenous people, build towns and economies through exploitation and/or slavery, sip coffee on verandas, write long letters to the Queen. These are the arch
etypes of empire and colonialism: the Belgian Congo, the Spanish Conquest of the Incas, the British Raj in India. Here in the Caribbean, British colonialism’s ripple effects have famously been given form by writers like Nobel laureates Derek Walcott (a native of Saint Lucia) and V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad); it is a pulse beating through their every elegiac line, as it is in the music of Bob Marley, the world’s best-known Rasta.

  Rastafari was established in Jamaica in the 1930s as an anti-colonial movement and Afrocentric religion that worships Haile Selassie, the mid–twentieth century emperor of Ethiopia, the only African nation never to be colonized. It spread across the Caribbean, including the USVI, where there are Rastas in the territory’s senate, Rastas at the grocery store, Rasta tour guides; they’re a common part of the everyday culture here. But because they’re so strongly associated with Jamaica, it’s easy to categorize them as imports from another place, with no real relevance here, just as the Danish architecture and history of slavery are imports from another era, wholly separate from here-and-now. They’re relics of the sins of others. (Surely it’s no coincidence that the villain of our pop culture’s most beloved saga, Star Wars, is the Empire—it is a term that conjures, to modern-day Americans, a Tyrannical Other.)

  But where do we draw the line between colony and not-a-colony? If the Danish West Indies were a colony on March 16, 1917, what about the U.S. Virgin Islands on March 17, 1917? Did we make that politically charged label disappear simply by hanging up the UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT shingle?

  I SPENT a few days poking around Charlotte Amalie, wandering around the waterfront and some of the backstreets and even Frenchtown, while constantly glancing over my shoulder, hearing both Ronnie and my distant wife in my mind, cautioning me to be careful. I trekked up a steep street, along with the tourist masses, for an obligatory lesson in the (robust, bloody) pirate history of Saint Thomas at Blackbeard’s Castle, a stone tower that the guide said was actually the notorious buccaneer’s prison. After I climbed to the top of the tower and back down—which took maybe five minutes, including the obligatory photos from the top—I asked the guide the way to the rest of the historic site.

  “Well, okay, you saw the gift shop?” she asked. “And the pool and the rum bar?”

  Yes, I said. Is there more?

  She shook her head and wished me a pleasant day.

  After a jerk-chicken lunch at a small café where the owner cranked up her Sinatra CD and serenaded me with “Pocketful of Miracles,” I went back to the Crystal Palace, where I met Ronnie’s cousin on the porch. She regaled me with stories about their parents and grandparents, including one who was “the dean of pit-bull fighting on the island” and once brought back a small alligator from his travels with the circus, which the kids played with until the parents had second thoughts. Ronnie listened quietly but with a pained expression on the other side of the porch, as he stared down at his domain. Finally, he interrupted and said, “You know, for real history, you need to go to the Historical Trust.”

  The next morning, my last on Saint Thomas, Ronnie called the executive director, a woman named Pamela, and said, “Mr. Mack is on his way.”

  I pushed my way through the Main Street crowds and a short walk later, I was standing in front of an old stone building with a sign reading ST. THOMAS HISTORICAL TRUST. Pamela buzzed me in and I signed the guest book; judging by the entries, only a handful of people came here every day, and I was the sole visitor now. Pamela was originally from the states. She had sandy, shoulder-length hair and a nervous jitter to her voice, hopeful to impress.

  It was a small museum, just a few rooms, with the soothingly bland feel of a small-town doctor’s office—but no worries, I thought, it’s the history that counts. Pamela led me into a room with bottles and plates from a Danish ship, and picked up a football-sized chunk of coal from the days when this was a shipping way station, “the 7-Eleven of the Americas,” Pamela said. This was followed by a room with an old-fashioned mahogany bed that had once belonged to a local doctor, and a small display of sepia photos, donated by Ronnie, showing daily life in Charlotte Amalie around the turn of the twentieth century.

  And . . . that was about it. I kept waiting for more—another room, another floor. By now, I knew there was more to the story of the U.S. Virgin Islands than Danish industry and manor life. But those were the only story lines being told here, in the primary museum in the primary city of the territory, where tens of thousands of tourists arrive every day.

  I was too shy to say it out loud but what was going through my mind was this: Where is everything else?

  There was nothing about the indigenous Caribs and Taínos, nothing about the centuries of colonial battles, nothing about slaves or the multiple slave rebellions, like the one on Saint John in 1733, when the nearly eleven hundred slaves took over the island’s fort and then the entire island for six months. Ran the place. Lived free. Successfully fought off Danish soldiers sent from Saint Thomas and two other takeover attempts by British troops called in by the frantic governor. (The gripping tale is ably told in Night of the Silent Drums by Lonzo Anderson.) And nothing, either, about the islands’ still-vibrant African cultural roots, aside from some photos and a traditional broom made with dried palm fronds, forming broad bristles. Pamela demonstrated with a saleswoman’s fervor: “Better than a vacuum!” Yes, and what else you got?

  Heck, they didn’t even have anything about that perpetual tourist-bait, pirates—not just Blackbeard came here but also Bluebeard, Captain William Kidd, and other swashbucklers, who literally left their mark here, cannons blasting, swords clashing.

  I asked about the history of the past century. This was my main interest, I told Pamela: the American era. She got very quiet and searched the room. Nothing. It was as though in 1917, the long arc of history screeched to a halt, skid marks on the timeline. Money’s tight, Pamela explained, adding that she knew they had work to do. She was a recent hire, the only full-time employee. Some grant funding was starting to come in. I felt bad for her, and silently tried to come up with fund-raising schemes: Sell Tap Huis T-shirts! Get a kiddie pool and reenact colonial battles with little toy ships!

  I walked away jarred, bewildered, and disappointed. That night, I ate dinner at one of the handful of restaurants open in the evening—most, along with nearly all the shops in central Charlotte Amalie, close down after the cruise ships leave in late afternoon—and moped over a beer and a burger. These past few days, I’d alternated between wide-eyed touristic wonder and a pronounced unease, from the safety concerns to the ever-present signs of the culture-skewing effects of tourists like me to . . . well, whatever was going on at the Saint Thomas Historical Trust. And I hoped that when I flew to Saint Croix the next day, I’d find something different. I finished my meal and sprinted back up the hill, past shuttered Main Street, to the Crystal Palace, where Ronnie was waiting on the porch.

  “So,” he asked, “did you learn anything today?”

  THE EARLY DAYS of the American takeover, as it happens, don’t make for an especially cheery, vacationer-education history lesson.

  For the United States, the appeal of the USVI was its utility as a coaling station and vantage point for monitoring the Panama Canal. The Navy officially ran the islands for the first decade after the transfer, and its general attitude toward Virgin Islanders was: What gall of these savage people, to intrude on our islands. Stories of Marines harassing black locals, including children, were commonplace, and public appeals for intervention by the Washington-appointed territorial governors were met with dismissals. In 1918, Governor James Oliver described one complainant as “a sort of half-witted negro . . . constantly causing agitation amongst the ignorant class.” There were some positive developments, to be sure: the Navy improved the local hospitals, sanitation, and access to clean water. Death rates dropped by nearly half. But even beyond the racism and treatment of Virgin Islanders as second-class citizens, the transition proved detrimental in other ways, including the decline of agricultural cultivati
on by almost two-thirds. The economy plummeted.

  Add it all up and it’s clear that while the Navy may not have had pith helmets and bullwhips, this was still Colonialism 2.0. The bigger question is: When did the USVI stop being a colony?

  Was it in 1927, when Virgin Islands residents were finally granted U.S. citizenship and governance transferred to a civilian—though still presidentially appointed—administration? Was it 1931, when President Herbert Hoover became the first American president to visit the islands since the transfer? Hoover’s visit is still remembered here, with frustration and anger. He decreed the USVI “an effective poorhouse,” adding that, “Viewed from every point except remote naval contingencies, it was unfortunate that we ever acquired these islands.” The islands were struggling, it’s true, but Hoover’s derision ignored external factors: the world economy was reeling after the 1929 stock market crash, and a hurricane followed by a drought had tag-teamed to all but wipe out the islands’ sugar plantations. Hoover’s assessment would shade the islands’ collective mood and political outlook for decades. Archibald Alphonso Alexander, who was appointed governor in 1954, called Virgin Islanders “wards of the state,” and his successor, Walter A. Gordon, characterized his constituents as lazy and standoffish.