by Rebecca Hale
With another sigh, I relented. “California. I used to be a lawyer.”
I bit down on my lip. The last phrase had slipped out before I could catch myself. I’d opened myself up to another line of questioning—one that I would rather not have to fudge the answers to.
“I’m a lawyer too,” my companion stated immediately. “Self-taught,” he added unabashedly. “Been in court dozens of times. I always represent myself, and I’ve always won.”
He pointed proudly at his chest. “That district attorney man, he’ll never convict me.”
With a wan smile of relief, I leaned back in my seat.
“You should come visit me at Maho Bay,” he invited eagerly. “I’ll cook you dinner at my teepee tent.”
Conrad quickly read the refusal on my face. He stroked his chin and tried another tack.
“You know, they’ve got a ghost up there at the campgrounds. I’ve seen her lots of times.”
I cleared my throat. This was quickly turning into a very long ferry ride. “You don’t say.”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, pushing himself onto the edge of his seat so that he could crawl even farther over the back of mine. “If you walk into the woods and stay real quiet, become one with the surrounding nature—you know, let your Zen ooze out—oftentimes, she’ll just sneak up behind you and tap you on the shoulder.”
Conrad’s bony fingers gently touched my shoulder blades.
“I bet I could introduce you to her, to the ghost that is, if you come for dinner at my teepee tent.”
Wincing dismissively, I shrugged out from under his grasp.
Conrad continued, undeterred. “This ghost, she’s from the 1700s, back when the islands were full of sugar plantations.”
His eyeballs bulged, stretching his skin against the tight contours of his face.
“She was part of a group of slaves that were brought over from West Africa. Her people were called the Amina. They were one of the most powerful tribes in the Gold Coast area, fierce warriors that all the others lived in fear of.
“But I guess the Amina had a run of bad luck and lost a couple of battles. A rival chief sold them to the Danish slave traders.”
Raindrops began to spit against the windows of the ferry as the sky grew darker, dimming the light inside the cabin. Conrad’s pale face glowed in the shadows. He licked his upper lip, warming to his narrative.
“Before her capture, the woman who became this ghost, she’d been part of her tribe’s nobility. She was the king’s daughter, the tribe’s princess. A delicate flower of a woman—just like you.”
Conrad paused for a lecherous wink in my direction. I rolled my eyes and looked pointedly at my watch. He cleared his throat and returned to the tale.
“The Princess managed to survive the ocean passage across the Atlantic to Charlotte Amalie; that’s where she and several other members of her tribe were auctioned off. Most of them were bought for plantations over on St. John. You can still see the ruins of the sugar mill where the Princess used to work, just off the North Shore Road on your way up to Maho.”
Conrad smacked his lips together. “It was a hard life, being a sugar slave—rough, I tell you.” He wiped his brow for emphasis.
“But from the moment of their capture and enslavement, the members of this warrior tribe began plotting their revenge. A couple of months after they arrived on St. John, they organized a massive revolt and took over the island. It was a bloody siege that caught everyone by surprise. Some of the plantation owners and their families escaped to St. Thomas, but most of them were”—Conrad twisted his face into a lurid expression and made a slicing motion across his bobbing Adam’s apple—“slaughtered.”
The rain was coming down now in nearly horizontal sheets, slamming against the windows of the ferry. I gripped the side of the bench as the boat heaved sideways in the rolling waves.
“These rebel slaves, they held on to the island for six or seven months before reinforcements of French troops arrived to help the Danes. Once the slaves saw the size of the incoming fleet, they knew they were outnumbered. And they knew what would happen to them if they were captured. So, as the troops advanced on their camp”—he drew in his breath, his thin face wrinkling under the force of an exaggerated cringe—“they committed suicide.
“Some of them used the muskets they’d stolen from the plantations. Some slit their throats with their knives. But one of the rebel slaves, the Princess, she chose a different method. She hiked up to the northern rim of Mary’s Point, just beyond the curve of Maho Bay. There on a cliff, overlooking Tortola, she stepped to the edge, closed her eyes, and jumped off”—he made a whirring flap with his lips, followed by an imitation of a loud splash before completing the sentence—“into the ocean.”
Conrad leaned even closer toward me, the pale skin on his skeletal face shining in the storm’s eerie half-light. His voice dropped to a whisper.
“Something about her death—the way the water swallowed her up—it didn’t quite do the job. Her spirit was too strong. It survived even after her body perished. The waves tossed her out onto the beach there at Maho, and she’s been haunting the island ever since. Everyone at the campground has seen her at least once or twice.”
He thunked his chest solemnly. “Every year, the Princess, she comes to visit me.”
He paused, switching his expression to an impish grin. “In my teepee tent at the far end of the campground.”
Wearily, I shook my head. I’d heard more than enough about Conrad’s teepee tent.
“No, no, honest, I swear,” he protested. “Late at night near the beach, you can hear her voice. It’s kind of a mournful, wailing chant.”
He made a strained caterwauling sound before nodding informatively at me. “They call her the Amina Slave Princess. The Ghost of the Slave Princess. Ask anybody. She hangs out most nights at Maho Bay.”
Conrad collapsed onto his bench and stretched his arms wide across its back metal railing. He was convinced of the ghost story, even if I wasn’t buying it.
“I tell you what, St. John, it’s an amazing place,” he said reverently. “I look forward every year to coming down here. This island, it will pull you apart, then put you back together again—if you let it.”
In the years since my first encounter with Conrad the charismatic hippie, I have heard many versions of the Amina Slave Princess story. The legend has been repeated over and over again, particularly among those of Afro-Caribbean descent.
Of late, some have come to believe that the Princess walks among us—that she has taken on human form to protect the sanctity of the shoreline where her lifeless body washed up, all those many years ago.
I leaned back in the white plastic lawn chair and took another slurp from the strawberry drink. If the rumor that Hannah had been done in by the Amina Slave Princess was circulating among the waitresses at the Crunchy Carrot, it was well on its way through the island’s gossip chain.
Of course, I knew Hannah hadn’t been sucked into the water by a wrathful sea spirit. I knew exactly what had happened to her—because I was the one responsible for her disappearance.
3
A Dark History
Setting aside Conrad’s constant references to his teepee tent, his ferryboat recounting of St. John’s slave rebellion did manage to capture the overall gist of the event. He glossed over a few aspects of the historical record, however, that are worth mentioning.
Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Virgin Islands in 1493, during his second trip to the Americas, a region he inaccurately identified as the West Indies. (Columbus’s vehement geographical assertions to the contrary, the islands he discovered were nowhere near India, Asia, or any other Far East spice-trade landmass. Nevertheless, the people of this region are still commonly referred to as West Indians.)
For the most part, Columbus and his Spanish cousins passed up the Virgins in lieu of the Greater Antilles islands to the east, which, they believed, were more likely to hold the fabled gold mines th
ey so desperately sought. Beyond the Virgins’ lack of obvious mineral riches, the European explorers were eager to avoid the area’s militant Carib inhabitants—their warriors considered the Europeans’ ten-der human flesh to be a tasty delicacy.
So the Spaniards gave the Virgins a wide berth and focused the brunt of their marauding efforts on the island of Hispaniola (now divided into the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Unfortunately, even brief contact with the Europeans was enough to do in the Virgins’ native tribes. Many died from the strange new illnesses the explorers brought to the area. The rest were subsumed in the first wave of colonial slave trading. With the exception of a scattering of British settlements to the east, by the time the Danish set their sights on St. Thomas in the mid-1600s, the Virgin Islands were largely wild and uninhabited.
Despite the island’s unoccupied status, the Danes had a tough time getting their new colony started. Their fledgling settlement was raided and obliterated several times over by the pirates that plied the Caribbean waters. It wasn’t until 1672 that a permanent township finally took root in the area now known as Charlotte Amalie.
As reports of these trials and tribulations filtered back to Denmark, fewer and fewer Danes volunteered for the trip across the Atlantic. The government was forced to recruit nationals from neighboring Nordic states, and, as a result, there were soon as many Dutch as Danish in the Danish Virgin Islands.
Once the foothold on St. Thomas was finally established, the colony grew quickly. Before long, most of the island’s arable land fell under the control of a few wealthy plantation owners.
In 1718, searching for unclaimed fields to cultivate, a small group of farmers crossed the Pillsbury Sound to the neighboring island of St. John. They circled around to Hurricane Hole, the protected cove on the island’s opposite side, and set up permanent camps in what is now known as Coral Bay. The meager contingent of Danish troops who accompanied the settlers built a rudimentary fort on a hill overlooking the settlement and the surrounding soon-to-be sugarcane fields.
Sugar production was the all-consuming obsession of the Caribbean during the colonial era, and this labor-intensive industry rapidly burned through the few native workers who had survived the Europeans’ initial invasion. Before long, it became clear to the colonial powers that the only way to maintain and harvest the islands’ valuable sugar crops would be through the use of imported labor, most readily found in the form of slave trade from Africa. The Danes soon turned to this approach for their primary source of manpower.
For the chattel on board the Danish slave-trading ships, it was a terrifying trip from the Gold Coast of West Africa to the auction yards on St. Thomas. During the months of ocean passage, the slaves were chained together and frequently packed into the fetid cusp of the ship’s hull. The extreme heat and unsanitary conditions in the below-deck quarters often led to the outbreak of illness and death among the hapless captives.
Those slaves that survived Danish transport across the Atlantic were put up for auction at Charlotte Amalie. The bidding price for each slave varied depending on the individual’s age, gender, and physical condition—but the most important criterion for determining a slave’s value was his African tribe affiliation.
By the early 1700s, the majority of slaves entering the Danish trading system were casualties of tribal warfare. Danish forts along the African coast traded with various tribal chieftains for slaves that were captured as part of ongoing intertribal conflicts in the region. As the Colonial demand for sugar slaves increased, the situation in West Africa grew more and more turbulent, destabilizing the established power structure and destroying many long-standing alliances.
Caribbean plantation owners lived in constant fear of slave rebellions and uprisings; if at all possible, they steered clear of slaves they suspected of having a militant background. Individuals from tribes thought to be more easily pacified brought a premium price at auction and were generally sold to the more prosperous plantations on St. Thomas, leaving those from tribes with warmongering reputations to the struggling farmers on the backwater island of St. John.
Despite the hopes of those first migrating planters, St. John turned out to have minimal agricultural potential. The island had a much smaller landmass than St. Thomas, and the available acreage suitable for farming was limited by its hilly topography. Many of the sugar plantations on St. John were eventually deeded to absentee landowners, who in turn relegated their responsibilities to largely unsupervised overseers.
As a result, the least desirable land in the Virgin Islands ended up with the least desirable slaves, that is, those most likely to resist their enslavement. It was no coincidence, then, that one of the most significant slave rebellions in the history of the Virgin Islands happened here on St. John.
In the fall of 1733, after a miserable crop season besieged first by drought, then hurricanes, a group of recently arrived warrior slaves planned and executed an uprising that took over the island for almost seven months. Some if not all of these rebels belonged to an African tribe the Dutch called “Amina.”
The rebel slaves sought to establish a new Amina empire that would encompass all of St. John and eventually extend east across the Virgins to the sparsely inhabited island of British Tortola. As envisioned by the rebels, this Amina territory would be ruled by their designated king and his noblemen. Theirs was not, by any means, a pan-emancipation effort. They expected, as was typical among the warring tribes in their previous West Africa homeland, to profit from the slave labor of other African ethnic groups as well as any of the homesteaders who survived the rebels’ initial attack. Given the prospect of Amina enslavement, many of St. John’s non-Amina slaves sided with their white owners during the revolt.
The Amina assault began November 23, 1733, at the Danish fort overlooking Coral Bay when a group of slaves purportedly delivering firewood overpowered the seven unsuspecting Danish soldiers manning the fort. The Amina rebels killed all but one of the soldiers (the lone survivor escaped by hiding under a bed); then they fired the fort’s cannon as a signal to their fellow conspirators throughout the island.
The cannon shot was followed by the blowing of conch shells, a call to arms for a bloody slaughter that commenced on plantations across St. John. The Amina wrought their vengeance against white slave-owning families as well as overseers of any color who failed to flee their path. Their reign of terror extended across the island’s north coast from Brown Bay, where an entire family was gruesomely slain, to the front gates of the plantation now occupied by the Caneel Bay resort.
Within a few weeks’ time, Danish troops from St. Thomas managed to recapture the fort at Coral Bay, but the Amina rebels maintained their grip on the rest of the island. They dispersed into the heavily forested jungle interior, many taking refuge in the dense woods of Mary’s Point, a bulging knob of hilly land that curves out from the modern-day eco-resort at Maho Bay to form the island’s northernmost point. Every so often, the rebels emerged from hiding to ambush patrolling soldiers or to raid and ransack another plantation.
Over the next several months, the Amina fought off assaults by both Danish and British troops. It wasn’t until an elite squadron of French colonial soldiers began a systemic sweep of St. John that the rebels finally gave up their Amina empire aspirations and faced the inevitable grim reality of their immediate future. In the slave-driven society of the colonial-era Caribbean, punishments for even the slightest act of slave disobedience were well publicized and severe. Recriminations for escape were, by design, so egregiously horrifying that only the bravest, most desperate souls dared make the attempt.
If caught, runaway slaves were subjected to a public display of hideous, sadistic torture, usually involving hot irons and crudely executed dismemberment, generally culminating in a slow and painful death. The heinousness of the penalty that would be exacted for seven months of open rebellion, not to mention the murder of several white plantation families, was simply unimaginable; for the Amina rebels, suicide
before capture was the only alternative.
The majority of the Amina chose to take their own lives; the few who couldn’t bring themselves to make that sacrifice soon regretted their decision.
The tale of the Amina Slave Princess, the one Conrad so vividly recounted, offers a somewhat romanticized twist on this story’s sad ending. According to the legend, instead of slitting her throat, the Princess opted to take a suicidal leap into the drowning depths of the Caribbean Sea.
The actual site of this jumping-off point has, of late, become the subject of some discussion on the island. Although Conrad and others place the Princess’s fateful plunge at the tip of Mary’s Point, many agree the more logical location is from the cliffs of Ram Head, a narrow peninsula of land that protrudes from the arid southeast corner of the island.
From the two-hundred-foot height of this barren, windblown peak, one can see the low shadow of St. Croix to the south and the flat-faced boulders of Virgin Gorda to the east. Directly below, the roiling churn of the ocean surrounds a bone-crushing array of volcanic rock.
As one stands on this dramatic spot, the image of a lonely, desperate woman leaping from the cactus-strewn precipice fixes the imagination. It is the ultimate act of rebellion, self-sacrifice in the name of self-preservation.
Despite the Virgins’ modern-day reputation as an idyllic vacation destination, the evanescent remnants of those tormented souls still float through the islands’ ether. The area’s dark history is reflected in the faces of many of the Territory’s current inhabitants, who have inherited their ancestors’ numerical advantage along with much of their seething resentment. Fixation with the Virgin Islands’ tragic history dominates and divides the modern political landscape, a deep fissure straining beneath the surface, threatening to rupture the fragile foundations of the Territory’s still-nascent democracy.