Relieved, I thanked Bennie and wrote the letter. The next morning we waited for Marcus to arrive at the restaurant. I felt as if I were about to kick my own son out of the house, yet I knew he had to go. I kept repeating our employee’s words to bolster my courage: “He’ll bring the whole place down.” There was no question that if the police found any drug activity at Blanchard’s, we would be blamed. It was also a little scary not knowing how deeply Marcus was involved. Firing a drug dealer could have further ramifications. What if Marcus decided to get even? His unsavory friends could be dangerous.
At ten-thirty, Marcus wandered in with his usual bounce and a cheery “Good morning.”
I looked at Bob, knowing I couldn’t say the words. “Marcus,” Bob said, “we’re going to have to let you go. You’ve been dealing drugs from here, and we can’t allow that.”
Marcus’s expression told me he was shocked that we had found out. He knew how much we cared about him, and tried to defend himself. “I ain’ been dealin’ no drugs.”
“Yes, you have,” Bob continued.
I felt like crying. Marcus looked like a scared little boy, and I wanted to hug him and tell him we were there to help. I knew that was impossible, though. Not in Anguilla. Our work permits could be canceled at any time, and we just couldn’t risk getting involved.
“We also know one of your friends is a big-time dealer,” Bob said.
Marcus dropped his head and said, “Please, Bob, I wan’ this job.”
“I’m sorry,” Bob answered, “but you’ve jeopardized the whole restaurant, and we have no choice. I just want to say a couple of things, and I want you to listen very carefully.” Bob spoke slowly, choosing his words cautiously. “Melinda and I both care about you, Marcus, and we feel very bad about this. I think you are headed down the wrong road, and someday you will get caught.” He paused, either to let that sink in or to figure out what to say next. “I know you go to St. Martin a lot, Marcus, and if you get caught over there, you’ll end up in the underground prison in Guadeloupe. That’s where they send drug dealers; you’ll never see daylight again. Do you understand that?”
I handed Marcus the letter of termination as a formality. I knew he couldn’t read it, but Bennie said it was important.
“You ain’ gonna turn me in, are you?” Marcus asked.
“No,” Bob said, “but I want you to think about what I’ve said, okay?”
And with that, Marcus turned and walked down the road. I could still remember him mimicking and laughing at the cartoon characters in the Thanksgiving Day parade. He was just a child.
It was two weeks before the local election and our kitchen buzzed with political banter. Every five years each of the seven districts on the island voted for their representative to the House of Assembly. England provides Anguilla with a British governor, but from what I gathered from the political debates among Blanchard’s staff, locally elected officials are the ones who really have the power.
Campaigns here are simple. There are no investigations into past indiscretions and no rules about divesting oneself of conflicting interests. Politics in such a small community understandably revolves around people more than issues. Constituents vote for the people they are closest to, the people they trust. And with only a handful of surnames dominating the phone book, many times the vote goes to a family member. This is not to say elections are unfair or even predictable; like anywhere else in the world, voters select officials they feel will make the right decisions. It’s just that in tiny Anguilla, the choices are closer to home.
After the election, the new members of the House of Assembly decide who is most qualified to fill the various positions within the local government. They appoint a chief minister, a minister of finance, a minister of public works, a minister of education, and others. The governor, sent by Her Majesty the queen, works in conjunction with the local officials and shares in running the government.
Night after night, kitchen cleanup was completed in record time so that our staff could get to a political rally. Ozzie was the smallest of our crew, but when it came to politics, his presence filled the room. “Mel, Eddie talkin’ tonight,” he said animatedly. “He the first man who get school bus to go Sandy Ground, ya know. Eddie Baird, he the man.” Ozzie’s usual dance routines turned into brilliant impersonations of the various candidates. He strode around the kitchen, chest puffed up and feet turned out, mimicking the opposition.
“Yeah,” Bug would argue. “But David the man who gonna keep Anguilla goin’ the right direction. He the man we need. He think bigger than school buses.”
“You ain’ got children in Sandy Ground,” Ozzie retorted. “We ain’ wan’ our kids walkin’ up that long hill to go school.”
Blanchard’s kitchen reflected the political divisions of Anguilla, albeit in the friendliest of fashions. Bug cheerfully disagreed with Ozzie and Garrilin with Lowell. They all cared deeply about the future of Anguilla, and their passion was sometimes deafening. As with so many kitchen discussions, I had to remind them we had customers just around the corner.
Posters were stapled to telephone poles, flyers were distributed at local shops, and billboards on elaborate wooden stands were erected along the main road. Nobody was making campaign buttons, but I thought it would have been a good business to start. Everyone seemed to wear a T-shirt promoting his or her preferred candidate, and the local radio station continually broadcasted political speeches and commentaries.
Politics permeated every facet of local life, yet our staff knew better than to lobby Bob and me. We listened to the debates but said not a word. We had friends representing all parties in the race and wanted to keep them as friends.
At six o’clock on the night before the elections Blanchard’s was busy with its usual predinner activities. The dining room was being set, Shabby was filleting fish, and Garrilin was washing greens for salad. I went into the walk-in cooler to take a quick inventory, and by the time I came out, everyone was gone. Ozzie had deserted his station; Bug’s sink was filled with suds and ready to go, but there was no Bug. I ran to the dining room and found it empty as well. Just as I was starting to get nervous that I’d missed some emergency, Bob came into the bar, motioning for me to come outside.
There they all were in the parking area, a jumble of excitement. “What’s going on?” I asked Miguel.
“Motorcade” was all he said.
“Mel,” Lowell explained, “this a motorcade for the opposition. These the people who ain’ in power and who wanna be in power.”
“But I don’t see any cars,” I said.
“They comin’,” Ozzie said. “They jus’ pass though South Hill and they comin’ Meads Bay now.” How he knew their exact location, I hadn’t a clue. But as our entire clan stood by the road I could feel the tension mount, and in a few minutes I heard horns tooting in the distance. As the cars rounded the corner by the salt pond, our staff burst into loud cheers and jeers, depending on whose side they were on.
I don’t know how many vehicles were in the motorcade, but it went on for miles and miles down the road. Hundreds of people were piled into the back of pickups, dump trucks, and jeeps; even a backhoe had a slew of hangers-on. By the time they were directly in front of Blanchard’s, the chorus of tooting horns was blaring. I saw dozens of familiar faces, and everyone waved frantically as they passed.
Fifteen minutes later the horns were fading in the distance, and we all filed back into the restaurant to prepare for dinner. We were behind schedule and had to work extra fast to make up for lost time.
A few minutes later Garrilin looked at me and grinned. “Here we go again.” Before I knew it, the entire gang was back outside. I followed, knowing there was no hope of getting anyone to focus on dinner with motorcade number two now approaching.
“This the other side now,” Lowell said. “These be the people in power and they wanna stay in power.” Each party had a symbol that they used for the campaign: the hand, the clock, the bird, and the tree. This motorc
ade clearly had a large contingent from the tree party, because people were energetically waving huge branches out of car windows and trucks.
The motorcade was almost past when our first guests arrived for dinner. We weren’t quite ready and explained about the big day coming up. Bob bought them a glass of wine and stalled them with a few stories. It was an exhilarating evening in the kitchen. The polls would open the next morning at seven, and everyone was fired up and ready for the count.
The voting took place in schools and under tents in each district around the island. People lined up to make their mark and drop their paper into the ballot box. A candidate can sometimes win by only a few votes, so the count was done carefully and in public, to avoid any mistakes. On election night everyone showed up early for work. They couldn’t bear the thought of being apart when the results started coming in. The TV in the kitchen was tuned to the local station, where the counting of the ballots was being televised, and Ozzie’s car radio was tuned to Radio Anguilla as it reported the tally. Bug and Ozzie took turns running to the parking lot to hear the latest commentary.
Each and every ballot was pulled out of a box and read aloud while someone held it up for verification in front of the TV camera. The live telecast continued throughout dinner, and more than once I heard Clinton chime in to the rhythm of the count:
Osbourne Fleming . . . the hand
Ronald Webster . . . the hat
Osbourne Fleming . . . the hand
Osbourne Fleming . . . the hand
Ronald Webster . . . the hat
Then, counting another district:
Franklin Connor . . . the bird
Hubert Hughes . . . the tree
Hubert Hughes . . . the tree
Hubert Hughes . . . the tree
Franklin Connor . . . the bird
And on it went for hours, seven districts, sixteen candidates. It was hypnotic—so much so that Clinton and Shabby would mimic aloud the counting process for weeks to come. It was though they had fallen into a trance. When the results were finalized that night, half our staff was cheering and the other half was silent. It was the first time we’d ever seen Bug without a smile.
We figured that was the end of elections for five years. We figured wrong. That night everyone again was out by the road, cheering and jeering. The winners were driving the entire length of the island in one last colossal motorcade, thanking their constituents for their victory. I reckoned elections were really over now and I had five years to figure out how to make campaign buttons.
The traditional food for Easter is salt fish, and Roxana wanted to make sure I sampled her mother’s recipe. She, Garrilin, and I met under the Saturday food tent where I’d tasted the bull-foot soup. One of the women from the church heaped a mound of what looked like yellow shreds onto our plates; we pulled out bottles of water and soda from a cooler, and before I picked up my fork, Garrilin wanted to tell me what I was about to eat.
“The fish ain’ from here, ya know. It imported from up by all you. Up there in the States. It codfish that be dried, and it keep forever—that why we like it. It come too salty, though, so we boil it in water with some sugar to sweeten it up. The sugar dissolve the salt—you know ’bout that?”
I had no time to answer before Roxana chimed in, “Mommy cook it twice. After she cook it in the water an’ sugar, then we all help to remove the bones. Mel, there a lotta bones in that fish, ya know.”
I took my first bite and wished they had used even more sugar. Garrilin and Roxana were eating steadily, obviously not at all bothered by the salt.
“Mel, here some ginger beer to wash it down,” Roxana said, handing me a cup. I’d tasted ginger beer before and knew it was strong. It’s made from fresh ginger soaked in water with just a little sugar, vanilla extract, and a drop of lime juice.
“So anyway,” Garrilin continued, “after all the bones outta the fish, we chip it up and cook it in a little oil with celery, peppers, onion, garlic, and a little curry, and let it stew to mix all the flavors. Mel, every house in Anguilla cook salt fish for Easter. It a local . . . what that word you use?” She thought for a moment. “It a real delicacy. That the word I try to think of.” Delicacy wasn’t the word that came to my mind. I was happy to have a johnnycake on the side, to help cut the salt.
Easter Monday is an official holiday in Anguilla, set aside for the national sport of boat racing. The tradition developed a hundred years ago, when ships came down from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean laden with lumber and salt cod and sailed back north with rum, sugar, molasses, and cotton from more prosperous islands such as Antigua and Barbados. Anguilla, the northernmost of the Leeward Islands, was their final stop, where they’d top off their cargo with salt from the ponds before leaving the West Indies.
The schooners from Nova Scotia were faster, lighter, and easier to sail than the European boats that were also picking up goods from the region. Several industrious Anguillians replicated this schooner design and built their own fleet to transport cargo throughout the Caribbean.
Since work on Anguilla was always limited, people looked for additional income off island. Sugar companies from Santo Domingo set up a recruiting station in Marigot on St. Martin, and on the first or second day of every year hundreds of Anguillians, along with people from surrounding islands, piled aboard the sleek cargo schooners to go cut cane on the rich sugar plantations.
Sails would fill the harbor, and the schooners would all weigh anchor for the four-day journey to Santo Domingo. Competition was inevitable as captains and crew sailed off into the sunset. Even more passionate still was the race back home, when the men returned to Anguilla after months away. Hundreds of families would wait on the beach, cheering as the sails appeared one by one around the point at Sandy Ground. The speed of each schooner became public record, and the competition became even fiercer. Boat racing as a spectator sport in Anguilla was born.
The love of racing spread, and it is said that every day was a race day in Anguilla, with the local fishing boats chasing each other back home after a day at sea. By the 1970s, however, fishing boats were fitted with outboard motors and were no longer fun to race, so people started to build boats specifically for that purpose. Today Anguilla’s racing boats still resemble the old fishing boats—the largest are twenty-eight feet long—and are completely open, with masts that soar up to fifty feet into the air.
Bob and I had listened to boat talk in the kitchen for months and were eager to witness our first Easter Monday race. The skillfully handcrafted wooden vessels gathered that morning at Sandy Ground; some sailed in from Island Harbor, while others were hauled overland by trailer. We walked up and down the beach admiring each boat as the crews assembled the rigging. The huge sails were spread out on the sand; ropes were threaded through rows of grommets and then lashed around the mast. Once ready to launch, logs were placed under each boat, and a dozen hot, grunting men rolled and skidded the boats along the sand and into the sea.
We spotted Shabby pushing a bright yellow boat named Stinger. His massive shoulders were propelling the boat toward the water in forceful jolts; the rest of the men were helping, but when Shabby leaned into it, the Stinger really moved. Bob went over and offered his assistance, and Shabby said, “Yeah, man, grab hold. Okay, now push.” The heavy wooden boat skidded a few feet. “Push,” Shabby called out, and it moved again.
I sat down on the hot sand to enjoy the action. I counted fourteen boats up and down the beach and watched as hundreds of people gathered round for the race. The smell of fresh paint from the boats mingled with that of barbecued chicken and ribs from the dozen or so grills set up on the beach. A steady thumping beat boomed from Johnno’s Beach Bar, where a group of people milled about, hips swaying and heads bobbing, many with a Heineken in one hand and a grilled chicken leg in the other.
Stinger floated off the beach, and Bob came back to tell me he’d seen Lowell’s boat. “It’s called Light and Peace,”he said. “It’s a beauty—shiny gray with a yellow stripe
at the top.”
Lowell saw us coming and waved from the boat. He was sitting on the gunwale along with seven other men, all wearing life preservers with the boat’s name printed on the back.
“We goin’ out to give ’er a try,” Lowell yelled, using his hand as a megaphone to make himself heard over the crowd. As the big sail swung around, all eight men quickly ducked, the boom narrowly missing their heads. The sail filled with wind, and Light and Peace skimmed away from shore with her crew leaning far out over the side.
Lowell’s captain maneuvered around the sailboats and yachts anchored in the bay, then tacked back and forth, testing the wind, before returning to shore. The crew jumped off and waded up to the beach. Lowell grabbed a shovel and began filling a nylon bag with beach sand. “She need more ballast,” he said. “She too light.” The men carried the sandbag out into the water and handed it up into the boat, where the captain placed it in the bottom along with the lead weights, rocks, and other sandbags.
“Why do you need ballast?” Bob asked. “Doesn’t the keel have lead in the bottom?”
“No, man,” Lowell said. “All the boats got live ballast so we can haul ’em up on shore when we done. They be too heavy if we couldn’t take the weight out. Besides, on the way back, we sometimes throw some of the sand overboard to adjust for the wind. I gotta go. We startin’ at eleven o’clock.” He waded out to Light and Peace, pulled himself up over the gunwale, and took his place with the crew.
All fourteen boats were now in the water, sails unfurled, and the crowd on the beach was gathered at the water’s edge for the start. Mr. Cool, the island’s refrigeration authority and owner of one of the racing boats, was in charge. He marched up and down the beach with the start gun, asking if all boats were ready. Once satisfied that they were, he raised his pistol in the air and fired. The race was on.
A roar came up from the crowd as the boats pulled away in a rainbow of color. Bob and I watched as they got smaller and smaller, and soon all we could see were fourteen little white triangles, all tilted the same way, all headed west.
A Trip to the Beach Page 18