SPURN BABYLON
EASING BACK ON the throttle of the company’s yellow Scarab powerboat, just clearing the rocky point of Hassel Island, I found myself stunned by the lack of yachts. Usually St. Thomas’s Charlotte Amalie harbor was a forest of masts and a rainbow of hull colors. Now only two ships sat at anchor, looking lonely and out of place. The recent hurricane that had closed down the island’s airport, forcing my company to send me here by boat rather than plane, had swept this anchorage clean.
Even more incredibly, a three-masted square-rigger lay lopsided on the waterfront’s concrete shoreline.
“Where’d that come from,” I wondered aloud.
I shook my head, wishing I had a camera.
It didn’t seem like things were all that bad, I thought later, sipping a Red Stripe and relaxing underneath the flapping awning of the Greenhouse Restaurant. Even only two weeks after the worst hurricane in the Virgin Island’s recorded history, things looked okay. Maybe even “irie,” as my supervisor seemed to glory in saying, trying to imitate local dialect. I distantly understood that half the houses on the island were uninhabitable, and I could smell seaweed no matter where I walked. But these islands were well known for recovering quickly.
I let the condensation roll off the side of the brown bottle and down the back of my hand, a cold contrast to the heat shimmering off of the concrete all around me. In the distance a generator hummed, keeping even more beer cold. Life went on.
“Evening,” someone said.
J. Ottley sat down into the seat across from me. The plastic hinges squeaked. He removed a well-worn straw hat and set it on the table. His long sleeved shirt was soaked under the armpits. He ran the St. Thomas cell of B.E. aerospace division, one of three sections.
“Evening to you,” I replied, handing Ottley the keys to the Scarab. Sombrero Island held our main launch pad complex, weathering the storm with minimal damage. St. Croix supported additional docking and shipping facilities for our sea-launch sections and shipping for the launch complex. St. Thomas housed even more shipping facilities. I’d spent the last week running around St. Croix helping rebuild damage to the sterile clean-rooms that prepared satellites for launch. Cutting edge. Now it was time to check in and make sure our warehouses here in St. Thomas were okay. “Ottley, what is that?” I pointed at the ship across the street from us. Now I could see a thick patina of silt hung to its sides.
Two brown-skinned men with dreadlocks and baggy gray trousers stood around, poking at the hull. A few uniformed students in red trousers and white shirts from the local public school had climbed aboard. They hung from the long wooden pole that stuck out of the front of the boat. The bowsprit, I think it would be called. The topsides seemed about seventy feet long. It looked just like my mental image of a traditional old wooden ship.
“An old ship,” Ottley said. “Very old. From under the sea.”
And that was all he would say. He gave me folders with pictures of the damage taken to our warehouses. Roofs ripped off, boosters inside damaged. There was water damage to a few satellites.
Yet my eye kept wandering from the pictures of fractured composites to the silhouette just on the edge of my vision.
A waterspout spawned by the recent hurricane must have sucked the ancient wooden ship up from the silted bottom of Charlotte Amalie harbor. And then set it next to the asphalt road in a pool of stagnant seawater and gray harbor mud. But even as I tried to envision that, I struggled. There should be more damage. What strange force had preserved it from decay?
I spent the next day coordinating the recovery efforts. We had a warehouse near the airport, more or less on the west side of St. Thomas; one in Red Hook, the east end; and an office in town. I tackled Red Hook first. Later, as the sun began to shimmer and kiss the distant salty horizon, I sat down exhausted on a lounge chair next to the pool and bar of the Marriott Hotel; Frenchman’s Reef. From the pool I could see the entire curve of the harbor and the whole waterfront skyline.
Charlotte Amalie is a beautiful little Caribbean town. Its Dutch architecture is mostly symmetrical, and the facades of the stocky two-story buildings reflect that with arches and squared windows in even numbers. The colors of the walls are vibrant bright yellows, pinks, clean whites, contrasted with red shingled roofs. Similarly colored tiny houses cluster all over the steep mountainside.
And sitting there I realized a familiar wooden shape was still up on the waterfront.
I took out my surveyor’s monocle and zoomed in. The dark-skinned crowd still surrounded the ship, and they had tools. I could see them hacking away at the hull. It seemed an inefficient way to move the ship.
Another sip of Margarita later I left to find my room.
I hired a taxi to take me out to the warehouse near the airport. It was a blue Toyota pickup with bench seats and a large canopy strapped onto the bed. “Safari bus.” I sat in front with the driver, who had what sounded like reggae thumping away in the cab. A harsh scratchy voice in a strong accent swore and belted out angry lyrics.
“Buju Banton,” he said, turning it down.
“Sorry?” I didn’t understand. He pointed at the tape and I understood; the name of the singer. “Airport.”
“Right.”
New York taxi drivers had nothing on island driving. We took off out the driveway and onto the road. Every corner seemed the last, with the pickup leaning, the contraption on the back shifting as we turned. Particularly since I couldn’t shake the conviction that we were driving on the wrong side of the road, the left. The driver honked and waved at every other car or pickup going the other way, and at the pedestrians along side the street.
The road took us down gently into town, and there we slowed down to a crawl with all the other cars. Finally I could get a close look at the ship. Crowds still surrounded it, but I didn’t think they were government workers. Children, old women, a Rastafarian with long dreadlocks and tattered jeans; some of them wielded tools, scraping away at the ship. Others stood around, singing hymns, or just watching. Many had tears in their eyes.
Some of the wet planks were pulled away to expose ribs. I could see the dim gleam of white inside. Skeletons? It suddenly dawned on me that this was an old slave ship. Horrible. I shivered. St. Thomas had been one of the center points of the trade, being one of the best natural harbors in the Caribbean. Had a pirate ship fired and sunk this slaver in the harbor? Divers often searched the bottom after large cruise ships stirred up the silt, looking for history. But here it had been brought straight to land.
I leaned over and tapped the driver, who was just as fascinated as I was.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Taking care of it,” he said. He had a strong accent: “Tekkin’ cyare af it.”
“What is it?” I whispered.
“It old,” he told me. “Very old.”
I had lunch again with Ottley. It was nice to relax and talk business with the skinny round-faced local. We reviewed plans on fixing the warehouses. Afterwards I walked out onto the concrete walkway that extended across the bay, following the old shoreline.
“You goin’ ah see it?” a passerby asked me.
I nodded.
I left my beer on the table, feeling that standing there and looking at the ship with a beer in hand would be sacrilegious. I felt this strange, deep tugging that called me closer.
The crowd around the ship parted and let me through. I could see a full range of color. From the darkest black man to the pale and grizzled yachtsmen, they all stood around watching me. Work paused. The wind kicked up a haze of dust that brushed past, tugging up my shirt and cooling the sweat on the small of my back. Someone coughed.
Placing the tips of my fingers on a plank, I looked at my tan hand and wondered how I fit in. I pressed against the wood, and it gave slightly, soft with age. Beyond that I could feel something else beneath the surface. A sense of history, the past talking directly to me. It was a knot in my stomach.
And yet, I still remained distant. Maybe because my ancestors were mixed, and I could never bring myself to identify with either side. It was the same struggle I had with deciding what “race” box to check off on paperwork, or applications. Black? Definitely some: there’s my unnaturally easy tan. White? During winter I would blend in with the average mall crowd, an easy anonymous decision. Or even maybe a little Latino, and some Oriental thrown in for good measure. I was trapped in dispassion. In the end, I always chose “other.”
I pulled away, and an old graying Rasta next to me nodded.
“Hear it call,” he said in a deep voice. His muscles stood out as he grasped and ripped a plank away. I looked into the heart of the ship. Sometime during the night the bleached remains of the scattered skeletons had been removed, but the chains and manacles still hung from the bulkheads and partitions, the iron blacker than the skin of the man standing next to me. They should have had barnacles on them, or been rusted, yet they gleamed at me as new as they day they were made. What force was at work here?
Then the moment passed, and the crowd began to attack the hull of the ship again. I wandered off and found a stand selling Johnny Cakes, fried dough of some sort. Pates were a rolled up pastry with meat inside. One of each and a Coke made for a good lunch.
Early the next morning I went through the motions of moving our office to a building in better shape. But even in the back streets of town I was near enough the ship that it dominated my thoughts. At lunch I wandered through the alleys with small shops and cool shade until I ended back up at the ship.
“Eh, white-boy. Hyere.”
The same old Rasta greeted me. He’d been waiting. He handed me a pick and I joined him at the hull, pulling off the old planks. We spent a sweaty hour ripping off old wood and stacking it up near the sidewalk. After that we took a lunch break, eating pates, squatting on pieces of wood. Two skinny old fellows slapped dominoes on a table, and Soca music drifted over from a small tinny speaker.
Eventually three other men joined us. The Rasta passed around a joint, and the five of us sat in silence for fifteen minutes, seeking enlightenment, drifting to the warbling in the air.
“Come.” The old Rasta got up, and I followed him around to the other side.
Here I found my surprise. They weren’t just taking the ship apart; they were rebuilding it. New waterproofed lengths of wood replaced the old. I hadn’t paid attention before, but the sound of sawing I’d heard while pulling planks off was not that of the old planks being broken apart.
“Why are you rebuilding it?” I asked. “Will you make it a museum?” I was trying to understand. The Rasta shook his locks.
“The whore of Babylon fall soon, we have ah be ready.”
“The whore of Babylon?”
“Babylon America,” he told me, shaking his locks. “Jus’ like in Revelations.” Revvy-lay-shons. “U.S. Virgin Islands part of Babylon, is time for we to spurn Babylon.”
My head spun from the sweet smoke in the air, and I blinked. The ship hummed.
It scared me. The wooden planks, the manacles, the calm intensity of the people working at restoration. Yet they didn’t plan to restore it. I would have understood restoration. I wanted to help with that, to rediscover a hidden part of myself, make peace with myself. Just like the Jewish I read about who returned to Auschwitz.
These people were planning something different though. I didn’t understand what. So I drank alcoholic drinks with umbrellas back at the hotel. Every time I visited the bar at the pool I could see the waterfront, and I couldn’t push the ship out of my mind. It was a relic, a reminder, and a key, and I didn’t understand how to use it.
I wandered through the silent corridors looking for anyone, until I found a single busboy. He sold me a packet of his best red. I lit up on the porch of my roof and smoked until I feel asleep on the cold tile.
I dreamed of naked and emaciated black specters rising out of the muddy waters of Charlotte Amalie harbor, thousands of them, marching in force up through town, and then swinging out towards the point that the hotel sat on. They picked me up and carried me back down into the sea with them.
There were lines up and down the waterfront. Islanders lined up and waiting to see the restored product, I thought. The taxi driver dropped me off, and I found the Rasta.
“’Ere we ah go,” he said, smiling.
I noticed someone had painted a name on the rear: Marcus Garvey. One of the founders of the back to Africa movement a long time ago. I paced the length of the ship, trying to come to figure out what exactly it was they were doing.
“This is insane,” I protested. The Rasta nodded again.
“Massive insanity,” he agreed. I briskly walked away to get a better view of the deck.
An old woman in a green shawl stood just under the forecastle. A young boy in a green and white uniform from the school just up the street stepped in to the front of the deck. Her old withered hands reached out to give him a sip from the green gourd she held. He shivered and fainted, crumpling in on himself, then rolling onto the deck. I could see the tiny chest rise with a slowing rhythm of breath, until the child fell still. My stomach flip-flopped with memories of stories of mass suicides.
The woman next in line, maybe his mother, took the liquid just as calmly. Behind her a policeman waited his turn.
As soon as they lay limp on the deck two men would bear the unconscious down into the ship’s holds.
The silent ritual repeated itself. I whirled upon the Rasta by my side.
“What is this? What are you doing?” I demanded, heart pounding.
“They sleep zombie-style ’till we ah come there.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Land of milk an’ honey.” He shrugged. “Or anywhere else. A new place. They will wake in Zion.”
“But why this ship?” I wanted to know.
“We ah bring we history with we. We face it, not run from it.”
I made my way to the hull and touched it. It sang now, full of energy. It sounded like a temple of Buddhist monks, an ooom sound that hinted at deep power.
My dispassion faltered for a moment. I was trying to think about work, rational facts, anything but deal with what was happening around me.
“I have to go,” I said. I was expected to return soon back out at Sombrero Island; I had to leave tomorrow. What could I do here, when even the police were lined up?
“You missin’ it,” the Rastaman said. He looked disappointed.
I turned away and walked back to the taxi. My hand trembled as I opened the door.
A slave ship could hold maybe four hundred bodies stacked in the worse imaginable manner. Yet it seemed that most of the population of the island stood waiting their turn to be led into the hold.
Impossible.
I slept fitfully that night until the deep ooom called me. I sat up, stood, and walked to the pool. The night was deathly quiet, and the clouds twisted in long strands above. The moon shone full on the shimmering harbor water, and lights blazed across the massive natural amphitheater of the harbor and curving backbone of the island’s mountains.
Anchored in the air above the town was the ship. As I watched it cast itself free and floated up over the hill. The long streamers of cloud that usually just scraped the tip of Crown Mountain, the highest point on the island, seemed to reach down and take the ship up into their depths and out of sight.
It’s a dream, I told myself, grabbing the railing. The cold metal railing told me different.
I woke up the next morning nervous. Today I was to take the water taxi from the hotel’s dock into town where Ottley was to be waiting with the powerboat’s keys. From there I’d go back to St. Croix. Then fly to Florida.
Now, waiting by the dock, the taxi already late, I knew I hadn’t been dreaming. I couldn’t see the slave ship way off in the distance on the waterfront. Only bare concrete. No cars moved through the street.
Hours later, after wandering throughout the deserted hotel to find something to eat, I walked down to the waterfront. The entire island had gotten into the boat yesterday and left. I understood that. Where they were going I still was not sure. I sat on the concrete rim of the waterfront, trying to explain to the wind why methane booster rockets were more efficient than kerosene, but I couldn’t remember, and it didn’t matter really. The entire waterfront, loud and bustling, lay dead quiet. I remembered other busy cities I’d lived in. I remembered production deadlines and dirt-free clean-suits, laptops and cellular modems, and being asked to have the numbers on the desk by the next morning.
A tiny wooden skiff bumped up against the large truck tires hung off the edge of the concrete to protect the ferries. I looked down. The green, red, and yellow letters read Little Garvey. My hand started to tremble again, and I wished I still had another joint with me.
The skiff had a bench in the middle, and two pegs on either side to put the oars between. It bobbed and hit the tire in rhythm with the swell. I carefully clambered in, untying the rope, and pushed off from the waterfront. Somehow they had all managed to subvert that horrible legacy, the slave ship and what it represented from the past, and take it with them proudly into a new future.
How?
I wanted to try.
I set the oars between the two pegs, closed my eyes, and leaned back. The oars bit into the water, the small boat began to move. Trust, I figured, was important. And belief.
I began to row.