The Ghost Apple (21 page)

Then another tourist came strolling down the path. He paused beside me and gestured casually at the beach, the water, the gauzy morning clouds. He said, “Postcard.”

When I was coming back up the hill a short time later, I noticed a scrubby little tree with a faded sign nailed to its trunk. The sign warned visitors that it was a manchineel tree: Its bark, sap, and fruit were poisonous. The sign was hand-lettered, and “poisonous” was spelled “poisonus.” This detail, and the sense it gave of a person without resources earnestly trying to do some good, endeared the place to me more than anything else so far.

I didn’t have any plans. I’d been reading the dispatches that Professor Kabaka had been posting online and I found them extremely compelling and persuasive—they made me want to do something, to get out there and stir things up, to show Megan I was a man of action like her beloved professor—but I knew I was no revolutionary. I was just trying to relax, at least for the time being. It was nice to be somewhere different.

Soon I settled into a comfortable routine. Each morning, I woke up early and watched the sunrise from the balcony outside my room. I had a little coffee and a roll or croissant, and then I went down to the beach for an early swim. Every day, I was shocked and delighted by the whiteness of the sand and the luminous blue of the water. Sometimes I stayed down at the beach the whole morning. One day I went on a chartered snorkeling trip. I think the reef itself is mostly dead, but I saw a few big schools of yellowtail snapper and angelfish, I watched parrotfish chomp at the algae on the dead coral, and I saw a few turtles and one shark. I was fascinated by the dark depths of the water on the other side of the reef, where the sea floor drops away into nothingness. One moment you can stand, the next you’re in a thousand feet of water.

After I’d been on the island about a week, I received a dinner invitation from a Big Anna® vice president named Johnson Price. It was a simple courtesy—I was still nominally a senior administrator at an institution with which his own company had formed a partnership. I was a little put out by this, because it meant that Acting President Beckford wasn’t tracking my activities, or at least that he hadn’t repudiated me or even bothered to tell Mr. Price that I’d all but left my position. Did Beckford have such a low opinion of me? Did he really think I was so ineffectual that my trip to St. Renard didn’t warrant any suspicion?

No matter. Maybe I could dig up some dirt on the company when I attended the dinner.

For the moment, it seemed like it was all business as usual on St. Renard: sunshine, surf, tourists, mellow sunsets. But I knew that things on the island were not as quiet as they seemed. Commandant Kabaka was in the mountains, where he and his “Antillia Liberation Army” were threatening violence. Somewhere out there were the Big Anna® banana farms and cane fields—places of misery and hardship—and one day, as I was walking in town, someone pointed out a man named Cudjoe, “the maroon,” who was said to have burned down a Big Anna® storehouse. He was a sturdy little fellow with a kind of hump on his back, and he wore a red coat, red pants, and a feathered hat. He looked like he had just stepped out of the eighteenth century, and I thought to myself, Well, the prevailing winds blow from the opposite direction down here—maybe time moves in the opposite direction as well!

from

The Tripoli College Telegraph (Approved Content)

February
3
,
2010

THE SPORTING LIFE

Tyrants to Hew Wood, Draw Water

Over the winter break, the Tripoli Tyrants wrapped up a disappointing season with a loss to Wampanoag College of the Arts in this year’s Genutrex® Palmetto Bowl in Lawtey, Florida. But those who think that it’s back to the gym and better luck next year should think again.

Volunteerism and service have long been important priorities for Tripoli sports teams, and the football team is no exception. Next week, the Tyrants are off to beautiful St. Renard, where they’ll give back to Big Anna®, Tripoli’s generous corporate benefactor, by helping out with the company’s many progressive initiatives on the island.

Some players will learn about home construction in Big Anna®’s new Port Kingston Executive Village, while others will provide invaluable domestic assistance to Big Anna® wives, help out on LoCarbon™ plantations, or just keep things running smoothly by providing security in snack factories.

As Acting President Beckford explains, “What better way to atone for dismal failure and cowardice on the gridiron than by the sweat of one’s brow?”

The acting president men-tioned several advantages to this program. In the first place, football players will provide an excellent reservoir of labor should local laborers decide to shirk their duties and take to the hills. More important, however, is the particular fitness of those players for service on the island.

“Most of our football players belong to the sable race,” said the acting president, “and are therefore better able to withstand the ravages of the climate than those of us whose ancestors hail from temperate zones.”

The acting president went on to put the proposal into a historical perspective:

“Napoleon’s great failure was to send white Frenchmen to fight the black Jacobins in St. Domingue. Of the
65
,
000
French troops dispatched to the island during the Haitian revolution, perhaps
50
,
000
died of disease, and thus the diminutive Corsican lost the most valuable colonial possession in the New World.”

The acting president has also championed a plan to employ student athletes in maintenance positions here at Tripoli. The question of “what is to be done” with student athletes is one that has preoccupied him for many years.

An Open Letter from the Antillia Liberation Army / February 10, 2010

To the managers and directors of Big Anna:

We explain again and again what we’re fighting for, and again and again our pleas are met with incomprehension. You say you don’t understand what we want. You tell us to be “reasonable.”

How many times do we have to explain ourselves? For five hundred years we have been fighting for the same thing. The past wells up and jumps its banks. History skips over whole lives, whole centuries, and nothing changes. Two hundred years ago John Stedman quoted a maroon leader complaining to a Dutch colonial commissioner in Suriname:

“We desire you to tell your Governor and your court, that in case they want to raise no new gangs of rebels, they ought to take care that the planters keep a more watchful eye over their own property, and not to trust them so frequently in the hands of drunken managers and overseers, who by wrongfully and severely chastising the negroes, debauching their wives and children, neglecting the sick, &c. are the ruin of the colony, and wilfully drive to the woods such numbers of stout active people, who by their sweat earn your subsistence, without whose hands your colony must drop to nothing; and to whom at last, in this disgraceful manner, you are glad to come and sue for friendship.”

It’s all the same, always the same, never anything but the same. With one or two emendations, his complaints are our complaints:

We want you to tell your CEO that in case he wants to raise no new gangs of rebels, he should attend more carefully to the needs of the banana workers and cane cutters. He should not simply abandon them to the drunken overseers, who—by abusing these laborers, debauching their wives and children, and neglecting the sick among them—are the ruin of the company, and willfully drive to the jungle those strong young workers who by their sweat earn his subsistence, without whose hands his company must drop to nothing, and to whom at last, in a disgraceful manner, he will be glad to come and sue for friendship.

Commandant Kabaka, the Antillia Liberation Army

From: “William Brees”

To: “Maggie Bell”

Date: February 15, 2010, at 11:05 AM

Subject: RE: RE: Hi

 

Hi, Maggie,

I'm sorry to bother you. I know you're probably extremely busy. I just wanted to make sure that everything's going well. Have you gone to the interior already? I'm actually in San Cristobal right now. I also thought you'd like to know that I've arranged an invitation to a banquet at the home of one of Big Anna's vice presidents. Maybe I'll learn something compromising about the company. If I can, I'd like to be of some help to Professor Kabaka in his liberation struggle.

Send me a line or two if you have the chance, and maybe we can meet up when you get back to San Cristobal. I've been enjoying myself very well here. There's a café near my bed-and-breakfast where they serve sea grape brandy. Apparently the slaves would brew it in their cabins. It tastes like poison fruit juice, which I suppose is what brandy is. I've also been enjoying Renardenne food—spicy curry goat, ackee, cornmeal porridge with a cinnamon leaf. I suppose you're probably a much more informed tourist than I am. In any case, I look forward to hearing from you and I hope you're well.

 

Your friend,

William “Bill Dean” Brees

SLAVERY IN THE WEST INDIES

or

A Description of One Semester Spent in Tripoli College’s Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture

containing

a narrative of the author’s trials in that program, and an account of the events that led to her miraculous escape from bondage, with observations upon the peculiar manner in which the sugarcane is cultivated and processed on Big Anna plantations, and the oppression and misery that results therefrom

“MEGAN”

written by Herself

PART ONE

I was born in the small town of Haverstock, in the state of New Hampshire, in the year
1990
. As a child I experienced no want of parental attention or care, nor did I ever suffer from hunger or similar causes, so that my girlhood was most pleasant, and withal almost free from fear. Later I was to marvel that I could have been so wholly innocent of the evil there was in the world, and yet I think I was. It was only on rare afternoons, once or twice in a wondrous summer season, when, the weather being delightsome and fair, I was surprised to discover that my own spirits were low, and my sight was as it were clouded by an almost sensible depression of mind, so that I was moved to consider whether there was not some darker world beyond the world that I knew. But except for those days, so few as to fade from thought and memory in the long intervals that separated one from another, I enjoyed a happiness too fine for words, sporting about with my twin brother and eating Pop-Tarts, and I had naught but the most fleeting apprehension that man could be other than that noble and selfless creature which, to my innocent mind, he seemed to be.

When I had reached the age of eighteen years, not being the daughter of tradesmen or traveling performers, custom dictated that I should be sent from home in order to acquire that special knowledge which is called education. My brother elected to attend New York University, but I came to Tripoli College, desiring for myself a liberal arts education and having been so unaccountably derelict in my academic duties that Wesleyan, where I had very much wanted to go, would not admit me. Nevertheless, for two years I enjoyed myself well, delighting in the society of my fellows, the illuminating discourse of my professors, and the abundant food and drink. For me those years were the honeyed glaze on the bun of youth.

And yet it was under the following circumstances that I was made to suffer the outrages of Hell on a plantation in the West Indies:

In the autumn of my third year at Tripoli, I made the acquaintance of one Professor Kabaka, a teacher and scholar, who was to prove very important to me, for though our association lasted only about eight weeks, and though it never transgressed the bounds of propriety, yet he taught me what it meant to be a black girl in America, and he taught me the power of righteous anger, and, in short, I admired him very much.

But Tripoli College was at this time in a state of turmoil, and it was deemed necessary, by those who were empowered to make such decisions, that we form an attachment to the Big Anna corporation, without the assistance of which our financial fortunes must sink to nothing. This arrangement was intolerable to Professor Kabaka, who had his own reasons for despising that company, and thus he felt obliged to return to the Caribbean island of St. Renard, his birthplace, in order to take up arms against Big Anna, and fight for the liberty of those islanders who labored in servitude on Big Anna’s plantations.

Though I cherished a deep sympathy for the banana and sugarcane workers of St. Renard, yet now I was preoccupied with my own sorrows, for not only had Professor Kabaka’s departure left a void in my life, but I had also begun to feel a return of that gloom of which I had had the briefest intimations as a young girl. My mind felt closed to the beauty of nature, I could not take pleasure in the society of my friends, whose concerns had come to seem trivial to me, and I was filled with a loathing of my own body, to such a degree that I could hardly leave my room for the shame of being, as I thought, so coarse of feature, so dusky of complexion, and so ample of figure. At mealtimes I simply languished over a bowl of pudding or ice cream, cursing myself for that indulgence and yet powerless to subdue my monstrous appetite. I was at all times, or so it seemed, alone.