Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks

suffering and imagery can make religious or historical sense of the world as experienced by middle-class white Americans. One tends to attribute the conversion of the Americans, if indeed they are converted, less to religion and history and sympathetic identification with the oppressed than to the Rastafarian use of cannabis as a sacrament and the seductive social rhetoric associated with reggae music—pacifistic, communal, and apocalyptic—and sex. And, of course, there is the fact that since the late 1960s all young white middle-class American men and women have known that nothing is more threatening to their parents than joining a black, ghetto-based, dope-smoking religious cult whose heroes are powerful, sexy black men with beards and weird hairdos who speak and sing an English patois no white American parent can understand. It’s the forbidden, eroticized.
    But the Rastafarian fantasy, and perhaps the permanent fog-inducing effects of ganja on still-unformed adolescent male brains, had taken the tattooed boys on Nevis beyond escape or rebellion. They could twist and roll their long blond and red Caucasian hair into rough, ropelike approximations of an African’s dreadlocks, but since they couldn’t turn their pink skin black, they had covered it instead with non-erasable graffiti, making it useful only as signage. Perhaps that was why they disturbed me so. The unconscious racial self-loathing and rage expressed by those tattooed young white bodies was my culture’s racism turned violently against itself. And possibly it was something closer to home, as it were, something more personal. Something to do with me and Christine and our time living in Jamaica in the 1970s and afterward, when our marriage came apart and she took a dreadlocked Jamaican lover and a few years later moved back to Jamaica and eventually married a different dreadlocked Jamaican man.
    When Chase and I visited the country, the government of St. Kitts–Nevis, led since 1984 by the People’s Action Movement and Prime Minister Kennedy Simmonds, was one of the most enlightened and stable governments in the Caribbean. The total population of the two-island nation was barely forty-five thousand, and the capital, Basseterre, on St. Kitts, had but fifteen thousand inhabitants. Tourism had been controlled, developed slowly and with careful regard for the environment, the cultural integrity of the populace, and the larger economic picture, which was mostly agricultural, with some small manufacturing and assembly plants developed by off-island companies. The largest employer was the government itself, which, in St. Kitts especially, was in the sugarcane business; but the laborers and farmers were organized, and although they were not exactly partners in the vast operation, they were protected to a degree unknown in the rest of the Caribbean.
    On the map, if Nevis, because of its shape, was a ball, thenSt. Kitts was a cricket bat. At least Kittians—cricket fanatics, like most West Indians—enjoyed thinking of it that way. The island is mountainous in the center, rising to 3,792 feet in the north at Mount Misery, dropping nearly to sea level along the bat handle, and rising again at the end. The coastal plains were given over mainly to growing sugar, and the only roads on the island looped along the coast around the fat part of the bat, passing through farming and fishing villages that seemed not to have changed in a hundred years. There were beaches at either end of the bat, and that is where you found most of the larger hotels—Frigate Bay, Jack Tar Village, Banana Bay Beach—where they could do the least damage to island life. This was rational tourist development, the kind of development that did not in the process destroy the product itself. In Basseterre and scattered throughout the island, there were numerous smaller hotels and inns, most notably the Ocean Terrace, and Rawlins Plantation, a tastefully renovated (not restored) old plantation house