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worn, sepia-brown photograph of her that my mother—a devoted daughter—had brought with her to America. She had kept it for luck, she said, next to her passport in her pocketbook when she landed on Ellis Island over a half century ago.
    “By the way,” Virginia says suddenly, “I almost forgot to tell you that while you were away there was talk again, even official talk this time, about maybe putting up a historical marker at the Manchester Docks. . . .”
    She waits for my reaction.
    “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I say.
    “Me neither, I guess,” Virginia adds.
    With that, we gather up our empty water bottles and the cushions we had also brought along, and with my intrepid friend once again in the lead, we start the arduous climb up the north bank, leaving behind the huge willow oak of a punkah fan, our stone ottoman and the once-pristine but now shamefully polluted and ill-used river.

I’VE KNOWN SEAS: THE CARIBBEAN SEA

Barbados, Part I
    I saw New York rise shining from the sea.
    —ADRIANA VIOLA CLEMENT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1923
     
     
    I f it so happened that “the twenty-and-odd negroes” did, in fact, arrive at Jamestown’s Point Comfort by way of the West Indies instead of directly from Africa, then the island of their provenance might well have been Barbados—Barbados being, circa 1600, as important a holding pen and transshipment point as Richmond, Virginia, would become, circa 1820, owing to a
surplus at the time of locally bred chattel. A green little coral gemstone of an island situated in the lower half of the Caribbean archipelago, Barbados is considered part of the conga line of islands doing their winding dance from the Florida Keys to the tip of Venezuela. Actually, Barbados has excused itself from the dance line to sit like a lonely wallflower off to itself some distance out in the Atlantic. It is the easternmost island in the chain, a tiny outpost of 166 square miles that, geographically, is the closest point in the Caribbean to the great pregnant bulge of West Africa and the former barracoon slave pens at Goree, Guinea, Elmina, Whydah, the Bight of Benin et al.
    When the trade in chattel cargo began in earnest, diminutive Barbados was invariably the first bit of terra firma sighted on the long, grueling Atlantic run. The island was at once landfall and a safe haven, with a natural harbor along its Caribbean coastline. Thus, it was often the place where the chattel cargo—those that had somehow managed to survive the crossing—were prepared for market, first cleansed of the caked shit, then fed—force-fed if necessary—to put flesh on the
wasted, festering limbs, and the will and spirit further broken. Once this was done—and it could take weeks—the better part of the cargo was then transshipped for sale up and down the hemisphere. Left behind was a portion needed to work the ever-expanding fields of tobacco (“the jovial weed” again) and, later on, the great sugarcane estates that would supplant tobacco to overrun Barbados. Then there were the incorrigibles, those among the consignment who somehow withstood the whipping post and the pillory, their resistance unbroken. Difficult to sell, they, too, were left behind on the little wallflower island.
    Barbados, British-owned and colonized from the beginning, was a principal way station at the outset of the trade.
    It was also the birthplace of my parents, descendants perhaps of the incorrigibles left behind. (I like to think as much.) My mother, Adriana Viola Clement, grew up in a hilly district called Scotland on the Atlantic or windward coast, while my father, Sam Burke, who totally disowned “the damn little two-by-four island,” never mentioned either his family or the name of his birthplace,
aside from referring to it, when pressed, as “some poor-behind little village buried in a sea of canes, a place forgotten behind God’s back.” Shortly after World War I, along with scores like them from other English-speaking islands in