Island People

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, a geographer and writer, is a regular contributor to the The New York Review of Books who has also written for The New Yorker, New York, Harper's, the Believer, and The Nation, among many other publications. He is the author of Island People: The Carribbean and the World, and the co-editor (with Rebecca Solnit) of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches.

"A travelogue of love and scholarship . . . does the region splendid justice."
-The New York Times

"A creative hybrid of travel writing and in-depth reportage. . . . Its balance of skepticism and enthusiasm is driven by both wide knowledge and a bracing sympathy for the oppressed. . . . Jelly-Schapiro's book [is] rich in its enthusiasms, but tempered by the author's own urbane intelligence. . . . He has a journalist's flair for interviews and is as deft with chance encounters as with pop idols. Above all he finds dignity as well as excitement in this beautiful archipelago."
-Colin Thubron, The New York Review of Books

"Island People, written by a careful and compassionate author, is a worthy travel and history book, a fresh study of these economically hamstrung islands and their failing attempts at rebranding."-The Guardian

"Many have tried this before-to get hold of, in its entirety, the volatile, beautiful, relentlessly shifting Caribbean. Nobody has succeeded as dazzlingly as Joshua Jelly-Schapiro."-Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize

"Joshua Jelly-Schapiro possesses both a humanist's irrepressible empathy and a journalist's necessary skepticism. He reports carefully, researches exhaustively, cares deeply, and writes beautifully."-Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

"The Caribbean-the supposed 'American lake'-has always been the sea of stories and of dreams, a phantasmagorical realm of the beautiful, the fantastical, and the not-quite believable. Since Columbus and the Haitian Revolution these scattered lands of miracles and wonders have shaped the history of our world, and for decades they have cried out for a revivified history by a chronicler-in the wake of C.L.R. James and Naipaul and Wolcott-equal to the task. And now here is Island People, precisely that marvel of a book, given to us by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, a superb young writer who brings to this sea of dreams a scholar's authority, a novelist's way with character, and an ace reporter's talent for stumbling into exactly that tale, however improbable and fantastic, that most needs telling."-Mark Danner, author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

"Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's grand book on the Caribbean is so striking in form and vision that it amounts to something new--a constant surprise. Even as Jelly-Schapiro combines reportage, cultural analysis, and history to superb effect, this important book filled with many truths defines and gives new meaning to that lovely phrase, sui generis."-Hilton Als, author of White Girls

"Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is one of those rare writers who bridges worlds-between deep scholarship and lively and accessible writing, between islands and mainlands, between big ideas and precise details, between history and possibility."-Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays

"Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's book illuminates, like no other I've read, the startling history and the complex present of the nations of the Caribbean. Written with passion and joyful music in the prose, Island People will become an indispensable companion for anybody traveling to the Caribbean-or dreaming of doing so. Accessible and well-informed, Island People is the best book about the Caribbean since V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage-and in significant ways, it is a better book."-Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Chapter 11
HEADING SOUTH
Antigua

Taxi drivers. You meet a lot them when traveling. Especially when visiting small places lacking public transit. You end up, when exploring such places, absorbing more from people who drive cars for a living than from people engaged in any other occupation. There's a reason much "travel literature" and reportage, about such places, can leave the impression that cabbies comprise the majority populace or represent a majority view-that their purpose in life, mirroring their place in reporters' notebooks, is to issue bits of eccentric insight to inquisitive scribes.

Guilty as charged.

But if the figure of the taxi driver in the traveler's tale can be turned into a kind of peak-capped archetype, so too does the figure of the "client"-generally, in the Caribbean, a tourist-blend into what amounts less to a kind of person, for drivers freighting them about for a living, than a generic flow of inputs. The daily stream of pink-faced vacationers disgorged on the curb by the V. C. Bird airport in Antigua, or alighting from cruise ships by its Heritage Quay like melting snowpack in winter, or slowing to a trickle in spring, grow akin, for the cabbies taking their bags, to widgets on a conveyor belt-animate objects to whom they're supposed to offer a bright "Welcome to Antigua!" as they come off the line.

In St. John's the taxi stand by the cruise port abuts a parking lot behind the Heritage Hotel just down from where members of the Antigua Hair-Braiders Association sit on milk crates to plait hair. The taxi stand, like the hair braiders' booth, has a large sign listing a set schedule of fees to common destinations. The men and a few women who gather around it park rattly Toyotas or newer Nissans nearby, and all wear the standard-issue shirt of the Antigua Taxi-Drivers Association. Their pale peach button-downs are embroidered at the breast with the logo of a syndicate they've joined to have the privilege of waiting here, each day, for dazed visitors to amble off the boats looking for a ride to Jolly Harbour's marina or the tourist beach by Dickinson Bay.

On a few mornings I brought my bad hotel coffee to the wharf, where the association's cabbies gather by 8 a.m. with their own Styrofoam cups. They wait, as does the steel band that sets up on the quay, wheeling their drums onto the wharf, to meet the boats. These boats arrive here after an overnight sail from Martinique or St. Thomas, at around 9. In a place whose economy's main good is tourists, access to that industry's low end is controlled through a union. Most of the drivers had begun paying dues to the association, both figurative and real, many years before. Some had belonged for decades. A few had managed to join its ranks after coming here from less-touristed islands nearby and putting in a few years of friend making. One, a man who went by his nickname, Sprat, had come six years before from Dominica. He delighted in reminiscing about a nice man we both knew in the sleepy village of Calabishie, on that mellow island's north shore, and had affixed a warning on his van's front door in what amounted to two languages-"PLEASE DON'T SLAM," and "NUH SLAM UM"-to ensure that, as he said, "all persons know what I mean." A woman driver with olive skin and the corpulence of many people the world over whose working lives involve sitting in place, said her name was Ms. Vieira. She pulled at the gearshift by her van's steering column with calm authority. "I did come here from St. Kitts when I married an Antigua man," she told me. "He was shrewd with the financials, and we did have children, but it didn't last. You know how it go." Ms. Vieira smiled patiently as she told me that many people moved between St. Kitts and here. "All this talk about the new Caribbean community, CARICOM and so- we've been moving among these islands since time. My grandfather was one of thirteen Portuguese brothers, from Madeira. I've got cousin