GOIN’ GARF!

the story of a taxi-ride

through the village of

Garf

on San Andres 

a West Indian island

 San Andres (Isla) Colombia

written and illustrated

by Lawrence Bohme

during his stay there in 1975 and 1976

and transcribed from the original manuscript in 2011

for Betty Barker of the Blowin’ Hole

FOREWORD

San Andres Island is eight miles of coral rock and coconut trees in the south-west Caribbean, 100 miles from Nicaragua.  Its people are descendants of Jamaicans brought here in the 18th century to plant cotton, but it was too far from the rest of the Empire to manage, and England ceded the island to Colombia, 500 miles away, in 1822.

The islanders, at least the older ones, imagine that “Britannia” still “rules the waves” and wish she would rescue them from the intruding “Spaniards”… In recent years the mainland presence has become more omnipresent, with a beachfront of South American-style hotels and shops at the north end of the island; but along the windward shore, in the elongated village officially known as San Luis but which the islanders still call by its old name Garf, dwell the folk who live by the old ways. Their singular Afro-Victorian character is what this small book, rendered from a year or so of living among them, is meant to portray.

    After a morning in town, it is always uplifting to hear an island taxi-driver rattle up to the square in his old Chevrolet and cry - to the homeward-bound waiting with pauper’s patience on the sidewalk – that he is “Goin’ Garf!”.  Garf is the earliest-settled stretch of the windward, eastern shore.  The ride south – or “down” – costs three pesos, and may delay 5 seconds in departing at rush hour to as long as an hour at night, this is, until the driver considers his car full enough to merit the trip.  But if you want to save some “cush” and don’t mind being squeezed in between some of the very dark ladies common to our island (those whose behinds men praise as “plenty flour”), then the “colectivo” is the best way to go to Garf.

    Leaving North End we ride through a region of marshy pastures with cows grazing under the coconut trees, called The Bight (an old English word for bay, since here there is an inlet, full of mangroves).  Here and there are farmers’ thatch huts made from coconut fronds (and called “leaf houses”) and in one of them, on top of the only hillock in The Bight and hidden by a patch of plantain trees (which the islanders oddly call “suckers”) lives an old man called Guillermo Forbes whose craft is making these houses, and his own stilted two-room model shows what a real master he is.  He also weaves fish-traps and screens from strips of wild cane – which, if you place an order, he will tell you can only be cut when the moon is full, since according to island lore, “when de moon is young de worms are walkin’” and make the cane “rot and tender”…  Like all the old-timers of San Andres, he enjoys a visit from strangers, although of late he’s in a wrathful mood.  He lives with a son known as Big Stuff, easily the biggest man on the island, and they have almost come to blows (which would be bad for Guillermo) about the old man’s habit of spending his money on “happy women”, who move in with him for as long as the pickings are good.  Guillermo publicly protests that he is “no child” to be told what to do with his money (although he was reckless enough to make a “borra” from the bank against his land which he never repaid, and is now in fear of losing it).  When his sister Miss Ramona told him he was too old, he made a terrible face at such a slander and thundered, “Ramona, I can handle a woman hard, you know!”  All this is aggravated by an infected rat-bite on his foot (he tells me they run over him in bed, his houses apparently not being rat-proof).

    Passing the junction with Orange Hill Road, which climbs steeply up to the old Baptist Church on the Hill Road, we come out onto the placid waterside of Coco Plum Bay, fringed with palms and fishermen’s canoes hauled up on the shore.  Here we see the old San Andres wooden houses (“board houses”, as they’re called), with steep bannistered staircases running up the outsides; and a very Victorian person, who owns the red-and-green one with the vines flowering on the porch is the good friend Randall Delryn May (“Mister Delryn”), one of our most venerable sextagenarians.  He is almost always to be seen vigorously walking up and down the road – on weekdays in his farmer’s attire, galoshes and straw hat with a bundle of grass for the cow; and on Sundays in a square-shouldered dark brown suit and snap-brimmed fedora, with Bible and umbrella – in any weather – under his arm.  If you should wander around in Coco Plum Bay he’ll be sure to engage you in conversation about the Prince of Wales or how the Kaiser was related to Queen Victoria!  So before you set foot in these parts you’d do well to bone up on English Historie.  These old folks still wistfully regard themselves as subjects of the Crown; but since England gave the island to Colombia in 1822, their knowledge of matters British is rather musty.

    Coco Plum Bay ends in a promontory of coral rock known as Rocky Cay, and now we’re in a small mooring cove called Platform.  Through the coconut trees you can see a rusty shipwreck that ran aground there several years ago, and fishing boats at anchor near the beach. The local boys fish at the South-East and South-West cays 15 and 30 miles away. These trips usually take two or three days, and if you’re there “when de boys come down from de Cays” you can buy snappers and conches (pronounced “conks”) right on the sand.  There’s always a gang of housewives standing about the old coconut log table on the beach with empty pots in their hands, swapping jokes in San Andres pidgin English while the fish is gutted and weighed.  Once, when the only kind that came in was a commonplace variety called doctor-fish, unpopular because of its rather strong taste, and – some say – black skin, I heard one woman loudly moan “Me no like dat fish a-TALL!”; and the fisherman who caught it snap back “Don’t speak ill of the doctor-fish, mistress, for it raised you!” (in other words, you were raised on it).  The particular fisherman who uttered this was Mister Jackson.  As well as being our best fisherman he is also a shoe-maker and carpenter, which – to speak in his own pungent fashion – may be why his skin is as weatherbeaten as a sail, his lips as sharp as cobbler’s nails and his tongue as biting as a chisel…  He’s from the Cayman Islands (he came to San Andres some 20 years ago but is considered and considers himself to be a foreigner) and lives in the smart yellow-with-red trim house we pass on our right (facing the beach where lie his several fishing canoes), with the sign

proudly bridging the gate, which, he tells me, stands for “God Bless Our Home, Alvorado Jackson”.

    The King of San Andres, in popularity and rambunctiousness, is the owner of the scruffy cement barracks we see just ahead with the old oil drums beside it.  He’s universally known as Lau Chau because he’s a “chinee”, although just his father was Chinese.  He’s a big brown man with a flat nose and rather Oriental eyes, which have a unique menacing twinkle, since he has a very bad temper.  By trade he’s a truck driver (his is the old red truck with the home-made cabin that is parked in front – sort of a shack on wheels); a grocer ((he sells dry good and animal feed from a hole-in-the-wall shop in his house); a baker (his coconut-flavored bread, baked by his hired help Miss Lee, is delicious), a fisherman (every other morning at dawn he and Hubert  the mechanic paddle a tiny canoe – which either one of them is larger than – out to his fish-trap); a coconut farmer; a hog-raiser (Mister Palacios next door is forever complaining that Lau Chau steals the breadfruit off his tree to feed his pigs) and gas-station owner (the only place where you can get it, siphoned from a cooking-oil bottle).  He’s a real San Andres man: the gingerbread truck is crumbling apart, the “fish-pot” often comes up empty, but he’s his own pig-headed master.

    Lau Chau’s most useful function, however, is making everyone laugh, as he rattles up and down the island all day long in his red truck, cussin’ and makin’ up all kinda lies.  He’s a crude old beast and if he don’t like ya he’ll make ya know, but if he do he’ll maybe take you for a ride down sout’ to load up with coconuts – or north to the dock to unload them – and entertain you on the way with a roaring recital of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“canon to de right o’ dem, canon to de left o’ dem”), sing World War II songs (he was cook on an American ship), deliver comical religious sermons (he claims that he doubled as chaplain) and tell you outrageous tales of his imaginary sex life, in dialect.  One Sunday on our way back from a gay visit to the Catholic nuns at the primary school he asked me with leers and chuckles if I could “put a woman in her nature” and then “bring her to high season”; and to show me how large and strong his own member was he gripped the stick shift with its pearly knob – so excitedly that the gears grated and we began lurching off our course…  If the talk is of forgotten island calypsos, he may croak a best-forgotten line or two, such as “A woman’s is a-sweeter than a man’s / but it smell like a sardine can”; or “What a calamity / to give company to woman / in mo-ra-lity!”… Lau Chau’s favourite retorts to almost any statement one makes (whereas we would simply say “Like Hell!”) allude to the genitals of local animals, such as “in cow ass!” or “in pig nut!”  A band of young boys rides on top of his truck to help load, and he whips them around with  names like “conk’s behind” or – one of his wittiest – “conk’s cock”…  If he comes across a Spanish-speaking mainlander who doesn’t know the dialect (some do) he will blister the uncomprehending fellow with “You a panya or a people?” – what are you, a “Spaniard”, or a human being.  Everything issues from Lau Chau’s mouth but flames, and those often seem to.  He has a large tribe of large children, all as silent as tombstones – roughly 10 legitimate and 10 “outside children” by his various “sweethearts”.  Miss Bertie his wife is a god-fearing lady who detests him for his hoggish ways, and every few weeks rebels with rows that regale the neighbourhood, after which Lau Chau skulks about mumbling that “Life is damn dis-GOS-ting!”

    Passing Napoleon (“Napo”) Palacios lovely house, with its long latticed balcony (“plaited” as island carpenters say) and many shuttered windows, we turn the bend at the junction of the Little Hill road.  These lanes in San Andres are always quiet and countrylike with people greeting (“hailing”) one pleasantly from their rickety porches (or “pay-za” as they say), and pleased to tell you what vegetables they’re growing (invariably the roots they call “breadkind”: yucca or manioc root, and sweet potatoes) or how old the kids are… The asking of the children’s names often reveals the curious custom of matching names, such as for the girls of one family I know: Ledra, Lolia, Lidia and Lilia; and the males of another (now all over 60 or dead): Vincent, Vinborn, Vanderville and Victor!

    Now we are in “de Gawf”… The Southern Baptist Church just ahead is the islanders’ busiest institution.  There are services five nights a week and twice on Sundays, which brings throngs of women, transfigured from the cotton shift and pig-tails in which they scrub laundry all week long into full costume and coiffure.  The author often sits on his nearby “payza” Sunday mornings, while Oklahoma-accented hymns loudly serenade the neighbourhood from the church’s record player (“The Wonderful World of Somewhere” is the one that best catches the mood in the air), wondering which of the powdered ladies marching past under half a foot of nylon wig, on top of 4 inches of heel and draped in several yards of lamé, is which of my neighbours…  Not to mention the perfume, which the prevailing winds blow directly to my nostrils from some 40 feet away.

    The cows that can be seen (and smelled) in the yard of the wooden house second after the church provide the author with his breakfast milk, when they’re not calving.  They and the old gabled house belong to Mister Vanderbilt Bowie, nicknamed “Tantu”.  The islanders are fond of christening their male children with the names of what are held to be the West’s greatest achievers: Darwin, Lindbergh, Waldorf (Astoria, no doubt); but these “real” names are in most cases mothballed for official usage only, and Achilles and Roosevelt go through life with their pet names Sugar and Conks.  Of course, to a stranger they will always introduce themselves with formality, which can be confusing when one mentions “Winston” to someone who may even be his next of kin, to be stared at in bewilderment until further description (such as: “the one who sells kerosene”, “the one who wears the green hat”) brings forth “Oh, you mean Cush!”

    Not far along is a tiny red-and-white house, the Trade Winds Boutique, where the author sells his creations in leather and his mother tends to her family of dachshunds.  As well as the sandals and bags (superbly hand-stitched) there is “beach jewellery” by a local craftswoman made from polished fragments of marine growths; and primitive art from San Andres painters, foremost among these being Anselmo “Quaco” Stephens, who portrays himself as a pink-skinned millionaire standing in manorial gardens, with pearl-studded briefcase and panting mastiff at his feet.  (In reality, Quaco is very poor, brown-skinned, lives alcoholically alone in a semi-constructed house on the loneliest hill of the island, and has one eye).  Trade Winds also has sea-side pictures of him (his ideal self) bearing blonde bathing beauties over his head like bar-bells, with the palms of the Johnny Cay on the horizon…  The little house is rented from Jacob Brockman, brother of its deceased owner, the popular Mister Sam (whom the author regrets not having come to San Andres in time to know); and the islanders still call it “Mister Sam’s House”.  Our neighbour Mamie Dawkins says he was loved by all for the stories he told of his sailor days, such as how he, Sam Brockman!, arrived at a hotel in the United States and was the “only coloured man” that the “white folks” there had ever “taken a liking to” well enough to let in…  One morning the neighbours found him dead on his kitchen floor, and ever since the house has been vacant or rented.

    Almost next door to Trade Winds is the old Roman Catholic church, a precious example of island architecture.  Outside it is only a bare clapboard shed with a stubby steeple and a large square presbytery in front; but within, the nave is like a delicately carpentered ship’s hull, with crossed rafters and well-knitted siding.  The altar-piece is trimmed with fretted curlicues and sequins, cut out of plain board.  All is brightly painted blue and white, and along the sides are shuttered windows that open out onto the coconut trees.

    Across from the church and perched on the rocks by the water is a yellow house where lives the author’s best friend in San Andres (they even say he’s my father), Joab Escalona, who is 85 years old (his wife Vy is 87).  He claims to be the great-great-grandson of the Spanish commander Escalona who discovered the island.  His dear old brown coconut with its fuzz of white hair can be seen in the window watching the cars go by – in no way resembling a Spanish commander or a Spanish anything else.  “Uncle Joab” is as full of the island’s legend-history as his cistern is of rain-water in January (the end of the wet season).  He’s a very articulate man, and rich in the blunt sarcasm common to the islanders; his every utterance reveals his contempt of fools and his awe of authority.  He will say of the islanders when they misbehave, “You can take ‘em outa de bush, Larry, but ya can’t take de bush outa dem!”.  His eyes glisten when he describes the Prince of Wales visiting the Panama Canal, of which Joab was an employee (as many San Andres people still are).  Age has forced him to give up farming his land at Booby Rock on the west side (where we sometimes go to pick oranges), so he has to make do with watching a tomato vine which some months ago took root by his porch…  A conversation with Joab is full of quaintly officious expressions (he was also a policeman and civil servant) such as, for “sexual intercourse”, “a sexual connection”; and island proverbs such as “If you can’t suck mamee, ya suck granny” (if you can’t get your mommy’s milk, get your granny’s!)… The aware visitor to San Andres is advised to seize the opportunity, before the old man “goes Upstairs”.

    We pass the foot of the Harmony Hall Hill Road (named after someone called Harmony Hall).  The last high old house before the road leaves the shore is Miss Muriel’s, and there’s “Muri” sitting out on her porch.  I will never forget being invited into her parlour when we first came to the island looking for a house, on a stormy afternoon in January with the rain lashing in from the sea against her window panes and Muriel, putting all her good-will at our disposal, among her family photographs and lace and china… She’s unable to walk much now with her pains and just manages  to get into a taxi every Sunday for her beloved Baptist revivals; but she’s sure enough of sight and hearing to pick up all the neighbourhood gossip.  She loves to have you sit with her while the sun sets and, between exhortations to come to her church, give you a run-down of everyone’s scandalous behaviour.  Nowadays on San Andres, in shameful contrast to the days when she was a girl, the men are all “wicked” and the women are “flip-flops” (or “flippish”).  The author has had her finger wagged at him for suspected involvement with these, although when I was finally given away she only mused forgivingly “Ah well, I suppose if ye hadn’t found the door open ye wouldn’t have gone in”.  As they say in the Caymans, “A man’s name is hard to spoil”…  Her tragedy is that she was an orphan raised in solitude by a family of Arab merchants, who, because she was “dark”, kept her all her marriageable life in the kitchen and sent her suitors away without her even knowing of their intentions, until (in one case) 30 or 40 years later… She acquired a certain gentility from her schooling in Bluefieds, an English-speaking part of Nicaragua, and inherited the house she lives in, and another in North End she rents out, from her Syrians.

    Just south of Muriel’s on the other side is a massive grey house standing out in the water on pillars like a fortress, which belongs to the island’s richest recluse, Arthur May (uncle to our friend Delryn up in Coco Plum Bay).  He’s over 90 years old and lives there all alone, cooks his own food and seldom receives visitors, except a little fellow who tends to his cows and brings him milk, and is rumoured to stand to inherit his estate (after a year of being his neighbour he is still only known to me as “Arthur May’s man”).  Arthur May doesn’t speak Spanish and probably wouldn’t want to, hating “Spaniards” as he does.  He attended farming school in Tuskeegee as a young man and is well respected for it by the island’s old folks.  When the author first came to San Andres, Joab Escalona, who had found me one windy morning hunting for a place to set up shop, kindly pledged to unearth one (“I’ll spot ya”) and took me to see his friend-since-boyhood Mister May (and, therefore, a very old one), about renting one of his ramshackle houses, one which used to be a general store in the days when the only way to go to town was on foot or horseback.  This house is a magnificent wreck that seems to lean into the sea wind.  Every morning, as we later witnessed, Arthur May walks to it very slowly along the waterfront from his home (an unforgettable “stick”, in his suspenders) and, laying his cane to rest, spends the morning among the dusty counters and cupboards (all empty, but for some godforsaken bottle of elixir made in Jamaica) and remembers the days when his wife was alive and the shop was busy.  When we found him there he was messily eating some porridge from a can and listening to an American news broadcast on his short-wave radio. (He looks like the farmer in the painting American Gothic, except he’s brown-skinned).  We loudly inquired how he was and he looked up from his mush and knelled “Betwixt and between”, quite ironically.  (On a later occasion when I stopped in to ask the same he said, “Oh, not so bad for an old jerk”).  When Joab inquired if he wouldn’t rent his store to this nice young man he declared that he would “neither rent, lease nor sell” any of his property.  Since the island’s realty boom he had obviously used these words to other strangers before me.  When I disbelievingly asked if he wouldn’t like to have the money he croaked “What would I do with the money, anyway, have all those half-naked girls come in here and take it away from me?”   Joab is a Seventh Day Adventist and very much the Good Samaritan (in his active years he’s said to have been quite callous, but the approaching Judgment Day has brought him to his knees) so he crusaded forth with “Didn’t the Bible say that you should always help your fellow man?” to which Arthur May snapped back “If I found a Bible that said that I’d burn it and buy a new one!”  He did offer a strange reason for not being able to part with his leaky ruin, though: he said that very morning he had misplaced his penknife and hadn’t been able to find it at home, but then came over to the store and turned it up there, which, he reasoned, he wouldn’t have been able to do if it had been rented out to me.  Joab gasped, “But man, if it had been rented out to this young man you’d never have lost it here to begin with!”

    It may be said that Joab’s last-minute moral reparations are normal of all of San Andres’ sinners, the one whose exit I was there to witness being Pinkie Jay, a brother of Lau Chau’s.  He was a notorious brothel-owner (“whore-master”), unlicensed masseur and greedy landlord.  From North End to Sound Bay, the houses he kept his “Spanish girls” in can be distinguished for their two-storey fronts and long tiled backs. (Since the Colombian priests removed prostitution to the uninhabited west side of the island they have become tenement houses).  He was famous on the mainland as a witch-doctor masseur who could restore sagging breasts, and he is reputed to have “breeded” (made pregnant) some 30 of his “Spanish” customers!  His nephew works in my leather shop and tells me how he once opened the door to his uncle’s massage room and found him at work on a lady – both of them naked!  In the months I knew him he drove a broken-down “colectivo” and never showed any awareness of my existence (except to collect the three peso fare) until suddenly one day he greeted me in the street with brotherly cries and arm-wavings.  Around the same time the tenant of one of his match-stick houses, a Chinese Costa Rican from Port Limón struggling to support her family with a grocery store in the front room, got a visit from Pinkie, not to collect the rent but to announce that out of pity he was lowering it – to which she in her astonishment said half-jokingly “Pinkie, you must be going to die!”, which a few weeks later is what he did.  Either a doctor or his own instincts must have forewarned him… He was a man who went to Mass every morning of his life, even though Father José would acidly assure him that he wouldn’t get off the Hell-hook so easily – which did not stop Pinkie from doggedly counting his beads until the end.

    Just after Arthur May’s is the Seventh Day Adventist mission, a narrow board church with the steeple over the porch, which has a poised, spinsterly charm.  Every Friday and Saturday the handful of local Adventists gather on its bare benches for a service as straight and sober as the bell-tower.  But with the exception of Joab Escalona as we know him today, their out-of-church behaviour is not often so respectably subdued…  The Adventist plainness is a far cry from the ringing spectaculars of the Baptists, which is perhaps why there are so many less Adventists than Baptists.

    This part of the island is known as Ground Road.  In a space among the houses looking onto the sea, there is a jumble of logs, half-hewn timbers and broken canoes, the boatyard, where the local shipwrights build and repair fishing vessels with the use of a hoe-shaped hatchet called an adze, that planes smooth the curving boards of the hull.  The launching of boats on the rocky inlet is a confusion of yelling bare-chested men, straining ropes and coconut-log rollers slithering about in the waves.  At the rate work is done here a boat can take several years to complete, for lack of funds as well as industriousness – and once launched may then idle several more years at anchor because the owner cannot afford an engine, so such launchings don’t happen very often.

    Next stop – if it’s after eight o’clock and you feel like a drink and listening to some raucous conversation in pidgin English – is an immaculately clean bar or “cantina” that belongs to an extraordinary woman known as “Poonchee”.  Like Lau Chau, she’s nicknamed for her Chinese ancestry, although whereas Lau Chau is an Asiatic-looking negro, Poonchee is an Asian who is only slightly negroid.  She sells cheap rum to the locals while she herself tipples all night long from a bottle of JB scotch on the top shelf.  I have heard her say that “as long as it’s good liquour it don’t matter how goddam much of it you drink” – and she’s sure no hypocrite!  Every night Poonchee undergoes the same metamorphosis: from opening time to 9.00 she’s as dignified as a duchess, you are waited on briskly, ashtray, ice, called “dear”; from 9.00 to 10.30 she’s wobbling and has to be bellowed at for service (the regulars fondly call her “Poonch”), gets into long conversations with her customers and fellow drunkards, swearing with masculine abandon (“One day you’ll get yer cock knocked off, if ya have one a-TALL!”); and from then on she’s face down on the table, and the boys turn over the country-and-western records (caterwauling along in their West Indian accents), serve and even charge themselves…  Poonchee is said to have amassed the money to build her business, and the by San Andres standards elaborate home behind it (where she lives with a spinsterly sister) on the streets of Panama; but she is well respected – if rather circumspectly – even in puritanical San Andres, where people rarely approve of what you do, but always envy-admire you for doing it profitably.

    There’s a dirt road that takes you down to Jennie Bay, through a coconut grove to a tiny lagoon on the beach, where the island children love to bathe and the farmers come at the end of the day to wash their horses… such as Bule (BOO-lay) who takes care of the author’s own animal.  Bule is a “bush police” (policia rural) whose job is to protect the groves against coconut thieves, of whom there are a wily number at the south end of the island.  He will tell you with voice and fist shaking how one thief shot and killed a “partner” of his to avoid arrest, giving Bule such a fright that to this day he carries his pistol in his pocket at all times… Bule is sun-burnt but of the light-skinned Suarez family, long of face and hook-nosed, and hill-billyish in manner (one might call him a “rock-billy”).  He speaks (or shouts, since he’s half deaf) a dialect as thick as the bush he patrols.  As he will tell you (Bule is entertainingly outspoken) he has “three loves”: his “hass” (horse), his “wo-man” and his “li-ka” (liquor).  In the days when there were races he was the trainer.  Any horse he has in his charge he loves madly, and our talk usually revolves about the leasing of some “grass piece” (pasture patch).  If my horse Gringo’s “belly full” and he won’t “done eat” (finish eating) his bucket of bran mush, Bule will steady his nose with one hand and anxiously feed it to him from the palm of the other, murmuring encouraging words in his ear.  If “Mistah Lawrence” should claim he is broke and unable to buy a “next” (another) sack from Lau Chau, Bule longs out his mouth, or scowls (“him long out him mout’”) and stamps about the yard with his bucket of water, as if I should know that a “hass” cannot live on grass alone (although in San Andres most do)…  With his women he’s more carefree: his advice to other young bucks like himself (he’s a bachelor at fifty) is “Find ‘em, friend ‘em, fuck ‘em an’ forget ‘em!”.  A woman would have to be a rider to win Bule’s “affect-shuns” – such as my mother, who used to be no more than “Mistah Lawrence mama” and mechanically greeted each dawn (when he comes to “carry” the horse to pasture after my ride of the eve) with a “mawnin’, mistress”; until the day she asked for his own dappled nag to accompany me to the Great Pond, on the Hill.  Women haven’t ridden in San Andres since Bule was a young man, and so on her return (from a very cautious saunter under the breadfruit trees) he proudly reached up to shake her hand, eyes a-gleaming (since then he’s treated her like a man).  Bule’s only use for women is when he’s in the mood “to beat off drawers” (to whip off underpants) for which he “fancies” the fat ones – he himself is a bony bantam, “maga” or meager like his horse…  His purest passion is for his 11-year old daughter.  A big black woman down the road “made a baby for him” and when he saw the picanniny “favoured” him (insofar as she had fine features and “good” hair) he took her from the mother (who had more than she could care for) to raise at his niece’s house where he lives in a room upstairs.  This girl is a mokka-coloured nymphet, and already becoming quite “stotious” (conceited, in San Andres English), what with the way her father spoils her.  I am told that in the days when Bule was “courtin’” her mother, or just “sportin’” with her, as it probably was, the woman would complain (as San Andres women most commonly do of their menfolk) that he was stingy;  and in fact he’s a laughingstock with his pockets always bulging with papers but never any money (or so people say).  But if little Cristina says she needs “a hondred peso” bill, Bule drops what he’s doing and solemnly bestows it on her…  At noon on Saturday, Bule changes into a white shirt and religiously goes “on the rum”; and if between then and Sunday morning Gringo breaks loose and gets into someone’s “plantation”, I have to rely on Bule’s being the policeman to not be fined for the devoured banana and sugar cane leaves…  At present he’s in the hospital with three broken bones: he fell backwards off the top bench of the softball stadium in town, when San Andres was once again playing Panama, on an excited Saturday night…  He can be spotted easily along the road because, apart from riding the only well-fleshed horse in Garf (my own), he always wears a baseball cap, an old sweater and baggy pants tucked into rubber boots.

    A bit along there’s a small house beside a breadfruit tree which is Bada’s bar (ask for it to the islanders as “by Bada” – Bada’s place, just as “by we” means “our place”) where you might “buck up” (come across) some of the local “rash dogs” whipping up a calypso on the wash-tub and “jaw-bone”, the lower jaw of a horse which is pounded and shaken so that the teeth rattle rhythmically around in their sockets. The proprietor Mister Simson (known to all as Bada) pours the fire-water and keeps his froggily hooded eyes on the wild ones from under the brim of his permanently affixed Panama hat.  The décor is unpretentious with up-turned beer crates for seats, peeling election posters on the wall and a pair of American refrigerators (one often works) which are almost museum pieces.  The blue-eyed rarely stumble in but are noisily welcomed when they do… To tell the truth, or “fo’ troot” as San Andres people say it, Bada’s Panama hat isn’t always on his head.  Some nights when the Lord-knows-what possesses him he hangs it on a nail over his chair; but then each time he gets up to go from behind the counter to “the box” (the refrigerator) he puts it on for the trip.

    The road joins the seashore again at Sound Bay (a “sound” is water sheltered by a reef and “bay“ in West Indian English means simply “beach”) with a pretty perspective of white sloping sand, clear green waters and flimsy wooden houses on stilts.  Sound Bay is the “bad” end of San Andres.  Its people are mostly unpropertied (and unschooled) squatters, and their primitive manners get them the name of “backsliders” from the finer folk of Garf – whose wags have a rude refrain which goes

Sound Bay girl no wash dem draws
till rain come down
Sound Bay boy no eat good food
till Payne get cod fish

(Sound Bay girls don’t wash their panties unless it rains, rather than carry water from the well, and Sound Bay boys can’t afford to buy anything better to eat than salt cod, from Allie Payne’s Chinese grocery store in Garf.)

    Here lives in a shack on the sand a loin-clothed n’er-do-well named Black Beddy, who fishes lobster by day with his spear gun and barefoot yellow-haired lasses at night with his guitar.

    On a wind-swept bend of the shore is a forgotten old cemetery, a long, low white wall with black wooden crosses and flower bushes half-buried in the dunes.  The islanders bury their dead next to their houses, and the few cemeteries in Garf and on the hill date from a period when the Colombian government forbade this – in their opinion – backward practice…  Here is the stretch of road the islanders used as a race-track, until it was asphalted.  Everyone attended these races which were hotly disputed with large sums of money being bet (my own horse won many, or so I was told by the man who sold him to me).  Nowadays there is no pleasure-riding and all one sees are the sorry steeds that “back” coconuts out of the bush, or turn the “mill” that presses “cane lika” at sugar harvest time.  The champions – “Hurricane” (an “ambler”), “The Red Hass” (a Spanish-style pacer) and “Pony” (who is untrained in any step at all) being those I have ridden – are kept sentimentally under a mango tree in the backyard, as pets.  But in the old days every man and woman was a rider, and any of them will tell you about the “moonlit rides” when 15 or 20, the ladies side-saddle, used to roam the island on full-moon nights, and what a “good enjoyment” it was.

    From here to South End, where you’ll find the Blowing Hole, a geyser forced up through the porous coral rock by the waves, and Miss Ramona’s thatch-roofed restaurant of stuffed land crabs, “crab-back”, and coconut stew, “run-down”, and then all the way “round de land” back to North End, it’s a loneliness of coconut trees and jagged coral shore… You might meet one of San Andres’ last remaining farmers, such as the priceless Ruddy Duddy, who will be glad to give you some alligator pears (which we call avocados) or “bitt’n’sweet” oranges, or show you his yucca patch under the trees.  He speaks of his wife as “my darlin’” even though they’re both nearly 60 – the reason for this being, I am told, that they were just recently married…

THE END

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Baptist Church on The Hill (La Loma), built in 1847

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    You have almost certainly never heard of the island of San Andres, and neither had I when I set up my crafts business on the Colombian mainland, in 1974.  One day I found in a Cartagena travel agency a tourist brochure saying that the distant Caribbean island which belonged to Colombia, San Andres, was in spite of its Spanish name populated with English-speaking people, and that they had been there since Britain ceded the island to Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, because it was too far from the rest of the Empire for them to administer. 

    From the accompanying colour photos I saw that the natives were blacks and must therefore have much in common with the people of Jamaica, which is one of the closest points of land in the vast expanse of sea in which the tiny island lies.  Having lived in pre-independence Jamaica, this aroused my curiosity and I determined to go there at the first chance.  Further reading revealed that, in fact, San Andres was once part of the same colonial family as Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. 

    A year later, with my young mother and her dogs in tow, I arrived in San Andres on the rusty freighter Johnny Cay, sailing from Cartagena - with all our belongings, having called it quits as far as the rest of Colombia was concerned.  We set up our crafts shop on the leeward shore, the place or stretched-out village called San Luis, but which the natives call Garf.  I created a series of pen-and-ink postcards of the island, and decided that a small guide book in English would be a good way of promoting our business. 

    The booklet was truly written with love, because by that time I was in love with both  the place and one of its natives. But the winds of fortune changed before I could have it printed and we took flight, not to flee poor San Andres itself but, rather, the troubled South American country to which it belongs.  I had some copies printed up on my next island, Grand Cayman, and put them on sale at my new crafts shop there, but islands take little interest in one another, only in mainlands, and few copies were ever sold.  I kept some in a box and forgot their existence, swept along by the whirlwind of life, as a French novel describes the tyranny of youth.  I never looked at the book again, nor did I ever return to Colombia or San Andres.

    Then, a few years ago, I had news from the island – thanks to the Internet, of course – telling me that a coconut tree I planted there 35 years before, at the lonely southernmost end of the land, had grown big and strong and had become a joy to all those fortunate enough to live in its shadow.  I gave the sign of life that was expected of me, and fell to thinking about that happy time.  So I had another stab at rummaging around in my papers, coming up not with the booklet itself but the stencil used to mimeograph it on the local newspaper's "office reproduction machine" back in low-tech 1977, in Georgetown, Grand Cayman.  I sat right down at my computer and transcribed the text I found without making a change.  So I can assure you that everything you have read up to this letter was written by me then, when I was exactly half the age I am now and before the tidal wave of consumerism had engulfed the world.

    Typing it out also meant reading it, of course, and I was pleased to find that it is more than just a rather poetic guide to a pretty island.  If the islanders seemed anachronistic to me back then, can you imagine how these pages, full of their over-sized personalities, their pungent and often scabrous patois just as reminiscent of pre-industrial England as of Africa, their subjectively simple view of the world, with an England-of-the-mind on the good side of the Cosmos and the “panyas” or Spaniards – who had already been Colombians for a century - on the wicked one, must seem to me now, in the borderless Age of the Internet? A paradise lost for any Anglo-Saxon (Americans and English then being, for the islanders, one and the same thing)  and probably also for those of them today who are old enough to remember how it was.  

    I often told my island friends that the reason they worshipped the English was that they had seen so few of them, at least as compared with Colombians.  But before we all knew everything, it was still possible to live in one's fantasies, for better or for worse. That is why I decided to publish these pages, not because they will be of much practical use for today’s tourists, but because they will make both tourists and islanders travel in time.