Almost everyone who has visited the Bahamas will tell you the same thing about my people; Bahamians are very friendly, open and honest, always smiling and eager to please. Indeed, all of the travel guides depict Bahamians…as being amongst the most beautiful people of earth…the typical visitor might honestly believe that this nation of islands is at least a close approximation of Eden…The Bahamas, however, is not quite paradise…there are…often below the surface, aspects of Bahamian culture (barely hinted at in the travel guides). For instance, we are a little bit too willing to ignore rules that don’t quite suit us……Serial adultery, which is euphemistically called ‘sweetheartin,’ is something of a national pastime….”
— Virgil Henry Storr Journal of Caribbean Literatures
Chapter 51: Nassau Memories
Nassau like Paris was one of those cities that stayed with you always. Over the years, saying I lived in Nassau seemed to create a pause in conversation, as others re-calibrated their view of me. Usually they expressed envy. Uniformly said I was lucky. I agreed. It was interesting how many women asked me if it lived up to its billing as Stud Farm of the Western Hemisphere.
Evidently the Venusian telegraph was not deflected by tourbook rhapsodies about white sand, blue-green water and trade winds. Focused instead on island sex and the alleged prowess of young Bahamian males. I admitted witnessing them slip over the fence onto the private Sheraton British Colonial beach downtown, shucking shoes, shirts and pants to reveal Speedos, inviting themselves onto the beach blankets of pale Northern girls. Sometimes they got run off, most times they got lucky and left with their new friends. Women hearing this story professed shock at their presumption — but sometimes with a covert gleam in their eye.
Virile native studs were not the only ones island languor and a supposedly aphrodisiac conch diet energized into serial “sweetheartin.’” The expatriate community played too. But our publisher, near as I could tell, was locked in his travel-guide world view with no interest in glorifying sexual riptides in Bahamian culture. He liked, for instance, Hollis’s suggestion to expand the line to include a children’s coloring book, and a collection of West Indies folk tales. Glenda already had the coloring book underway, more confident than when she did one about St. Augustine on the mainland.
The publisher still was dithering about the book I was hired to write, so Hollis took me along to research folk tales. I had traded the TR Herald for a Fiat 850; we took two tape recorders, a raincoat and umbrella in case of squalls, and drove out to Adelaide Village. He had located two storytellers, 65 and 71, to spin B’Boukee and B’Rabbi tales. Told me B’Rabbi was Bahamian for the same Br’er Rabbit that Joel Chandler Harris made famous. B’Boukee was B’Rabbi’s perpetual fall guy. We convened beneath cedars on the lee shore. Light surf piled up on an offshore reef, a light hiss on the tape beneath their melodic accents. They did not confine their yarns to those two, spreading out to lie about encounters with mermaids — probably too sexual for the publisher — and an African tale about how dogs lost their tails.
Hollis loved that stuff, and still was optimistic about new ventures. We ran out of tape before they ran out of stories. He gave each a dollar for beer. Back in the village the Fiat refused to start. Laughing boys too young to chase tourist girls circled us, offering to fix it for a dollar. Hollis told me to pop the hood, and re-secured the distributor cap. The boys were unembarrassed he knew their trick. Our second visit, it was just the spark-plug wires. Twice irritated me but Hollis thought it was fun. The weeks slipped by. The main book, the fat annual, still was not cleared for publication by the publisher’s J-School wife. Even Hollis’s patience was wearing thin.
Nassau was a party town. Employee parties would start with island conviviality but devolve into wickedly sarcastic jokes about the publisher’s indecisiveness. Frequent expat-community parties included natives, boyfriend or girlfriend of an expat. Not infrequently the Bahamians would score an additional fuck off compliant foreigners. Skin tones from Abaco-white to Gold Coast-black and all between, males upheld their stud-farm legend. The legend was silent on island women — a form of gallantry? — but on party evidence, they were no strangers to sweetheartin.’
The running expat joke was no one drank the water, substituting gin. Tanqueray, my favorite, was almost the official lubricant. Bourbon was too heavy in the heat. Expats shared a wealth of arcane knowledge over endless drinks. A Dutch engineer confided for really long road trips English drive is better than American: you can rest your gas-pedal foot against sidewall to avoid cramps.
Two drinks and Chloe would be dozing. If she pushed it she would sick up. Expats, observing me holding her hair away from her face above a Bay Street trash can after a Blackbeard’s Tavern night, steadying her with my other hand, said it must be true love.
Hard-drinking women showed mild contempt when she nodded off at parties, and closed in on me. One voluptuous English blonde sat close to describe being raped by several Haitians who broke into her place. Her description was more reminiscent than traumatized.“They were gentle when I didn’t argue…didn’t hurt me, though some were quite well-endowed….they were just lonely. Didn’t even steal anything. Would you think me a slut to say it wasn’t that bad?”
Peculiar form of come-on but damned if she didn’t seem aroused. Abruptly seized my arm, said,“Take me dancing at Charlie-Charlie’s!” An Over the Hill nightclub that didn’t open till two a.m. I said Chloe’s too drunk. Instant reply:“She can sleep in the car…” She later told Hollis I was a real man, worth getting to know. We did eventually dance at Charlie-Charlie’s on other nights, but I avoided sex with her. A non-Bahamian thing to do. My Augusta ME and the Jacksonville Navy publisher would have shaken their heads. Hollis just grinned and shrugged.
Chloe, with her Seattle knowledge of queers, said there was more than heterosexual attraction around. A little Welsh guy was a party regular with his male partner. When I questioned her dancing with his English roommate Chloe said,“He’s doing his duty so his macho partner can hit on you.” Which amused her, as women hitting on me did not. The Welshman volunteered to guide me bird shooting on various Out Islands for my putative tour book, just us. I avoided that but attended a stag “smoker” featuring 8mm pornography.
Even in Nassau they weren’t bold enough to invite women. The Welshman told Chloe lots of men affect a drunken doze to pretend disinterest,“but you can see light on their eyes under the eyelids. They’re looking, all right. Not Ish — he really was asleep. Head turned away.” I was a fraud. The porn was heterosexual and so arousing I had to keep my eyes off to avoid tumescence in an all-male setting. Chloe thought that funny.
Hollis and I flew to Long Island, Columbus’s second landfall in 1492, just across the ocean from Watling’s, his first. Watling’s was said to have excellent duck shooting. Never found out; we didn’t go across. Hollis had his Hasselblad for advertising-spread photos of the posh north-end resort built by our hosts. The German wife was our pilot in a new, comfortable Piper Cherokee. I went to take notes for the tour book. Lodging, meals, drinks were on the house. The rich and colorful guests, the clubhouse, the cottages, were something out of Somerset Maugham, “South o’ Cancer.”
We took a long drive down the island in an whirring Austin jitney, natives waving and smiling. From two white churches Friar Jerome built in ClarenceTown near the mail-boat landing, one Anglican, one RC, we counted 34 churches back up the island to the resort. Then there were the signs: Joe and the Girls Grocery; Jean’s Cold Drinks and Dry Goods Store; Kentucky — Club №2;The Pink Elephant — Hollis said such names would never ring true in fiction.
One of us — I don’t remember who; Hollis said me — compared our jaunt to road trips Hemingway and Fitzgerald took in Europe. I was larger, but Hollis had the jaded world view of a Hemingway. I was the naive one. Proof of which was not long in coming.
The resort owners’ daughter, a Montreal advertising executive, dark, intense, vivacious, lobbied her parents in support of my suggestion that“game-bird-shooting at Columbus’s landfall” would make their resort even more attractive to certain rich patrons — like her Irish friends who flew to Quebec each fall to shoot.
Over drinks in the clubhouse, she related her surprising plan to live on an Israeli kibbutz. I asked if love led her so far from her Montreal-Bahamas axis. She wondered why love was my first thought and I told her my Israeli story, which absorbed her. We talked writing, from books to newspapers to advertising. She seemed to like me. Hollis took her away to shoot photos for the resort ad. I saw them in Nassau: curvy and smoldering in a swimsuit, wading in a beach cave. Look what you turned down, he said. That night when he returned to our guest cottage, I had mentioned I was sleeping without Chloe the first time since marriage.
But not necessarily alone, he said. Our new friend is taken with you. Gave me her cottage number. Go on over for drinks and whatever. By yourself. Three is awkward for that. I concede the field. I was nonplussed and reflexively declined.
Like the Augusta ME and the Navy publisher, I finally had Hollis shaking his head. The simple truth was that I feared rejection, and didn’t want to make a fool of myself. And wasn’t sure how I would feel if I wasn’t rejected. In an island environment where philandery ran rampant, I was uncomfortable.
