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Book 3. The Vigil…
I went to the viewing for a “much-loved by the community” friend this afternoon, at the Davis Funeral Home. The paper said that the viewing was scheduled from four to six PM, I got there a little early, and parked between the Western Cemetery #1 and #2. The Western Cemetery is over three hundred years old and is one of a number of very old burial grounds in Charlotte Amalia and on the Island of St. Thomas.
The Western Cemetery was in two sections (#1 and #2) for many years and has now become three. It’s very reminiscent of New Orleans with the above ground (always picturesque some time quite fancy) vaults. Within the old stone walls and beneath ancient mahogany trees, time stands still.
I have been affected by the powerful emotional impact of this place since I first saw it up close, as a boy of five. All of us children from Nisky School were here standing sadly around a little white coffin, poised to go deep deep into the ground. We were burying “Peggy” a beautiful little brown skin girl with a bright and smiling face and a heart of gold. After school yesterday, or the day before, Peggy fell off one of the children’s play things (a rusty old dump truck) in the communal “yard” in the Nisky community atop “Chinaman Hill” She fell and broke her neck. And just that quickly Peggy was gone, and every one that she had ever known was forever changed because Peggy was beyond any doubt, as pure and as good as they come, she was an absolute innocent.
Why the good and loving God at the center of the Nisky School, Nisky community and Nisky Moravian Church Universe would break Peggy’s neck and take her away from us, is a question that hangs in the still air of the Western Cemetery, and will for us, be there forever.
That she would be followed soon after by “Augustine” the most perfect and beautiful golden boy child that the hardscrabble community of “French Town” had ever produced, furthered the idea for some that the God that the children of Nisky were trying to understand and obey, did not make any sense.
Still to this hallowed ground where cries and questions and prayers, hang in the air like blue smoke, we came and come again and again.
Today it’s another golden boy, as innocent and loved as any before. Chronologically, no longer a child, still he was his Mothers baby boy, and the youngest of the brothers.
This is a “Creole” family, children of children of Scotland and Africa, with some of every other sweet sop of the earth thrown in for good measure and there is “plenty of good” to be measured.
As I walk towards the door of the funeral parlor someone says to me “You look like Jesus Christ” a quick glance at my reflection in a car window confirms that he’s right. I’m all spiffed up and when I’m all spiffed up, I do tend to look a bit like Jesu Christo. Conversely, when I’m not spiffeled, I look more like a Tasmanian devil. (Could be some kind of cosmokarmic, Yin Yan bipolaric impression disorder? who knows.) The observation comes from a brother of the deceased, he then says “if you’re here for the viewing you’re an hour early, from four to five is for family only..I don’t want you to be embarrassed”
It occurs to me to say (a whole day later it’s true but..) “Yes, but if I look so much like Jesus Christ, the family might be overjoyed to see me, and that I have come for the dear departed” (and then to my self) “and perhaps I could steal a kiss or two from one or more of those beautiful Afro-Celtic daughters”. Instead I say “Well, thanks for telling me, it could have been very uncomfortable for them, I’ll be back in an hour”
So I walk back up the road between Western Cemetery #1 and #2 and as always the power of the setting captures my attention. Section #2 had been closed to burials for 100 years because of the terror of Cholera. 1867 was a very difficult year for the people of St. Thomas. There were two Hurricanes, a Yellow Fever epidemic, a Cholera Epidemic, an Earth quake and a Tidal Wave
They put the people (over 1200 men, women and children) who died of Cholera in Section #2 and declared that no soil was to be turned here for 100 years. And they stuck to it. All through childhood we wondered and worried, could it come back up from the ground to get us all?
Just across (on the North side of the street) from The Western Cemetery #1 and #2 is the Old Moravian Cemetery and next to that, The Old Jewish Cemetery. Each very interesting and colorful in their own right, many generations of my son Scott’s maternal line, are in The Old Jewish Cemetery)
The Danish West Indies were a welcoming and tolerant society and St. Thomas is the home of the second oldest Synagogue in the new world. Jewish families of every hue have been a part of these Islands since shortly after the last ship load of their ancestors (fleeing the inquisition), left Palos Spain on the exact same tide that Columbus did on his first voyage of discovery. My boy’s people (the Trepuks and Levin’s) went first to France and then came here to the Danish West Indies. Of course “My Boy’s people” are his beautiful Mother’s people, and she and he are a natural-born part of the Creole society that I am holding vigil with today.
While waiting for four to become five, I drove over to the Old Villa Olga, in French Town. The Villa Olga has been many things over the past three hundred years, and I am drawn to it’s beauty, history and cool breezes. Villa Olga sits on a little point, in fact the very point from which the coal carriers of old (all female) would cross the slippery marshy coral bridge to Hassel Island every morning and evening, going to and from their work. These coal carrier ladies, balancing precariously on sagging steeply angled narrow gangplanks, loaded and unloaded (in baskets balanced on their heads) every rock, nugget, sliver, and dust particle of the coal that fired the furnaces of the great transatlantic steam ships of the time.
After carefully removing and folding my spiffy jacket and leaving it in the car, I sit on the rocks and think about them and a hundred other things that are a part of the history of the area. The entire economy of the people of Charlotte Amalia (apart from the merchant class) were dependent on the work of these women and their paltry hard-earned incomes. The old photos show lines of ragged coal blackened women that appear to be caricatures of human beings. No one could be that ragged, that dirty, that disheveled, that exhausted. The impression is that they aren’t photos of people, rather they’re paintings exaggerated to make a point about suffering.
For years the community response was “Thank God that’s not me, thank God that we’re not like that. But in reality, they are, we are like that. These are the Grand Mothers and Aunties of many of our loved ones and friends. The heroic “Coal carriers” the hard pressed ladies that changed the history of the DWI when they organized themselves and struck from insult and rage and defiance when the twice removed decided to pay them for their hard work with (of all things) Mexican Pesos.
Mexican Pesos worth even less then, than now. But to the twice removed the caricatures that carried the coal were worth less than a worthless Peso. When it became clear to the ladies that their labors were rewarded with currency that they could not use to buy food for their children and families, they struck. And in so doing, earned their place in history.
The slippery coral bridge is long gone now the US Navy blasted it to kingdom come when they bought the Islands from Denmark in 1917 for 25 Million Dollars and no sense. (a small local joke) They blasted the bridge to give boat traffic improved passage from one anchorage to another. It was a good thing, sea water got stagnant in this little corner of the harbor, and Yellow Fever is rumored to have had a ball concocting it’s self among the flotsam and jetsam of three hundred years of naughty goings on here.
Before our town was given the name of the beautiful Queen Charlotte Amalia, it was known throughout the West Indies as “Tap Hus” which means of course “The Drinking House”. Many more than one drunken sailor was swept by time and tide into this corner of the harbor to wind up as a rum poisoned feast for fish and mosquitoes. You can imagine what a God awful stew of stink and pestilence this quaint little corner must have been. This may be one of those rare instances in which three bombs and a bazooka “done good”.
This afternoon, Passenger Boats of every possible color combination, inbound from or out bound to St. John, St. Croix, Tortola and Puerto Rico, are zipping through the passage on their way in and out of the Harbor. Sea planes are splashing down and splashing up every few minutes and fishing dinghys and inflatables are zipping by every where.
This is quite a busy quiet spot. Over there are the remains of the concrete walls that was the huge salt water swimming pool of my childhood, and here (floating across the harbor from the West Indian Dock), comes a basso profundo rendition of “When You Wish Upon A Star” played by “Captain and foghorn” as the Disney cruise ship announces it’s imminent departure to one and all. As It slips out to sea I can’t help but notice what a remarkably classically beautiful ship it is, and think how extraordinary it must be, for little ones to take a cruise on her.
It’s ten to five, time to get back to the Vigil.
Book 3. The Man Who Swam To St. John…
BOOK 3. The Man Who Swam To St. John
In 1985 Shaky Acres (the recovery program that Tuts and I had started in 1981) was going along fairly well, but was in need of a fund raiser or two, Tuts heard (along with everyone else) of a proposed St. John swim (every body heard of it because it was considered impossible by most folks, and suicidaly dangerous by local folks who knew that there were hungry sharks out there the size of the battleship “Bismarck”). The UDT (The Frogmen, The Navy Seals, The toughest hombres on or under the sea) while training for many years in St. Thomas, had given up on swimming to St. John because it was simply too crazy dangerous a deed.
The well intentioned local lady legislator who had proposed “the swim” was unaware of the deep and dark difficulties inherent in the “big fun fundraiser”
.When Tutsie was a young boy, riding back across Sir Francis Drake’s Passage coming home with his Mother from a harvest festival in Cane Garden bay in Tortola, he looked out from the deck of “The Joan Of Arc” or “The Bomba Charger” at Pillsbury Sound (The five mile stretch of wild water that separates St. Thomas and St. John) he said to her “I could swim ‘crass dat yu kno” His usually loving mother had replied “Man hush up yu schupid mout, why yu like tu talk such schupid craziness?” Tuts didn’t see any reason to discuss it any further, but, he says, the conviction that he could do it, was locked in his mind for ever after.
It was July the third, 1985, Emancipation Day in The Virgin Islands. (Emancipation Day is the day in 1849, on which it became official that the slaves in the Danish West Indies had won their freedom and were now and forever more free) Freedom was a long time coming for the children of Africa in the DWI, and very hard won, as was Tut’s own personal freedom from drugs and alcohol.
There were forty eight entrants all together, most of them young white kids from the hot shot St. Croix “Dolphins Swim Team”, they came prepared and ready to succeed, with sleek buoyant body suits, well fitted goggles and the best fins that money could buy
A number of the St. Thomas swimmers were runners down from the states, budding tri-athletes, an elderly white gent determined to show his wife he still “had it” and half a hand full of locals with a mismatched assortment of masks and fins..
Tuts on the other hand was wearing one pair of big and baggy boxer trunks, y nada mas…
As the other swimmers did warm ups and calesthetics on the sand at Vessup bay, Red Hook, a tough old Tortola man, a sailor, pulled Tuts aside and said” Buaayyy yu, yu crazy buaay? Following de damn schupid white people dem? Yu don kno de real name fo red hook is shak waff? Buaayy!! Shak ow de biggah den uh submarine! A black man gon follow dem schupid white people? Buaayy wha rang wid yu, yu crazy o something?”
Tuts concedes that the strongly delivered warning did cause him much concern, but that he had already told everybody over and again that he was going to do it, told them in the strongest terms, in the face of the harshest ridicule. It was common knoweldge that no (sane) black person from the Islands could ever, should ever and would ever attempt to make that swim. Therefore, as his sanity was in question, it was also a crucial moment for recovery in the Islands.
At this moment he was demonstrating clearly (to local folks) that local people who went to fellowship meetings “wid de crazy white people dem” were demonstrably nuts (just like they thought) and for him to chicken out before he even hit the water would have sealed it once and for all. Tuts has since confessed that on that particular morning he had decided that he would rather be eaten alive, than quit.
Once the old Tortola man realized that he was not talking to a sensible gentleman of color, he began to encourage him with information about what to expect in terms of currents and where to find what he called “soft spots” in the sea. He stated flatly that “yu can’t swim directly East ta St. John, yu will have tu swim for “Loango” (Loango Key, a small Island due North of St. John) and as yu hold Loango as your goal, the current will be sweepin’ yu south, look sharp! Buaay, dat is de onliest way to get dare”.
As the swim began, the fast and the fancy took off due East for Cruz bay and before you knew it half of them had been swept away and were heading backwards around Cabrita Point towards Big and Little St. James, then out over the Anegada Trench, (on the bottom of which the scariest bug eyed things on earth, with jumping, wiggling electro “bait worms” dangling in front of foot long razor teeth, swim around four miles down, snapping steel trap jaws, and saying fish prayers, to get their dribbly lips around something, anything, slathered in coconut oil, or greasy mango scented sun tan lotion) and then south and west for St Croix, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Haiti, The Caymans, The Isle of Pines Cuba, and New Orleans. (of course by the time they got to New Orleans there would be nothing left of them but a Speedo tag and whatever plastics they’d swallowed along the way) needless to say, an armada of rescue boats started pulling people in over the gunnels, like langustas on parade, on a fish pot Saturday night.
Tuts was heading for Loango .
Shortly after the fast and the fancy fiasco, the old white gent’s wife, standing in his rescue boat started screaming hysterically “A Shark! A Shark! Oh my God, I see a Shark!” Pull my husband out, pull my husband out, pull him out right now!! Oh my GOD! Pull my husband out right now!
Tuts says the poor old gent was utterly dejected as they pulled him up, his bathing suit drooping below his pale old, pink old, shiny hiney.
Next went the dapper sharply outfitted “high color” attorney from the states, who had looked most disdainfully upon our man’s baggy boxers and boney bare feet but was now being dragged, thoroughly defeated, flat on his back from the sea to flat on his back on the bottom of the heaving boat.
The boats were heaving now because the seas were heaving now, they were coming into “The Big Blue”. A section of the sound a mile or more wide, in which, or perhaps I ought to say, through which, big serioso, fast moving, megalo mountains of Big Blue Heavy Water Waves (Waves of the sort that make you say “Good Lord” or “Mama Mia” or “Holy Freakin’ Toledo” when you first see them even though you are looking at them from your perch on the deck of a passenger ferry, ten or fifteen feet above the water line.
If you are in the water “down in the hollow” splashing along on your belly and craning your neck up trying to see the top of the wave, you will probably say a lot more than good lord, and if you are Tutsie and your rescue boat is manned by one “Fisherman John” a continental dipso juicehead, that you helped to drag off the junk heap of life, but now haven’t seen for over half an hour, most of it will not be printable in a general audience mem.wha? such as this one. But you can believe me when I say, you have probably never heard anything like it.
Eventually, Tuts discovered that if he swam like crazy faster and faster as he got closer and closer to the top and he could then flip over to his back at just the last second the wave would crest and the curl would break over his shoulders. He could “hang there” for seconds, (perhaps one or two of the longest this side of eternity,) and contemplate his mounting misery and helplessness before having to roll over and slide headfirst down down down, ah..down down down, ah down down down, down. (Knowing that some thing is surely waiting in the “trough” to open its porky yaw and scrape you all along your back, belly and sides as it swallows you whole)
As I may have mentioned casually a short while ago, this section of the sound was just a splash over a mile or more wide, can you guess how many times your whole life can flash before your eyes before you get completely bored with it?
What you don’t get bored with is the fact that you cannot see either Island or for that matter any thing at all when you are down in the valley, nothing but deep dark blue. So the desperate hope that you might be able to see something, anything, hinting at where you are, (is it Puerto Rico? Is it Berlin?) at the top of the next wave is a powerful draw, and can keep you going for many a repetition.
One time he did see some thing recognizable back on St.Thomas, it was the two super poles that mark the spot where the undersea cable goes down beneath the sea. way down to the bottom, that’s the bottom way way down in the pitch black darkness beneath his own bottom. Better to see nothing he thought, than things as scary as that.
Pretty soon his primary concern had shifted from monstroso seas, to waves slapping him in the face, slap slap slap slap and he realized that he was in a different kind of swim now, the big blue was behind him, and he was battling offshore currents, lucky he had gone for Loango, because now, in spite of his forward motion he was being swept sideways, southward towards “Stephens Key”, a small flat island outside of Cruz Bay Bay, (or the Bay of Cruz Bay), that is actually two small flat Islands because what would have been one Island has a rocky channel (with it’s own spiffy little current) right through it’s middle.
Tut knew that if allowed himself to be swept southward beyond Stephens Key, he would be out in the Anegada Trench, and then as likely as not his rescuers would be the Venezuelan Navy. He determined that he had to get to and make it through the spiffy little current hole in the middle of Stephens Key
.If the current was running in his favor it could be a breeze, he was exhausted but just on the inside of Stephens Key was the outer entrance to Cruz Bay. He was almost, almost there.
Alas, the current was not in his favor (unless he wanted to turn around and “go with the flow” back to the “Cabrita express” and the afore mentioned many points beyond) and this part of the swim took everything but the very best of him. The very best of him was all that kept him kicking; the current was so strong that the surface water was rippling backwards in protest. That’s when the “water under water” is moving too fast for the water “on the water” to keep up, so the surface ripples backwards in tiny little cascades of confusion, all of which seemed to be going right up his nose, and down his throat.
They say that the children of Africa can’t swim. My friend Tutsie has proved time and again, that that is a racist lie, or put another way, demonstrably untrue. Although it is true that Tutsie’s Mother, Miss Meu, born in Dominica, was one half Carib. And although the present effort of the Carib/Arawak Federation is to dispel the myth that King Charles of Spain used to promulgate and excuse the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, specifically, that the Caribs were so savage that they ate people, there is no question that the Caribs were and are among the toughest of the toughest human beings that have ever lived. So our man, three quarters African, One quarter Carib (with a smitter smatter of Frenchish, British, both in the African part of the pie) is all but dead in the water, having just burst through the impassable current hole at Stephen’s Rock.
Tuts aka “El Toro” aka “Peperino” aka Skarpy aka “The Rabbi” (that’s another story) aka a hundred other desperado descriptors, is ready to surrender. If only he had the strength to raise his arm signaling, no, begging to be dragged out of the sea, he would have done so. Just then the cheerful voice of Fisherman John came skipping across the water, singsonging advice to“Make it look pretty Tuts! Make it look pretty! We’re almost there man!, Make it look pretty!!!.
Some day I’ll build a statue at Cabrita Point to Victor Antonius “Tutsie” “El Toro” Edwards, one portraying a skinny little mahogany hued dude in baggy boxers, tilting forward on one leg, the other angled out behind, with hands (as in prayer) just above his head,. Poised to dive into history.
Tuts became that day the first native Virgin Islander to EVER in all time, swim from St. Thomas to St. John.
It wasn’t pretty as he crawled and dragged himself ashore (water streaming from every orifice), and it wasn’t pretty as he collapsed on the sand, unable to stand for a full three minutes. But in his defense, he was forty freakin’ years old and working with a body that had been ravaged by drugs and alcohol.
The kids on the Dolphin swim team have much to be proud of, they did in their wetsuits, fins and organized swim formations, what the rough and tough UDT had given up on, they made the swim.
I know that where ever these kids are in the world, and where ever they will go, they will always remember that “once upon a time, when we were kids in the islands, my friends and me did the impossible together” they will also remember with awe and admiration “that skinny little fellow in the baggy boxer trunks” that did it alone and bare footed, and then, passed on the champagne and praise, because “that’s not why he was there”.
.Tutsie made the swim because it was Emancipation Day, and he wanted to demonstrate and celebrate freedom, he wanted to demonstrate freedom from fear of the sea and the ignorant idea that “Black people can’t swim” He wanted to demonstrate that “recovery is macho” and that black people now need to be emancipated from the chemical slavery that is alcoholism and addiction, and because even though she was long gone, he wanted his mother to know that he could do, what he said he could do, and now it was time to go home… And oh yeah, to raise a few dollars for Shaky Acres.
Scott Fagan's Mem.wa? 