Free Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks

foreign to St. Bart’s as to St. Moritz, and the place felt a little like St. Moritz, though more laid-back, if that’s possible, and more expensive. In a sense, the entire island was a huge, chic French gated resort. There were many private villas in the hills, luxury hotels and bungalows along the coves and beaches of the north coast, and a picture-perfect yacht basin in the one town, Gustavia, a regular stop for the Lesser Antilles sailing crowd.
    Popular with entertainers hiding from their fans, models working on their tans, and a large number of balding businessmen in their sixties and seventies strolling the beaches alongside very attractive, much younger women in string bikinis, St. Bart’s provided little of interest for travelers like me and Chase, voyagers interested in the five-hundred-year clash-and-blend of diverse cultures, races, and classes that makes the Caribbean so exciting and so threatening. St. Bart’s was lotusland. But even the most intrepid of travelers can use a break now and then, so we settled into a cabana at Baie de St. Jean for a few days and tried not to be too distracted by the perfect beaches, the cuisine, the designer boutiques, and the discos. And—no surprise—we slumbered our days and nights away as if on holiday in St. Moritz, thousands of miles from the Caribbean, and I spoke almost not at all about my marriages and divorces. And it was painful to leave.
    Our itinerary and booked flights, however, obliged us to head next for Antigua. After reading native daughter Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place, one might think, as one approached Antigua for the first time, that one was entering the third circle of hell. And, indeed, there was much about the island to offend the sensitive visitor and perhaps even more to offend a native Antiguan like Kincaid, who left her idyllic island home and returned twenty years later to find a country on the make and the local politicians on the take. Antigua is the largest of the Leewards, 108 square miles, seventy-six thousand people. It is also the most entangled in the history of British imperial ambitions. The economics and culture of sugar andslavery shaped its destiny to a degree matched only in Barbados and Jamaica. As a general rule, these are the islands most tragically caught in the subtly interwoven conflicts between hatred and slavish adoration of the mother country, between third-world nationalism and hopeless dependence on foreign loans, between profound affection for their island’s natural resources and relentless determination to develop, at all costs, the tourist industry. Antigua was an island at war with itself, and it showed.
    But if all we saw of the island were the congested, filthy streets of St. John’s, the capital, and its deepwater port, where the cruise ships touched down, and the recklessly developed north coast along Dickinson Bay to the airport, where the jumbo jets disgorged troops of tourists from the mainland, we would have concluded that, just as on St. Thomas and Sint Maarten, the island’s war with itself had been won by the darker forces. A drive across the island to Nelson’s Dockyard and the famed English Harbour would have only reinforced that view, for the elaborate restorations and reconstructions painted the history of colonialism and slavery in what can only be called a sanitized, benign, almost nostalgic light. And if we had followed the handsome art deco signs posted all over the island pointing proudly to something called Carlisle Bay, all the way through the Shekerley Mountains to the southeast coast, until we finally came to Old Road—where a two-hundred-year-old village of local farmers and fishermen was in the process of being removed and a vast mud hole was surrounded by a high chain-link fence with a rusting bulldozer in the middle—we would have smelled arrogance, greed, foreign capital, greased palms.
    Yet inland, away from St. John’s and over on the east coast, where large-scale tourism