Free Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page A

hadn’t yet taken over, the country was beautiful and clean, and the residents, mostly small farmers, were both proud and friendly. We could still find the Antigua mourned by Jamaica Kincaid, but we had to work at it, and it would not, could not, last much longer. Small guesthouses and owner-operated hotels, like the Long Bay on the east coast, where there were no social directors and no free drinks with cute names and paper parasols and we were free to talk and read, were rapidly being shouldered aside by the huge resorts, casinos, and condo complexes. All the good roads on the island now led only to where the air-conditioned tour buses wished to go.
    We made a day trip to Antigua’s country cousin, Barbuda, which had recently received its first attention from U.S. tourist publications, but the dry, low-lying platter of an island, located a few miles northeast of Antigua and part of the same political unit, offered little that had not been more interestingly, and prettily, offered by Saba. There were coral beaches here, however, and one (expensive) resort hotel, Coco Point Lodge. Barbuda was essentially a fishing and salt-producing island, isolated, sparsely populated, poor, with no scenic attractions, almost no tourist services, and a somewhat irritated local populace—irritated that Antigua, like a glamorous, gifted older sister, got all the attention and money and political power in what is supposed to be a two-island nation.
    We left Barbuda the following day and returned to Antigua, the transportation hub for the region, where we were to switch planes for St. Kitts–Nevis. Antigua’s huge V. C. Bird International Airport is named after Prime Minister Vere Bird, who had run Antigua and Barbuda like a fiefdom for the previous forty years. Built by the U.S. military in World War II, the airport was as large as the one the Cubans had built on Grenada, the airport that so famously alarmed President Reagan’s national security advisers. Steel bands played “Island in the Sun,” and grinning hostesses in Aunt Jemima costumes offered us free rum punch in plastic cups.
    The difference between Bird International on Antigua and the single short landing strip and rough one-room open-air terminal that greeted us on Nevis was extreme and captured the difference between the two islands. It wasn’t just size. It was character. Kincaid was right to be pissed off. We climbed out of the Winnair single-engine STOL plane that had carried us and three other passengers from Antigua, stretched our cramped legs, and instantly, because there wasn’t much else to do, admired the scenery—the glittering Caribbean Sea with emerald-green St. Kitts five miles in the distance, the palm-lined beach, the forested slopes leading quickly to the volcanic cone of Nevis Peak, 3,232 feet high, set smack in the center of the thirty-six-square-mile, circle-shaped island. A soft breeze blew, and except for the gentle clatter of palms at the edge of the field, all was quiet. This, we thought, might be the perfect Caribbean island. This is a North American’s idea of paradise.
    We were not alone in thinking that. A pair of white American teenaged boys in cutoff jeans, barefoot and shirtless, were hanging out at the airfield building—latter-day Huck Finns gone way south of south. They could have been me and Morelli in Amarillo thirty-some years earlier. One of them was explaining what a skateboard was to a puzzled local kid who was not sure what a skate was, while the other, red-haired and taller and seemingly in charge, tried in vain to make the pay phone on the wall work by every now and then giving it a slow whack with his open hand. “Dis t’ing vex me, mon!” the redheaded boy said in a sad, lame version of West Indian Rasta talk. “I-an’-I cyan’ mek de dam t’ing wok fe I-an’-I!” They couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, and in spite of their long hair, which had been forcibly knotted into pathetic imitations of