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In the spring of 1968, my father ran his sailboat onto a coral reef in the Bahamas. After swimming to shore from the half-sunken wreck, he wound up spending several weeks on Cat Island, in the Out Islands. My father—a marine artist—passed the time ashore sketching scenes of Bahamian life. My mother heard the news back home in South Carolina from our small town’s gossipy postmaster, who had a habit of reading other people’s mail, especially intriguingly stamped postcards requesting a wire transfer of funds from a remote island. Needless to say, both men got a wicked tongue-lashing. That didn’t stop Dad from falling in love with this tiny dot in the ocean. For years after this high-seas adventure, he talked glowingly about the island’s empty beaches, certain illegal crops, and the gracious locals who owned a guesthouse where he stayed until the weekly mail boat fetched him back to Nassau. (This was long before the island had hotels or an airstrip.) And on that homeward voyage, tucked in his duffel bag for me, he had a shell-decorated straw hat withBahamas stitched in pink on the brim.
The Out Islands. There’s something about the collective designation that implies an appealing remove from the mainland. Yet this Bahamian barrier chain is not far off the coast of Florida, starting at a latitude parallel with West Palm Beach and sweeping southeasterly. It wraps around the world’s third-largest reef system and a mile-deep abyss named Tongue of the Ocean. Beyond the capital of Nassau, on New Providence, with its casinos and gargantuan cruise-ship port, these low-lying coral islands and cays are sparsely populated by the steadfast descendants of English Puritans, African slaves, and Loyalist planters who moved from the Carolinas after winding up on the losing side of the American Revolution. (Had they not fought on the winning side, my own cotton-planting ancestors from Charleston might have landed here instead.) Even the lilting English spoken
Best Regards
Lahcene
