Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page A

him at his table, we accepted. Chase and I had already quietly noticed that the coffee-and-milk-colored waiters and waitresses, the cook, and even the several maids and gardeners seemed to have the same bright blue eyes as old John Archbold. Chase remembers his eyes as green; my memory says blue. We both remember the strong familial resemblance. A blunt-speaking, presently unmarried septuagenarian—I later learned that he’d been married four times (what is it about four ?)—he was one of the last of his particular kind in the islands, the unapologetic neocolonial who believes he earned his place in the sun the old-fashioned way and not by dint of race and birthright and can’t understand why others, especially the “natives,” cannot or will not do the same. He was not the sort of man with whom oneargued the virtues of democratic socialism or reparations. He was a curiosity, an antediluvian relic from another age whose dream of the Caribbean—suggested by the portraits of the British monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth on the dining room walls—was the dream of empire, an empire in the tropics inhabited by people he had come to know and, in his perverse way, to love more passionately, perhaps, than he knew and loved the cold northern people and land he had left behind. Or, judging from the biracial appearance of his staff, maybe it was the slaveholder’s dream. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the two desires, empire and slavery, and the racial fantasies and projections they engender.
    Our dinner with our garrulous, opinionated host lasted long into the night over port and Cuban cigars. Although one could call it interesting, it was a bit like dining with a public executioner who loves his job. Archbold’s assumptions of racial and class solidarity with his two white American guests led him early on to share his low opinions of Dominicans, people like the caramel-colored waiter with half-closed blue eyes expertly refilling our wineglasses, and of Afro-Caribbean people and culture in general. I listened in silence and wondered if he would feel the same racial and class solidarity with the sunburnt, tattooed white boys on Nevis, or with the American real estate developers whose signs on Antigua pointed the way to Carlisle Bay and led nowhere, or with the throngs of white cruise-shippers with funny T-shirts at every port of call, or with the dudes at Bomba’s Surf Shack on Tortola, or with the white women with clumped dreadlocks strolling the beach at Negril with their rent-a-Rastas—all those Caucasian appropriators of the Caribbean. Would Archbold see a connection to his own atavistic neocolonial racist fantasy? Or was it the nature of the fantasy itself—and the reason it so often ends up thwarted, doomed to disappointment, frustration, and bitterness—to recognize no other?
    And what was our white people’s Caribbean fantasy, Chase’s and mine? Was ours an unexamined, equally privileged version of Archbold’s, too?
    I thought I could recognize Chase’s. It was almost scientific—tentative and exploratory and cautious and curious—with a modest, open-minded acceptance of my role in our mutual courtship as guide and narrator of her journey. She would not have made this voyage without my having initiated it. The Caribbean held no romance for her, except by way of my attachment to it. My own fantasy, however, was turbulent and moody, alternating between painful personal memories and nostalgia. Subjective in all ways. For me, this was both a compulsion and a willed return trip entered upon with a certain ill-defined reluctance, and I was confused by the conflicted emotions it evoked.
    The third night at Springfield Plantation, our last before departing Dominica for Martinique, we met a new addition to our catalog of versions of Archbold’s vision of the Caribbean. We decided that we’d had more than enough of the old man’s cranky racist company and would dine alone. We entered the dining room