It was a time of exploration and new territory; as millions of Americans watched Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin land on the moon, my parents were making preparations for their marriage and their new life. Seeking to move away from their families in New York, they got jobs teaching at public schools in the Virgin Islands, a place that I can only assume sounded like a paradise to them, where the only oppression would perhaps be too much warmth. Eleven years later "Buzz" Aldrin came to St. Thomas to visit some friends who now had a goddaughter. That goddaughter was me. I was born on May 24, 1980 under two flags: one with the fifty stars and thirteen stripes and the other with the American eagle holding arrows and an olive branch.
I will apologize in advance to the reader who sees this story as that of a place and not a person. For me to tell the story of my life, it is necessary for me to tell the story of where I grew up because, as I am even now still finding out, the culture in which I was immersed is so different from the norm. In many ways I grew up without a place to call home, introduced to the American culture through my parents and alienated by the St. Thomian tradition around me. Don't mistake me; I am not trying to say that I grew up with one culture at home and another as soon as I left the house. The truth is that I never was really in the dominant, mainstream culture. I was always kept in the continental ghetto, like almost all non-natives. The school I went to was a private school, one divided not by color but by economics and so over half of the students were white. My friends and I did not live in town; we were what Iris Traumm would have called "the hill crowd." In much the same way that English Australians learned nothing of aborigine culture, my knowledge of V.I. history and culture was limited to a single month in the fourth grade. I was sheltered from West Indian culture by a school that did not even have days off for local holidays.
And admittedly I have been less assimilated than most of my friends. Most of my friends attended Church and religious education where, especially in the case of the Catholics, the majority of the people they came in contact with were natives. I never spent much time in town to get to know the merchants, like some of my friends whose parents owned shops. Local cuisine never interested me, as I don't care for seafood or mutton stew, and as for the music, which is a mixture of calypso and reggae, I have always preferred classical music.
But culture is more than food and music; it is an attitude and a way of life, and the culture of the V.I. is vastly different than that experienced on the mainland. My parents noticed this immediately after moving to St. Thomas. When they inquired about an advertisement for an apartment, they were given directions. They expected to write down road numbers but as no one in St. Thomas knows road numbers, they were given more useful directions: Turn right at the tamon tree, just past the goats. A bit incredulously, my parents headed out to find the apartment, and sure enough, they followed the directions and, even not knowing what a tamarind tree looked like, found the apartment. Another cultural difference of which they were made aware is that West Indian relationships tend to fall into a dominant-submissive category and domestic violence is tolerated and even encouraged. The pervasive thought is that women like to be touched up a bit or else they don't know that their husband loves them. Child abuse is a lot more common, as people firmly believe in "spare the rod, spoil the child" and that children just need a good slap upside-de-head.
Their first year in St. Thomas was one that caused them to re-evaluate their ideas. They had expected their classes to be predominantly black, but were surprised when they met their first classes that the students did not match the faces they had pictured when reading their class lists. Foy, O'Conner, and Jeppesen did not sound like black names to them although they immediately do to me. The day before Christmas break that year my mom was told by her students that they hoped she would come back. What they meant was that they hoped she would come back to teach for the next semester. Continental whites were seen, and even still are, as extremely transient. My parents were coming to terms with a new place and the new way in which they were viewed within this context.
They were also introduced to melee. Without dependable phone service, people found a way to communicate by gossiping. The standard thought was that if someone went to the post office to check their mail and said hello to the postmaster, by the end of the day everyone would know exactly what they had said. Driving over to visit people and melee is still much more a part of the culture than is picking up the phone. I had always taken this personal contact in communication for granted and was thus very surprised that most people on this campus pick up the phone to call someone who lives down the hall.
They also learned that people, especially children, were extremely polite and respectful. Sirs and ma'ams were the norm. There is much of a double standard about politeness today. The V.I. has its share of inner city yout' violence but at the same time children are still very polite. Saying "good morning" or "good afternoon" is imperative, and I learned that it was rude not to greet people. I could not expect to be recognized in a government office until I had said "good morning" to everyone. Especially in continentals, failure to address others was considered snobbish and upidity. Everyone, even the street bum, was to be greeted courteously. At Simon's Rock though, people who I don't know well look at me strangely when I say "good morning" or "hello" when passing them. It is not uncommon for two friends to walk past each other in complete silence. I am still puzzled by this, just as I am confused when people say "good night" to mean goodbye instead of hello. This is just a more visible part of how where I have lived has affected me.
St. Thomas celebrates its carnival in April (since 1912), in over a month of festivities and preparations, calypsos, a food fair, a week of drinking, especially during Jouvert, parades and mocko jumbies. When I was five I prepared to be in the Carnival Children's parade with my school, but hours before the parade started, and hours after it was scheduled to start (the local attitude towards time is more than a bit relaxed), I grew exhausted, hot and tired of listening to loud music baking in the sun in my sea anemone costume. For years I entered the parade, always with almost as much failure. The congestion of town, the noise, and the heat, were not my idea of a good time. Most years we used Carnival weekend as a chance to get off island and do some shopping. Only this year when I will be missing Carnival altogether, am I sorry that I won't get a chance to be part of the festivities again. True, if I were there I would be complaining loudly, but at least I would be hearing the calypsos, the memorials and testimonials to the year's stupidity, first hand instead of listening to them from a tape. "Carnival is very sweet!"
St. Thomas is a place of contradictions and dichotomies. There are the natives and the tourists, and I belong to neither group. The natives are either wealthy and well-established, belonging to one large family clan, or of the impoverished masses living in town. As I grew up I learned that there are many other classes: the town merchants, the Indians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Hispanics, the Cruzans, the downislanders (garrot), the Danes, and the Frenchies (cha-chas). The tourists are white, pale or red; they drive slowly in rented red jeeps and often on the wrong side of the road, and they don't stop suddenly in the middle of the road to get out and talk with friends. They ask stupid, or at least ignorant, questions and have no understanding of where they are. And so I resented the fact that I was often mistaken for a tourist, hollered at in town with cries of "Back to de ship?" and asked in shops where I was from or how I was enjoying my stay. I would answer, "I'm from the Northside, Mandahl," or I would go out of my way to mention the name of my school or a politician or something, anything that would tell people "hey, I live here."
But a tourist I was and still am in St. Thomas. There are so many things that I don't understand and so many things that I am not willing to take for granted. I'm a tourist of sixteen years, a tourist who has long outstayed her welcome. In many ways my parents seem to be more the natives than I am, which makes sense since they have lived on St. Thomas almost twice as long as I have. My father has been a guidance counselor at the same public high school for over twenty years now and has had hundreds of students each year. He stood out as being one of the only Caucasians and an eccentric one at that. Every time I go somewhere with him, we get stopped by someone saying, "Mr. S., 'member who I is? I you student in aytee-tree" or whatever. My mother is also well-known. She left the public schools many years ago and moved up to district coordinator and chapter two grants write and helped to design and run a resource center for teachers. When her boss moved from education to law enforcement in 1989 so did she as deputy drug policy advisor, so she is known in the political sector, more well-known than most would like for a honky continental.
Every time I hear that blacks can't be prejudiced because they're oppressed and whites can't be discriminated against because they're the majority (and I hear this even in the Virgin Islands), I have to snicker. Prejudice, like everything else is not limited to color. But, and I need to stress this, the prejudice that I have encountered is not primarily a distinction made by color but by nativity. Downislanders and black continentals are just as much out of place in the V.I. as I am. Prejudice is one thing I've seen a lot of recently, especially from the local Senators, but it goes back many years.
The day I was born, not only did my father meet "Buzz" Aldrin; he also had a letter to the editor published in the newspaper about recent proposed legislation. The idea of this legislation was to take away rights from non-natives. Fifteen years later, a clause defining a "native Virgin Islander" as a direct descendant of a V.I. resident prior to 1927 was passed. This bill was sponsored by a senator who five years earlier had lashed out at my mother, complaining that her boss had hired a transient, a twenty-two year resident, saying: "Have you tried to locate a Virgin Islander [for this job]?" Twenty two years is not enough for her to be considered a Virgin Islander, nor is the fact that I was "bahn heh" good enough for me to claim the V.I. as my home. It is the place where I grew up, but it is not my home.
Living in the Virgin Islands, gave me a vastly different experience than I would have gotten elsewhere. Growing up, particularly before the nineties, I found that there was nothing there. Luxuries like department stores, delivered mail, and dependable phones, water, and electricity are foreign concepts entirely. But I did not expect these things. We did all of our shopping during the summer and had a generator for the rotational power outages. We were more conscious of what we had than the ungrateful tourists who took so many things for granted. As a child in St. Thomas, there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go, especially without a car. I complained of course, but in a way I was glad that St. Thomas was so undeveloped. Looking out my window everyday reminded me that I had something that many people could only dream of or would willingly pay a large sum of money to see.
Hurricanes are undoubtedly my least favorite part of life in the tropics, but the crime, violence, and poverty are another drawback. The lack of civilization coupled with the development of condos and hotels, the dependence on tourist and the resentment towards tourists is another. But the real fact of the matter is that I don't belong. I cannot truly call St. Thomas my home, and yet there is no other place for me to call home. The V.I. is a place of incredible political greed and corruption and of fear of speaking out against the government. V.I. politics is the subject of a different book entirely. At times I just think that the federal government should just drop a bomb over the Virgin Islands and end it all.
In high school I started socializing a bit more with tourists and limers (people in their twenties who come to live a few months or years bartending, waitressing, or in construction and lime around). As some of my friends got cars, I learned that the only thing to do here besides going to the beach is to experience the nightlife by barhopping. As the local bars are unsafe for white teenagers, the hangout spots became the red (sunburnt) and white touristy bars. Meeting people who loved St. Thomas because they were just out of college and knew no better or were seeing the sheltered tourist view of the island (without the government corruption and the high murder rate) helped me to realize that the V.I. is not as awful of a place as I have thought. St. Thomas is a beautiful place with its own culture; it's a fun place to visit that caters to tourists' needs with a lot to do for a week or so. It's a pretty place to visit, but I wouldn't want . . . . .
Or would I want to live there? Now that I am at Simon's Rock I have a different perspective. This year I have learned many things that are part of continental culture that I never knew. I have met people who have come from different places and are now in New England perhaps for the first time. I have also learned many things that are part of V.I. culture that I had always taken for granted as universal: motorcades, funeral booklets, families with outside children, and baby girls having their ears pierced almost immediately after birth. This year just before Christmas I realized that many of the carols I knew were unfamiliar to everyone else. I knew that "Thrushee in a Calabash Tree" was a local song, but it had never occurred to me that "Ma, Ma Bake Your Johnny Cake" and "Good Morning" were not standard Christmas songs. Nor had I realized that there were words to "White Christmas" besides "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, for that is one I've never seen before," or that the holiday most people celebrated at the end of the year was not Old Year's.
Another thing I learned about was rain. In the V.I. when it rains, school is canceled, people don't leave home. I always knew that people didn't go out in the rain, and they certainly didn't drive. Rain meant cars going off roads, floods, and landslides. But also people didn't go out in the rain because rain was caused by jumbies and would cause them to get sick. In the V.I., as with almost all of the West Indies, Obeah is commonly practiced in what most continentals would consider a rather incongruous conjunction with Christianity, and the idea of jumbies, bad spirits that needed to be scared away, is an ingrained one. I was stunned when it started raining here one time and everyone went about their normal lives, but then I realized that it was only in the V.I. where everything depends on weather. Just the other day I was telling my roommate about how I went swimming over break because I was sick. She looked at me with a shocked expression and explained that it was bad to go in the water when you were sick. But I am used to the West Indian saying which involves dunking your head in salt water to cure a cold. Obviously, if you are sick it is bad to go swimming here because you will get cold, but in the V.I. where this is not a problem, the salt is a decongestant.
So where do I want to live? I don't know. At times I'm incredibly bitter about where I am from, in a place where I don't belong and never will. Most of the time I dislike St. Thomas. But I can't think of anywhere else I would want to live. New England, or at least Massachusetts, culture strikes me as strange and narrow-minded. There is no doubt about it, if I had not grown up in St. Thomas I would not experienced the same things; I would not be the same person today. Norman Paperman "can just go home," but I can't because I have nowhere to go home to.