The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  Perhaps the shift away from “colony” happened in 1936, when Congress passed a Virgin Islands Organic Act, setting up a local legislature; or 1954, when they passed a stronger Revised Organic Act. Or maybe in 1969, when the territory was finally allowed to elect its own governor.

  Decade by decade, the USVI gained more self-governance and became less and less like what we think of when we think of Quintessential Colonialism. But the question still nagged me: Does the USVI still fit the bill? Have we ever fully shed the label of Empire? What does a colony even look like in the twenty-first century?

  SAINT THOMAS is known as the busy island, what counts for the big city around here. Saint John, more than two-thirds of which is the Virgin Islands National Park, is much smaller and more laid back. The vibe on Saint Croix, forty miles south, is somewhere in between. It has about the same population as Saint Thomas and twice the landmass in its wing-shaped form. The principal city, Christiansted, is on the northeastern part of the island and feels even more Old World than Charlotte Amalie; the Government House, a regal golden box lined with rows of white columns, seemed to have been teleported straight from Copenhagen. I texted Maren a barrage of photos.

  The streets were lively with people and good cheer well into the evening. There’s no cruise-ship port in Christiansted, and it operates as a normal town, with restaurants and stores open normal-town hours, the dinner options numerous. This particular evening turned out to be the monthly art crawl, with a dozen or so galleries open, and music and wine and the territory’s highest concentration of tight black clothes and thick-framed glasses.

  “Good evening, good evening!” I said to the art-crawlers, but none of them replied. Most of them seemed to be from the states, not tourists but people who’d moved down here to stake a claim in an island daydream. (Thanks largely to influxes of American mainlanders, who are mostly white, and “down-islanders” from other parts of the Caribbean, who are mostly black, USVI natives make up less than half of the territory’s present-day population. While the newcomers are largely welcomed on an individual basis, locals told me, there’s also a wariness about the demographic shifts to the islands, and questions of whose voices are heard—a parallel of sorts to the broader tourists-versus-locals anxieties. The native-born population feels the strongest kinship to each other, regardless of race, as their home is ever-changing.)

  Away from the galleries, though, passersby greeted me warmly and I greeted them back and all was right with the world. Alongside the waterfront sat a bright yellow Danish fort, surrounded by a quiet park. A small group held a worship service and two young children played in the grass with their parents and an enthusiastic terrier. Sailboat halyards clinked and palm trees danced languidly in a light breeze.

  I felt my posture relax.

  THE CONSTANT greeting of everyone you encounter—art-crawlers aside, evidently—was quickly becoming one of my favorite things about the USVI. Even at the safari stop in Charlotte Amalie, and on safaris I later rode, the chorus of pleasantries directed my way never abated, despite the fact that everything about me, from my running shoes to my sunscreen-blotched cheeks, screamed, Tourist!

  One night in Christiansted, I encountered a teenage Rasta sitting on the curb, flicking through photos on his phone. He greeted me warmly and I asked how his evening was going; he said it was real good. As an afterthought, he added, “Oh, hey, man, I got some nice kush if you need some.” I politely declined.

  “Okay, cool.” With a thoughtful squint he added, “Well, yo, you looking for some powder? I can get you that, too.”

  “No, no. I’m all good.”

  “All right, man. Bless. You enjoy your evening. And be safe out there!”

  At my hotel in Christiansted, I bade good morning to the cleaning woman, Pauline. She was a down-islander—an immigrant from elsewhere in the Caribbean—in a floral-print blouse, and, ice broken, we proceed on to small talk: the weather; her kids, who were in the U.S. military; and then the subject of lunch. “Go to Harvey’s, ask for Richie, and tell him I said to take good care of you,” she said.

  Around noon, I reported to the twelve-table restaurant, its walls covered in framed newspaper clippings and photos of President Barack Obama and San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan, a Christiansted native. Richie presented me with a menu, which consisted of a notepad that he held in his hand. Pauline had recommended some local specialties: conch in a viscous butter sauce; fungi, a yellowy, cornmealy dome that was billed as a sort of vegetable-studded polenta; and mauby (“MAW-bee”), an iced drink made from a bark infusion, with flavors of anise and ginger.

  I texted Maren a photo of my glass of mauby: Instant refreshment—delicious! It was her birthday and I felt guilty; here I was, romping around the tropics, while she weathered below-zero temperatures.

  A lean man with a goatee and a blue polo shirt walked in, and I recalled that I’d seen him at breakfast at another restaurant that morning. We’d exchanged pleasantries then and began chatting more now. His name was Dexter, and he introduced me to his friend Sheldon, a stocky guy with a quick, eager smile and a white polo shirt with a red-and-yellow logo reading DA VYBE 107.9 FM. It was the local R&B radio station, where Sheldon worked and where they hosted a show together.

  After two or three minutes of chitchat, Sheldon said matter-of-factly, “Hey, we should drive you around and show you the island.” Just out of the blue. Like he said it to every stranger he met.

  Dexter nodded. “Where we gonna go?”

  I silently made predictions: an old plantation so they could tell me the heartbreaking legacy of slavery, or perhaps a shiny resort, the obvious tourist destination.

  Dexter stroked his goatee. “We should get some ice cream!”

  I laughed to myself. It doesn’t get more middle-of-the-road Americana, more Norman Rockwell, than a trip to the local ice-cream parlor.

  They finished their lunches and we got in Sheldon’s blue Jeep Cherokee, brand-new and every inch shimmering in the bright sun. We drove up a hill and out of Christiansted, into an area called Orange Grove. The landscape was decidedly suburban: McDonald’s, Subway, a big-box grocery store. We stopped at the radio station and at a print shop so I could meet a friend of Sheldon’s. As they shared their lives with me, I told them about Maren, freezing in Minnesota.

  “It’s her birthday? And you’re here without her?” Sheldon said, more scold than question.

  “Yeah,” I replied sheepishly.

  Sheldon’s eyes lit up. “We gonna give her a big surprise. Text her and tell her to go to DaVybe.com and listen to the live stream.”

  I laughed and typed. Deep bass notes thumped softly from the car’s stereo as Eminem issued a profane-yet-catchy rant. A few minutes later, Maren wrote back, I’m listening. Whatever song this is, it’s DEFINITELY not workplace-appropriate. What’s going on?!

  Sheldon called the station and gave orders, grinning ear to ear. A moment later, the DJ came on the air.

  “All right! All right, all right. We got a reeeal special request here.” Pause for laughter. “This one’s goin’ out to Maren way up in Minnesooh-tah.” He nailed the accent. “Happy birthday from her lovin’ husband, Doug, sendin’ all his love and tropical sunshine from the VI.”

  He put on a bouncy song called “Love and Affection.” The entire car shook as we doubled over in laughter and triumphant whoops, and maybe even some moist eyes over the sweetness of it all.

  “That was beautiful, Sheldon,” Dexter said. I looked at Sheldon. He glowed with one of the broadest smiles I’ve seen in my life.

  “Next time, you gonna bring her with you,” he said.

  We coasted to Armstrong’s Ice Cream and gleefully stumbled inside. The owner came around the counter to shake our hands, and the woman in line ahead of us turned out to be Sheldon’s former English teacher, who chatted with me about the writing life as she licked her cone. We got scoops of the best-selling flavor, gooseberry, with a subtle, not-too-sweet fruitiness and little pits that I kept swallowing
rather than spitting out, desperate not to offend my hosts.

  “It’s good, right?” Sheldon asked as we got back in the car.

  I nodded, my mouth full.

  “It’s all good,” Sheldon said.

  We drove back across the island, as Sheldon fielded periodic calls from the station and I marveled at the road signs. Saint Croix is divided into estates based on the former plantations, all two hundred of them, and many have exquisitely unexpected names: Great Princess, Mary’s Fancy, Solitude, Adventure, Barren Spot, Rustop Twist, Prosperity, Hard Labour, Jealousy, Upper Love, Lower Love, Punch, Sprat Hole, Wheel of Fortune, and Body Slob.

  Near the side of the highway, Sheldon pointed out a complex of apartment buildings, stout and handsome in that generic suburban way. They had recently been completed, replacing buildings destroyed in Hurricane Hugo.

  Okay, I thought, No big deal, so—

  “Hugo was in 1989.” Sheldon said. “Some things still aren’t rebuilt. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.”

  A few minutes later, we passed the local oil refinery, Hovensa, which opened in the 1960s and had long been one of the world’s ten largest refineries, as well as the keystone of Saint Croix’s economy. But it closed in 2012, putting more than twelve hundred Crucians out of work in an instant. I asked Sheldon about poverty and he visibly flinched: “Man, I don’t know you’d call it poverty. We got poor people, yeah, but . . .” His voice trailed off. Times were tough, it was true, and I’d later look up the unemployment rate: in the USVI overall, it hovered above 12 percent. But median income in the USVI was just a shade lower than that of the USA overall. On each island, I saw homeless people and shanties—but not shantytowns of the Hooverian, developing-world stereotype.

  We drove on to the far side of Saint Croix, to see Point Udall, the easternmost point in the United States, a high, windswept cliff with a monument of tall, angular stones. The houses out here were farther apart and larger, and the overall effect reminded me of coastal Route 1 in California.

  “Yeah, it’s just like that,” Sheldon agreed. “It’s nice out here. In fact, lots of people don’t realize all the nice things about the VI. They just think about, like, Fountain Valley, even though that was like three million years ago.”

  I’d wondered if any locals would bring up Fountain Valley, the mass shooting I’d read about in my pre-trip planning. It happened at the height of a flurry of high-end development in Saint Croix in the early 1970s, which brought in wealthy tourists and landowners and alienated locals whose own lot was far from improving. For the first time, island residents from other places outnumbered the native-born. A small independence movement arose, led by a local man named Mario Moorhead, known for his “Third World Marxist” books. Against this background, on September 6, 1972, five gunmen burst into the Fountain Valley clubhouse and killed eight people. It made headlines around the world, and a 1994 investigation in the Virgin Islands Daily News, uncovering new details of the case, won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Five young black men, three of them Vietnam War veterans, were arrested.

  “They were a bunch of crazy Rastas,” Sheldon said. “It was bad, but not something big that should’ve scared people away, or that they should still talk about like it was yesterday.”

  There is crime here, as Ronnie warned. In fact, the previous year, there had been more than thirty murders on Saint Croix alone, a rate higher than that of any major American city. But another Crucian, echoing Sheldon, told me not to get too concerned. He’d gone back and looked at the list. He knew all the names. Tragic as they all were, all but one were “folks involved in the wrong sort of activities”; tourists and most residents were perfectly safe.

  On the way back into town, Sheldon decided to give me a taste of the island’s high life. We pulled up to the gate of a resort called Buccaneer, and Sheldon talked his way inside. He took an accidental wrong turn onto a golf-cart path and kept going, which fortuitously led us to a postcard vista at the top of hill, the town of Christiansted laid out to our left, a trio of perplexed golfers to our right. “If anyone asks,” Sheldon said, “Dexter was driving.” He pointed toward Christiansted. “And, look. Look at that view.”

  “IT’S NOT MAYBERRY, but it’s not Detroit, either,” a man named John Beagles told me that night, as he and his wife, Karen, and I tucked into bowls of pad thai and ramen at an Asian fusion bistro in Christiantsted. John was a native Crucian, with large glasses that accentuated a perpetually ruminative gaze. Karen had blond hair and an amused smirk, and was from the mainland; she came down years ago to be a dive master, and never moved back.

  As we ate, a steady stream of passing friends stopped at our table to say hello; no more than a few minutes passed before the “Good evening!” call-and-response resumed.

  I asked John and Karen to tell me stories about life here. Well, they said, there’s the sense of community.

  “Yeah,” I said, silently adding, And how.

  “It can also be . . . a bit tiring,” John said. Everybody knows each other’s business, whether you want them to or not, and they know it right away, through “the Coconut Telegraph.”# The territory also seemed to attract more than its share of odd outsiders, John added, sizing me up with a look that said I might fit this description. Given its less-than-full federal oversight, he went on, “It’s the end of the line. There’s a bar down at Coral Bay where you get all the fugitives from the states. Go in there and just whisper, ‘FBI,’ and just like that it’ll clear out, just you and the bartender.” There were the more benign eccentrics, like the disheveled woman who used to go into their friend’s store and shoplift all the time, and turned out to be a prominent heiress missing from New York. There was a mysterious woman known as the Contessa who wore coordinated polyester outfits, picked up hitchhikers in her limo, and lived in a stone castle at the top of a hill.

  John and Karen shared a shrug of so-it-goes amusement before turning to greet more friends who had just entered the restaurant, an elegantly dressed couple.

  John and Karen introduced me to their friends, and for a minute the four riffed on some of the minor annoyances of life on Saint Croix. Groceries were expensive—a gallon of milk cost $7. Ordering online could be difficult because many retailers charge international rates, not understanding that this is the USA; sometimes the islands were listed in a drop-down menu as “Virgin Islands, U.S. and British.” Often, though, you could use a workaround: select Virginia from the drop-down menu, then enter the proper zip code.

  And territory residents pay into Medicare and Medicaid taxes, yet the programs’ payouts are disproportionately low. John and Karen knew a young woman who was hard of hearing. If she’d been in the states, they said, she would have been eligible for subsidies for interpreters and hearing aids. Because they live in a territory, nothing. And the Affordable Care Act essentially forgot about the territories. It required the local insurers to comply with all the new regulations, like doing away with existing-conditions clauses, but failed to mandate that residents purchase insurance, or give them subsidies to do so. Healthy people were neither compelled nor inclined to buy into the system and give it the necessary strength in numbers, and premiums soared. In 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services came up with a solution: it exempted insurers in the territories from many of the requirements they had to follow in the states, starting with—and this is the big one—“guaranteed availability.”

  Eventually we finished our meal, and then moved on to another nearby restaurant, where Karen wanted me to try the rum cake, and John wanted to make the rounds and see who else was out. He got back to the table just as Karen was telling me about a voodoo-like practice called obeah, whose adherents sometimes place offerings at various local crossroads: a metal bowl filled with lettuce, money, and a dead chicken.

  “Did you see the one at the end of our road the other day?” Karen asked offhandedly.

  She and John chuckled and then looked at me with matching half smiles, which I read as both, This-i
s-home-I-love it, and, Seriously-this-place-is-nuts.

  And here was the point that they, and all the hospitality-minded, stranger-welcoming locals I’d met—Monica, the Rastas at Bordeaux Farmer’s Market, Sheldon, Dexter—had been trying to impress upon me: They’re making it work. Yes, there are some problems, some oddities, some kinks in the system. It can be paradise; it can be utterly maddening; it’s both, and also, for many residents, just a pleasingly average, American working- and middle-class existence. Farmers, cleaning ladies, radio DJs. Malls, softball leagues (or pickup cricket), happy hour with your friends. It’s just that, well, sometimes there’s a voodoo shrine on the way to the mall. Sometimes there are little pits in your ice cream. That’s just how it goes.

  ALL OF THIS was making it ever harder for me to answer the question of colony, which grew even more muddled when I asked people how they felt about the territory’s political status. Nearly everyone bemoaned their inability to vote for president, the lack of full-fledged congressional representation, the general attitudes and misconceptions of the stateside tourists, and the myriad ways in which the federal and local governments try to outdo themselves in their bumbling.

  But to my great surprise, no one I talked to was particularly worked up about the political status. In fact, I had to drag opinions out of them; they weren’t offered readily. John and Karen waffled when I asked, over dinner, and the sudden awkwardness was such that I immediately changed the subject. When I emailed later, John replied, The change would be a concern, noting, for example, the tax incentives. All territories have tax codes unlike those in the states—in the USVI, Guam, and the Northern Marianas, there’s a “mirror” system set up, in which many basic rules of the IRS apply, but the money goes straight into the territorial coffers—but the USVI, in particular, is “A Made-in-America Offshore Tax Haven,” as Newsweek put it: “With the blessing of the U.S. Treasury and Congress, the islands offer a 90 percent reduction in U.S. corporate and personal income taxes.”