The Ghost Apple Read online

  I sat looking out over the clear water to the reef, where the waves broke. The sand was bright white—actually it was mostly crushed shells—and there was a large heron standing in the surf. With its long legs, its upright posture, and its air of deadly patience, it looked just human enough to be strikingly alien.

  Then another tourist came strolling down the path. He paused beside me and gestured casually at the beach, the water, the gauzy morning clouds. He said, “Postcard.”

  When I was coming back up the hill a short time later, I noticed a scrubby little tree with a faded sign nailed to its trunk. The sign warned visitors that it was a manchineel tree: Its bark, sap, and fruit were poisonous. The sign was hand-lettered, and “poisonous” was spelled “poisonus.” This detail, and the sense it gave of a person without resources earnestly trying to do some good, endeared the place to me more than anything else so far.

  I didn’t have any plans. I’d been reading the dispatches that Professor Kabaka had been posting online and I found them extremely compelling and persuasive—they made me want to do something, to get out there and stir things up, to show Megan I was a man of action like her beloved professor—but I knew I was no revolutionary. I was just trying to relax, at least for the time being. It was nice to be somewhere different.

  Soon I settled into a comfortable routine. Each morning, I woke up early and watched the sunrise from the balcony outside my room. I had a little coffee and a roll or croissant, and then I went down to the beach for an early swim. Every day, I was shocked and delighted by the whiteness of the sand and the luminous blue of the water. Sometimes I stayed down at the beach the whole morning. One day I went on a chartered snorkeling trip. I think the reef itself is mostly dead, but I saw a few big schools of yellowtail snapper and angelfish, I watched parrotfish chomp at the algae on the dead coral, and I saw a few turtles and one shark. I was fascinated by the dark depths of the water on the other side of the reef, where the sea floor drops away into nothingness. One moment you can stand, the next you’re in a thousand feet of water.

  After I’d been on the island about a week, I received a dinner invitation from a Big Anna® vice president named Johnson Price. It was a simple courtesy—I was still nominally a senior administrator at an institution with which his own company had formed a partnership. I was a little put out by this, because it meant that Acting President Beckford wasn’t tracking my activities, or at least that he hadn’t repudiated me or even bothered to tell Mr. Price that I’d all but left my position. Did Beckford have such a low opinion of me? Did he really think I was so ineffectual that my trip to St. Renard didn’t warrant any suspicion?

  No matter. Maybe I could dig up some dirt on the company when I attended the dinner.

  For the moment, it seemed like it was all business as usual on St. Renard: sunshine, surf, tourists, mellow sunsets. But I knew that things on the island were not as quiet as they seemed. Commandant Kabaka was in the mountains, where he and his “Antillia Liberation Army” were threatening violence. Somewhere out there were the Big Anna® banana farms and cane fields—places of misery and hardship—and one day, as I was walking in town, someone pointed out a man named Cudjoe, “the maroon,” who was said to have burned down a Big Anna® storehouse. He was a sturdy little fellow with a kind of hump on his back, and he wore a red coat, red pants, and a feathered hat. He looked like he had just stepped out of the eighteenth century, and I thought to myself, Well, the prevailing winds blow from the opposite direction down here—maybe time moves in the opposite direction as well!

  from

  The Tripoli College Telegraph (Approved Content)

  February 3, 2010

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  Tyrants to Hew Wood, Draw Water

  Over the winter break, the Tripoli Tyrants wrapped up a disappointing season with a loss to Wampanoag College of the Arts in this year’s Genutrex® Palmetto Bowl in Lawtey, Florida. But those who think that it’s back to the gym and better luck next year should think again.

  Volunteerism and service have long been important priorities for Tripoli sports teams, and the football team is no exception. Next week, the Tyrants are off to beautiful St. Renard, where they’ll give back to Big Anna®, Tripoli’s generous corporate benefactor, by helping out with the company’s many progressive initiatives on the island.

  Some players will learn about home construction in Big Anna®’s new Port Kingston Executive Village, while others will provide invaluable domestic assistance to Big Anna® wives, help out on LoCarbon™ plantations, or just keep things running smoothly by providing security in snack factories.

  As Acting President Beckford explains, “What better way to atone for dismal failure and cowardice on the gridiron than by the sweat of one’s brow?”

  The acting president men-tioned several advantages to this program. In the first place, football players will provide an excellent reservoir of labor should local laborers decide to shirk their duties and take to the hills. More important, however, is the particular fitness of those players for service on the island.

  “Most of our football players belong to the sable race,” said the acting president, “and are therefore better able to withstand the ravages of the climate than those of us whose ancestors hail from temperate zones.”

  The acting president went on to put the proposal into a historical perspective:

  “Napoleon’s great failure was to send white Frenchmen to fight the black Jacobins in St. Domingue. Of the 65,000 French troops dispatched to the island during the Haitian revolution, perhaps 50,000 died of disease, and thus the diminutive Corsican lost the most valuable colonial possession in the New World.”

  The acting president has also championed a plan to employ student athletes in maintenance positions here at Tripoli. The question of “what is to be done” with student athletes is one that has preoccupied him for many years.

  An Open Letter from the Antillia Liberation Army / February 10, 2010

  To the managers and directors of Big Anna:

  We explain again and again what we’re fighting for, and again and again our pleas are met with incomprehension. You say you don’t understand what we want. You tell us to be “reasonable.”

  How many times do we have to explain ourselves? For five hundred years we have been fighting for the same thing. The past wells up and jumps its banks. History skips over whole lives, whole centuries, and nothing changes. Two hundred years ago John Stedman quoted a maroon leader complaining to a Dutch colonial commissioner in Suriname:

  “We desire you to tell your Governor and your court, that in case they want to raise no new gangs of rebels, they ought to take care that the planters keep a more watchful eye over their own property, and not to trust them so frequently in the hands of drunken managers and overseers, who by wrongfully and severely chastising the negroes, debauching their wives and children, neglecting the sick, &c. are the ruin of the colony, and wilfully drive to the woods such numbers of stout active people, who by their sweat earn your subsistence, without whose hands your colony must drop to nothing; and to whom at last, in this disgraceful manner, you are glad to come and sue for friendship.”

  It’s all the same, always the same, never anything but the same. With one or two emendations, his complaints are our complaints:

  We want you to tell your CEO that in case he wants to raise no new gangs of rebels, he should attend more carefully to the needs of the banana workers and cane cutters. He should not simply abandon them to the drunken overseers, who—by abusing these laborers, debauching their wives and children, and neglecting the sick among them—are the ruin of the company, and willfully drive to the jungle those strong young workers who by their sweat earn his subsistence, without whose hands his company must drop to nothing, and to whom at last, in a disgraceful manner, he will be glad to come and sue for friendship.

  Commandant Kabaka, the Antillia Liberation Army

  From: “William Brees”

  To: “M
aggie Bell”

  Date: February 15, 2010, at 11:05 AM

  Subject: RE: RE: Hi

  Hi, Maggie,

  I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re probably extremely busy. I just wanted to make sure that everything’s going well. Have you gone to the interior already? I’m actually in San Cristobal right now. I also thought you’d like to know that I’ve arranged an invitation to a banquet at the home of one of Big Anna’s vice presidents. Maybe I’ll learn something compromising about the company. If I can, I’d like to be of some help to Professor Kabaka in his liberation struggle.

  Send me a line or two if you have the chance, and maybe we can meet up when you get back to San Cristobal. I’ve been enjoying myself very well here. There’s a café near my bed-and-breakfast where they serve sea grape brandy. Apparently the slaves would brew it in their cabins. It tastes like poison fruit juice, which I suppose is what brandy is. I’ve also been enjoying Renardenne food—spicy curry goat, ackee, cornmeal porridge with a cinnamon leaf. I suppose you’re probably a much more informed tourist than I am. In any case, I look forward to hearing from you and I hope you’re well.

  Your friend,

  William “Bill Dean” Brees

  SLAVERY IN THE WEST INDIES

  or

  A Description of One Semester Spent in Tripoli College’s Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture

  containing

  a narrative of the author’s trials in that program, and an account of the events that led to her miraculous escape from bondage, with observations upon the peculiar manner in which the sugarcane is cultivated and processed on Big Anna plantations, and the oppression and misery that results therefrom

  “MEGAN”

  written by Herself

  PART ONE

  I was born in the small town of Haverstock, in the state of New Hampshire, in the year 1990. As a child I experienced no want of parental attention or care, nor did I ever suffer from hunger or similar causes, so that my girlhood was most pleasant, and withal almost free from fear. Later I was to marvel that I could have been so wholly innocent of the evil there was in the world, and yet I think I was. It was only on rare afternoons, once or twice in a wondrous summer season, when, the weather being delightsome and fair, I was surprised to discover that my own spirits were low, and my sight was as it were clouded by an almost sensible depression of mind, so that I was moved to consider whether there was not some darker world beyond the world that I knew. But except for those days, so few as to fade from thought and memory in the long intervals that separated one from another, I enjoyed a happiness too fine for words, sporting about with my twin brother and eating Pop-Tarts, and I had naught but the most fleeting apprehension that man could be other than that noble and selfless creature which, to my innocent mind, he seemed to be.

  When I had reached the age of eighteen years, not being the daughter of tradesmen or traveling performers, custom dictated that I should be sent from home in order to acquire that special knowledge which is called education. My brother elected to attend New York University, but I came to Tripoli College, desiring for myself a liberal arts education and having been so unaccountably derelict in my academic duties that Wesleyan, where I had very much wanted to go, would not admit me. Nevertheless, for two years I enjoyed myself well, delighting in the society of my fellows, the illuminating discourse of my professors, and the abundant food and drink. For me those years were the honeyed glaze on the bun of youth.

  And yet it was under the following circumstances that I was made to suffer the outrages of Hell on a plantation in the West Indies:

  In the autumn of my third year at Tripoli, I made the acquaintance of one Professor Kabaka, a teacher and scholar, who was to prove very important to me, for though our association lasted only about eight weeks, and though it never transgressed the bounds of propriety, yet he taught me what it meant to be a black girl in America, and he taught me the power of righteous anger, and, in short, I admired him very much.

  But Tripoli College was at this time in a state of turmoil, and it was deemed necessary, by those who were empowered to make such decisions, that we form an attachment to the Big Anna corporation, without the assistance of which our financial fortunes must sink to nothing. This arrangement was intolerable to Professor Kabaka, who had his own reasons for despising that company, and thus he felt obliged to return to the Caribbean island of St. Renard, his birthplace, in order to take up arms against Big Anna, and fight for the liberty of those islanders who labored in servitude on Big Anna’s plantations.

  Though I cherished a deep sympathy for the banana and sugarcane workers of St. Renard, yet now I was preoccupied with my own sorrows, for not only had Professor Kabaka’s departure left a void in my life, but I had also begun to feel a return of that gloom of which I had had the briefest intimations as a young girl. My mind felt closed to the beauty of nature, I could not take pleasure in the society of my friends, whose concerns had come to seem trivial to me, and I was filled with a loathing of my own body, to such a degree that I could hardly leave my room for the shame of being, as I thought, so coarse of feature, so dusky of complexion, and so ample of figure. At mealtimes I simply languished over a bowl of pudding or ice cream, cursing myself for that indulgence and yet powerless to subdue my monstrous appetite. I was at all times, or so it seemed, alone.

  It was during this period that I began to think of coming to St. Renard myself, where, I hoped, a change of scenery might do me good, and for all I knew I might happen upon Professor Kabaka in the street. It was with these ideas in mind that I applied to be a student in Tripoli College’s Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture, for not only would this bring me to St. Renard, but so too would it provide me with an opportunity to lose myself in charitable work, and it was my earnest hope that I might stir myself from that peculiar state of soul-sickness, and achieve a finer appreciation of all that was good in my life, if I labored to improve the lot of those less fortunate than I. The Field Studies Program, notwithstanding its association with Big Anna, an association of which I then had an imperfect understanding, seemed ideally suited to my needs, for the application materials available to me promised that it was a “broad-based initiative in resource management and community planning.” I give the very words so that the reader may see how I was led astray. Participating students worked to “improve community organization, reduce the island’s dependence on fossil fuels, and introduce sustainable methods of agriculture,” and would themselves acquire “hands-on experience with tropical food crops.”

  O Reader, if I had but attended more carefully to that phrase, “hands-on experience,” I might have saved myself so much grief! And yet what indication did I have that the Field Studies Program was not what it purported to be?

  It was the eleventh day of January, in the year 2010, when I boarded a plane with six other students, to be joined on the island by nine more, and flew to the old colonial city of San Cristobal, on the island’s Caribbean coast. Thus in a matter of five hours I was transported from the unutterable gloom of the northern winter, with its bitter cold and low skies, to the paradise of the West Indies, for so it seemed to be: The water shone an astonishing blue, the air was rich and exhilarating to breathe, and the sun, at its meridian, was almost directly overhead, and seemed but a distant relation to that fragile gray disk that hung in the skies over wintertime Tripoli for a few hours each day.

  St. Renard lies twelve or fourteen degrees north of the line, in tropical waters, and has accordingly only two proper seasons, a wet season and a dry season, making it suitable for the cultivation of tropical crops like bananas, sugar-cane, coconuts, and cocoa, as well as coffee at higher elevations or in shaded groves. And yet, as I had learned from Professor Kabaka, the island’s bounty is its curse, and these crops depart each day from its seaports, or are processed in factories on the island, and provide no nutriment to the Renardennes. Indeed, with so much of the cultivable land, and so much of the fa
rmer’s own time, consumed in the production of these crops, the island is unable to produce food for its own tables, and later I often saw the local laborers eating tinned salmon or pale, canned vegetables, which were imported from the United States and Brazil. Our task, therefore, as it was represented to us in the only orientation meeting we were privileged to attend, was to help islanders make the transition from this manner of farming toward a model of subsistence agriculture. And yet such noble designs were quickly forgotten, and indeed were never mentioned again once we were in the island.

  We had no time to explore San Cristobal, and promptly upon disembarking from the plane we were led to an ancient and rattling school bus and taken south to Tripoli’s branch campus, which is called the Proxy College of the West Indies. This beautiful house was to be our lodging for the first five days of the semester.

  The Field Studies Program was at present the only educational program offered at the Proxy College, for the conditions of Tripoli’s agreement with Big Anna had necessitated a reorganization of sorts. This was all to the good, for it meant that we had the place to ourselves. The Proxy College is situated on a former coconut estate along the island’s Caribbean coast, from where it commands a majestic view of the water, which manifests, in its various depths, all the blues and purples of the spectrum. Our accommodations were spare but of the utmost cleanliness, with the excellent ventilation that is a necessary comfort in those latitudes. For the five days we were privileged to live there, I delighted in learning the names of the exotic plants that were in the grounds, and the wonderful variety of their colors and forms: the elegant disorder of the coconut palms, the haunting dream-purple blossoms of the jacaranda, the spreading banyan, the oleander, the pineapple plants, the salmon-pink ixora and the malodorous soursop, the silk-cotton tree with its buttressed roots.