My first visit to St. Thomas US Virgin Islands was in 1981 and I hated it. The first thing was that someone had given me a package to take to someone there and the package was well addressed but it took two hours to find the recipient and I received an unwelcome introduction to the house numbering system in St. Thomas. System is not the right word.

I was staying out of town in a very secluded (and I think exclusive) neighbourhood with a cousin from Anguilla whose corporate husband enjoyed all the sweets of his office. However, he was away and my cousin did not feel comfortable having visitors, not me but my friends. I could not give my friends her home number either and those were the days before cell phones ruled our lives, so the grand vacation was turning out to be, well, not grand. She was a stay at home Mom with two small children and another one just waiting to be born so I stayed home to help out, understanding that I was not going to see much of St. Thomas on that trip. I understood and accepted that but one morning a mutual friend called to say that Bob Marley had journeyed and that was added to everything else that was wrong with St. Thomas. Then I spent a week-end with a cousin who lived in Contant and decided to walk into town. By the way people were staring at me, I concluded that I looked strange in my red Che tam covering up my year-old dreadlocks but then realized that I was the only person walking. When I got to town, several mega-cruise ships were in port that day and I was literally bumping into tourists on the streets. I hated those ships dominating the harbour, dwarfing everything in sight and I tried to remember that tourists were just people spending their hard earned dollars in Paradise so the people who lived there could earn income. But in my mind, St. Thomas was the closest thing to hell that I had experienced to date and I did not understand why people even lived there so it got struck off my list of places to visit again.

Several years later, I ventured again for my last sister Allison’s graduation. Ali was born when my mother was either 40 or 41 and as older siblings we took wicked delight in calling her “the dregs”. But Ali was and still is the most brilliant one of us. I don’t know if she ever got a B grade in her life and so it was no surprise that she was graduating from the College of the Virgin Islands Summa Cum Laude. I was so proud of her that I dismissed my promise of never again St. Thomas and went to go shout for my sister. After the ceremony, she introduced me to one of her lecturers, Gene Emmanuel. That changed my experience of St. Thomas drastically as Gene is a stalwart Pan-Africanist who introduced me to as many of the people in the Pan-African community in St. Thomas as he knew. After that kind of stimulation, my promise was to return to St. Thomas as soon and as often as possible. That did not happen for several years but since 2000, the Rastafari community has been ensuring my presence at certain events in St. Thomas.

Something similar happened with St. Croix. In 1982 while still a student at the University of the West Indies, I left Jamaica to spend a week in St. Croix. The scenario at the home of my host included serious illness that at that time was being mistaken for something else. Then I heard on the news that a Jamaican poet named Mikey Smith, a close friend and brother, had been stoned to death in Jamaica. As you can imagine, I did not care about St. Croix much after that either, though I enjoyed St. Croix’s open spaces as much as I had enjoyed the hills of St. Thomas the year before. It took over twenty five years before I returned to St. Croix only last year in 2008 for the African Liberation Day event that I thoroughly enjoyed as a guest of the Pan-African community there.

I have now been to St. Thomas more times than I can count and I continue to be amazed at how strongly Africa is embraced in the US Virgin Islands. This is now one of the places where I come to charge my batteries to enable me to keep alive the spirit and memory of Africa in Anguilla. I am truly sorry that I did not bring as many copies of Bless Our Forebears as I could because that is also what our forebears did, calling on survival skills that came with us across the Middle Passage. I am equally glad that I was invited to speak at the Indigenous Healers Symposium last Sunday where the recurring theme was return to the ancient healing traditions so that as a people we can know how to heal ourselves. I am trebly glad that I participated in the Rastafari Farmers Agriculture and Culture Fair in Bordeaux for the 3rd year in succession, and look forward to bringing new organizational insights to the planning process for the Anguilla Cultural Education Festival which is being revived by the Department of Youth and Culture.

Oh, one last thing about St. Tarmos (that’s how the Tomians sound to my ear when they say it). We know that the guns, the drugs, the angry disenfranchised youth, the alienation of lands and all the ills that Anguilla had hoped to avoid have long been here. In our minds at home, Anguilla is still the best place on earth to be so it was such a pleasure to be staying in a quiet community where older children in the neighbourhood look out for younger ones and where people can still leave their doors not only unlocked, but wide open. I still wouldn’t leave Anguilla to live here but there is this bright spark of Africa – and traditional African spirituality especially - that will keep pulling me to this place for rejuvenation time and time again. Soon coming home though – no place like home.

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