At the Foot of The Southern Cross

Dick Gentry

The Cayman Islands: A Personal Memoir and Reminiscence; an American Newspaper Editor Offshore in The Cayman Islands.

'This is a small story I wrote for myself because I wanted to remember it. When someone asked me what it was like down there, I told them to read Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk. That was fiction; my story is true.'

Sample

CHAPTER 1

THE LAND OF THE CROCK

Looking down from my window, I saw an enormous, elongated pancake poured on a gigantic blue griddle. My first surprise was its dimensions. I could see from one end to the other as we approached. It was absolutely flat with very few landmarks inland, and surrounded by the vast, consuming Caribbean Sea. There were no high buildings, trees or hills to be seen and the other two portions of this three-island nation were nowhere on the horizon. No wonder it took so long for somebody to discover this forlorn-looking pebble.

The Costa Rican jetliner braked to a stop a dozen or so yards from an open, tin-roofed building that might have been a tobacco barn except for the concrete floor and long tables visible inside. For a moment I thought we were lost and had somehow blundered into backwater Mexico. But there was no mistaking the faded sign over the entrance to the big rustic structure: “Cayman International Airport.”

The weather was a shocker after the late-winter chill of south Texas. When the hatch door opened, the smell drifted in with the heat. It wasn’t unpleasant, just different. In fact, given a choice between the sickish sweet aroma of the greasy, belching refineries around Port Arthur and the inexplicable scents in Cayman, I wasn’t complaining.

There was this oddball hint of decaying vegetation chopped up with exotic spices. I didn’t know it then, but Cayman had no sewer system, or fresh-water wells. Hundreds of septic tanks around the capital, George Town, were adding their obnoxious aroma and there was the hint of rotten eggs that I would learn was dissolved minerals from the minuscule aquifer beneath the limestone.

I wondered what Dr. Roy would look like? I only knew he was ancient and had been one of the first dentists in the country. I wasn’t positive who was going to meet me. Perhaps no one? That idea was unnerving.

Looking at the congenial faces watching us as they waited outside in the hot sun, I saw a peculiar bunch. The faces reflected a light to dark-brown hue and most looked through yellowish-brown eyes, or pale-blue ones diluted occasionally with gray. As they anxiously peered at us, I thought the eyes sparkled and blinked and bedazzled or faded with the accidental brightness, or dullness, one sees looking up at the heavens at night. The faces radiated more pleasantness than handsomeness. I recognized the composite of skin and eyes among many of them as a familiar mixed-race mulatto concoction I had seen growing up in the segregated and recently violent Deep South. And since I had never known a person of colour very far beyond skin tint—even after my exposure in the Marines—I was abruptly anxious about that, too.

I would soon learn these colourful faces reflected a multi-generational, genealogical soup—the flotsam and jetsam amalgamate of black, white, Latino, pirate, scalawag and other assorted misfits and adventurers interrupted unfortunately, in more recent decades, by the arrival of bankers, lawyers and other more sophisticated thieves. I hardly knew where I was, much less what it was. Like all of the arrivals before me, stretching back almost to the day Columbus’s son spotted and recorded these tiny islands on the Great Mariner’s fourth and final voyage, the Caribbean was a legacy to plunder and despoil. If there is such a thing as genetic memory, many of these people seeing me step off of the jet probably wondered: “What’s this new white boy after?”

Other faces were disappointingly normal; almost identical to those who watched us leave from Miami International Airport. These misplaced gawkers were probably tourists waiting to return to Miami or expatriate Brits waiting to welcome more skilled employees from England. I thought of myself as a tourist, not a potential employee. I had already made up my mind this trip was a mistake. We retrieved our bags from the unattended pile on the tarmac and hauled them inside to place on wooden tables and wait for the unhurried customs inspection.

When it was my turn, the inspector looked at me through bottle-lensed glasses and smiled. He poked through my overnight bag and asked where I would be staying? The way he said it wasn’t menacing. He had an accent. It was certainly English, but with an unusual singsong lilt.

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