In 1780, all of this was deserted in comparison to Old Providence: the island was almost uninhabited, beyond the strategic scope of any empire, too far, too flat, seemingly inhospitable. The chronologically closest historical record is the diary of Stephen Kemble, an American, thirteen years before Spain resumed its dominion over the archipelago. When Captain Kemble was shipwrecked on the island, there were twelve families and some children – surely not very different from us, from all of us – and virgin land with no flags in sight. I imagine a bohemian life, peaceful, unruled, and I see blonds and Africans steeped in the abundance of nights fragrant with tobacco, rum and seafood, I picture pregnant women like the ones I’m looking at now, and mixed children, barefoot and smiling. There would be no way to fight or mistreat too much. If the slave-trading ships didn’t come, a death, any death, would be shocking. There would be no way, for instance, to separate mothers from their children. But every beam of light travels with its own shadow, the crackle of selfishness, the pyramid of ambition – so I also see punishment, the whip of despair, the perversions of isolation, force and power, the blood spilled from the thorny branch, the rapes. Without the freedom to move, to leave, how rich those nights could have been, tender with the jubilation of escape: first euphoria, then the fugitives’ resignation.

The gringo captain, who landed here with battle wounds, wrote in his diary that the twelve families were mostly Jamaicans who lived for themselves. He described a banquet with wine and rum, locally made in barrels of the good cedar that already existed on Henrietta before any European footfall was ever reported; with meat and turtle eggs and the finest tobacco he’d ever tasted. A feast, a libertine smorgasbord. I imagine it lit, like this rundown, with the same scent of burning wood. The captain was especially struck by the fact that the inhabitants weren’t united around any religion or authority. In living as subjects of their needs and desires alone, in the middle of a disputed Caribbean, I hope those adventurous Jamaicans were happier, freer – and that their children bore witness to it – if only for an instant; those discoverers of a paradise surrounded by human trafficking, when kidnapping was even more profitable and the industrial revolution accelerated the introduction of a different class of slaves into European factories. Like that, like that. I picture them dancing and singing some mestizo chorus, or some word charged with meaning, a scene that shelters the aching memory, the echo of a moment when someone lived the life they’d chosen. Someone, at least. My hips sway again, as I know the pañas’ hips are swaying, and everyone else’s too, when our whims open themselves to be satisfied, when we honour the shared desires that still drive the days along in our island trance.