They called it Burma Road, the trail newly cut through the scrub and the pine forest to connect the airfield being built at the western end of the island with Oakes Field in Nassau. The name represented some wry reference to that legendary seven-hundred-mile route across the Himalayas, down which the British had recently retreated from the Japanese forces in China. Everyone’s got a sense of humor, I guess. Anyway, the airfield laborers had built Burma Road themselves, and upon Burma Road they traveled to work each day, and on Burma Road they now gathered up a few fragrant pine branches for clubs and marched back into Nassau, right past Government House—the Windsors were visiting Washington, remember—to Bay Street, down Bay Street to Rawson Square where the House of Assembly stood. I knew this because I could hear the shouting ahead, the singsong chanting, something about Conchie Joe. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe.

And that’s when I knew it was trouble, all right, because Conchie Joe was the white man, Conchie Joe was the fifteen percent of the Bahamian population allowed within the walls of high-class joints like the British Colonial and the Emerald Beach Hotel, to say nothing of the front door of Government House. Conchie Joe was the foreman on the airfield project, the merchant on Bay Street, the lawyer, the doctor, the owner of virtually all property. The legislator in Parliament, passing laws on himself and the other eighty-five percent of the population. Until now, I had always understood the word as a term of needling affection. But words, you know, they’re funny things. You wake up one sultry, troublesome morning, and their meanings invert. Over and over, louder and louder, the laborers sang. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe, do nigger don’t you lick nobody, don’t lick nobody . . .

A mass of humanity like that, you could hear them and smell them and feel them before you saw them. The reek of perspiration, the buzz of nervous energy. The trace of fresh pine. Nassau Street was motionless. So was George Street, stretching up to pink Government House on its hill. Not until I reached the corner of Parliament Street, not until the plaza opened up before me, the palm trees and the white-columned pink facades that constituted the seat of Bahamas government, did I discover the crowd, the hundreds of black men, a few women too, maybe a thousand or maybe even more. I braked the bicycle and touched my toe to the pavement. It was just past nine o’clock, according to the clock on the tower, and the chanting had died away into that thing called expectant silence, as if the men—having marched into the very heart of Conchie Joe’s domain—now prepared themselves to listen to somebody. That was nice. Somebody who? Who the devil was in charge around here, while the Duke of Windsor was away? The colonial secretary, maybe? The crowd, rustling and grumbling, had turned toward a square pink building on the corner of Bank Lane, where some white men seemed to be standing on the steps, sweating in their suits.