And he was gone, just like that, threw himself right into the pell-mell and disappeared. I stood shaking under the portico where he left me, scared to death, and yet underneath all that fear lay something more like excitement. Some charge that drew me forth, step by step, from underneath the portico to get a better vantage, to watch this extraordinary thing, this riot, this tumult of angry men, these placid Bahamians—Oh, they’d never revolt here, they know their place, the coloreds here—exploding into fury. Men shouting and glass smashing, the beat of two thousand feet on the sun-bleached pavement of Bay Street, drumming, hollering, howling mad, because they got paid four shillings a day to labor under the broiling sun while the white Americans got twelve, all laid out in a contract negotiated by the Bahamian government, by Conchie Joe, and they were sick and tired of that. Sick and tired.

This is big, I thought. Heart thumping.

And then: I need my camera.

I thought if I could maybe cross this stampede alive, I could head up Parliament Street to higher ground. I could skirt along parallel to the action—the laborers meant to smash up Bay Street, symbol of Conchie Joe’s power, that was obvious—and pedal home fast to fetch my Kodak. I could take photos of this, astonishing photos, write it all up and send it to my editor, an exclusive on-the-scene account of an unprecedented race riot in Nassau, Bahamas, a spark lit to a pile of bone-dry tinder. Real news, vital news. News that was not filtered through the peculiar lens of royal privilege but was raw and genuine and needful.

I gripped the handlebars of my bicycle and pushed forward.

Now, I suppose you might think this sense of adventure—this journalistic curiosity, anyway—was in my blood. Maybe that’s so. I’m told I take after my father. So said my mother, anyway, whenever she caught me in some kind of mischief, like leading innocents—say, my kid brother and sister, for example—into the neighbor’s orchard and climbing the trees, one by one, to drop apples into a basket held by my anxious companions. Or else that time I took the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan all by myself, aged thirteen, and stormed into the Metropolitan offices to visit my father, so he could settle what you might call a domestic dispute between my mother and me. (As it turned out, my father was in a very important meeting and couldn’t see me. His secretary called a taxi to drive me home.) As for the time I walked into a Columbia mixer and walked out with a certain Mr. Randolph, well, she wasn’t around to scold me. But I feel sure that she would have blamed my father for that too. Certainly the shrinks would’ve agreed with her.