An Embarrassment of Mangoes (31 page)

In a corner of the cabin, Valencia begins to carry on a full-fledged, full-volume, completely comprehensible conversation with George. “Do you think Valencia pretty, George?” she asks him, dancing him on his feet. “Do you like Valencia’s dress?” I know George will tell her exactly what she wants to hear, so I leave the two of them and retreat to the cockpit, where I tell Sharon that Valencia is starting to feel at home. “Poor kid,” she says.

“She lives in a children’s home on the outskirts of Basseterre. When she was a few years old, her mother sold her to a woman on St. Vincent for a couple hundred dollars, and when that woman no longer wanted her, she ended up back on St. Kitts, at the children’s home.” Though she looks only nine or ten, this endearing kid is fourteen, and carrying enough emotional baggage for a roomful of adults. Four or five years ago, Sharon took her under wing, and though she still lives in the home, she spends weekends, and other times as well, with Gong and Sharon. “She’s much,
much
better now than when we first met her.”

Mothers who can’t afford to keep their kids. Kids who can’t afford to go to school. We’d heard stories of it on Grenada, too, and there, wanting to give something back to the island that captured our hearts, we made a tiny step toward getting involved.

Newlo—the New Life Organisation—overlooks the ocean halfway up Grenada’s leeward coast and provides a “second chance at seventeen” for disadvantaged kids who never made it further than primary school. They learn a vocational skill and what Newlo calls “life skills”—high among them, self-esteem. Those without any other option can live right at the school. It’s a warren of rickety stairways and cramped rooms that reminds me of the shoe inhabited by the old woman in the nursery rhyme. A bit of concrete wall rises tentatively in one spot, under construction by kids in the masonry program; in another area, the guts spill out of ancient fridges, in the midst of repair by the kids learning refrigeration. Up another twisting stairway, we’re shown an office, straight out of the sixties, with young men and women concentrating hard at manual typewriters: the office skills program. “We’re trying to get computers,” Ann David-Antoine, the director, tells us, “but right now the duties are too high to bring them into the country.”

Newlo gives us a warm feeling. In the Dove Café, students in “hospitality arts” get to practice on real customers at lunchtime one day a week. They take what they’re doing seriously—
very
seriously—and we’re served with gravity and impeccable manners, one hand behind the back and ladies first, no matter what. The menu is carefully handwritten and photocopied on colored paper: a choice of golden-apple juice or pineapple juice; pumpkin soup or chicken soup; stew fish or stew chicken. Students do all the cooking—from the warm yeast rolls that arrive first to the Jell-O and pound cake for dessert—under supervision of their instructors. The food is simple, just homestyle cooking, but with a few stretch-their-wings flourishes: The steamed carrot batons that accompany my stew fish are carefully arranged in a hollowed-out round of cucumber. There’s an incentive to do well here: A lucky few will be placed in an internship on a cruise ship—an unimaginable opportunity for these kids.

“In three weeks I have done so many things I never did in primary school—talk about myself, stand up in front of the class and talk,” one young trainee told the director.

“Miss, look at me. I okay now,” said another.

“Miss” writes us a few weeks later with an update. She’d used the check we’d left behind to buy one promising student a set of his own carpentry tools, a second, his own tools for electronics repair. A third young man, she tells us, she’d found hanging around the school long after class was over. He simply had no money for bus fare to return home at night, so she made him a resident at Newlo “and he is making a valiant effort to use wisely the opportunity.”

Months later, we hear from her again. All three young men have completed their programs, but she seems particularly pleased to tell us about the third: He is in the middle of on-the-job training for full-time employment with the Court of Grenada. Miss, look at him now.

Accras (Saltfish Fritters)

Accras
(or
acrats
)
de morue
are saltfish fritters—the French island version of Dingis’s saltfish cakes. (
Morue
is French for cod.) Serve them as an appetizer or a snack.

1⁄2 pound salt cod or other saltfish, preferably boneless

1 lime

1 small onion, grated

1 clove garlic, grated

1⁄4–1⁄2 hot pepper, seeded and finely minced

1 seasoning pepper or 1⁄2 green bell pepper, finely chopped

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

2 green onions, finely chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

Freshly ground black pepper

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1⁄2 cup water (approx.)

Vegetable oil for deep frying

1. The night before you want to serve the fritters, put the fish in cold water to soak. Change water 4 or 5 times, squeezing half the lime into the water during each of the last two soakings.

2. Rinse fish, drain, and remove skin and bones if necessary. In a large bowl, finely shred the fish. (See Tips, below.) Add the onion, garlic, peppers, celery, green onions, thyme, and black pepper, and mix well.

3. Combine flour and baking powder and add to fish mixture. Stir thoroughly. Slowly add enough water to make a thick paste.

4. Heat oil to 350°F in a deep fryer or pot. Drop fish mixture by tablespoons into hot oil and fry until golden on both sides.

5. Drain on paper towels and serve hot with hot pepper sauce.

Serves 4

Tips

• Some saltfish may not shred easily. If that’s the case, chop it finely in a food processor or by hand with a knife. Alternatively, put it in boiling water, turn off the heat, and allow it to cool in the liquid. It should then flake easily. Whichever method you use, be sure to “chip it up fine,” as Dingis says.

• Before proceeding with step 2, try a little piece of the soaked fish. If it is still too salty for your taste, soak it again in fresh water.

Curried Chicken in Coconut Milk with Island Vegetables

This dish is popular on Guadeloupe and Martinique, where cooks prepare it with their own freshly made curry powder,
poudre de colombo
. Any good-quality curry powder can be substituted.

As they do with fish and lambi, island cooks “wash” their chicken with lime—squeeze a lime over it and rub it with the pith—to freshen it before cooking.

Serve the curry with rice and Steve’s Favorite Plantains (see page 149).

2 limes

4 pounds bone-in chicken pieces

3–4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1⁄2–1 fresh hot pepper, seeded and finely chopped (or to taste)

2 tablespoons curry powder

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 christophene, peeled and cubed

1 large Japanese eggplant, cubed

1⁄2 pound West Indian pumpkin, or butternut or Hubbard squash, peeled and cubed

1 cup coconut milk

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon rum

1. Halve one of the limes. Squeeze the juice over the chicken pieces, rubbing it in with the cut lime.

2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the oil in a large heavy pot. Pat the chicken dry with paper towels. Over medium-high heat, brown the chicken pieces in batches until golden on all sides, adding more oil as necessary. Remove chicken and set aside.

3. In the same pot, gently sauté the onion, garlic, and hot pepper until soft and golden, about 5 minutes. Add curry powder and thyme, and continue to cook for about a minute, stirring constantly.

4. Add the vegetables and stir until they are coated with the curry mixture. Add coconut milk, return chicken pieces to pot, season with salt and pepper, and stir. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and the chicken is cooked, stirring occasionally.

5. Stir in the juice from half the remaining lime and the rum. Taste and adjust flavor with additional lime juice, salt, and pepper.

Serves 6

Tip

• Add and subtract vegetables depending on what’s available. Other possibilities include unripe papaya, zucchini, sweet potatoes, white Caribbean yams, or white potatoes.

Beautiful Babe Spit

Red and black—Wahoo attack.
Yellow and green—Dolphin fishing machine.

BAHAMIAN CHRIS LLOYD’S RHYME ABOUT WHICH COLOR
LURE TO USE WHEN TROLLING OFFSHORE FOR FISH; FROM
ON AND OFF THE BEATEN PATH: THE CENTRAL & SOUTHERN
BAHAMAS GUIDE
BY STEPHEN J. PAVLIDIS, 1997

“Come on, spit. A
big
gob. None of this dainty stuff.” Steve is dangling a large lime-green fishing lure in front of my nose as
Receta
serenely sails along on autopilot. Knowing there’s no sense protesting, I work up a mouthful and,
pitooey
, deliver enough saliva onto the lure to do a baseball pitcher proud. Satisfied, Steve runs the fishing line out behind the boat, then offers up another lure. I hark it up and spit again.

I blame Ed, the Minister of Rum—at least indirectly—for this unusual fishing practice, just as I blame him for the boat’s still-growing collection of spirits.

“Come over for a ’ti punch at sundown,” Ed said one day at Hog Island. “I want you to meet Cleo. He’s in publishing, too. You’ll like him.”

Across Ed’s cockpit that evening sat a courtly man with the look of a longtime sailor. Lithe, attentive, with laughing eyes—a real ladies’ man, my mother would have said—white-haired and well-read. And extremely hard of hearing. With Lisa Soon Come as his only crew, he sails each year between the Virgin Islands and Trinidad, he told us, spending much of hurricane season in Grenada and much of the rest of the time in Culebra, a scrubby U.S.-owned island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Cleo is in his early seventies, Lisa Soon Come is scarcely two. She’s a placid tabby, whose name captures the jus’-now essence of both cats and West Indian life and conversation.

Capturing stuff in words is what Cleo is about. A writer, poet, and retired professor of modern languages, he’s also the publisher, editor, and everything else of
The Melibea Review
, an occasional literary magazine that takes its name from the place it’s produced, Cleo’s boat,
Melibea
. Each
Review
is a photocopied-and-stapled (as well as online) collection of writing that relates to the Caribbean, some by cruisers, some by islanders he’s found and encouraged, some his own.

Even though we hadn’t yet read anything he’d written when we met him on Ed’s boat, we quickly realized Cleo could sure
tell
a story. I had no doubt his tales were true—but the truth plotted and prodded to serve a writer’s ends. Could a Grenadian land crab really jump a man and chop his balls off? Could it really be hypnotized by a flashlight to prevent such a fate? Did Cleo
really
drop his flashlight with a monstrous crab just inches from . . . ? Not a word of a lie, his manner implies, and who would doubt this erudite gentleman? Cleo was a raconteur of the first rank.

The conversation on Ed’s boat meandered from island life to writing, to reading, to rum. The subject of saliva on fishing lures, oddly, never came up. Nor did it in the days that followed, as we got to know Cleo better.

Frankly, fishing (unlike lobstering) just wasn’t that important at Hog Island. Steve occasionally dangled a line over the side late in the day for the fun of it, sometimes picking up a two-person snapper or grouper that he cleaned and I fried for dinner. And he sometimes went off with his fly rod in
Snack
toward the mangroves that edged the anchorage. That dinner never resulted from these excursions was beside the point: Steve loved the solitude and took pleasure in simply casting the line, watching huge tarpon roil the water and ignore his flies, and letting his mind wander wherever the breeze took it. He always returned happy, and empty-handed. With fresh, cheap fish at the market in St. George’s a short bus ride away, any notion we had of devoting serious attention to catching our own had long since drifted out to sea on the tide.

Even when we started moving back up the island chain—and traveling offshore, where big fish live—we were pretty lackadaisical about putting our lines in the water. The problem was we still weren’t exactly fish deprived. “Just listen for the conch horn blowing,” we were told by islanders from Bequia to Dominica. “That means there’s fish arriving at the market.” In fact, we didn’t even have to listen for the horn at Dominica’s north end: When we saw the local ladies clustering in the shallow water around the brightly painted open boats, we knew the fish were in. With their long skirts hiked up, the women bent over the catch, pointing and prodding, before wading back onto dry sand, dinner in hand.

C
arol and Jack on
Splashdance
have been putting even less effort into catching fish than we have. We’d been introduced to them at the Mighty Sparrow concert in Grenada and really got to know them in Trinidad. With interests as wide-ranging as ours, always-exuberant Carol and quieter but equally enthusiastic Jack became our sometimes-partners there for exploring and liming. Now after several months of going our separate ways, we’ve caught up with each other again in heavily developed, touristified St. Martin, the island with the split personality near the top of the Leeward chain. The northern part of St. Martin is French, a
département
of France, like Martinique and Guadeloupe; the southern part, Sint Maarten, is Dutch. No customs or immigration checkpoints divide the two halves, but a wall of difference lies between them. The Dutch capital, Philipsburg, where the cruise ships stop, is crowded with casinos; expensive high-end jewelry and designer stores sit cheek by jowl with crummy souvenir shops and places selling duty-free booze and smokes. The French side is, well, French: chic, fashionable, and sophisticated, with elegant little boutiques, wine stores, brasseries, and cafés.

Like Carol and Jack, we anchor on the Dutch side of St. Martin’s protected lagoon, and eat and shop on the French side. Take it as an indication of the style of the French side that the supermarket in the heart of Marigot, the capital, is called the Gourmet Boutique. Food is flown in daily from France. The Gourmet Boutique has at least a dozen types of goat cheese; an array of
saucissons
and pâtés, stuffed with bits of wild mushrooms or truffles; delicate greens like frisée, white radishes, and young asparagus; even fish from the Mediterranean. Worse than the Gourmet Boutique is Le Goût du Vin, the wine store across the street. Steve is simply incapable of walking by its sandwich board—which advertises a daily special for $2.75 to $3.50 a bottle, imported duty-free from France—without nipping inside to try a sip and make a purchase.

When I return from a brief New Jersey visit with Mom and Dad, Steve picks me up in the dinghy from a dock near the airport.
Snack
’s bottom appears to be covered with collapsed cardboard boxes, but it’s dark, I’m tired, and I don’t bother to ask. The next morning I discover two things have occurred in my four-day absence: First, Steve learned Le Goût du Vin delivers to the waterfront; and second, he has spent four days “renovating,” turning a couple of corners of the boat into storage cupboards for the case of champagne and the five—
five!
—cases of wine he has acquired in my absence. “I cut open the old holding tank and put a door on it,” he says proudly. It had been connected to the second toilet, which we had removed when we bought
Receta
. I look at him with horror. “Don’t worry—it didn’t look like it had been used much, and I scrubbed it out with bleach. It holds a full case.”

Our credit cards, which had a light workout in Grenada and the islands that followed, are feeling bruised. If we don’t get out of St. Martin soon, we will be broke—and fat. We drink
café au lait
and munch
pain au chocolat
under big umbrellas at waterfront cafés; sip red wine and eat escargots in profiterolles in elegant Antillean houses; devour mussels in white wine and
frites
at a streetside brasserie with the regulars (we
are
regulars); and, in our bathing suits, down cold beer, smoky grilled fish and chicken, and deep-fried
accras
at the beachfront barbecue shacks called lo-los. “The game plan is to bus to Marigot and go hiking from there,” I write in my journal one day. “The reality is we bus to Marigot and have lunch.”

Little wonder no one’s been thinking a whole lot about fishing lines. Now, though, we’re getting ready to leave St. Martin. Carol and I are sitting in our respective dinghies, waiting for Jack and Steve to return from doing the checkout formalities with Customs and Immigration.

“We need a tournament,” says Carol. “
That
will give us the incentive to start fishing.”

I’ve been in the Caribbean for more than a year now, I’ve learned how to lime, and I’ve fully integrated “jus’ now” into my vocabulary and lifestyle. But I haven’t entirely lost my once finely honed competitive edge.

By the time Jack and Steve return, we’ve worked out the details. “Here’s the scoring,” Carol tells them, “five points for an edible fish landed, four points for an inedible fish landed, and three points for one that gets away before you land it. Winner gets a case of Presidente.” Both boats are planning to again spend a few days in the land of Presidente on the way north.

Unfortunately, Carol and I have little experience with fishing tournaments—none, actually—so the Rules Committee neglects to mention size of fish: It’s five points whether you land a four-foot tuna or a four-inch snapper.

“All on the honor system,” I add. The whole point, after all, is to
eat
the proof as soon as possible. The tournament will last however long it takes both boats to reach Beaufort, North Carolina, Carol and Jack’s home port, which is at least three months away. Since
Splashdance
is headed from St. Martin to the U.S. Virgin Islands and
Receta
is headed to the British Virgins, we’ll keep track of tournament action via SSB.

W
e’ve barely got the anchor on deck that afternoon when Steve runs out the fishing lines. (He has a fairly strong competitive streak himself.) On one side of the boat, a length of plastic pipe hose-clamped to the rail holds a long-past-its-prime rod and reel bought at a Florida flea market. On the other side, a “Cuban reel” lies on one of the cushions. This oversized plastic yo-yo with fishing line wound on it is about as cheap and cheerful as fishing tackle can get. There’s no rod; to bring in the line, you just wind it by hand back on the yo-yo.

Scarcely half an hour after we’re out of the harbor, the radio crackles. “
Receta, Receta; Splashdance
.” Damn. They’ve caught a small tuna. A little later, they call again: another small tuna. They’re already up ten points. Carol attempts to console us. “Don’t worry—we’ll freeze some and save it to eat with you.” Steve isn’t consoled. Dinner is now beside the point; the ego of a lifelong fisherman is at stake.

By the time the two boats share an anchorage (and the tuna) a week later at Watermelon Cay, off St. John in the U.S. Virgins, the score is thirteen to zip:
Splashdance
also hooked one that mercifully (from our point of view as well as the fish’s) got away. Meanwhile, we hadn’t had a strike.

“It’s become an onboard joke,” Steve e-mails a friend. “I let out the fishing lines and Ann checks the freezer for a dinner selection.”

By the time we reach the Spanish Virgin Islands, and Culebra, where Cleo is by now anchored, Steve has tried every lure in his Tupperware box. He’s switched squid skirts so frequently you’d think it was a fashion show. These brightly colored, soft, plastic, fringed thingies fit over hooks like grass skirts on hula dancers and are meant to mimic swimming squid. Chartreuse, hot pink, fluorescent green, sparkly yellow, silvery blue—none of them makes a difference. In fact,
nothing
makes a difference. He varies the length of the lines behind the boat. He varies our speed (though just a little: much as I like to win, I draw the line at slowing down when we’re on a passage). No fish.

“What am I doing wrong?” he laments at dinner on
Receta
one night. Cleo is at the table, and so too is another set of guests from home, Sari and Pete. Steve’s question hangs unanswered in the warm night air, but Cleo, a gleam in his eye, launches into a story about a young Grenadian girl he once took fishing. “It was her first time,” he says, “so I explained the secret of successful fishing to her. If a pretty lady spits on the lure before it goes into the water, I told her, she will almost certainly catch a fish.”

The girl would have been completely charmed by Cleo, I know, the same way that Sari and I, and every other female who’s been introduced to him in my presence, have been completely charmed by him. She wouldn’t have been able to resist his intimation of her beauty. The young lady spit, of course. And to her amazement, a fish was caught.

Steve’s eyes light up in the shadows, and I know there will be no peace onboard
Receta
tomorrow until the lures have been anointed.

W
e thread our way into open ocean through the coral reefs that surround Culebra for the 20-mile run to Punta Arenas, Vieques, another one of the Spanish Virgin Islands that are part of Puerto Rico.

“Spit,” says Steve.

“This is ridiculous.”

“Does the spit of two pretty ladies work better than one?” Sari asks.

“Okay, both of you spit.”

Zinnnnnggggggggg
. A scant fifteen minutes later, we’re so surprised to hear the line sizzling off the reel that it takes a few seconds for anyone to respond. Steve grabs the rod.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. The fish clearly has the upper hand. Steve gives us a play-by-play as the fight continues. “
Big
tug,” he reports at one point, his arms straining against the pressure. Then, suddenly, the fish is easier to reel in.

I dig out the tools we’ve had ready for weeks, just in case: gaff, bucket, garbage bags, and rum. The rum isn’t for celebrating; cheap alcohol poured into the gills is a cruiser’s trick for subduing a large fish before bringing it into the cockpit. “Carol emptied the better part of a bottle into our first tuna,” Jack had told us while we ate five points’ worth of fish at Watermelon Cay. “But in the excitement she used the first bottle she grabbed. Unfortunately, it was my Tanqueray.” His
ferociously expensive, imported, hard to find Tanqueray
, he might have added.