By Sue Eisenfeld
“The primal function of these historical reminders is not to keep or preserve the past
but re-waken it…”[i]
It’s the middle of the night, and the furnace of my body’s central engine is at full fire, the slow boil of my core bubbling to the surface, my face oily, my body damp, my cheeks hot as coals.
I am exhausted from more than twelve hours of travel to this island—and dehydrated, my blood a thick paste by lack of fluids, holding in my heat rather than releasing it. Heartbeat pounds in my ears: a timer, a drum. The cross-breeze through the plantation shutters is not nearly enough, even near Windward Beach. I cannot imagine how I will endure this night—certainly not an additional six nights—with such a fever.
The landscape of this unease is loud. Flaps of elephant-ear tropical leaves swat against the stone building like a hurricane. Palms sweep like windshield wipers across the windows, back and forth throughout the night. Between short bits of slumber, I hear a spasm of cloud-forest rains splat among the vines and mango trees, splash down the stiff, spiny spears of bromeliads overflowing into the rain pot at the center. The storm spawns the haunting, nighttime, high-pitched whistle of the Antillean coqui. Vervet monkeys roam in the trees.
Inside our tower—a cone of local, black volcanic stone, three feet thick, forty feet high, I toss and turn in my crisp, floral-scented, white cotton sheets, next to my husband, wondering what kind of nightmare we have entwined ourselves in. A thousand feet up the volcano from the sea in the deep of the night, in our secluded, standalone honeymoon vacation suite on Nevis Island at the old Golden Rock plantation, we are surrounded by ghosts.
In the mist of history, stonecutters are hewing rock from quarries, cutting blocks by hand, stacking them by size. Laborers are hauling loads in carts. The curved walls of our room are white, but my night eyes see them dark and dirty, splattered with mildew, rotted vegetal waste, old blood.
In the center of the cylinder, near where a spiral staircase now ascends to a second floor where I will practice yoga, a massive metal machine takes form, with rollers the size of timber logs and gears powered by the wind—the machine we will see in coming days at the ruins of the Hamilton Estate, the remains of New River, hidden in dozens of stone skeletons around the island. Figures with blurred faces and dead eyes enter the large, arched doorway, the maw of the workhouse, and feed fat stalks of sharp, woody reeds into the machine’s moving parts, which mash and crush day and night. Juices flow out a pipe to boiling vats, spattering and scalding the scarred arms of ladlers, evaporating and thickening into a golden-brown sludge, to be refined as white gold to satiate sweet-tooths of Europe.
The machine in the center is the nerve core of an industrial operation that sprawls over a hundred acres in Gingerland, the backdrop of a past this boutique resort is repurposing for pleasure. Where now lush botanica frames the doorway of our abode, I glimpse in the metamorphosing haze an unending rotation of male and female automatons, feeding into the tower like clockwork. The tower takes them in, but it does not let them all out. For next to each desperate feeder is a guard, and the guard stands still with a machete, and his job is to stay alert and to save the wretched endeavor if he needs to—that is, to save the syrup, which means to save the human machine, which means to cut away anything that gets caught in the roller: any delicate crushed finger, flattened hand, mangled arm, the essentials of mothers and fathers, gobbled in a relentless, heartless hunger.
There is no off-button. While the one-armed walk the estate like zombies, fully fleshed new figures replenish the stock to feed the machine again. Could any of them, so long ago, in their own nightmare, have imagined me, lying coddled in a feather-top bed, imagining them?
Outside, lightning cracks, zapping the space with the power of a time machine.
I must have slept, for at last morning comes—and calm. The early sun streams onto my head as bright as high noon, and by 7:00 a.m., I rise. I lap cold bottled water, collected from Nelson’s Spring on the west coast of this leeward island, splash water from the tap onto my face, accept the French-press coffee prepared by my husband, black, and ready myself to walk outside to breakfast, with its sugary sweets, served at the plantation long house, now a restaurant. The rewilded tropical landscape is a “Gauguin come to life,”[ii] where Purple-throated Hummingbirds flit, and soothing, pastel Zenaida Doves bob and coo.
As I step out through the tower’s archway, I notice at once its front doors: fire-engine red, emergency-light red, stop-sign red—signals from the past of the place that kept me up nearly all night with unfathomable dreams. At the apex of the arch—the keystone, the piece that locks all stones into position and gives the structure its strength, the center upon which all else depends and without which nothing can stand, nearly hidden by vines of trumpet flower in a sliver of shadow offered by the sun, is engraved these characters:
E.H.
1811
A brag. The imprint of the man who purchased this land in 1801, built Golden Rock Estate as a sugar plantation on the fertile soils of Nevis Peak in 1811—on the island with the richest sugar economy in the British Empire, and claimed ownership of more than 900 human beings. The most brutal enslaver on the island, charged in court even by the British government for his cruelty but acquitted by his fellow white plantation owners. It was a miscarriage of justice so grave that an uproar in England led to the abolition of slavery in the colonies. All the islands were free; Edward Huggins dug his own grave at the Sugar Mill he built.
In days to come, we will speak with native Nevisians about these towers, as curious Americans coming from a place in the middle of Confederate monument removals, and wary of memorials to white folks. But the Nevisians shake their heads and correct us with loving kindness. We marched for Black Lives Matter too, they explain. But these structures are monuments to our ancestors, stones touched by their very hands. The stones, the gears, the sluices, the vats; they want all the pieces preserved. Crumbling statuaries cross the island, poking out like weeds—reawakened, speaking their stories to whomever can hear.
Photo: Copyright Sue Eisenfeld, 2024.
[i] Raivo, P.J. (1999). “In this Very Place: War Memorials and Landscapes as an Experienced Heritage,” Lancaster University, The Thingmount Working Paper Series on the Philosophy of Conservation. British Association of Nature Conservationists, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/in%20this%20very%20place%20(raivo).pdf
[ii] Friedman, M. (2021, June 11) “Wonderland: How to Disappear Completely at Golden Rock,” Tablet Hotels. https://magazine.tablethotels.com/en/2021/06/wonderland/
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Sue Eisenfeld’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Gettysburg Review, Potomac Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Full Bleed, and many other publications, and her essays have been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction and teaches for the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Science Writing program. www.sueeisenfeld.com