Intersession Back from the Bahamas

THE TWO islands are inhabited by sunburned, towheaded Tories, whose ancestors left New England in 1775. They and their former slaves live together on Harbour Island. On Spanish Wells the blacks are deported at 5 p.m. Five family names embrace the whites of these islands. The inbreeding is so ancient that they all look alike; thin, spindly, with glassy, blue eyes, crooked jaws, bony wrists and thick knuckles. The blacks are inbred to a lesser extent as they come and go more with the outer islands. Nevertheless, two out of four blacks share the same surname.

Perhaps it is the inbreeding, or their isolation, or both, that cause the peculiarities of their behavior. Or perhaps it was my naive eye that saw what was not there. The natives have a distinct style. A behavioral scientist might understand the manifestations of this style; a tourist can only let the impressions reflect and magnify in the back of his mind's eye. Is something special in the way children congregate around the big tree and roller skate on only one foot? Is something special when they swing their arms downward and slap spinning wooden tops at one's feet? Is something special in the perpetual squabbling of the basket weaver and the mad woman who clutches her groin when strangers pass by? Is something special in the white fisherman who speaks with pride of his people (old Tories) and shares his catch with his less fortunate black comrades? Is something special in the "slows" of the bartender who takes half an hour to mix his friends' drinks while he mixes the tourists' quickly?

As I say, they have their own style, difficult to understand and difficult to impute any specific significance. But the impression is powerful. Their idiosyncrasies give glimpses of a deeply complex community. A certain sympathy exists amongst the natives that expresses a psychic life peculiar to themselves.

Glimpses are all the tourist is allowed, and the intriguing hints are brief and inarticulate. But they are lasting. My thoughts have played with the natives' idiosyncrasies since my return. It is evident that they know each other so well that the simplest rituals of daily routine take on the meanings of generations of common experience.

En route to Miami, I was already bothered by the noisy insufficiencies of my own world. At the airport my sleepy irritation was jarred by a platinum wig, perched on a mannequin head, that watched dumbly while its brunette alter-ego harangued a porter. I drove through Miami Beach to indulge myself in a deluge of costumes and Cadillacs. Later, in Palm Beach, Harold's grocery truck (of Southampton, L.I., and Palm Beach) sped by advertising pheasant and fresh caviar. At Hamburger Haven I was handed hamburgers by a waiter in a cashmere sweater and Gucci shoes (no socks). In front of the Beach Club a wedding party sang college songs and split Jack Daniel's on the tenth tier of the wedding cake.

The contrast to the islands was unfair, but in three hours I had changed worlds, and I was forced to make comparisons. Were the Gucci shoes and the Lilly sportcoat as expressive as the proud fisherman's beard and straw hat? And the weaver and the crazy woman-was their squabble the same as a joust of honking between a Mercedes and a Bentley? No, emphatically, no. Not Palm Beach: this extravagance could not have the same depth as the simple, slow, island rituals. The islanders' foibles had communicated their self-knowledge. Here, I felt that the foilbes denied that knowledge. Or was I just too culture-shocked to see through a veneer?