—ADRIANA VIOLA CLEMENT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1923 If it so happened that “the twenty-and-odd negroes” did, in fact, arrive at Jamestown’s Point Comfort by way of the West Indies instead of directly from Africa, then the island of their provenance might well have been Barbados—Barbados being, circa 1600, as important a holding pen and transshipment point as Richmond, Virginia, would become, circa 1820, owing to a surplus at the time of locally bred chattel. A green little coral gemstone of an island situated in the lower half of the Caribbean archipelago, Barbados is considered part of the conga line of islands doing their winding dance from the Florida Keys to the tip of Venezuela. Actually, Barbados has excused itself from the dance line to sit like a lonely wallflower off to itself some distance out in the Atlantic. It is the easternmost island in the chain, a tiny outpost of 166 square miles that, geographically, is the closest point in the Caribbean to the great pregnant bulge of West Africa and the former barracoon slave pens at Goree, Guinea, Elmina, Whydah, the Bight of Benin et al.
What do You think about Triangular Road: A Memoir?
