From New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, it is possible to fly direct to nearly twenty Caribbean islands. One can reach Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, and Puerto Rico in under four hours; Antigua, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Saint Kitts, Grenada, Trinidad, Aruba, and Martinique in under five. Some 15 million American tourists visit the Caribbean each year. The islands are so close, American tourists visit them so frequently, and yet most of these visitors know so little about them. For a long time, I have been fascinated by the place the Caribbean seems to occupy in the mind of the American tourist as an “escape,” or, as I put it early in the novel, a “lovely nowhere.”
This phenomenon was at the heart of my decision to create a fictional, unnamed island, Saint X, for my setting. Building the world of Saint X was a process I undertook with a great deal of questioning about what it means to invent a fictional island within a place that is not fictional at all. In a region where every island has a rich and distinctive history, culture, dialect, cuisine, flora and fauna, and on and on, how does one approach creating a fictive space that embodies without simplifying, that is none of these places, exactly, but is also never pure invention? I have done my best to create in Saint X a cohesive place that, I can only hope, will inspire readers who don’t know much about the Caribbean to learn more.
In this process, I am especially indebted to the wonderful series of Caribbean histories and guides published by Macmillan Caribbean in the nineteen eighties and nineties, in particular: Nevis: Queen of the Caribees by Joyce Gordon, Anguilla: Tranquil Isle of the Caribbean by Brenda Carty and Colville Petty, St. Kitts: Cradle of the Caribbean by Brian Dyde, St. Lucia: Helen of the West Indies by Guy Ellis, Grenada: Isle of Spice by Norma Sinclair, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines by Lesley Sutty. To the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and the New Register of Caribbean English Usage, both edited by Richard Allsopp. To Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (see also the beautiful map “Archipelago: The Caribbean’s Far North” created by cartographer Molly Roy in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Jelly-Schapiro and Rebecca Solnit). To Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook by Donald R. Hill. And to Jamaica Kincaid’s seminal work, A Small Place.
When it came to rendering Clive Richardson’s life in New York City, some key sources included Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in NYC by Biju Mathew, and Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York edited by Nancy Foner.
I am incredibly grateful to those people on Anguilla who gave so generously of their time when I visited the island for research. Thank you to Josveek Huligar for being such a fun and helpful guide. My deepest gratitude to Anhel Brooks, Trevon Liburd, to M., to A., to M., and to J. for sharing your stories with me. Thanks also to Scott Kircher for the introduction to Trudy Nixon, and to Trudy for sharing her experience as an incomer on the island.
Thank you to Melissa Borja for sharing her knowledge on conducting oral histories and interviews.
To Stephanie Stokes Oliver and Crispin Brooks for reading the manuscript with such brilliance and care. To Graham Gao Hodges for so graciously reading the passages about Clive’s working life in New York.
To wonderful friends who shared geographic and linguistic expertise with me: Margo Levin, Kate Rubin, Dave Serafino, Geraldine Shen, and Erin Zimmer. To Marisa Reisel for … everything.
To the brilliance and generosity of Greg Jackson and Lulu Miller, who read this book when it was a mess and saw so clearly how it could become less of one. To my teachers: Christopher Tilghman, Caroline Preston, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Chang-rae Lee, Joyce Carol Oates, and Wendy Phelps.
I thank my lucky stars daily that Henry Dunow is my agent. He is the wisest reader I know, and he worked with me patiently over many years and many, many drafts to help this book find its footing. Thank you also to the wonderful Arielle Datz and everyone else at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
To my fabulous editor, Deb Futter, who sees everything so clearly and who made this process more fun than I could have imagined. To Rachel Chou, Anna Belle Hindenlang, Randi Kramer, Christine Mykityshyn, Jaime Noven, Heather Orlando, Clay Smith, Anne Twomey, and everyone else at Celadon: I feel so fortunate to be in your capable hands. Thank you also to David Cole, Elizabeth Catalano, Cheryl Mamaril, and Jonathan Bennett for their wonderful work on this book, and to the incredible Callum Plews at Macmillan Audio for his work on the audiobook.
Our son was born a year before this book was completed, and I never would have finished it were it not for the people who cared for him so lovingly in his first year. To Meg Sweet, Cate Nowlan, Roberta Sweet, Carly Knight, Allison Haley, Maria Mastrandrea, and Molly Egger: Thank you.
To Shawn, Walter, Charlie, James, and Kelsey: I’m so lucky to be able to call you my family.
To Dona, Keith, and Brian: my rocks, my favorite people, from the very beginning.
To Emerson, our baby, our big boy. We are the very luckiest to have your light and spirit in our family.
And, always, to Mason, whose faith in me is the most profound thing I’ve ever known. I love you.