Adrift on St. John Read Online Free Page B

was a hard life, being a sugar slave—rough, I tell you.” He wiped his brow for emphasis.
    “But from the moment of their capture and enslavement, the members of this warrior tribe began plotting their revenge. A couple of months after they arrived on St. John, they organized a massive revolt and took over the island. It was a bloody siege that caught everyone by surprise. Some of the plantation owners and their families escaped to St. Thomas, but most of them were”—Conrad twisted his face into a lurid expression and made a slicing motion across his bobbing Adam’s apple—“slaughtered.”
    The rain was coming down now in nearly horizontal sheets, slamming against the windows of the ferry. I gripped the side of the bench as the boat heaved sideways in the rolling waves.
    “These rebel slaves, they held on to the island for six or seven months before reinforcements of French troops arrived to help the Danes. Once the slaves saw the size of the incoming fleet, they knew they were outnumbered. And they knew what would happen to them if they were captured. So, as the troops advanced on their camp”—he drew in his breath, his thin face wrinkling under the force of an exaggerated cringe—“they committed suicide.
    “Some of them used the muskets they’d stolen from the plantations. Some slit their throats with their knives. But one of the rebel slaves, the Princess, she chose a different method. She hiked up to the northern rim of Mary’s Point, just beyond the curve of Maho Bay. There on a cliff, overlooking Tortola, she stepped to the edge, closed her eyes, and jumped off”—he made a whirring flap with hislips, followed by an imitation of a loud splash before completing the sentence—“into the ocean.”
    Conrad leaned even closer toward me, the pale skin on his skeletal face shining in the storm’s eerie half-light. His voice dropped to a whisper.
    “Something about her death—the way the water swallowed her up—it didn’t quite do the job. Her spirit was too strong. It survived even after her body perished. The waves tossed her out onto the beach there at Maho, and she’s been haunting the island ever since. Everyone at the campground has seen her at least once or twice.”
    He
thunked
his chest solemnly. “Every year, the Princess, she comes to visit me.”
    He paused, switching his expression to an impish grin. “In my teepee tent at the far end of the campground.”
    Wearily, I shook my head. I’d heard more than enough about Conrad’s teepee tent.
    “No, no, honest, I swear,” he protested. “Late at night near the beach, you can hear her voice. It’s kind of a mournful, wailing chant.”
    He made a strained caterwauling sound before nodding informatively at me. “They call her the Amina Slave Princess. The Ghost of the Slave Princess. Ask anybody. She hangs out most nights at Maho Bay.”
    Conrad collapsed onto his bench and stretched his arms wide across its back metal railing. He was convinced of the ghost story, even if I wasn’t buying it.
    “I tell you what, St. John, it’s an amazing place,” he said reverently. “I look forward every year to coming down here. This island, it will pull you apart, then put you back together again—if you let it.”
    In the years since my first encounter with Conrad the charismatic hippie, I have heard many versions of the Amina Slave Princess story. The legend has been repeated over and over again, particularly among those of Afro-Caribbean descent.
    Of late, some have come to believe that the Princesswalks among us—that she has taken on human form to protect the sanctity of the shoreline where her lifeless body washed up, all those many years ago.
    I leaned back in the white plastic lawn chair and took another slurp from the strawberry drink. If the rumor that Hannah had been done in by the Amina Slave Princess was circulating among the waitresses at the Crunchy Carrot, it was well on its way through the island’s gossip chain.
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