Excerpt from The Ghost of Bridgetown

A duppy by default, he was drowned, but he came out of the sea. Never dead, he said, though who would believe him?Life raft, he explained, but his employers—graying pair, nondescript Anglicans who already spoke of the Will of God to describe his disappearance—now spoke of that same Will to describe his appearance.

He was an unlikely, sunburned ghost, white-toothed and island-bred. At the request of the local clerics—and for the benefit of the public—he was installed on a stool and behind a bottle at the Breadfruit Bar. The whole arrangement—bar, stool, man, bottle, beer—sat on Farhall Street. By day, the Breadfruit was a failing bar, an eye in the storm of activity of the street. By night—who knew? The place had a reputation, and each evening, it earned its changeable identity, only to be scrubbed clean in the morning of peanut shells and beer, events and personality.

Charlotte was standing in the airport customs line when she first heard of the good-willed ghost. She craned her head back to eavesdrop on two women, huskily whispering about a man who spent his evenings laying hands on the ill and blessing children. Apparently, he would tell the story of his life, his time at sea, only if you told your own story, whatever that might be, first. He accepted payment in cigarettes and liquor and an occasional flying-fish sandwich.

Charlotte turned to hear more, but the woman speaking gave her a look, blank with hostility, so she swiveled her head back around and pretended to be deeply engaged in a "You Are Welcome to Barbados—Drugs Are Not" sign.

Later, Charlotte's youthful cabdriver continued the story. "The ghost's age," he started. No one could guess what it was, though his parents, or so the reports went, had specific numbers to offer. He seemed to be, alternately, craggy sage or soft-lipped infant, and sometimes both at once. If you slit your thumb open on a knife, he might heal the wound with a wisp of tobacco smoke he blew from his mouth.

Charlotte, already wilting in the day's soggy heat, nodded at this. Around her, the island sped by: coconut palms, bamboo, hibiscus. She couldn't name the other trees: one covered with gaudy orange-red blooms, another dark and feathery, smudged against the sky like a charcoal drawing. There were goats tethered to posts, cement-block homes painted pink, turquoise, or peach but weathered into colorlessness, the flat hue of decay. Everywhere, rusted galvanized tin was pieced together to form crooked backyard fences, and there were bars—really no more than shacks built over counters—with reveal-nothing names like Hideaway or T&P. And churches. Moravian. Church of Christ. United Church of Holy America. Salvation Army.

The road the cab was on narrowed and angled toward the water. The first sight of it was a shock, such a vibrant turquoise, and Charlotte allowed herself a pointless exclamation: "Oh, the water." Yes? There was a pause in which the driver waited to hear more. Charlotte offered the required sentence: "It's beautiful." And it was, though otherwise the landscape—both Third World and all too familiar—disappointed. The taxi passed two strip malls, filled, as malls with sixties and seventies architecture were invariably filled, with unglamorous banks and Laundromats. The street's gutters were rivulets of papery trash, highlighted with the signature yellow of M&M wrappers.

At the stoplight, three bare-chested men wearing crocheted wool caps, puffy as popovers, crossed in the front of the cab. "Hey." One waved to the driver. "Hey." The driver stuck his arm out to grip his friend's hand.

"I telling her about the duppy." The driver gestured with his thumb to Charlotte."

"What duppy?"

"Ah, you don't know mahn?" the driver said, but the light changed color, and he had to wave good-bye without enlightening his friend. It was hard to tell if the exchange was meant to mock her in some obscure way. The pure embarrassment of being white, Charlotte thought, especially here, where it was clear white people were tourists and black people had real lives.

"You don't believe me about the ghost." The cabdriver laughed. "The ghost of a Bridgetown."

Charlotte was about to answer, Sure I do, when he interrupted to say, "But it's a fact."

Charlotte smiled and sank deeper into her seat, hugging her arms, as if that might hide her skin color from the general observer. I'm here on business she wanted to explain. But Charlotte's true purpose hardly mattered; she'd have said anything to convince the driver she wasn't who he took her to be. "For Christ's sake, why do you care?" she could hear Helen say. And she'd be right to ask. This desire to be above reproach was dumb for a thousand reasons. But even Helen—breezy, loud-mouthed Helen—had felt it. In the hospital, at the end, she kept saying to their mother, "But I'm a good girl, aren't I? Aren't I?"

Copyright 2001 by Debra Spark. All rights reserved.