An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude by Ann Vanderhoof

Author:Ann Vanderhoof [Vanderhoof, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Biography, Non-Fiction, Travel
ISBN: 0767914279
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2003-12-09T13:00:00+00:00

Mr. Butters,

the Mysterious

Breadfruit, and

Monday Night Mas

No doubt our productivity would have been affected. . . . Probably, this week may have seen a great number of people taking the remaining work days to recover after consuming too much alcohol, or being fatigued from the constant long sleepless hours over the days of festivity.

EDITORIAL ENTITLED “NOW THE CARNIVAL OVER,” GRENADA

INFORMER: THE FEARLESS WEEKLY THAT TELLS IT AS IT IS,

WEEK ENDING FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1998

The beach on the mainland side of the Hog Island anchorage—a tiny patch of sand by two derelict, half-submerged Cuban gunboats, relics from the 1983 invasion—is diagonally across from the Hog Island beach and a minuscule fraction of its size. If you squint away the rusted hulks as you approach, the scene is what winter-weary tourists dream they’ll get when they book their Caribbean holiday: a little beach all their own with soft white sand, swaying palm trees, and brochure-blue water under a flawless sky.

We’d seen cruisers dinghying into shore there only to return an hour later with arms full of watermelon and bags protruding with eggplant and squash. To us, the new kids on the block, it was a mystery, there being no sign whatsoever of habitation near that beach; certainly no market or store. But soon, through the cruisers’ grapevine, we learn of Mr. Butters.

“Pull up your dinghy on the sand and follow the path from there,” Terry and Nancy tell me. We had got to know them in George Town, and their sailboat, La Esmeralda, had arrived at Hog Island about a week before Receta. “The path will lead you right to his shack.”

Mr. Butters used to make rounds of the anchorages on this stretch of Grenada’s coast by boat, they had been told, selling his fruit and vegetables. But no more: Now, if you want to buy his produce, you have to go to him. Mr. Butters (as everyone respectfully calls him) has been squatting on the hillside behind the beach for the last seventeen years and cultivating the soil—by hand, without benefit of tractor, rototiller, or harvester.

“Did they say turn right or left?” Steve says as we drag Snack up onto the beach. Expecting it to be obvious, I hadn’t bothered to ask. Once we leave the sand, we’re at the edge of an expanse of more-or-less cultivated fields, hidden from the anchorage by a stand of white cedars and Indian almond trees and stretching a hundred yards in each direction. What’s lacking is a sign that says “Produce stand this way.” Cows moo unseen somewhere on the hillside in front of us. “Rare steak,” says Steve longingly. (He’s learned the hard way that the words “chewable” and “steak” don’t go together here.) We wander right; nothing. We wander left; nothing. We wander right again, by this time wishing we’d brought a water bottle, and finally spot an overgrown, sort-of track snaking through spiky sugar cane.

Five minutes along, a donkey tied to a tree flips his lips at us with disinterest. Beyond him stands a rickety wooden shack.

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