The Sea Captain's Wife by Martha Hodes

Author:Martha Hodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

To conjure Grand Cayman Island when Eunice lived there, depart George Town, where the airplanes land and the cruise ships dock, where boutiques and dive shops crowd the capital’s small streets, and hotels and condominiums line the famous Seven Mile Beach. On the other side of the island, in the village of East End, a large sand cemetery was once the site of the three-gabled Presbyterian church where the Connolly family worshiped, and gravestones still bear their name. Traveling east, you come to a plot of private seaside land, adjacent to a local bar, that may be the site where Smiley built a house for his new bride; in their day, the property extended across the present-day road, all the way back to the cliffs. Or Eunice and Smiley may have lived a bit farther east still, on land that sits between the Seventh-Day Adventist church and what is now a playing field. Past the public library comes a smaller sand cemetery, the resting place of Thomas Dighton Conolly, Smiley’s half brother (all but Smiley spelled the name with one n in those days), whom Eunice called Brother Dighton.

Eunice’s entire world transformed when she crossed boundaries of race and nation to live in a settlement of freed slaves on an island in the remote western Caribbean. On Eunice’s Grand Cayman, there was no graveyard by Brother Dighton’s house, and no roads, for the land lay unbroken from beach to interior, crossed only by footpaths or bridle tracks. With her husband and children, Eunice traversed these paths, prayed in the church that stood on the sand, sailed on the bay in the evenings, and gazed daily upon the sea. To find a view that she took in, look past East End’s convenience store, gas station, and lighthouse (built only in the twentieth century), toward any unobstructed vista of the crystalline jade and turquoise waters, next to a band of fine white sand or the rugged ironshore, that jagged, blackened rock that rings the Cayman coastline.

In the Caribbean, Eunice’s marriage to Smiley Connolly meant something quite different from what it had in the eyes of hostile white New Englanders who thought of Eunice as no better than an Irish immigrant or a black woman. For one thing, Smiley was building Eunice a home on land that he owned. Once and for all, Eunice would “go to housekeeping,” as she used to say, and live as mistress of her own domestic sphere. For another, Eunice no longer needed to hide the love she shared with her new husband. All this meant that Eunice’s residence in Cayman—at least at first—marked an interval of years in which she experienced a happiness made sweeter by the hardships that had come before. True, these novel comforts, both material and emotional, came tempered by the pain of separation and unfamiliarity, but women in the nineteenth century routinely parted company with loved ones in order to follow their husbands, just as Eunice herself had done a decade earlier. In

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