Sweet Paradise by Gene Desrochers (most read books in the world of all time .txt) 📕

imported. Thus, more slaves were brought to the Caribbean to replenish the voracious appetite of sugar mills, which devoured the workers when the foreman wasn’t fast enough to chop off a slave’s arm before his entire body was sucked into the mill.

Some of the information shocked me, as I had never really studied my African maternal grandmother’s roots or considered that the famed slavery in the southern United States was only a minor part of a much larger system. Francine had highlighted a passage.

Slavery was about economics. Slaves were chattel, as much property as the conveyor belt on an assembly line or the cotton gin. In ending slavery, property was annexed from people who had paid good money for what they owned and, in many cases for slave-owners who did not own the means of production, their sole source of income was in leasing out their slaves to perform tasks for others in the community. Abolition was a taking without compensation, as surely as taking someone’s home or land. In some instances, a small compensation was given to the slave owners, but not nearly enough in most owners’ opinions. Abolition bankrupted many slave-holders.

In the next paragraph, a single sentence was not only highlighted, but underlined in black ink and an asterisk had been penned in the margin beside it: If the slave owners felt cheated, imagine how the slaves felt.

After finishing the eleven-page article, I gazed at downtown Charlotte Amalie. A smattering of old, wooden homes dotted the flats at the bottom of the hill. They stretched away. Above it all, slightly to my right, sat Government House. A white, colonial structure that housed the sitting governor, Abioseh “Abbey” James. The intricate balconies and majestic placement jumped out from the rabble of galvanized roofs and utilitarian architecture.

I flipped the stapled pages to a photograph of a plantation home in Cuba in all its aristocratic glory. Holding up the photo, I compared the real colonial structure on the hill in front of me to the picture. Although I didn’t know the history of Government House, I suspected it was a plantation owner’s dream: top of the hill, looking down on all the peons.

An article on slavery. I kept coming back to one question: why? Why would Francine Bacon give a rat’s ass about slavery at this point? Junior and Harold never mentioned her interest. Either they were holding out or she didn’t share her hobby with them. Did she share it with Kendal? And what about the asterisked sentence?

Marge was into computers. When you considered it, computers and a nearly mute person fit together nicely. She could communicate with her fingers, like sign language. In an effort to capture the millennial market, three months earlier, I had suggested Lucy go ahead and install wi-fi in the building. In true Virgin Islands fashion, the install had sputtered at the starting line, needing a replacement router twice before the service finally worked. After a mere nine weeks, they printed new flyers saying they had “free wi-fi.” Marge updated the website, and I witnessed two couples under twenty-five roaming around the grounds a week later. One of them even had hacker-hair: purple tips on green roots.

I ran a quick search on my iPad for Bacon Sugar and Rum. Sure enough, in both St. Thomas and more extensively in St. Croix and Puerto Rico, they had employed slave labor before it was outlawed in the mid-1800s.

Did anyone still grow sugar cane? I thought sugar cane had been done in by beet sugar in the nineteenth century. What were they producing rum and sugar from now in the Bacon business? Again, the internet answered quickly and easily. Cane sugar was all the rage and the finest rum still fermented from Caribbean cane, at least that’s the notion pushed by the marketing.

Corn syrup and other sweeteners were on the decline as once again, good old cane sugar had weathered the economic hurricanes and roared back in the last twenty years. Out in California places advertised Mexican Coca-Cola because it was made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

My phone rang.

“I TOLD THEM. I TOLD ‘em,” Junior said dejectedly. “If we’d started looking sooner.”

“We don’t know that it’s her. Not yet,” I said.

Junior let his head loll to the right until he gazed drunkenly at Harold from the waiting room chair. Despite his dejection, his speech came in clear, certain tones.

“It’s her.”

“Will you two shut up!” Herbie growled. “How would our mother have washed up on Hassel Island? It’s just some half-eaten body.”

A technician came out of the hospital morgue, cleared her throat, then said, “This way, please. Are all of you family?”

“No,” said Herbie pointing at me. “He’s not coming in. He’s not a member of this family.”

Junior started to protest. I waved him off, settling into the waiting room chair. The white walls and chilly air made me shudder. When no one returned for over ten minutes I knew they had located Francine Bacon.

Farther down the sterile hallway a fat white guy sprawled in a chair, thumbing through a newspaper. He had a beard, but then again so did every hipster who could grow facial hair in the last five years. I trotted out to the parking lot, locating a blue Toyota Rav-4 five minutes later. After jotting down the license plate number, I returned to the waiting room. Fat guy gone.

My knee throbbed, but I couldn’t stop pacing. Who was that guy? I was itching for a beer, but I didn’t want to leave before they came out.

Twenty-five minutes later, Junior and Harold lumbered out, eyes red, cheeks flushed. Junior’s pale face had blotches matching his sunburned arms. Neither man seemed much in the mood for talking. Harold, Junior and I drove straight to a boat slip. A man in khaki shorts and a baby blue tee stood next to a white fishing boat with the moniker “High Hopes, St. Thomas, USVI” stenciled across the rear end above two large motors.

“Where