I awoke most mornings to the hum of hymns, in Union Island.
Perched above a seaside cemetery, looking out to the barrier reef on the southern end of the St. Vincent and Grenadines archipelago, is the cream-colored two-story home my grandparents built.
My grandmother in the yard slapped and wrung moisture from the clothes by a concrete water tank.
I remember the cramped kitchen where her ancient hands ladled wangu pois in a large pot of ground corn and peas.
Every lunch was a family reunion.
Grandchildren played in carefully pressed school uniforms and grew fast like the stalks of peas and corn.
Often, after lunch, my grandmother would sit atop the outdoor staircase to catch the sea breeze and tell stories.
This was the same house where I was given my first traditional bush bath and caught my first (and last) chicken, and where villagers heaved and swayed as they sang hymns to mark her passing at the age of ninety-five.
On their return to the island in the 1940s, after several years working in Aruba, my grandparents had built what was considered a modern home, made not from wattle and daub or wood but from concrete, with a cream finish.
It survived its first test, Hurricane Janet, which struck the island in 1955.
It sustained some minor roof damage when Hurricane Ivan arrived in 2004.
But it was among the 90 percent of homes severely damaged or destroyed when Hurricane Beryl tore through Union Island and her neighbors on the morning of 1 July 2024.
The peas and corn that once grew tall and wild were uprooted, the remnants eaten by goats who now roamed freely into the yard.
Bat guano seeped down a wall on the porch.
I arrived days after Beryl.
Beside blown-out windows, I held waterlogged photographs.
I watched family memories dissolving, dripping—in sunlight that came through where the roof once was—into puddles.
It brought to mind that memories had been forced from us before.
When the first of us were carried out of Africa, “all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast,” Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return.1
According to Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History,” we could no longer rely on the “monuments, martyrs, and battles” others use to evidence their past.2
We drew instead from recent memories.
Memories that were now pooling at my feet.
I wondered if the green would return to the blackened hills.
I thought about the old ways and dialects of elders, evacuated, along with young drummers, who might never return.
I was unsure if fishermen, their boats laden with conch and kingfish, would call again and if the perfume of roasting bakes and fried snapper would come back.
Would it fall on me to attend the seaside cemetery and straighten the graves?
Perhaps roofs could be repaired and windows replaced, but what about those meager family heirlooms: the prized necklace, the unblemished china tea set, the school certificate that hung proudly on a living room wall, or the handwritten letter hidden in a drawer for safekeeping?
This felt like another enforced memory lapse.
Gusts of wind left me asking if we would remember who we were.
My connection to Union Island is complex.
I was born in London, raised by a mother who was also born and raised elsewhere.
My grandparents had her during their brief spell in Aruba, but no sooner had they returned to Union than she was whisked off by an uncle to be brought up in Trinidad and Tobago, a relatively modern place with running water, electricity, and trains.
She moved to Britain as a teenager, reuniting with my grandfather who had arrived from Union as part of the Windrush generation.
My grandmother remained in Union with the rest of the family—four boys and two girls.
In those days, it was relatively common for children to be parceled off to relatives or for parents to head to Britain—the so-called mother country—alone, splitting families.
It was how many coped with the economic hardships that arose from the colonial situation.
But soon after I was born, my grandmother spent a year in London looking after me.
Was this compensation for her having lived so many years apart from my mother?
Then again, having arrived in Union as a baby from another island, my grandmother knew what it was like for a little girl to be raised away from hers.
Probably in these early years, before I had even been there, I gained some familiarity with Union: tasting its food, hearing its dialect, and being gently admonished by one of its formidable women.
Later, I took in the people and the landscape.
Visits that began on a turboprop plane swooping between two volcanic peaks onto a small landing strip.
A place where people predicted what family you belonged to by the way you walked.
And where the freedom to play and roam made you think a three-mile slice of paradise was yours.
Besides, I didn’t take to Britishness.
Falling under England’s spell was hard, knowing what its people had done to my ancestors and what they were unremorsefully still doing in the world in the name of Queen and country.
Growing up as a Black boy in 1990s inner-city London was to grow up in a strange and dangerous place.
It wasn’t just cold and grim, the wind seemed to be doing its best to blow right in your face.
Historical circumstances had conspired to send you to jail, the mental institution, or an early death unless you conspired otherwise.
The time parents spent trying to divert their offspring from this fate, setting up Black Saturday schools, housing projects, health societies, bookshops, and police monitors, did not always work.
My cousins in Union Island had a different set of problems and did not have easy access to a top-tier education or the advantages granted by a British passport.
But they appeared to reside in more natural surroundings, raised on the island’s dances, drums, and dialect, and could hear the rustle of crickets at night and cock’s crow at dawn.
They had an ease and a grace that I lacked. And as far as I could tell, Union was the source, the center.
Hours after Beryl passed Union Island, Aunt Ruth boarded a ferry for the mainland island of St Vincent.
Ruth is my late grandmother’s aunt and the eldest resident in the island.
She grew up hearing her parents speak French Creole, a language that has now died out in the island, and she knows the name of a grandfather who arrived from Costa Rica to marry her grandmother, a former slave.
The youngest members of my family are five generations away from Aunt Ruth, the same generational distance between me and her enslaved grandmother.
Ruth’s 104 years number more than half the period since the enslaved were emancipated in 1838.
She is a living archive, a portal to a shuttered past.
Her presence in the island seems all the more vital, given what little has been retained and what has now been lost.
Ruth had meant to turn over her archive to us, but Beryl got there first.
The hurricane sent a yacht swimming through the air, landing it in her bedroom.
What did her archive contain?
Maybe a love letter from King Mitchell, the teenage sweetheart she married after retirement and who died at 100.
Perhaps an old leather Bible handed down from a foreparent.
Or maybe a photograph of her grandfather, Filius Ferary.
We will never know.
Nor do we know if she will ever return.
Ruth’s parents—my great-great-grandparents—are buried in the graveyard across the road from the family home.
Their granite gravestone gives their dates of birth and names, a specific reference point for those who are severed from an African past.
Jonas and Adelaide Ferary arrived in Union at the turn of the twentieth century from the neighboring island of Canouan.
Jonas set up as a shipwright; Adelaide, remembered as “Aunt Noble” for her generosity, a homemaker.
Part of the first generation to be born free after the enslaved were emancipated in 1838, they nonetheless lived in an era of colonial neglect.
After sucking the islands dry like an orange peel during slavery, as the Trinbagonian statesman and scholar Eric Williams once put it, Britain did little to develop them.
Left to fend for themselves, some islanders departed in search of work, moving between the islands or beyond, to the United States, Canada, or Britain, as the region experienced its own Great Migration.
Like their parents, Adelaide and Jonas’s children also left.
Ruth worked in the United States as a nurse for twenty-five years, while some of her siblings ended up in Aruba, the Unite States, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Ruth’s brother, Andrew, my great-grandfather, disappeared into Curaçao without a trace.
The scale of movement over the generations is such that every person in the direct line from Ruth’s formerly enslaved grandmother to me has been born in a different place.
Onto this stage of colonial underdevelopment came the desperate characters that populated my grandmother’s stories: fishermen who were taken by the sea and their weeping widows, cradling children; runaway madmen in torn shorts; fathers who went off to build the Panama Canal and never came home; children sent to grow up with relatives, like my mother and grandmother.
Caribbean people had paid a heavy price for slavery and were now forced to pay another for their freedom.
Family bonds were broken and recast.
But despite my family’s dispersal, a sense remained that Union was home.
A place we had come from and to which we could one day return.
While Beryl was brought to bear on Union last year, her winds had been set in motion long ago, when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492.
Indigenous genocide was followed by the trafficking of Africans to work on lucrative sugar (or cotton, in Union’s case) plantations, heralding the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe.
A scramble for resources and new markets followed in the nineteenth century, with Britain’s imperial hegemony assured by factories and marauding warships, fed by coal.
Today, the cargo ships and fighter jets that guarantee Western hegemony are powered by another fossil fuel—oil—and this has brought us to the brink of a climate catastrophe.
The small island nations of the Caribbean again find themselves on the frontlines, despite contributing just 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Pan-African activists have borrowed the term maangamizi to describe these interconnected catastrophes.
A kiswahili word meaning intentional devastation, maangamizi encompasses the systemic and structural destruction of the environment (ecocide) and peoples (genocide) that began with Columbus’s arrival (though some scholars date this process as starting in Europe with the obliteration of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Iberian Peninsula, which reached its zenith that same year).
These activists have proposed reparations as a way to repair the past and chart a different future.
Following their lead, Caribbean leaders have proposed a ten-point plan for reparatory justice, demanding compensation from European nations through investments in healthcare, cultural institutions, and debt cancellation.3
An updated plan will seek reparations for climate change resulting from the decimation of the natural environment.
However, the struggle for reparatory justice will be long.
Hilary Beckles, the chair of the Caribbean Community’s Reparations Commission, has said it could take up to one hundred years, should it succeed.4
This does little to help those urgently needing a roof or a new home in Union Island.
If we continue on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions the Caribbean will by then be uninhabitable for humans.
A loss-and-damage fund for developing nations fighting climate change, again proposed by Caribbean leaders and accepted by nations at COP27, could come into effect in a matter of years.
But the money pledged stands at less than 1 percent of what is required.
Maangamizi also encapsulates the shredding of Indigenous thought systems and cultures, a process now playing out in Union Island.
But cultures also change and adapt.
The canon of Union Island’s Big Drum tradition typically draws on rhythms and songs that survived the crossing from Africa, in languages such as Akan and Hausa.
The tradition has a wedding dance battle where two women writhe and pirouette, each balancing a wedding cake on her head.
It also includes the Maroon festival, a heady harvest rite that lasts long into the balmy night.
Over the years, new songs have been created to reflect the everyday experience of Unionites.
One is about the goat-tying practices of children, and in another, Aya, a young woman, defends herself from rumors of an illicit romance.5
In yet another, the chantwells cry out for peace and unity.
Since their arrival in the islands, Caribbean people have been forced to adjust to new circumstances, and seen in this light, the aftermath of Beryl is no different.
People might build differently and cultivate the land in new ways and invent songs reflecting these practices.
New people may bring fresh ideas and vigor.
Islanders may develop a closer relationship with the land, air, and sea.
Beryl could spark a renewed political consciousness.
The equalizing effects of such a catastrophe could bring the community together, closer to the peace and unity of which they sing.
For better or for worse, Union will be different after Beryl.
A new home.
Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, focusing on the literary activism and global solidarities that coalesced around the Grenadian revolution. As a journalist, he has reported from a dozen countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, and is the author of Becoming Kwame Ture (Chimurenga, 2020), about Stokely Carmichael’s time in Africa. His work has appeared in the Guardian, Aljazeera, and the Daily Telegraph, among others.
[1] Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012), 5.
[2] “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? // Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, // in that grey vault. The sea. The sea // has locked them up.” Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History,” in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 137.
[3] See CARICOM Reparations Commission, “CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice,” CARICOM Caribbean Community, https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/.
[4] See Shelly-Ann Inniss, “Sir Hilary Beckles: ‘I’m Aware of How Fragile the Caribbean Is,’” Caribbean Beat, no. 157 (May–June 2019), https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-157/sir-hilary-beckles-im-aware-of-how-fragile-the-caribbean-is-own-words.
[5] See “Union Island—Imani Culture Club: You Tell a Lie,” 22 April 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6d5GBsvCSU (accessed 6 April 2025).