Close your eyes.
Now imagine islands so enchanting that if you do believe in Creation, you must know that God took His time crafting them.
Don’t open them just yet.
Continue to dream with me, because given the current state of affairs we can all use an escape to a place where racism, consumerism and pollution hasn’t yet killed the human spirit.
Enter the Virgin Islands.
I wrote those words two years ago when comparing our beloved islands to Wakanda – as the only place under the US flag where a majority Black constituency rules culturally, politically and economically. In other words, those who look like me cut the checks and make the laws in our cosmopolitan society void of civil unrest.
Hence, I felt Hollywood did our ancestors an injustice by creating the fantasy of the futuristic fictional kingdom depicted in the film “Black Panther” – and disregarding the actual place.
This endearing dream was interrupted back in August when I found my mother Anita Bailey lying on the ground in her garden, adjacent to her favorite mango tree, a stone’s throw away from the soursop tree whose leaves she picks to make tea.
On that unforgettable day she found herself drawn to the garden to calm her nerves as hurricane Ernesto had just passed the night before, leaving us void of electricity amid months of ongoing power outages that evoked horrific nostalgia of hurricanes Irma and Maria.
“Mommy you need to go relax…the sun is too hot out here,” I told her. “Son, you know I can’t right now,” she fired back.
Drawn to cultivate the land like many Caribbean elders from her generation, at 81 my mother found respite from the rotating outages and Ernesto’s wrath by tending to the same fruit trees I and her propped up after Irmaria knocked them down in 2017 – nature’s monument to our resilience.
So when I saw her lying there being held up by my older brother I figured she had simply stumbled, but soon realized her condition told on the worst.
The entire left side of her body seemed paralyzed and her ever-present smile was now distorted.
“I think she’s having a stroke,” my brother sighed. “I gon call deh ambulance,” I affirmed.
“For what?! I don need no ambulance, just help me up,” my mother barked, her speech slurred.
Unable to stand or lift her eyelids, she still embodied the defiance that brought her to the Virgin Islands – first St. Croix and finally St. Thomas – in search of a better life from her impoverished Anguilla upbringing. She would eventually become one of the nursing supervisors at our local hospital. My father Joseph Bailey made a similar journey from Trinidad as a pastor who would go on to produce his own top rated radio show “The Sky Pilots” on WSTA and establish several churches.
He died on September 3, 2018 due to complications from Alzheimer’s exacerbated by the stress caused from Irmaria.
In the aftermath of those storms I told the world I wasn’t ready for my mother’s demise, writing in The New York Times:
My mother‘s life, which began in dire poverty on Anguilla, shouldn’t end amid rubble caused by a hurricane.
With my phone turned off and unable to charge I ran down the road in search of someone in the neighborhood with a working phone. When I finally found a gracious neighbor and called for an ambulance my soul began to scream in utter dread of finding my mother deceased upon my return.
She was still alive.
When the ambulance arrived my brother and I strapped her in the chair, carried her up the slope of our hillside estate and meandered through her fruit trees guided by the EMTs.
I never knew pain could tear at my chest, rip through my inner being and make it hard to breathe as it did during the ambulance ride to the ER where my relatives were already crowded inside.
Finally.
My moment of relief was short-lived as the ER doctor informed me and my sister that it’s best our mother be air lifted to a healthcare facility in Miami as soon as possible as our local hospital lacked the resources and medical specialists in case she has complications.
“So Doc you’re saying she can die in here?”, I asked him.
He answered with a sobering glare.
This shouldn’t happen in Wakanda.
We took off to Miami on the air ambulance the next morning. I would spend the next several weeks sleeping at my mother’s bed side in Miami’s Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center, one of the nation’s elite luxury rehab centers.
During one of those nights my mother grabbed my hand and told me:
“Pete if this happened to someone without the means or connections they would have died. Our people deserve better. Do something about it.”
After the initial nightmare of her stroke and now through these trying moments during her ongoing recovery as she’s walking again, I’m both thankful and inspired by the lessons being forced upon me by her reinvention.
I also never forgot what she told me.
It’s why I’ve launched Yellow Cedar with fellow University of Delaware alum Jed JohnHope to amplify the issues facing our territory and hold our leaders accountable for not addressing them. We’ve decided to act upon the debates we had as undergraduates on how to make our islands better and invite you to do the same.
In our flagship docu-series Upfront we go one-on-one with Governor Albert Bryan Jr. on his plans to fix WAPA, our broken healthcare system, the territory’s crippling cost of living and what drives him beyond politics. In the provocative sit-down Bryan also refers to our islands as Wakanda – not surprisingly since being the only US Head of State to appoint the Attorney General essentially makes him King.
On the Yellow Cedar pages you’ll also find stories of otherworldly resilience and triumph like current “Keys to the City” recipient Bryan “Benny Demus” Boulai’s rise to music royalty, in depth forward-thinking analysis as well as multi-media content curated by emerging local creatives.
We’ve always known our story to be inspiring, because being legendary and unassuming is the VI way and now it’s time the world knows it. Yes, I still believe us to be the closest place on Earth to that fictional kingdom, but ours isn’t defined by skin color. No, let’s not take on that US mainland burden, but instead choose character as the ultimate judge in our Wakanda.
It’s because we at Yellow Cedar don’t plan to ever stop dreaming of what the Virgin Islands can be and neither should you.
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