sultry, troublesome morning, and their meanings invert. Over and over, louder and louder, the laborers sang. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe, do nigger don’t you lick nobody, don’t lick nobody . . .
A mass of humanity like that, you could hear them and smell them and feel them before you saw them. The reek of perspiration, the buzz of nervous energy. The trace of fresh pine. Nassau Street was motionless. So was George Street, stretching up to pink Government House on its hill. Not until I reached the corner of Parliament Street, not until the plaza opened up before me, the palm trees and the white-columned pink facades that constituted the seat of Bahamas government, did I discover the crowd, the hundreds of black men, a few women too, maybe a thousand or maybe even more. I braked the bicycle and touched my toe to the pavement. It was just past nine o’clock, according to the clock on the tower, and the chanting had died away into that thing called expectant silence, as if the men—having marched into the very heart of Conchie Joe’s domain—now prepared themselves to listen to somebody. That was nice. Somebody who? Who the devil was in charge around here, while the Duke of Windsor was away? The colonial secretary, maybe? The crowd, rustling and grumbling, had turned toward a square pink building on the corner of Bank Lane, where some white men seemed to be standing on the steps, sweating in their suits.
From where I balanced on my bicycle, looking up Parliament Street from the harbor walk, I couldn’t tell what anybody was saying. I thought one of the white men was speaking—if I strained, I could hear a high, indignant voice—but the words got lost among the perspiring bodies and the pink walls and the heavy air.
My hair stuck to my temples. The sun burned my neck, stuck the dress to my back. I dismounted the bicycle and walked it forward, up Parliament Street, to where the stragglers milled about, trying to find a better vantage. One of them saw me and shook his head. He called out—and his voice surprised me, it was so gentle—“You gwine home, miss. Ain’t you business here. Gwine home.”
Of course I didn’t obey him. I edged instead around the fringe of the crowd, craning for some view, some channel of clear sound to reach me. Whoever this fellow was, whatever he was saying, the crowd didn’t like it. A murmuring rumbled the atmosphere, a discontent, a shifting of hot, perspiring bodies and impatient skin. Couple more shouts, somebody calling out the first notes of that chant, Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe, do nigger don’t you lick—then SMASH. Holy God. An explosion of broken glass, too sudden and too cataclysmic even to say which direction it had come from.
I flinched and ducked, and the next instant craned my neck to see what the devil, where the devil, and the square trembled with shouts and footsteps, everybody turning at once, pelting down Bay Street, where the shops and offices of Conchie Joe lined the way, all hell broken loose and tumbling free, armed with clubs cut from the pines of Burma Road.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a riot before, up close. It’s not so much a sight or a sound as a feeling, a mayhem. A kaleidoscope, too many sensations all crammed into your brain at once, so you can’t remember what happened when. I recall stumbling back from the stampede, someone grabbing my arm and dragging me away, and when I looked up I saw the man who had spoken to me before. His eyes were wide and white-rimmed, his skin blacker than I remembered it. He shoved the handlebars of the bicycle toward me and yelled, Gwine, I said! Gwine outta here, before you gets kilt!
“What did he say?” I demanded. “What was he saying up there?”
Gwine outta here, crazy lady! He pushed my backside. Go, get!
“But what—”
And he was gone, just like that, threw himself right into the pell-mell and disappeared. I stood shaking under the portico where he left me, scared to death, and yet underneath all that fear lay something more like excitement. Some charge that drew me forth, step by step, from underneath the portico to get a better vantage, to watch this extraordinary thing, this riot, this tumult of angry men, these placid Bahamians—Oh, they’d never revolt here, they know their place, the coloreds here—exploding