Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: The Sermon on the Bow*

The African Atlantic Church of Bone and Ghost

14° 45′ 15.2″ N 32° 55′ 16.8″ W

‘Stuck in the Middle with You’

“Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight.

I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right.

I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair.

And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

Here I am stuck in the middle with you.”

— Stealers Wheel

On March 1st, 2022, Isaiah found himself in the closest thing you could get to an upscale dive bar on the southwestern side of the 5-mile-wide by 10-mile-long island of Barbados. If he had bothered to look up at the sign before he entered, he would have known the name of the establishment was “The Careenage Rum Stop!”

To Isaiah, it was just another bar, on another Caribbean island, it could just as easily been in another hotel lobby, with populated with drunks sitting on thier barstools spinning toward oblivion.

There he was, lost again in the middle of the vortex of his journey, having drifted too close to the great maws of the forever spiraling gyre.

An aged hand reached out and gently touched the cover of a deeply tanned leather-bound novel—the first he had ever written, quite by accident, of course.

As he opened the book and began to read, he found a novel cobbled together from a collection of notes written for his masters/doctorate, letters he had typed on his crimson 1969 Olivetti Valentino vintage typewriter while at sea, along with those sent to him during his voyage from Galveston to Ghana. In those days, most of his correspondence was directed to his parents, Helena and Kennedy Jones, while others were written to his future wife, Aeon Gabriella Zavala, and one was mailed to his best friend and legal counsel Penelope Stockard Bedowitz.

The book included reproductions of the NOAA maps his family had kept, marking his daily progress and recording the coordinates he sent each evening and each morning in his daily text messages. It featured reproductions of the pen and ink, colored pencil and watercolor drawings he had made of the people he met in port cities around the world: sea birds, dolphins, orcas, cloud formations over the sea, and the ports, towns, and villages he visited. His boat—a Monarch Ti-44 ft Solent-rigged sloop, the SS Exodus—was one of a handful of sailboats with a marine-grade titanium hull.

There were even reproductions of the sketches of his Dogo Argentina, Starbuck, napping on the bowsprit. He loved capturing these moments through quick plein air paintings and pen-and-ink drawings whenever he had the time. Had it really been one hundred years—an entire century—since he set sail from the port of Galveston after spending that last night with Aeon? He had initially planned to leave on New Year’s Day, but Aeon had other plans.

So much had happened in the last few months since he first cast off and set sail from the port of Galveston in January: the out-of-control celebration of the shakedown run with Beatrix and Mara when he arrived in Key West; the meeting with the Albino, Dead Eye Polly after returning his gunshot wounded lost soldier to him in Cuba; the night with Naomi; waking up on a different island on a different beachside hotel room, or tin shack on a jungle hillside with open sewage running parallel to a road that was little more than the compacted earth from centuries of human foot traffic.

Even in the palm tree shaded blockhouse ghettos of the many islands, he found his people living their humble lives quietly on the tiny tropical islands of the Caribbean Commonwealth. When he awoke in the mornings in the arms of beautiful strangers, he noticed as he made his way back to the harbor the sameness of our black lives, on the islands were just the same as back home or any village in Africa always he saw the ebon hued old women heads wrapped in brightly colored scarves sitting on overturned plastic crates, braiding their grandchildren’s hair.

Their burnt umber-colored skin, wrinkled as tree bark with age as they sat on the stoops just outside their neon-colored corrugated steel shacks. They all sat with their muscular thighs spread wide beneath the voluminous fabrics of their long cotton skirts, while a skinny little brown boy or girl sat on the ground in front of their granny, getting their hair twisted, braided, plaited, and their scalps oiled. The leftover Vaseline on her hands was rubbed onto their faces and bodies to keep the child’s deep bronzed skin from becoming ashy.

The old women kept tea kettles nearby on tiny electric hot plates powered by the same pirated electric line that illuminated the metal hut’s, block and chattel houses single light bulb. The old women boiled water for coffee, and he joined the elder women whose daughters and granddaughters’ arms he had awakened in on a cot in the back corner of their tiny home.

“Mamma Torres smiled as Isaiah stepped out into the morning, squinting in the bright light as the old woman insisted he sit down with her just outside of the corrugated metal hut that she and her family called home. The old Bajan woman stopped him as he exited the shack that morning.

“Sit daw, leh muh do something wid yuh head, boy.” She would make a clicking sound three times with her tongue popping off of the roof of her mouth as a sign of disapproval, a hold over like the Twi words in their Pidgeon English he recognized. He sat down, as the honored elder commanded. Being an introvert he hated most human contact; but he loved having his hair braided; it comforted him and made him feel safe, less alone, and less homesick.

Momma Torres sent the grand kids in to retrieve her barstool to sit on as she styled his hair. She used a bar of ivory soap and an ancient straight razor to trim his edges before she set about braiding his hair in neat cornrows.

“Yuh in a tall drink on water boy it Gine do got do sit pun me high seat do sih de top on yuh head while yuh sit pun de ground here.” she laughed and mussed his hair then served him his drink in her best dish a chipped porcelain bone China cup an old plantation relic filled with thick black coffee, condensed milk, and lots of sugar, along with a slice of buttered toast with honey squeezed from a plastic bear as she took his braids down, combed out his hair, oiled his scalp, and then re-braided his hair.

The old arokin (griot of the Yoruba) laughed when she saw him sneak Starbuck a bite of his breakfast as she talked about the life she had lived on the tiny island, working in the same café where he had met her granddaughter when she was her age. He left one of the sketches he drew of her braiding the grandchildren’s hair, along with a few hundred-dollar bills tucked neatly beneath the empty, chipped teacup before he left to find the forgotten plantation houses she told him about in her stories.

It was only a mile to the north, so he walked with Starbuck down the long black tar road to the main paved street that led to the 300-year-old buildings covered with the usual white-painted stone. The island of Barbados like the rest of the Caribbean islands was not as busy this year because of the covid pandemic. They took no chances on the tiny island and anyone not vaccinated was turned away.

The buildings were now in ruins nearly complexly over grown with vegetation of the last 2 centuries covering it up. Today, it was barely visible even when you knew where to look. There were only a few of the old stone seventeenth century Georgian architecture buildings left standing, the majority of the old plantations land that had been fields of sugar cane was now returning to the tropical jungle. The rest of the houses on the island were the usual wood-framed, ornately steepled portable chattel houses like Mackenzie’s mother’s lime green and Chinese white striped home on the northern tip of the island.

Isaiah had met Momma Torres granddaughter, Makenzie Fitzgerald, at the seaside café where she worked as a cook, waitress, cashier, bartender, and occasionally even the bouncer. Makenzie was 23, dark-skinned, and had a perfect natural afro just like her grandmother’s. The 5-foot-4-inch slender cocoa-colored woman let Isaiah hide in a cubby in the back of her cantina, where he could still see the patrons from his chair and tiny table for two. There he sat, clandestinely drawing and painting the people while he and Starbuck hid in the corner, nursing their drinks, he his long-neck amber bottles of Banks, the local beer, and the Starbuck’s bowl of water. Isaiah had been drunk every night since he left Cuba in mid-January; it was now March.

It hadn’t registered to him that he was changing, how he had gone from being the straight edge nerd terrified of even having too much to drink, to taking whatever drug anyone handed him at a club or party without giving it a second thought.

Izzy was all smiles as he walked into the tavern after exploring the island all afternoon. He was happy to see Mackenzie was at work; he was looking forward to sketching her again. As soon as she saw him, she rushed to him, then slapped his face as hard as she could before she spit in his face, as she screamed a stream of indecipherable curses at him. Her face contorted with anger and shame as she cried,

“I’ma no cock-rat!” Mackenzie screamed. She threw the hundred-dollar bills he had left with Mamma Torres at him.

He stood there shocked his face stinging the taste metallic taste of blood pooling in his mouth motionless for a moment before he could speak.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t think of you like that,” he stammered. “I just left the cash for her to buy the kids some lunch or something before I took off to go explore the old plantation ruins she talked about. It had nothing to do with us. I like you, because I like you. he said as he held her face tenderly in his hands, and because you make me laugh, I think your afro is going to grow taller than you one day,” he grinned.

Mackenzie looked up at him, her eyes red from crying. She shook her head slowly as she reached out and wiped the spittle from his cheek with a red-and-white striped dishtowel she kept tucked into the waist of her bright red apron, to wipe the bar and tabletops.

“I never foop wid one on yuh sailors before. She sobbed. II’m not a “

I don’t serve anything do de customers but food an drink. But because we in nah rich, nuff on men dat come in here got ben propositioning muh since i was too young do even bleed! Dem got Nuh shame.” Mackenzie sighed.

“Forgive muh, I don’t know wuh I was thinking. I know yuh in nah like dat, but I just got so mad wen I woke up ah an Mamma Torres shawed muh dat money. Is made muh feel like yuh just used muh like dat. I in know wuh I thought. I just lost it.”

“I’m really sorry.” Izzy grinned as he picked up the wadded-up hundred-dollar bills from the floor near his feet, where she hurled them. He handed them back to her, grinning. “Hey, let me make it up to you. How about you come over for dinner tonight, and let me cook for you.”

He grinned, and she reached out and hugged him.

“I’m en idiot, okay? but yuh should got known better dan do do such a ting. Wuh do yuh think I would think?” She asked.

“I didn’t think.” he confessed.

They both laughed. She kissed him.

“I duh sih yuh after work.” She looked up at his face. “you know, sometimes I think yuh like do just do things do mess wid muh. I forget yuh in autistic most on de time. Intellectually, yuh may bi son sort on a prodigy,” she grinned, “but emotionally, yuh in a fucking moron.”

“I know that too,” he concurred. “I do love the way you cuss,” he drawled. “It gets me excited; I don’t know why, but it does. I pinch you on the ass when ever I walk by just to hear a bit of it,” he grinned.

“Ya cheeky bastard,” she laughed as she hugged him and pinched him on his rear end.

He and Starbuck spent the rest of the afternoon belly-up to the bar with a dozen other barfly’s the islands regulars drinking until it was time to close up. He didn’t feel out of control. He got up everyday before sunrise, walked the dog, and worked every day on his dissertation. He explored the sites of former plantations, visited the oldest African graves on the island where the old woman said they would be, unmarked behind the remnants of an foundations and remaining walls of the abandoned sugarcane factory and abandoned slave quarters. Using notes from centuries-old captain’s logs to find slave ship ports of call where the old slave markets had once been the main feature of the location.

He found peoples related to the various indigenous tribes shipped to the islands as slaves by the Spaniards, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. He made notes on how the languages of each island evolved differently over the centuries—the great genetic variety of the peoples from dark to light skin, from skinny to broad noses, thin to full lips, straight to kinky hair—all on islands only a few miles long in many cases.

The isolation of the islands, even when only a few miles apart, was enough to allow radically different variations of peoples’ languages and cultures to evolve. Yet, the one thing they all had in common was that they were almost all descendants of someone brought to the islands in chains after being kidnapped in their own land. He wrote his log entries and drew the areas of interest for his research on this subject.

But he was also drawing a lot of different people, half-nude and fully naked, in flagrante delicto. It was all there in his journals, as well as his sketchbooks, which began to fill with more sketches in cantinas and taverns. Pictures of hotel rooms littered with empty wine bottles rum and Coke cans, bent with punctures scorched after being used to smoke dope of every kind. Clothes were strewn about carelessly while sleeping naked bodies snored softly like kittens in the morning light.

That morning, he woke up between the skinny blonde boy whose suite it was, Sascha, and Mackenzie, who slept with her head resting on his belly. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his cock, the morning erection resting lightly beneath her lips while Sascha played with his cornrows—gently nibbling on his right earlobe before he leaned over Izzy’s face to kiss him, then wrinkled his nose.

“You have puppy breath this morning.” He reached over to the end table and handed Isaiah a glass half-filled with rum punch. Isaiah took a drink, then looked around the room, yawning as he regained consciousness. It was almost sunrise. Sascha left and returned a moment later with a new toothbrush in a plastic cup and a bottle of water. He brushed his teeth, then grabbed the tall skinny platinum blonde boy from behind.

Makenzie tossed a pillow at the two from her futon in the suite’s corner.

“Watch yuh rashole!” she shouted. “Shut ah, I got de worst hangover, yuh noisy cunts.”

“We didn’t say anything,” Sascha said as he threw the pillow back at the curly-haired brown-eyed girl. Starbuck looked up from her spot near the daybed behind Makenzie, then lay back down, seeing no one was leaving yet.

“You leaving so soon?” Sascha asked.

Isaiah smiled. “After breakfast, I have a lot of work to do before I take off this afternoon at high tide, so while you call room service, I am going to walk Starbuck.”

Sascha kissed him again before he headed back into the master bedroom filled with nude girls and boys from the last party to retrieve his phone. Izzy stood naked, still stretching and yawning, his dark black skin in high contrast to the ivory drapes he stood in front of, covering the bay window. Standing there naked, illuminated by the shaft of incandescent light streaming in from the kitchen, he felt clear-headed; for the first time in months, he didn’t have to drag himself out of bed still half drunk and drugged out. He had a lot of work to do before he set sail. He had just begun to look around the room searching for his clothes when a bundle of clothing came flying at his head out of the shadows. It was Makenzie, laughing after tossing his clothes and shoes to him.

“A heads up would be nice,” he looked at the silhouette of the girl laying on the bed in the dark and smiled. He didn’t have to see her impish face to know she was smiling. He hurriedly dressed and walked over to where Makenzie lay nude on her belly, slapping her perfectly shaped fat brown ass before he stepped out of the bungalow’s front door onto the beach. She cursed at him in her Bajan-accented Creole English; he adored the way they used the same words, but they had completely different meanings here. They even still had a few words of Twi.

This was one of the strange things about the islands: the western foreigners owned all of the beachfront and seaside property since the colonial sugar cane plantation times, while the locals were forced to live in the interior, with few, if any, services or amenities you take for granted in the States or even at the hotels here.

Yesterday, over a breakfast of French toast, thick slices of canned honey baked ham, and poached eggs, Makenzie confessed that she had never had a hot shower or hot running water in her life before the one she took on his ship. This, he later learned, was not unusual for someone growing up poor on tropical islands. They used hand pumped wells to fill buckets to get their water most of the time. You were lucky if you had running water at all, let alone hot running water.

They reminded him of his mother’s family in Kentucky when they visited his maternal great-grandmother for Christmas when he was seven. They were the descendants of Asa Harmon McCoy, living in the hills and having wells on their property. They had their own generators for power, but his other cousins from further up in the hills, who were there, lived in trailers with busted toilets, so they used a porta-potty they stole from a construction site.

They were all nice to him; most had the same green eyes as Isaiah and his mother. Before he left to return to Dallas, his cousins confessed that Isaiah and his father, Kennedy, were the first black people they had ever seen in real life.

He walked along the beach as the dog trotted ahead, the sun still a few minutes away from rising and warming the eastern edge of the sky. He sat down in the sand, waiting for the sky to do something amazing. It never disappointed. Sascha reminded him of Aeon; he was a social butterfly, exceptionally good at reading people.

He took one look at Izzy at the hotel bar last night, turned his schtick off, put his phone away, and took him to his bungalow down the beach. His entourage followed along behind them, only quieting down after he shushed them and gave them the evil eye. They knew who Isaiah was on sight, but to Sacha it was obvious he was burning out and needed to take the night off.

Isaiah was lost so deep in his own thoughts as they approached him sitting at the bar drinking bourbon neat. Sascha could see that he was about to spiral into a dark place. Whatever was going on in his head didn’t matter; he just saw someone in trouble who needed help, not someone to keep drinking and partying with until he imploded.

Sascha put his hand on Isaiah’s wrist gently as he tried to take another drink.

“I have what you need at my place. Come.”

Isaiah got up as if he were a zombie and walked out of the bar with the group of strangers.

His place was nice, despite the mess—the remnants of last night or this afternoon’s party still littered the room. His host used the app on his iPhone to order pizza. When he returned from the kitchen, he handed Izzy a bottle of berry smoothie.

“Thank you. Isaiah said dejected as he sat half lotus staring at the floor. You know, I been sitting here thinking. I’ve been drunk for three months now. I’m fucking this up.” His eyes filled with tears. Sascha sat on the rug beside him and put his arm around him.

“You are just walking through the valley of the shadow of darkness. I’ve been there before; it’s easy to lose your way.” Sascha grinned. “But nah, if you were fucking this up, you would not be here right now thinking you are fucking this up. That is just how it works, man. Ya see, it is just like being crazy. If you are actually crazy, you never think you are crazy. But the real brain buster is that if you think you might be crazy, then you are perfectly sane.” Izzy looked into the blue eyes of the stranger.

“Who are you?”

“I am Sascha. You are a guest in my home; you are amongst friends now. You are going to be fine. Food is on the way, and I sent everyone who was awake home. Now, get undressed; I am going to give you a bath. I have these amazing bath salts that will help while you soak in the bubbles. I promise, you will feel reborn afterward; it is almost magical. Come, phew, he grinned, I swear you are sweating bourbon out of every pore of your body. I could smell the reek of the booze from across the bar.”

The tub was huge, wide, and curved up at the ends. The polished brass faucets were in the center rather than the end. It looked as if it were a great bird carved out of Thalo-green marble with golden veins. Sascha undressed him as he stood, staring at the tub filled with bubbles. The smell was like a garden in the spring, with the soft scent of fresh flowers, sunlight, and the cool shade of an oak tree.

“Whoa, climb in, relax, listen to some music while we wait for our food.” He came back from the medicine cabinet with a flat black zippered leather case. “Now I need you to relax,” he said as he unzipped the bag holding the syringe. “I am going to give you an injection; it will instantly sober you up and flush all of the party out of your bloodstream, it’s not addictive, but it is pretty intense. I promise you this is not a drug, but it is very hard to come by and probably illegal. They extract it from the adrenal glands of fresh corpses. Do not ask how I get it; let us just say I know a guy that knows a guy. It is the best thing invented since the speed ball.”

Izzy gave the stranger wearing the scarlet sarong and gold mesh tank his arm as he stared at Sascha’s platinum blonde haircut, cut short and spiky. He smiled as he injected the substance into Izzy’s left arm.

“The only side effects,” he said with a grin, “are extreme focus, divine clarity, and the most unimaginably intense sexual arousal.”

The soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, “Stuck in the Middle with You,” began to play as Sascha stripped and joined him in the tub.

“Now we are going to Netflix and chill, watching a classic old movie because that is what normal people do.”

Starbuck lay down on the cool bathroom tiles next to the tub, as the flat screen on the far wall displayed the start of the movie, it was the original black and white Romero film, Night of the Living Dead.

“I’ve never seen this movie before,” Izzy said as the film began.

Sascha smiled. “I promise you this is an educational film.”

It was as he approached Puerto Rico after leaving Key West, when the first strangers began to come to the docks to meet him. As he pulled into port, there were just a handful of curious young locals and three of the islands reporters—two were bloggers, but Bianca was the most widely read, well-known reporter in Puerto Rico.

As he made his way through the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands, more people gathered at the docks each time he moored the ship. Even when there were no crowds when he arrived, large numbers of young people were gathered at the pier by the time he returned to the boat a few hours later with provisions. Most just smiled and waved, as many recorded his return to his vessel with their phone cameras.

Of course, none of this made any sense to him; he was just a scientist who loved to sail and happened to be black. Big deal, he thought. This was a scientific expedition to retrace the route of the slave ships from Galveston to Ghana. It was important to document these sorts of journeys, so he chose to use pen and paper to document his expedition, with Galveston being the place where the last enslaved African peoples had heard only after the arrival on the island of Union Calvary troops that the slaves had been freed 3 years earlier and the civil war had been over for over a year. The islands plantations owners knew this, they simply chose to ignore the constitution, because Texans have always been assholes. The Texas war with Mexico being about slavery, since Mexico like Britain had abolished slavery in 1837 nearly 2 decade before the American Civil war. The Americans that settled in Mexican Tejas territory did not want to give up slavery.

He took notes in the margins as he sketched and painted anything that caught his eye’s attention: an overbearing seagull, a dozen scrawny barefoot brown boys playing football shirts vs. skins on a hard-packed dirt field with pairs of discarded 50-gallon steel barrels for the goals.

On the occasions when he was docked for more than one night, it became an unofficial tradition for him to invite a few people and a local reporter aboard for supper. He was a high-functioning autistic and an introvert by nature, but he was also coming to understand that he was viewed as an ambassador for his tribe. Most had never met an African American sailor; all the skippers of the cruisers they met were mostly white guys, sometimes Arabs or Asians, and occasionally, a white girl would sail through.

He noticed as time went by that he was seeing more and more people wearing their hair in cornrows and dressing in white muslin linen ensembles, which he favored for the informal affairs and dinner parties aboard the Exodus. His long silver cornrows were still dark in those days before the the two civil wars or the 3rd great war that followed, nearly destroying the newly formed AUA (African United Alliance) union. He looked down at the titanium cybernetic prosthetic grafted to his right leg just below the knee. He felt the ghost of an itch where his shine used to be.

By the time he reached Barbados, the last stop on the Caribbean island-hopping before he crossed the Atlantic, the crowds had grown to hundreds of spectators hanging around the pier, hoping to get a glimpse of the guy from the Key West video. Most came to gawk at the high-functioning autistic black boy with the sailboat.

The video Mara and Beatrix posted the night they celebrated his shakedown run in Key West was still getting millions of views on YouTube; it had been two months since he left Key West. Aeon, Penny, Trenton, Adira, and Raphaël had all messaged him to let him know that their favorite NPR writer, Sara Vowel, was flying in to interview them for an article about their old punk CD, Death Pixel. After the article was published, the album of 17 songs was put on Amazon and Spotify for sale, and so many people tried to get it that the servers crashed. It was a punk album that was being highly praised by music critics for its intellectual depth and emotional range; it was a punk album with a blues song and a blank verse poem set to bebop jazz.

Homecoming: After the grueling six weeks fighting the current and the prevailing winds, he spent the last month and two weeks tacking across the Atlantic heading east towards the west coast of the African continent. He enjoyed the solitude; the long days and nights alone at sea suited his disposition. Without the distractions of the outside world, he found it easier to think, with no other concerns pressing than the routine of sailing the ship. He dried out while crossing, having no booze on the ship or illegal drugs; his head was as straight as could be expected.

It was in the depths of night, in the darkness amid the great blue nothing, that he came to understand the terror of the Middle Passage in all its horror—in a way he could not grasp before. After weeks at sea, he could feel the lost souls crying out to him from their unmarked tombs beneath the azure waters.

He let the weight of their agony rest on him in a way that he had always avoided out of fear. He moved from merely encountering history academically to feeling the soul of the story. Our story is unique; there is no ancestor of ours welcomed at Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty’s lie is evident on her face, whitewashed after the French sculptor used his African lover as the model for the original design of the statue as monument to the end of slavery. The Americans forced him to remove the broken shackles from her wrist they now lay hidden at her feet. The rest is white washed propaganda perpetuating the myth of American exceptionalism.

Where are we now? In the middle of the great nothing, shackled by fear and propaganda from your nearly transparent master. There are no Hebrews in Egypt attempting to parley with pharaohs’ descendants about their civil rights.

He had been distracted by all of the attention from the press, and the people dressing in all white and wearing their hair in cornrows seemed more than a little odd. The Atlantic crossing would take nearly twice as long, having to tack the entire passage and beat into the wind. The extra distance of tacking made Isaiah and Starbuck both glad to finally see land as they approached the small cluster of islands, Cape Verde, about 100 miles off the coast of Senegal.

The crowds that gathered when he made landfall in Cape Verde were modest compared to the masses that congregated in the Caribbean. But that was a trick of the island’s location, being 100 miles west of the mainland. He stayed overnight, then rose early to gather provisions, enjoying the day with the dog off the boat while Starbuck stretched her legs, running along the edge of the surf on the quiet island beach.

[Notes] [These are for me and the well, actually guys. You know who you are.]

Caribbean Commonwealth

The jurisdictions included in the term Commonwealth Caribbean are: Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts/Nevis/Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks and Caicos.

The United States currently holds five major, permanently inhabited territories: American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI).

The accents if the various islands are the result of the blending of the languages of the leading slaver nations England, Spain, French, Dutch, and Portugal mixed with the indigenous Taino tongue and the languages of the west African tribes brought to the islands to make up the labor shortage after disease and mistreatment all but exterminated the indigenous peoples:

-About the author:

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Texas.