Foreign Service life in Jamaica: Land of Red Stripe, reggae, and romance

Part 2: Romance in the air and on the ground ...

Last time I introduced readers to my first Foreign Service posting in Kingston, Jamaica, where I lived for about two years in the mid-1980s. This blog entry explores what happened when I went out “looking for Jamaica,” and ended up at a Jamaican party with no one I knew.

I was freshly divorced, and while I had had a series of romantic relationships in graduate school, during my two-year separation from my first wife, I was not yet interested in anything permanent. Far from it. During Foreign Service training in Washington, I had been informally forewarned that Kingston, like many Caribbean postings, was considered a “red flag” post for single male officers—very few came back single, I was told. Take care down there … I laughed it off.

Three weeks into my tour, all that began to change. I was at an informal party with many Jamaicans I did not know—invited there by the one friend I had met days earlier—when a glamorous young lady, a slim, stunning blue-eyed brunette, made a grand entrance, demanding to know who owned “that car with the diplomatic plates in your driveway?” As mine was the only unfamiliar face in the room, Margaret could have guessed instantly, without help, but her flair for the dramatic gesture was instinctive—despite every eye in the room singling me out.

At the moment she entered, I happened to be talking with her roommate, Iris—a slightly older Chinese Jamaican who needed cataract surgery, and was reading something with a huge magnifying glass when I met her. They shared a large house—an old sugar plantation “great house” in the mountains overlooking Kingston, I soon learned—and Margaret was planning to spend the night here, rather than drive up that long, lonely road, nearly 2,000 feet up, after dark. A flight attendant for Air Jamaica, she had just returned from a meeting in town that had run way late. My conversation partner lifted her glass of Scotch—not her first that evening, she admitted—and pointed it at me.

Margaret blushed for just a moment, rather uncharacteristically, but quickly recovered and went into the kitchen, followed closely by Iris, whose quick character assessment had produced a definitive judgment: “That one’s for you!” Iris was a successful store manager, not a fortune-teller, but her prediction was still unerring: spot-on, as the Brits would say. And most Jamaicans were direct, never coy—relentlessly outspoken, sometimes alarmingly so. It was a good thing she liked me … I only had a brief conversation that night with Margaret—for such a vivacious talker, she could also be disarmingly shy under certain circumstances—but before I knew it, I was being invited to a rather large, impromptu dinner party at her house in Smokey Vale the next night, after which she was leaving for New York to visit Anne, the only one of her four sisters living outside Jamaica.

My original friend was also invited, to show me the way—and the rest, I used to say, was herstory. The dinner was a rousing success, and I met many of her friends. From that night on, I was thoroughly, hopelessly smitten. Though we did not actually go out on a date for two weeks, until after she returned from New York, our determined matchmaker Iris made sure we talked on the telephone from Smokey Vale. (It took months for me to get the telephone connected in my apartment—Margaret finally instructed me how to circumvent the slow-as-molasses process …) She also admitted she was glad she had met me on the ground, not aboard one of her Air Jamaica flights—since she had an ironclad rule against ever dating a passenger. And I was never to call her a stewardess—she hated the term.

And yes, she was one of those rare “fair” Jamaicans, with an exotic twist. Her surname, Cadien, sounded vaguely French, but was actually Scottish; her late father had been half-Scottish and half-Portuguese. Her mother was more than half English, partly Irish, with a large percentage of South Asian heritage through Margaret’s grandfather, a tobacco farmer whose ancestor had come from India in the 19th century. She had been born and educated in Catholic schools in Kingston, but lived for years in the country, near Sandy Bay, after her father’s death. She loved to read, and loved dogs even more—she had two, a poodle named Cognac and a mixed Rhodesian-Labrador Retriever named Punch. She was a terrific dancer (thank goodness one of us was!) She loved to travel—anywhere, everywhere—and was crazy about snow, even to the point of booking Canadian flights in mid-winter hoping to get stranded for days, which did happen. She had been an occasional fashion model, particularly for Air Jamaica’s promotional efforts on its European and Canadian flights—when the flight attendants sometimes conducted mid-flight fashion shows. She was Roman Catholic, I was Episcopalian …

She resisted my proposals, but I was persistent, and wore her down. I guess we were just meant for each other, and fate was not to be denied. The romance that quickly blossomed over the next few months turned into marriage 18 months later—her first, my second—in the ancient, Anglican St. Andrew Parish church at Halfway Tree, when my Kingston tour came to an end, and after I obtained a dispensation for remarriage from my Episcopal bishop in North Carolina—and the all-necessary permission from the State Department to marry a foreign national.

The “red flag” curse over single J.O.’s in Kingston gained one more happy victim. That was 38 years ago …

* * * * * *

Romance or not, the daily work of a J.O. never ended. One of my first non-visa tasks for the Citizen Services branch was to help identify the body of an American killed in the crash of a small private plane on the North Coast, near Port Maria, a quaint but lovely old town, the capital of St. Mary Parish—about halfway between the better-known tourist cities of Ocho Rios and Port Antonio. To get there, I had to drive an unfamiliar Embassy vehicle from Kingston over the Blue Mountains—using a somewhat rural arterial road, the A3, which I had not yet taken—for more than 40 miles.

If that sounds easy, it was anything but simple. For one thing, it takes almost two hours each way, and the signs are a bit tricky. Back then, getting to the North Coast involved negotiating Fern Gully—a scenic, winding road named for the prehistoric-looking ferns which form a canopy overhead—and praying it didn’t rain. The Fern Gully road was built atop a destroyed river—victim of a 1907 earthquake that heavily damaged all parts of the British colony—and is picturesque but prone to potholes; Throw in the fact that most Jamaicans tend to drive much too fast, and tend to overtake in the most inappropriate locations …

The airplane crash had occurred west of Port Maria, at a small airport called Boscobel Aerodrome. It was not clear exactly how the crash occurred, although it appeared the small plane had attempted to take off from Boscobel, apparently at night, but struck an overhead power line. The plane, apparently full of marijuana, had then crashed and burned. From the police account, there were two men found in the burning plane—believed to be the American pilot and a Jamaican passenger—and after the fire was extinguished, both bodies had been removed and taken to a sort of makeshift morgue at the Port Maria government building.

The plane was registered to a U.S. owner—the apparent pilot—and my job was to try to determine visually if one of the bodies was, in fact, the pilot. The plane had not been destroyed—the tail section survived, almost intact, allowing its identification. The coroner was taking dental impressions, and would eventually be able to determine identity by comparing those to U.S. records—but that process would take weeks. We needed some kind of interim answer, so that the family of the presumed pilot could take whatever steps they needed to in order to retrieve the body—and undoubtedly begin to claim insurance benefits.

I dutifully inspected what was left of the plane, and tried to stick to the facts in my later report to the Citizens Section chief. Rumors were already circulating that the body might not even belong to the American owner—that perhaps the crash did not occur as reported. According to this theory, whoever originally piloted the place escaped and substituted another body for his, and perhaps the body of another accomplice with a bystander, before setting the plane on fire with gasoline to cover his tracks and burn all the evidence.

I then went to the Port Maria morgue, and inspected the bodies. It was grisly. I had seen dead bodies before, embalmed, in caskets, but I had never seen a dead body in such a condition—the pilot ”frozen” in seated position, and removed from the plane in two pieces, the attendant told me, before being reattached temporarily for my visit: eyeballs staring at me, with eyelids burned off. It could have been the American pilot—no one could tell for certain—even with a burned wallet or photographs, but I left the identification matter “open” in my report. The other body was less recognizable. I managed to avoid being sick until I got back to my room in the Casa Maria hotel.

The next day was a long drive home. But it did not rain. The long drought continued. I turned in my report the next day and let my superiors handle it from there. Back in the visa section by now, I lost track of the case, but later heard, weeks later, that the U.S. dental records sent to our office “matched” those of the body I had seen.

* * * * * *

Other Citizens Services cases were far less grisly, if still memorable and compelling. We J.O.’s took turns visiting the pathetic U.S. prisoner on death row at St. Catherine’s prison in nearby Spanish Town—taking him cigarettes and listening to his rather sad tale of how “the other guy” had actually murdered the Jamaican woman he was convicted of killing. The “other guy,” according to court records and a psychiatrist’s report, was our prisoner’s alter ego—and if he had not been insane when arrested and tried, would surely have become crazed by having to stare out his cell window every day at the gallows in the St. Catherine’s prison yard.

We all felt sorry for him; there but for the grace of God, after all. We wished he could be spared this final indignity. And in the end, he was never executed. Years after I left, I believe he was eventually allowed to be transferred home, exchanged for a Jamaican prisoner held in the United States.

It was a bit different dealing with the greedy U.S. tourists who decided to try smuggling drugs out of the country for extra cash “earned” on vacation. We had to visit them, as well, after they were apprehended at one of the airports—usually Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, sometimes Sangster International at Montego Bay—with marijuana packets taped to their bodies. I was the consular officer on duty one Thanksgiving—actually sitting down to a large dinner at the Consul General’s home with other J.O.’s—when I was called by the Kingston police to the city jail to visit four citizens, three men and a woman, being held there on drug smuggling charges. I did not mind explaining the procedures to them—they were American citizens, after all, however stupid, and it was my job—so I gave them the usual list of attorneys to contact, held their hands, consoled them as best I could. I did what I could.

The next day, I went back to check on my new charges—and found all four had miraculously been released on bail overnight and escorted to the airport—without their marijuana, of course—and banned from ever returning. The Jamaican court system got its significant bail payment—par for the course for the drug overlord—and everyone waited for the next gullible tourist “mule” to come along. I don’t know how many—only a very few, probably—were smart enough to get away with it—but I always wondered why they thought they should take the risk.

* * * * * *

Some days were better than others, even on the visa line. And for two months of my tour, I was seconded to the Embassy’s administrative section—my assigned specialty, after all—in the high-rise Embassy building down the road. I spent one month in General Services, another in Personnel. Both were interesting diversions—a little heavy on paperwork, as are most government jobs, but at least I wasn’t refusing visas.

Some days we did not have to go to work—and could play on the North Coast, in Negril, in Port Antonio. It was, after all, a little slice of Caribbean paradise—and I was hopelessly in love—so I played as much as I could, and spent almost every free evening at Smokey Vale, the 300-year-old great house, high above Kingston, that Margaret called home.

Next time: Part 3: Saying goodbye to paradise, and moving on