“Welcome home.” That’s how Jamaicans greet tourists who visit the island. And in a way, I did feel home—the same way I do when visiting family from out of town. There’s a familiarity: the same smells, the same traditions passed on from your grandma to your father to you. That feeling of being closer to the root of the tree. That’s how I feel in Jamaica.
The accents are familiar, like my family’s Geechee-Gullah accent, but also different. As are the jokes and ribbing done by the staff on the resort. The faces are familiar. So are the shared traumas of slavery and colonization. In Jamaica, I feel this closer connection to the continent from which we all originated.
One day, we ventured away from the manufactured beauty of the resort to visit Hampden Estate, a rum distillery located on a sugarcane plantation that’s been making rum the same way for 260 years. I make it a point to stay away from the plantation because of the history. I feel my ancestors would want it that way. To stay away from those places that caused them so much harm, so much pain.
I also stay away because of the wide-eyed people who I’ve heard visit those places with only romantic memories of the past. I don’t want to witness that. I can’t stomach it. Despite this rule, I still wanted to visit Jamaica’s second-largest producer of rum. You might not have heard of it, but according to our tour guide, it’s blended into a number of rums, including Appleton Estate.
On the plantation is a six-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom house. It’s said to be haunted. I thought: Haunted like Charleston. Haunted like Savannah. Their connection, slavery. While talking to my husband, I mentioned my theory on why all these places are haunted—it’s because of all the pain and horrendous events that happened in them. One of the staff members overheard me and said, “Exactly.” Different but the same.
I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I know a place can hang onto a feeling. I’ve felt it on every visit to Charleston to see my extended family. It hangs in the air like humidity. It crawls on the skin like the sun.
