To the Taxi Driver Who Never Arrived
Eleuthera, a 110-mile long island, one mile at its widest point, rises from the body of the Caribbean as craggy as an old bone. I spent my summers as a girl on Eleuthera, Greek for freedom, where we went spearfishing off pink sand beaches and ate conch raw from the shell, where the legend of a sea monster still protects one of the largest seahorse populations in the world. Eleuthera is where my childhood heart lives, and where I met you.
I was eleven when my family and I took a Bahamasair flight from Fort Lauderdale to Lower Bogue. My four-year-old brother had started to run a fever, and he vomited into a paper bag while my mother held him in her arms like a fledgling bird. I kept peeking out my window, shocked by the unreal turquoise below us.
The international airport’s arrivals and departures all happened in one room the size of a shed. You must have seen us first. You stood outside at the taxi stand, wore dark glasses, a fine collared shirt. I remember the wide smile, the glint of a gold tooth.
“I must know the man who wears shoes like that,” you said, looking down at my father’s expensive braided Italian leather shoes. My father was a grain farmer from Virginia, but he liked to dress like a gentleman. You had the same build, the same agile walk, the same way of holding space as my father, except you were Black and my father had the fairest skin.
“My name’s Daniel, but everyone calls me Karaka,” you said.
“I’m Cary Montague Wellford,” my father said in his sometimes slow Southern drawl that always left anyone guessing if he was joking or not.
“That’s quite the name,” you said, loading our suitcases into the trunk of your enormous tan Eldorado. “And what do you do, Cary Montague Wellford?”
“I’m a farmer.”
You stopped, rested your arm on the hot car, and laughed. “A farmer.” You shook your head. “Just so happens I’m a farmer, too.”
My mother, brother, and I piled into the back of your car, and my father rode up front with you. You pointed out the pineapple farms as we passed by. You had respect for those who worked the land. It was impossible not to see the immediate bond between you and my father.
You drove us to our rented villa at Oleander Gardens, where we met your friend Pearline, who took my sick brother from my mother’s arms saying, “Put him in the sea, mon.” She laid him in that clear water and his fever lifted.
You took us into your home and fed us field soup made from a few roots you dug out back. All kinds of empty bottles hung from your guinep tree to ward off evil spirits—detergent bottles, Beck beer bottles, jugs of wine—which jangled like wind chimes in the breeze. Like most locals, you and your wife, Weeann, believed in Obeah, white magic, in messages and omens, but also in the church on the hill. You gave me a bag of sapodilla from your trees, a cinnamony fruit that made my eyes roll back with pleasure. You had thrown soil into the potholes in the bone white coral ground and grew everything you could.
You and my father shared a love of not just farming but marijuana. A sweet cloud followed you two around. You stayed up late together that night after my father invited you back to our villa, long after I had gone to bed. Beer bottles covered the coffee table in the morning. Years later, I would learn from my mother that my father shared his deepest secrets with you—most I will never know. He told you about being adopted into an old Virginia family who shunned him for not being issue—blood related—something I wouldn’t know for many years, and learned not from my father but my mother. He never felt like he belonged, that is, except to the land. But here in Eleuthera, in this unlikely place, he opened up. It was as if he had found a brother. I longed for that closeness with him. You had only just met my father, but you knew him in ways I never will.
You and your sons Zhivago, Keno, Travis, and Tony came by our villa every day that week to give us sugar apples, bananas, a pot of soup, and a couple loaves of bread in case of brownouts, which were frequent. My mother said she would bring your boys school supplies and clothing. My father offered to bring you seeds to grow tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables—varieties that could survive the heat. All supplies are hard to get there. Food is expensive and can be scarce. If not grown or caught, it’s shipped in by the mail boat once a week. There’s no hospital on the island. Hurricanes wipe out towns every few years. We appreciated your gifts, what they meant. It’s hard to be a stranger where you must band together to survive.
My father had bought a VHS camera before the trip, and we all took videos of one another every day. Your sons screamed with laughter to see themselves on TV. We promised to come back every summer. You drove us in your taxi to the airport. We hugged you as if we had known you for years.
On the way to the plane, my father said to me, “If we didn’t have a farm, you know, we’ d move here.”
“We didn’t know this would happen, that friendship could have such a price. I hope these words carry across an impossible distance, Daniel, Karaka. I hope you can hear me.”
When my family invited you to visit our farm in Virginia, my father wanted to show you his land as you had shown us yours. I wanted to cook for you, to fish in our river for you, to offer the same generosity you had shown us. You were afraid of flying, Daniel, Karaka. You said you’d never set foot on a plane, that you had had a bad omen and had never taken a single flight. You took a boat to Florida, and then Amtrak up the coast on the Silver Star.
My parents left for Richmond in the morning to pick you up at the busy station at noon. First the train was delayed, but then hours passed. The station manager reported on the loudspeaker that there had been a derailment, but they had no other information about the Silver Star.
By late afternoon, my parents wanted answers. My mother knocked on the station manager’s door, but he wouldn’t open it. She kept knocking and yelled through the door, “I’m going to make a scene unless you answer some questions!”
He threw open the door and told her to be quiet, sitting her down in his chair. He left her in his office and closed the door behind him. She watched the derailment play in a loop on his computer. The last cars lost control and smashed into a nearby freight car, ripping the cars apart like a can opener. She jumped up from the chair. She beat on the door. He had locked her in. She beat repeatedly on the door. When he opened it, she pushed past him and yelled out to the crowds at the station, “It’s not just a derailment. It’s a crash!”
Later, the surviving passengers began to arrive by bus. Seven had been killed on the train, three unidentified. “Two were women and one a man. We’re confident this is not your friend.”
By nine in the evening, my parents were the last people at the station.
“There aren’t any more buses. We’re closing. You have to leave,” the manager said.
My parents didn’t want to leave, but they were being forced out. They had walked fifteen paces when my mother had a terrible thought. She ran back and banged on that office door again. The manager reluctantly opened it.
“Just one more question. Is the unidentified man Black?”
The white station manager didn’t think to tell my white parents, didn’t think they could be waiting for the Black man who had been killed.
“Yes,” he said, surprised.
The 1991 Camden-South Carolina crash made national news. I had never seen my father cry before. My mother’s photo appeared on TV, her face buried in her hands. My brother and I wept in our beds.
Your funeral was beautiful. The island had never seen such a turnout. A thousand brightly colored dresses and suits, a gospel choir, three marching bands. I don’t know if you knew what an important person you were. How much your generosity meant. The pedestrian procession stretched at least two miles long to the church on the hill.
We walked with Weeann and your boys at the front of the procession. I was afraid of all the eyes trained on us, the white family responsible for your death. It wasn’t the 105-degree heat but the guilt I felt that made it hard to breathe. Your trip to Virginia was meant to be so joyful. A reunion. You were like a brother to my father. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
One of your cousins pulled us to the side. “Daniel, he was international. He was doing what he loved, traveling to see you,” she said.
Her words made me cry.
So much of our lives are left to chance. What if you hadn’t taken that train? What if we hadn’t taken your taxi that day? But we did. It was you.
I was just a girl then, too young to understand much. I wish we could enjoy field soup together again. I wish I could’ve known you as my father did. I wish you could be here to see your boys grow up as I did. We didn’t know this would happen, that friendship could have such a price. I hope these words carry across an impossible distance, Daniel, Karaka. I hope you can hear me.
My father died of cancer ten years later. Both of you are gone now. My mother keeps flowers from both of your graves in the same small vase on her windowsill. Yellow and red carnations for you and a rose for my father. Daniel, I look at them all the time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Wellford published the novel Indolence and her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Barcelona Review, Fence, and World Literature Today, among other journals. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an assistant professor of writing and the Pan-European MFA program director in creative writing at Cedar Crest College.
Read Alison’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Miguel Davis.