The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water by Kate Summerscale
Joe had black girlfriends, though none of them was Bahamian. In about 1940 she had an affair with the beautiful Blanche Dunn, who after a small role in The Emperor Jones (1933) had retired from acting to pursue a series of glamorous and often scandalous liaisons; one of her lovers was killed by his jealous wife, and Blanche herself once went after Joe with a carving knife, causing her to leap out of a hotel window. Joe also had platonic friendships with black women. In France in the 1930s she met the singer Mabel Mercer, who by the end of the decade ‘had become my sister almost’. ‘I thought she was a very great lady and had a marvellous voice,’ said Joe. ‘She was very proper, you know, just the opposite to me.’ Afraid that the Nazis would persecute Mabel because of her colour, Joe urged her to leave Paris before war broke out. Mabel Mercer crossed the Atlantic to America in 1938 – Joe paid her passage – and she became a regular visitor to Whale Cay. She had a ‘green thumb’, Joe said, and planted trees all over the island. Mabel went on to form a musical partnership with the composer Bart Howard, of whom Joe was also a friend and patron, and recorded his composition Fly Me To The Moon before it was popularised by Peggy Lee.
On Whale Cay in the 1930s and 1940s, Joe employed blacks as well as whites as store managers, teachers, clergy, and so on, while in Nassau job segregation persisted into the 1960s. When dining with a black friend in a restaurant in the still segregated American South, Joe was approached by a disapproving waitress. ‘Is this lady coloured?’ the woman asked. ‘Certainly not!’ roared Joe, countering one absurdity with another. She was something of a hero to the liberal Bahamian newspaper the Herald for her outspoken championing of black self-improvement. And at one level the Coloured League of Youth was a pioneering body for the economic emancipation of Bahamian blacks. The manifesto stated that the Bahamas were run by and for whites, and that it was up to the blacks to change this.
Joe too felt thwarted by the establishment – first in Britain, now in Nassau. She identified with the blacks as brothers in exile, plain working people up against the forces of convention and entrenched power. But to her the blacks were subjects as well as comrades, and her feelings about them were a peculiar jumble of idealism and prejudice. In her rebellion Joe had effectively modelled herself on a colonial ruler. The persona she constructed drew on old-fashioned models of manhood: she stood for Empire, Britishness, cleanliness, hard work, physical bravery, moral fibre. The Coloured League of Youth was correspondingly paternalistic, run principally by whites and predicated on weaknesses in the black race.
‘It is not only their colour which has prevented and hindered them, and left so many in abject poverty,’ Joe wrote in the manifesto. ‘It is because so many of them are foolish, and not to be trusted, or relied upon. A people, most of them, who know not Truth, or Morals. They have not intelligence; nor do they see that they have a responsibility towards the great Empire to which they belong – and to this land in which they were born.’
Despite this rather strong proviso, the white merchants in Nassau were convinced that the league was dangerously subversive. The Bay Street Boys, who occupied most of the seats in the House of Assembly, warned Joe that her organisation could incite racial hatred, and demanded that she close it. In 1940 Joe withdrew the original CLY manifesto and issued a new circular stating that ‘the movement does not seek to create animosity between the two races but merely tries to help the coloured race to advance economically and socially’. Though it was true that the Bahamas were run for whites, Joe wrote, this was ‘fair and right’. ‘These islands were discovered by White People, founded by White People, governed by White People . . . And apart from a few who have proven their ability, around them and behind them throng a rabble of Coloured folk, waiting for crumbs to drop from their tables.’ Members of the league were told that they should acknowledge ‘For the present we must be led’ and admit ‘It is our fault. We have been sleepy and stupid.’
The Bay Street Boys were temporarily appeased but towards the end of 1941 Joe launched a direct attack on the government of the British West Indies, blaming it for both the poverty of the people and the high incidence of syphilis in the colony.
‘Whenever my Negroes go to Nassau,’ Carstairs complained to the New York World Telegram, ‘they come back infected with syphilis. The tourists are kept in ignorance of these conditions. They see only the picturesque . . . The Bahamian House of Assembly is to blame for these conditions. It is the parliament of Nassau. Its members are the merchants of Bay Street. All they care about is the tourist trade. It’s a damn shame, a disgrace. The health and economic status of their people means absolutely nothing to the House of Assembly crowd. The islands should be worked on an agricultural basis. I’ve proved that any vegetable in the world can be grown in the Bahamas . . . The merchants of Bay St would rather import alligator pears and sell them at 75 cents apiece than buy native-grown ones which could sell at a few cents each. Why? Because there is more profit in big prices.’
The House of Assembly was incensed. Joe Carstairs was an ‘ungracious guest’, its members raged, who had ‘been given refuge in this colony from features she did not like about her own country’ and was now ‘slandering the good name of these islands’. The newspaper interview she had given caused the biggest sensation in the Bahamas since the announcement that the Duke of Windsor was to be appointed Governor. The government discussed the possibility of hauling Joe before the Bar of the House or of deporting her. She had overstepped the mark.
By the end of 1941 Joe had been spurned on all sides. The Coloured League of Youth, now shorn of its fighting spirit, faded to nothing. When the United States entered the war in 1941 many Bahamians moved to America to fill the farm and factory jobs that had fallen empty. At the same time the philanthropist multi-millionaire Sir Harry Oakes funded the construction of two airfields on New Providence, a project which provided well-paid work for thousands of Bahamians. Some of Joe’s islanders started to leave her.
Joe tried to do her bit for the war effort. When the British Navy issued a request for boats to be handed over for use as minesweepers, she immediately offered Sonia II. ‘This ship,’ Joe wrote in a press release, ‘one of the most beautiful private schooners in the world, has been placed by Miss Carstairs unreservedly at the service of His Majesty’s Navy.’ His Majesty’s Navy turned Sonia II down as unsuitable. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Joe offered the ship to the American Navy and again it was refused.
She presented the Duke of Windsor with a plan to establish fighting and farming task forces which would make the colony self-sufficient during the war. He ignored it.
Joe, of course, longed to see service in the war herself. She asked the advice of her half-brother, Francis Francis, on how to enlist. He hit her where it hurt. ‘Wrong age,’ said Frank, ‘wrong sex.’
Chapter Sixteen
The Neverland
‘I don’t know if you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind,’ wrote J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan:
Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and there are probably roads on the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also the first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on; and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothin
Joe Carstairs did land again on the Neverland. As Wadley was an image of her soul, Whale Cay was its map. The island, Joe believed, was her own creation: ‘I didn’t make improvements,’ she pointed out impatiently. ‘There was nothing there. I made just what I wanted.’ By inventing a counter-kingdom, a fantasy world in which to live, she defied the censures and strictures of the adult world. In 1941 she was shunned once again by that world, and once again she retreated to her Neverland. Whale Cay was a region of her self, and so it had no chronology. Here she could be a boy who never had to grow up.
In her teenage years Joe had experienced a recurrent dream which she later interpreted as a premonition, a vision of Whale Cay. It can also be read as a reliving of her momentous crossing to America in 1911, in which she ‘left family aged 11’.
In the dream she would find herself aboard a small steamship, crowded with baggage and people, sailing in beautiful blue sea. The sky too was very blue, dotted with clouds, and a high wind was blowing. Then land came into view, a shore of sand dunes laden with tall jungle grass blowing in the breeze; the dunes were a creamy pink, and the grass the colour of wheat. On one of the dunes was a building shaped like the Flatiron Building in New York. Joe longed to leave the ship for the land – which was strange, she remarked, because she usually longed to be on ships. But she could not disembark because she was unable to find her baggage among that of all the other people. ‘If I could only get off this boat,’ she thought, ‘but I’ve got to have my luggage.’
‘This dream was always the same,’ Joe said, ‘and I never did get off the boat. Exactly the same, as if it was stamped.’
In her early thirties Joe Carstairs finally stepped on to her island, leaving her baggage behind her. By buying Whale Cay she expelled for ever the dream she had carried. On the island she was able to live out her fantasies, externalise all that was inside her, so that she remained untroubled by emotion and memory.
The Darlings, too, know the Neverland when they reach it: ‘Strange to say, they all recognized it at once.’ Just as Whale Cay called to Joe, the Neverland beckons the Darling children in Peter Pan: ‘The island was looking out for them. It is only thus that anyone may sight those magic shores.’ And where Whale Cay was roused by Joe, the Neverland is roused by Peter Pan. ‘Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life . . . With the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life.’
To Joe, lethargy was death. She was once asked whether she missed racing boats after buying Whale Cay. ‘You can’t qualify movement,’ she replied. ‘It’s a different kind of speed.’ The island was a place where you lived for ever because nothing stood still. It was so vibrant that Joe barely slept. ‘Some people,’ she observed, ‘sleep a very dead sleep. I don’t. I sleep lightly, wake up two or three times. I sleep on the top of the bed.’ As if the bed might prove a grave, she lay on it rather than in it; as if sleep were death, she refused to enter it too deeply. ‘I’ve really kept awfully young by the way I’ve lived,’ she said. ‘I live young.’ She had come to Whale Cay in the same spirit as the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon had come to the Bahamas in 1513, seeking a fountain of everlasting youth. He claimed to have found it on the Bimini Islands, twenty miles or so west of Whale Cay.
Movement to Joe was a defiance of death, a way of outrunning mortality. She seemed to feel she could beat death by denying it, that she could devour her time and so escape being devoured by it. Friends remarked that they did not once hear Joe say that she was tired. The emblem of Whale Cay was a sun, an image of perpetual day; the island flag was hoisted daily alongside the Union Jack. The little god of Whale Cay was Wadley, unageing, unchangeable and still. Like the island, he carried the weight of Joe’s desire, leaving her to travel light.
Joe stayed young by forgetting the past, and with it the future. ‘No one ever gets over the first unfairness,’ writes Barrie, ‘no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and the rest.’ It was Joe’s gift, too, immediately to forget wrongs done her. ‘Can you remember anyone who ever did you dirt?’ asked a friend. ‘No,’ Carstairs replied. ‘No. If they did I would have cast it out.’
As well as sanitising her past, she cast out dirt – the signs of mortality and decay – in the houses of Whale Cay. Joe organised a collection service for rubbish, which was burnt at designated sites on the island. She inspected the islanders’ huts for cleanliness every month. The men who lived alone, Joe noticed, were cleaner than those who shared a house with a wife.
The Great House, white within and without, was regularly repainted. Each bedroom was equipped with a huge bathroom. Ostensibly for fear of contracting syphilis, Joe never sat on lavatory seats but always stood. Downstairs the chairs were backed with vinyl, for easy cleaning, or with white leather, and the floor was laid with gleaming lobster-back-pink tiles. One man was employed solely to polish the silver, another to polish the copper and brass lamps. Bertram, the half-Syrian, half-Bahamian butler, waited at table in white gloves. The sturdy, ample furniture was made on the island of native wood – mahogany, lignum vitae. The kitchen was big, with stainless steel cabinets and linoleum.
Four women ran the laundry, working day and night; the quality of their washing was so celebrated that visitors to the island would bring with them suitcases of dirty clothes. ‘If one went to the bathroom and took off a shirt,’ a friend remembered, ‘three or four black women would come and grab it and take it to the laundry room.’ Joe changed her shirt two or three times a day and ordered forty new shirts at a time from her tailor. She insisted that her white shirts be washed by the best laundress, Miss Martha, and put out in the sun to dry. She was delighted when a friend’s mother described her as ‘clean-cut’.
Though she liked to play the doctor and to cure illness, Joe could not bear to be in the company of those who were sick. Guests with colds were encouraged to stay in their rooms. In the late 1940s the Reverend Julian Henshaw went with one of Joe’s girlfriends on a trip to Rome, where he was rumoured to have conducted a Black Mass. When Henshaw returned it emerged that he had contracted syphilis. Joe was horrified: ‘How can you sleep with all those boys and be a priest?’ she demanded. She threw Henshaw off the island. His condition deteriorated and he shortly afterwards died in a Nassau hospital. Joe said Henshaw’s spirit would career around the world paying penance for his sins. ‘There’s no rest for Julian,’ she said. ‘He goes round and round.’
Joe had been impelled to action by Henshaw’s physical sickness, but she was clearly upset by his moral degeneracy, especially since it involved the corruption of youth. Joe loved little boys as equals – they were at their best, she said, between the ages of seven and fifteen. ‘They think of me as one of them . . . they like me like another little boy.’ One boy on Whale Cay, she recalled, had told her conspiratorially that his father was an old person – the father was in his forties at the time, younger than Joe. This showed, she claimed, that the boy ‘was not conscious of any age group as far as I was concerned’. The children on Whale Cay called Joe ‘my relative’.
The first white child to be born on Whale Cay was a girl, Blanche Lowe, the daughter of the captain of Joe’s boats. Hutchins Lowe was an orphan who had run away to sea at sixteen; before Joe employed him, he had been running rum as well as mail and food. Joe, perhaps disappointed that her captain’s first-born was not a boy, dressed Blanche in khaki like a tiny soldier. Blanche and her younger sisters grew up as tomboys, shooting marbles, playing ball, running wild in the bush, in the care of an old black man named Jake. ‘After Daddy produced four girls,’ reflected one of Blanche’s sisters, ‘I guess Miss Carstairs kind of gave up on him.’ But Joe ret
Joe also took under her wing Ben Dawkins, a black boy, giving him work in the Great House, smart clothes, an education. She encouraged him to train as a boxer but was angry when he left the island as a young man to try his luck in Florida – the trouble with real boys was that they grew into men, and went away. When Ben Dawkins told Joe that he planned to enter boxing matches as ‘The Whale’, in honour of Whale Cay, Joe relented a little and had some robes made for him.
In the early 1950s the Reverend Prince Hepburn, a garrulous and charming black priest from one of the poorer sections of Nassau, approached Joe with a request to hold a summer camp for underprivileged boys on Whale Cay. Joe agreed and offered to provide transport, accommodation and food. Hepburn thanked her, but said he would organise the food – they must do something for themselves. ‘Well, by damn,’ said Joe. ‘I meet the first Bahamian who doesn’t request the horse and the saddle too.’ She jumped up from her chair and shook his hand. ‘Congratulations. I go for you.’ The camp took up residence on the island each summer for the rest of Joe’s time there. ‘I find Joe Carstair to be very kind but also very demanding,’ reported Prince Hepburn. ‘Ms Carstair was a disciplinary. She could be very mean at times. When that steam was over she was calm, forgiving and meek.’ Joe loved to visit her colony of lost boys. These boys, conveniently, always left the island before they grew up. Sometimes when Joe visited Nassau in later years, men would stop her in the street and say, ‘I was one of your boys at Whale Cay.’ A girls’ camp was also established on the island, but Joe showed no interest in it.