After Abaco's blacks were emancipated, they erased themselves from history. Black Bahamas retreated into isolation, and for two hundred years they subsisted on fishing and agriculture. They left the old loyalist towns and sprung new villages on distant coasts and under unknowable pines.
Like their fellow British loyalist islanders, nothing substantial could have happened in this time; this is the Bahama backwoods after all. So it is perhaps no great loss to greater history that little of this time is known. But for me, small histories are beautiful, and so this fact is one small missing key in the grand groundworks of North America.
People equate the word Bahamas with Mr. Howell of Gilligan's Island, or with offshore gambling and banking. But the Bahamas are in fact one of the last intact wildernesses in North America. Rather than palms and groomed beaches, the Bahamas is a sea and mangrove wilderness only sparsely dotted by development. Seven hundred islands, but if you count the islets, that number escalates to nearly three-thousand. If you look at a map, the Bahamas encompasses an area that masks most countries.
If the Bahamas is a wilderness and its ethnic history is missing, then what are those old black villages like today?
One such place is called Sandy Point, a seaside village on one of Abaco's two southern points. It is so far from anything that driving there means an afternoon on a paved road alongside wooded pine and thick mangroves.
The village is wooden houses, painted in pastel colors underneath palms and electric poles.
Two years of hurricanes have left Sandy Point weathered, but it is not the kind of place that is trying to impress outsiders anyway. Sandy Point is a fishing village - conch, lobster, grouper. It is still mostly a black town, but there are whites too. Americans, mostly it seems: older folks in fishing hats.
