“Greetings from Jamaica”

Perhaps because it is so rare to receive a handwritten letter in the mail these days, a postcard that I came across in my investigations of travel in the sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century Caribbean piqued my interest. The postcard written by Scottish-born actor Robert B. Mantell, who himself played an array of Shakespearean characters over the course of his career in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, was sent from Jamaica to New York in 1915.

On one side, it announces itself in the familiar, often-parodied phrase: “Greetings from Jamaica.” The postcard is also visually striking. It features lush, deeply saturated green bushes and banana leaves against what appears to be a golden-hour sky of blue kissed with a peach underbelly. A towering tree stands above all the green, a red trunk sprouting into green leaves. This is what I see at first glance.

In the upper-righthand corner, opposite the breezy salutation, is a description of what is actually pictured and where it is: “Tree growing from old Sugar Estate Chimney, Burlington, Port Antonio.” The red trunk is not a trunk at all, as my eyes first registered; it is a redbrick chimney, a remnant of Jamaica’s history as a sugar colony. This visual clash of organic and industrial speaks to the ways in which the Spanish and later the English—who implemented large-scale sugar estates across the island in subsequent centuries—attempted to naturalize the violence of slavery in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean through blithe rhetoric and sustained cruelty.

On the other side: thick black ink, a vibrant red postage stamp, green print manufactured on the postcard itself, and inky stripes. A kind of flag. As a matter of procedure, the postal service has stamped the time and location of the postcard’s provenance in all capital letters toward the top of the card:

KINGSTON
DEC 11 [19]15
6—30 AM
JAMAICA

The final line of the stamp, “JAMAICA,” overlays the first name of the addressee: William (William Winter). The effect is somewhat of an optical illusion. The two names, one of an island country and one of a man, blur together. I think of the phrase no man is an island and how ironic it is, in more ways than one, that this postcard is an instrument of social connection.

“My Dear William,” the salutation with which the writer’s message begins is simultaneously “My Dear Jamaica.” In fact, because of the differences in print versus handwritten script, “My Dear Jamaica” reads the clearest of the two on the page; it is an ironic twist that speaks to the slippage between a writer’s intention and the interpretive afterlives of a text. The postcard had been written to William to speak of Jamaica. And yet it reads like a letter to Jamaica and its history. It is a sober reminder that the postcard world that the two men share, from Jamaica to Staten Island, literally comes to fruition on the back of a sugar-producing Jamaica.

To me, the dearness of the “Dear Jamaica” is its precarity. Here, and going back to the seventeenth century, Jamaica has a layered history. The Spanish and the English fought bitterly for control of the island, with relations reaching a fever pitch in 1655 under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. As part of an effort to strengthen English presence in the Caribbean, Cromwell launched a campaign to undermine Spanish control of the region’s largest island, Jamaica. After ordering an invasion, Cromwell and the English finally captured the coveted island from their fiercest imperial rivals that same year. The Spanish officially recognized England’s American holdings in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. I view Mantell’s correspondence as somewhat of a microcosm of that conflict and its legacy. The two nations, England and Spain, like the name of “William” and “JAMAICA,” overlapped in the Americas. And many years on, New York is home to thousands of Caribbean immigrants. By the beginning of the twentieth century in which Mantell penned the postcard, the first waves of West Indians—including a high concentration of Jamaicans—settled in New York in search of economic opportunity.

William Winter, to whom the letter is addressed, was a prolific poet, biographer, and theater critic. A few months before his friend sent him this postcard, Winter published the second installment in a book series called Shakespeare on the Stage in March of 1915. The collection of essays provided studies of Shakespeare’s plays. Staggeringly, Winter quotes Sir Walter Raleigh in the dedication to this 1915 book. In memory of another friend, he includes a line from a Raleigh poem called “Epitaph”: “In worthy hearts Sorrow hath made thy tomb.”¹ Raleigh is a prominent figure in England’s state history. He was a soldier, one-time close confidant of Queen Elizabeth, head of several English colonial expeditions to the Caribbean, and one of England’s most formidable agents against Spanish dominance in the region. Famously, Raleigh was beheaded in 1617 at the request of a Spanish ambassador because his crew carried out an unauthorized attack on Spanish forces in the Caribbean.

It is all in the execution. In the body of Mantell’s letter, he laments not having his friend Winter’s “head and pen” to write more about the “great time” that he is having in the Jamaica he calls a “wonderful place.” Given the intertextuality of Winter’s work (and name), the exchange is a tantalizing prospect. What more might Mantell have penned of Jamaica if he had a mind that brought together Shakespeare and Raleigh? Oh, dear!

The message is brief, yet full, finally signed “Love to all.” Research sends you in so many directions, like a postcard in the mail, waiting to be delivered. But like a handwritten note to a dear friend, it is a labor of love. I like to think of this post as my love letter to research and to the Caribbean.