‘The Island Always Brings You Back’: Finding a Caribbean Home

Here is everything I knew about Mafolie before I went to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in January: It was one of the original hilltop estates, given to my grandparents by my great-grandfather as a wedding present in 1936. The views, of Magens Bay to the north and Charlotte Amalie harbor to the south, were supposedly among the most-acclaimed in the Caribbean.

When my father was a child, the estate was 42 acres, but when his parents divorced, he returned to the mainland with his mother and didn’t go back, or see his father, for 25 years. When he did return, in July 1973, he had a Ph.D., a wife and a baby daughter, and the estate had been subdivided. My grandfather had managed to keep the original house, the Great House and two acres. We went back the following summer, when I was 3, and that is the last time any of us saw Mafolie.

My father is a university professor, a scientist skeptical of what he calls my “humanist love of place.” And yet he was the one who kept a framed pair of maps of St. Thomas, one of the biggest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, on the wall behind his dining room chair all the years I was growing up. He is the one who said the view from Mafolie had been described as the “eighth wonder of the world,” and told me about my grandfather playing horseshoes in the evening, his cocktail in a glass the shape of a bud vase so it could be slipped into his shirt pocket. I share my father’s deep love of his second landscape, the Connecticut River valley, but this first, tropical place was a mystery to me.