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caution, a warning: he leads children away from their parents . But I love the word “pied.” At first I imagine the piper as a sort of baker with a kitchen full of pies—a dessert I prefer to cookies or cake. When I understand that the word means someone dressed in patchwork rags, I of course think of the tramp. Does this story stay with me because I am already following him—following the sound of his triangle—even as I know that, unlike the piper, the tramp is perfectly safe?
    I also hear stories about ancient people wandering in faraway deserts—or about others being led to gas chambers. All stories seem equally real and unreal, true and untrue, at the same time. I don’t quite understand why gas would be in a chamber. After all, we get gas for our car at the Esso Service Center, located at the entrance to the airport. As the attendant pumps it, I love to watch British West Indian Airways or Caribair planes soaring toward Antigua, St. Kitts, San Juan. Sometimes I want to be aboard in order to explore distant places. Other times I don’t, knowing I’d miss my mates, my ballet lessons, and now, the tramp.
    In some of these stories, following seems to be a good thing. In others, not. I could ask my parents or teachers about this, but I don’t.
    The following Sunday evening, as usual, my parents drive my older sister and me to the Virgin Isle Hotel. It caps one of the mountaintops like a snow peak. We arrive when the sun, crimson as a hibiscus, sizzles the horizon, sinking below sea for the night. Foam encircles the island like fiery opals, as if you might scorch your feet if you stray from shore. Inside the hotel, blazing with light, we cross the marble lobby to the dining room. As always, we sit next to the dance floor, close to tables where my mates from school sit with their parents, intermingled with tourists. We eat roast beef and baked Alaska. All evening parents sip planter’s punches or grenadine and rum in frosty glasses, rims outlined in rose-colored sugar. Flames of white tapers shiver in winds gently blowing through floor-to-ceiling windows. Panmen on the stage plonk calypso rhythms. Men swirl across the dance floor in white linen dinner jackets trailing the scent of bay rum aftershave, of Bances Aristocratos, dark vuelta cigars. They dance with wives whose sequined gowns sparkle, whose silk guipure skirts whisper, whose Maltese shawls smell of Chanel No. 5.
    Vicki, a friend from school, eats dinner with her parents and brother a few tables away. Even from here I notice a small bruiseby her left eye. I know her father hits her—though we never speak of it. Here where we live, where we dance, where we eat—isolated atop mountains or behind chevaux-de-frise , high stucco walls strung with tigerwire—we shall be safe. Perfect. In our wealth. In our whiteness. The waiters and waitresses, as well as the panmen, are black.
    After dinner, Vicki and I stroll outside to the upper terrace. We stand by the wrought-iron railing. On the lower terrace, the lit swimming pool ripples turquoise. Labelles , fireflies, sparkle like stardust. Pinpricks of light pulse dark mountainsides. Lower, at the base of the mountain, a cruise ship in the harbor, strung with colored bulbs, glitters like bijoux. Lights define Charlotte Amalie, the capital, while lamps in Emancipation Park outline paths among lignum vitae trees. Yes, it is perfect. We are perfect, aren’t we?
    How can one small bruise by a girl’s eye mar the visage of a colorful, tropical island?
    Only the fields and forests beyond shantytown, where the tramp led me, are dark, pristine, original—not lit by artificial light.
    When we first arrived on the island from Washington DC , where my father had worked for the Department of the Interior, a demonstration was organized by islanders who thought my father’s bank was only for his own gain. They believed that if they opened accounts, he would steal their money, like a pirate. The crowd, carrying torches and