Bahama Pundit

Julian Granberry and Sammie Swain

by Larry Smith

Counterfactual history is an attempt to answer hypothetical questions by considering what would have happened if certain key historical events had not occurred. Such speculation has spawned an entire book genre, which seeks to understand the relative importance of the event in question.

Science fiction writers are very fond of counterfactual themes, but serious historians have also been unable to resist the temptation to ask 'what if?'  In 1931, for example, Winston Churchill contributed to an anthology called If It Had Happened Otherwise. His essay examined the course of events if Robert E. Lee had won the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. 

Julian Granberry, the veteran Florida anthropologist and linguist who contributed decades of scholarship on the extinct Lucayan Taino inhabitants of the Bahamian archipelago, has produced his own alternate history titled The Americas That Might Have Been: "a book I expect practically everyone to find some fault with" as he says in the preface. "My hope is that everyone will also find a great deal that is new, interesting and useful."

In this 2005 work, Granberry attempts to answer the question: What would the Americas be like today—politically, economically, culturally—if Columbus and the Europeans had never found them, and how would these American peoples interact with the world's other societies? 

It assumes that Columbus did not embark from Spain in 1492 and that no Europeans found or settled the New World afterward, leaving the peoples of the two American continents free to follow the natural course of their native lives. 

The Underground Railroad of Bahamian Music

by Larry Smith

Last week I took a trip on the underground railroad of Bahamian music. Man, I was walking in Jerusalem just like John. I saw a number of signs, and all the guides remembered quite well. And sometimes, they even had fire and brimstone coming out of their mouth.

We embarked at the Doongalik station on Village Road. Jackson Burnside and Charles Carter were the conductors on a fascinating journey to excavate the memory of two great Bahamian musicians - the idiosyncratic guitarist Joseph Spence (who would have been 100 this year) and the obeah man Tony McKay (whose first album appeared 40 years ago, when Tough Call was a yoot-man).

One of the guides on this trip was 79-year-old Geneva Pinder. She described her Uncle Youngie as "the sweetest man...sitting with his pipe and singing with my parents. My grandmother was a Sunday school teacher on Andros and we had to sing from when we were little. My mom wasn't that learned, but she could rhyme."

Geneva's mother, Edith, was the sister of Joseph Spence, who died in 1984. And it was her rhyming - a musical form sometimes described as an ancestor of rap - that attracted the American folk artist Jody Stecher to Nassau in 1965, where he recorded Spence and the Pinder family in their Culmersville yard.