Bahamian Culture

You round a corner past a bougainvillea-draped cottage and the Atlantic breeze hits you with the same salt, the same heat, the same light that Loyalist families felt when they stepped ashore in 1783. New Plymouth, on Green Turtle Cay, is often described as a New England village transplanted to the tropics — picket fences, gingerbread trim, houses painted in soft pinks and yellows and blues that have weathered centuries of storms. But the description misses the harder story underneath. This was not a picturesque relocation. These were refugees, British Loyalists who fled the newly independent American colonies and

Dominoes is the glue of the community.” — a saying across the Caribbean that captures why a simple tile game holds together generations, neighborhoods, and diasporas. In the Bahamas, the crack of dominoes against wooden tables is as much a part of the soundscape as the waves. From rum shops in Nassau to porch games in the Family Islands, the game cuts across age, class, and island. It shows up at Sunday dinners, beach cookouts, weddings, and even wakes. But why this game, and why here? The answer reaches back through colonial trade routes, post-emancipation community life, and a

Cat Island, one of the least-inhabited islands in the Bahamas, rises from the sea as a long, green spine of coppice forest and limestone cliffs. On its western side, a hillside overlooks the Atlantic with no movie theater, no paved road, no electricity reaching the scatter of settlements. This is where Sidney Poitier spent the first decade of his life — a place so quiet that the world of film, let alone the idea of becoming its first Black leading man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, must have felt like a story from another planet. Cat