Trevor said something to me in that Mount Gay warehouse that I hadn't been able to put down since, about rum being one leg of a three-sided trade that also carried enslaved people and the molasses used to make more of it. I'd nodded along at the time, filed it as context, and kept tasting rum like the sentence hadn't rearranged anything. It had, though, and it kept working on me quietly for weeks afterward until I understood I wasn't going to feel right about this whole book unless I actually went and stood on all three points of that triangle myself instead of just hearing about them secondhand from behind a tasting counter.
New England seemed like the strangest place on earth to look for rum history until I actually got there and understood how backward that assumption was. Newport, Rhode Island doesn't look, at first glance, like it has anything to do with the Caribbean at all, cold harbor water and colonial clapboard instead of palm trees and cane fields, but by the middle of the 1700s this small port town was running more rum distilleries than nearly anywhere else in the American colonies, more than thirty of them crowded along a coastline that never grew a stalk of sugarcane in its life. They didn't need to grow it. Cheap molasses, often the lower-grade byproduct that French Caribbean planters didn't want for their own better rum, came up from islands like the ones I'd already stood on, got distilled in Newport into a rougher, cheaper spirit, and that rum then got loaded onto ships bound for the coast of West Africa, where it became one of the primary currencies used to purchase captive human beings from local traders and rival kingdoms engaged in their own wars and raids.
A historian named Miriam walked me along Bannister's Wharf and through the old counting houses still standing near the harbor, explaining that Rhode Island, this one small colony, is estimated to have launched more slaving voyages than any other American colony before the trade was formally outlawed in 1808, over half of all such voyages departing American shores in total. The Brown family, whose name now sits on a university a short drive up the bay, built a meaningful piece of their fortune on both ends of this exact business, distilling rum and financing slaving voyages in the same ledgers, a fact the university itself has since acknowledged and studied rather than buried, which struck me as at least a more honest reckoning than most places manage. Standing outside Touro Synagogue, one of the oldest in the country, in a town whose wealth and whose freedoms for some were purchased directly through the total unfreedom of others, I understood the sentence Trevor had handed me in Barbados a lot more completely than I had the day he said it. The rum in my glass at Mount Gay wasn't just historically connected to slavery in some abstract textbook sense. It was, quite literally, one of the actual currencies used to buy and sell people, manufactured a few thousand miles from the nearest cane field by colonists who never had to watch what their product actually purchased on the other side of the ocean.
I went to Ghana next, because I couldn't write another word of this chapter from behind a New England harbor without going to see the point of the triangle where the actual buying happened, where a barrel of rum stopped being an abstraction and became the literal price paid for a human life. Cape Coast Castle sits right on the water, whitewashed walls that from a distance look almost cheerful, built and rebuilt over centuries by Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and finally British traders who used it as one of dozens of fortified trading posts strung along what colonial mapmakers callously named the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast in the same breath. A guide named Kwame walked a small group of us down into the dungeons beneath the fort, low stone chambers where captives were held, sometimes for months, waiting for a ship, packed in numbers that Kwame recited without any need to editorialize because the bare arithmetic did all the work on its own. He walked us finally to the Door of No Return, a narrow stone doorway facing straight out to the Atlantic, the last piece of African soil hundreds of thousands of people ever stood on before being loaded onto ships bound, many of them, for exactly the Caribbean plantations I'd already stood on months before, the same islands whose molasses had helped pay for their own capture in the first place.
Kwame told me, standing in that doorway with the surf loud enough to fill every silence, that rum specifically held a strange, doubled status in that trade, valued by European traders as a reliable, transportable currency precisely because it didn't spoil the way food did and carried a demand that crossed cultures easily, and valued by some African traders and kingdoms for the same practical reasons any hard currency gets valued, useful for its own sake beyond whatever moral weight got attached to it centuries later by people looking back. He was careful, and I want to be careful here too, not to spread the responsibility for this trade evenly across everyone who ever touched it. European ship captains and New England distillers and Caribbean planters built and profited from the system and bear that weight most directly. But he wanted visitors to leave understanding the actual mechanics of it rather than a simplified morality tale, because the real history, he said, is more useful for actually preventing its like again than a comfortable, simpler version would be.
I flew back to the Caribbean afterward carrying all three points of that triangle in my head at once for the first time, New England's counting houses, a West African dungeon, and the cane fields and rum shops I'd already spent months walking through without connecting them properly to either end. Sitting on a beach in Barbados not far from where this whole thread of the book started, glass in hand, I thought about how thoroughly this one drink had absorbed an entire hemisphere's economy of suffering into itself and then gone on, decades and centuries later, to become something poured casually at a wedding, a beach bar, a distillery tasting room, most of the people drinking it never once asked to think about where the whole habit actually started. I don't say that to ruin anybody's rum punch. I say it because Trevor was right to hand me that sentence in the first place, and because I think a spirit this old and this widely loved deserves to be understood honestly rather than just enjoyed thoughtlessly, the good history and the unbearable history both, sitting in the same glass whether we choose to notice or not.
I don't know exactly where this thread pulls me next, only that I owe it a lighter chapter or two after this one, something closer to a rum shop porch and further from a dungeon doorway. But I wanted this stretch of the book to sit with the weight properly before I let myself go back to enjoying the drink, because I don't think you can actually understand rum, or love it honestly, without carrying both halves of its history at the same time.
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