Jamaica

Ian Thomson, author of The Dead Yard, "which investigates Jamaica's gritty underbelly," describes "a strangely moving visit to a sugar plantation and its elderly owner."

The world have been reduced to this:  an old man in an abandoned house on a hill.  Cooke was born here almost a century earlier, the last of his kind in Jamaica.  And Chester Castle, like Cooke, was at the end of its existence.  I left him in the home of his slave-owning forebears, oddly moved by the encounter, and returned to the forest path as the sun sank over Jamaica. -- from "My Travels:  Ian Thomson in Jamaica," The Guardian