Behind the Fa

Tropical squalls of racial tension have twisted through the islands of the Caribbean with increasing frequency in recent years. But the wanton shooting of eight people, including four tourists from Florida, at a golf club earlier this month on St. Croix, largest of the three American Virgin Islands, seemed to portend something deeper. To assess the mood, TIME Correspondent Peter Range visited St. Thomas and St. Croix last week and sent this report:

THE license plates advertise AMERICAN PARADISE--VIRGIN ISLANDS. And so they still seem to be. Gleaming white cruise ships dock at Long Bay on St. Thomas, their passengers pouring forth to fresh feasts like ants toward a sugar cake. Taxis whisk tourists to the duty-free shopping district to ring up discount deals on Arpege, Nikons and Johnny Walker Red. En route they pass black schoolchildren in burgundy tartan jumpers and stiff white shirts who are shouting and skipping happily home from school. The pleasure yachts ply the cobalt blue waters of Christiansted harbor. Tropical bougainvillaea, poinsettia and fragrant star jasmine bloom effortlessly on every patch of earth, and each morning begins with the cacophonous chorus of the loud local birds.

For the white American "continentals" who live on the Virgins and who are perhaps a quarter of the islands' population of 95,000, those tourist visions are part of an increasingly cruel fac,ade. The fac,ade is hard to penetrate, because to speak ill of the islands is to tamper with the crown jewels--the image that draws the visitors on whom the economy depends. But among themselves, when the continentals gather in the Hotel 1829 bar at Charlotte Amalie or beside the King's Alley pool in Christiansted, there is only one prevailing topic of conversation these troubled days. "Did you hear?" it begins, and then comes everyone's latest horror story of minor molestation, pointed rudeness or harassment, a near assault or a burglary. The assailants are always black, usually young; the victims almost always white, usually well-to-do. Some of the stories may be exaggerated, but the fear is pervasive and palpable, the mentality of siege akin to that of many big-city dwellers in the U.S.

"Just the other day," says Penny Aylor, an expatriate American who came to St. Thomas three years ago from Munich, "a guy knocked down my daughter and hit me in the breast on Main Street. These guys were just leaning against a wall laughing. I love these islands, but I'm going to leave. We wanted our children to grow up in a truly integrated society, but it isn't working here." Her sentiments are echoed by Joyce Nieboer, 25, an attractive blonde nurse who traveled round the world before taking a job as a hotel hostess in St. Thomas. "I'm not a scared person," said Joyce, "but when I get off at 11:30 p.m., I'm sometimes afraid to walk next door to my room. I tell all the ladies who come here not to carry purses at night."

One resident of 20 years plans to take her title of nobility and move some place else. "This place has become like New York--or worse. I won't even drive home alone at night. I can't leave the island without someone backing a truck up to my house and filling it up. We've all been robbed several times. That's standard." A white civil rights activist who moved down from Connecticut says, "We came here because we thought it would be a better way of life. My kids had never heard the word nigger in their lives, but now they're bigoted just from the abuse and the shoving around they have got."

The essential roots of this cultural cold war are depressingly familiar: the gap between those who live in the cool stucco villas on the hillsides and those scrabbling for an existence in the tar-paper shanties in the towns; unemployment and underemployment hard by glittering affluence; the infection of black nationalism. Says Melvin Evans, the islands' black Governor: "Our people feel they are losing their home; they feel they'll soon be outnumbered by the people from the north, from the U.S." Adds Leopold E. Benjamin, his black assistant: "There's a lot of young people, especially those who have been in Viet Nam, who want a piece of the action, but feel that whites own everything." To his point, two of the five youths being held for the golf-course massacre are Viet Nam veterans.

The new racism is particularly ironic and painful in an island culture with a history of near complete and happy integration going back to the arrival of Danish colonizers nearly 300 years ago. Never in memory was it a problem for blacks and whites to sit at the same restaurant table or drink at the same bar. But St. Croix's first all-white bar has sprung up as a sanctuary in Christiansted. Architect Frank Prince recently took his wife to a place they used to go to drink and was immediately accosted by a black friend who said: "Frank, get your drink and travel. I'll cover you until you get out."

The Virgins have as tight gun-control enforcement as practically any place in the U.S., but the gun population has soared in the last two years. Says Attorney General Ronald Tonkin: "I don't think there is an unarmed house in St. Croix now."

Lax. The continentals claim that a large part of the problem can be traced to lax courts and a poor police force, and they seem to have a point. Says Tonkin: "There are 60 to 100 real troublemakers; they're mostly on St. Croix, and we know who they are." Yet virtually nothing is done about them. Of 933 misdemeanor cases brought to trial on St. Croix last year, only 33 resulted in jail sentences. All five of the black youths charged with the massacre at Laurance and David Rockefeller's Fountain Valley Golf Course had had previous arrests and convictions and were either out on skipped bail, light bail or their own recognizance.

Criminals are dealt with so lightly here that one New York accountant was moved to remark, "You get one hanging judge down here and that will clear up the problem." Hardly, but then a good police force might. Since most native islanders opt for bureaucratic jobs rather than manual labor (that is done largely by "bonded" blacks from other islands), virtually every criminal seems to have a relative in a government job who will work to prevent him from being found out, arrested or held for any length of time.

Sidney Lee, real estate investor and president of the St. Croix Rotary Club, believes that the murders will lead to a tightening of police and law enforcement. "I'd say things are safer now. I advise all my friends who call from the States to come anyway."

Indeed, the average tourist sees little of the new violence. This is still not a place where the fear is outwardly visible, where pedestrians always look over their shoulders and where guns can be seen all round. The tension is more felt than seen. It is an atmosphere reminiscent of the stories of Joseph Conrad --the sense of unease and some vaguely threatening danger that broods amid the lushness of the American paradise. Or as one continental put it, of a growing "unwanted unfriendliness."

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