Friday Feature: Soni Brown

Soni Brown writes from the complicated spaces between countries, between family members who should love each other, between the person you were and who you're becoming. Raised in Jamaica and now splitting her time between Colorado and Montego Bay, she tackles the messy realities of identity, belonging, and family dynamics with unflinching honesty.

She is querying her memoir about caring for a mother who abandoned her during childhood while asking brutal questions. What do we owe parents who discarded us? How do you heal from someone who can't even remember the harm they caused? An excerpt of the memoir will be included in an anthology of essays about adult child/parent estrangement, provisionally entitled No Contact, to be published by Catapult Publishing in 2026 and edited by Jenny Bartoy. Soni is a staff writer for Colorado State University Pueblo and a comic-memoir educator with Brink Literacy Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and earned fellowships from Tin House Summer Writing Workshop and Mendocino Writing Conference, plus a scholarship to PREE Writing Studio. Her essays and articles have found homes in places like Cosmopolitan, The Believer, Desert Companion, Sisters from AARP, The New York Daily News, F(r)iction, and Africa is a Country. She wrote the screenplay for the documentary Across the Tracks; A Las Vegas Westside Story. Her essay about leaving the United States for Jamaica after George Floyd's murder received notable mention in Best American Essays 2023. She founded and facilitates the Papine Writing Collective, an online, do-it-yourself creative writing studio and community for emerging and mid-career writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. 

Haunted Paradise

In Jamaica, we build shrines to our oppressors and call them tourist attractions. This thought occurred to me two years ago. I was driving from my home in town, passing the all-inclusive resorts that dot the highways of Montego Bay, on assignment for a travel magazine. I park outside the gate of Greenwood Great House. There’s a painted sign instructing visitors to “ring for service.” The ghosts of the past still demand we announce ourselves before entering. 

A small woman appears to let me in, telling me “Mr. Bob busy but come.” I follow her down the winding path toward what was once a shrine to colonial power. To the left lies a fallow, fading garden where a carriage house peeks in and out of view. We emerge into what is situationally the backyard. Now it serves as the official entrance to this preserved piece of our painful history. What strikes me immediately is how ordinary this “Great House” feels—a structure that modern Montego Bay mansions easily rival in size and grandeur. 

As I linger near the entrance, I notice a young family browsing the gift shop. I strike up a conversation with the wife hoping to get some pithy quote for my article. It’s a travel guide meant to attract Google's algorithm. My editor suggested a word-soup title: “Top Ten Reasons to Tour Jamaica's Plantation Homes Like a Native.” It's all kinds of wrong but I need a check. Living in Jamaica with North American tastes means constant compromise between my politics and my money. 

The wife's expression mirrors my own internal struggle: curiosity about our past, anxiety about confronting it, and the desperate hope that somehow these preserved plantation homes might offer us resolution rather than just another sanitized narrative that erases our ancestors' suffering. 

But resolution requires remembrance, and Jamaica has yet to build a single, significant memorial to the horrors that happened here. At least not on this side of the tourism corridor. Yet, here I am, part of the problem, preparing to write glossy copy that will bring more tourists to play golf and get served by people in colonial costumes.

Greenwood’s owner, Bob Betton, is a Black. He returned to Jamaica after years working as a postman in the U.K. He greets our small tour group and explains how he acquired the property through serendipity. He got lost while driving one day and was mistaken for a taxi driver by Greenwood’s white owner. Bob gave him a lift to the house as an unexpected bond formed between them. Later, when the owner needed money, he offered to sell the property to Bob. 

 “When I bought this place in the seventies,” Bob tells me, “The white people renting the carriage houses out back accused me of being ‘a neyga man who wanted to punish them for slavery.’” It was a time of profound transition. Jamaica's socialist government had produced white flight. Families fled for Miami, fearing the country would follow Cuba's path to communism. Their exodus created space for Black political power. “All I wanted,” Bob says, gesturing at the polished woodwork, “was to turn this into a proper museum.” I nod, understanding what lay behind his words. This place, this “Great House,” represents both accomplishment and atrocity. A contradiction seen in its cut limestones quarried in England and shipped to the island. 

As our tour begins, I notice how the young guide's narrative carefully navigates around the darker aspects of the plantation's past. We hear extensively about the Barrett-Brownings who lived here, their famous poet relative Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the European furniture painstakingly preserved in each room. When we reach the top floor, the guide proudly points out the spectacular view of the Caymanas Trench and remarks on how clearly you can see the curvature of the earth from this vantage point.

Throughout the tour, slavery is mentioned only in passing—a footnote to the grander story of European achievement. When I ask direct questions about the enslaved people who made this house function, the guide shifts uncomfortably before sharing the plantation's most treasured myth. During the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, Greenwood was spared from burning because the owner was “a benevolent Master,” allowing his slaves to practice religion and learn to read. The story settles over our group like a thin blanket over a corpse. It technically covers the ugliness but does nothing to disguise its presence.

***

Outside in the garden, I find myself wanting to feel satisfied with this nice version of history. The Christmas Rebellion—or Baptist War as some colonists called it—was one of the largest slave uprisings in the Caribbean. But what the tour and history books fail to mention is how women were instrumental in its organization, lighting fires across the island as signals for the rebellion to begin. The narrative centers men like Sam Sharpe while erasing figures like the unnamed woman who was the first person hanged for the uprising. According to records I've studied, her last words declared she acted so her children could be free. Where is her memorial? Where is the place that honors her sacrifice?

I think about American plantations and their recent reckonings with the past—albeit imperfect ones. I remember the controversy when actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds held their wedding at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, celebrating their love in a place where hundreds had suffered and died in bondage. The backlash forced a public conversation about the ethics of using sites of historical trauma as picturesque backdrops for contemporary pleasure.

Yet here in Jamaica, where most citizens are descendants of the enslaved, this conversation seems perpetually deferred. Instead, we adopted a slogan meant to attract corporations and foreign investors as our national ethos: “Out of Many; One People.” A comforting motto that erases centuries of exploitation with five simple words. I knew what this really meant—there is no distinguishing among the people who carries the legacy of enslaver and enslaved. We are all Jamaicans now. We had supposedly reconciled. Never mind the economic disparities that persist along color lines. Never mind that the descendants of the plantation owners still own the hills while the descendants of the enslaved clean their pools. This convenient mythology allows us to sidestep the uncomfortable work of confronting our history, replacing genuine reckoning with a marketable fiction that serves tourism brochures better than it serves justice. We've transformed plantations into tourist attractions where visitors can fall in love with the tropical vegetation and parrot our statement for casual indifference, “No problem, mon.”

How long does a place remain hallowed because something horrific happened there? What does it mean when the descendants of the victims must serve as guides, smiling and recounting a history that erases their own ancestors' suffering? The past is not past. The dead are not dead.

***

Years ago, when I worked as a flight attendant, I would greet tourists bound for Jamaica's golf resorts and all-inclusive getaways. Many of these paradise vacations were built on former plantations. Their names still proudly announce their heritage: Rose Hall Estate, Tryall Estate, Good Hope Estate. With a professional smile, I'd say, “Welcome aboard,” while silently thinking, “I hope my ancestors haunt you and you lose every damn bag and golf ball, maybe a limb.” The thought was petty, perhaps, but it was the only resistance I could offer to the ongoing commodification of my country's pain.

Now I live in Montego Bay with my white husband and biracial daughters, and the contradictions of Jamaican society press in from all sides. The gated community near my children's school has become the social epicenter of our lives for playdates, birthday parties, and sleepovers. They all unfold behind those security checkpoints. There, I must show ID and submit to having my trunk searched a little too carefully. The guards are Black like me and seem to relish putting me in my place. Or perhaps that is the guilt I feel knowing that it is my kind that does this kind of work. The residents behind the gates are predominantly white or super light-skinned, their surnames appearing on company buildings and street signs throughout Montego Bay.

Walking beside my husband through these spaces, I find myself deliberately leaving inches between us, embarrassed to hold his hand in public. My fingers twitch with the desire for connection but remain firmly at my side. I know why. I've fallen into the age-old trap that from the outside looks like self-hatred or, worse, the pan-Africanist who preaches Black love while partnered with a white man.

I've researched the family I visit behind the Montego Bay gates, seeking to understand if they were among those who received compensation when slavery was abolished. Not the enslaved, mind you, but the enslavers, paid for their “loss of property.” I find some relief when I discover certain families arrived after emancipation, but the dynamics remain unchanged. I am still the Black woman dropping off her light-skinned children to play with white Jamaican children, a scene that has likely played out countless times on this very property over centuries.

My illusion of equality shatters one evening at a "Paint and Sip" party hosted in one of these homes. A white European woman, whose accent betrays her rural origins but who has found unexpected status as an auteur in our color-conscious society, asks where I'm from.

“Kencot in Kingston,” I reply.

Without hesitation, she responds, “My maid is from Kencot.”

In that moment, I understand that no matter how educated I am, no matter how “well-spoken” or professionally successful, to some, I will always be categorized alongside domestic workers. This is not because there's anything wrong with such honest work, but because in her mind, that is what Black Jamaican women are: helpers, servants, nannies, laborers who toil in the sun because as one Jamaican white woman told me, our black skin is better suited for work in the heat.

The European with the maid from Kencot made her money in entertainment, appearing in music videos for reggae artists who need to fake foreign scenes. What fascinates me is how her whiteness alone grants her access to capital and social currency that would be unattainable otherwise. Her mannerisms—loud, brash, occasionally crude—would typically earn disapproval from Jamaicans if displayed by one of our own. Yet her pale skin functions as both shield and skeleton key, unlocking doors that remain firmly shut to locals despite generations of belonging. I recognize this dynamic because I live its mirror image: Jamaica-born but only welcomed into certain elite circles because I arrive on my white husband's arm. At these events, I become simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible—a Black curiosity granted temporary passage into spaces built on exclusion. 

***

The next plantation on my journalistic tour is Bellefield Great House, home to the Kerr-Jarrett family for seven generations. Located in Granville, on the western outskirts of Montego Bay, the property manager proudly tells me that at one time, everything visible from the house to the sea belonged to the Kerr-Jarretts.

Unlike the more ornate Greenwood, Bellefield has a utilitarian quality that supports what a member of the Jamaica Historical Society once told me. This structure was likely not the main Great House but rather housing for the head overseer, built close to the canefields and sugar mill for the convenience of management.

The property manager is a woman about my age. She serves as my tour guide. I ask her directly, “What's it like to work at a place where people who looked like you and me suffered?” She pauses, considering her words carefully because she too needs a check. “More than likely somebody in my family worked here as a slave,” she admits. “When I was offered this job, I didn’t want it. But good work outside of call centers or hotels is hard to find in Montego Bay.”

The call centers she mentions are themselves a creation of the Kerr-Jarrett family. They’ve introduced technological parks where multinational corporations can outsource their customer service operations to Jamaica's desperate workforce of high school and college graduates. The hotels, too, function as modern-day plantations with their six-day workweeks and below-industry wages.

As we walk through the rooms, the property manager reveals darker aspects of life at Bellefield. “For the longest while, the family thought they were being poisoned by the slaves. They had a food taster,” she tells me. When family members died mysteriously, enslaved people were probably tortured and murdered in retribution. “It turns out the family was eating and drinking from lead plates and utensils,” she adds. I wondered aloud how many people paid for that mistake.

At the sugar mill, a stone structure now picturesque with lichen and age is operating as a restaurant and bar. The menu is American food for a Jamaican palate. My host points to where the grinding mechanism once stood. “There was always a big slave whose job was to have a sharp machete ready,” she says.

“For cutting sugar cane that got caught in the mill?” I ask.

“No,” she replies quietly. “It was for anyone whose arm got stuck in the gears. It was faster to cut their arm off than to stop the ox walking in circles turning the gears.”

I feel bile rise in my throat. A coldness washes over me. The violence of the past is suddenly visceral and immediate. This practical horror, the economy of amputation over production delays, captures the dehumanization of slavery more powerfully than any exhibit I've ever seen.

***

Days later, I met my friend Angela for a tour of Rose Hall, perhaps Jamaica's most famous Great House. The owner of Greenwood had described it as owned by a foreign investment company that had “built a fairy tale” around Annie Palmer, the former enslaver said to have practiced Obeah to kill her husbands before taking enslaved men as lovers.

“There,” he had said dismissively, “is the Disneyfication of our history.”

Rose Hall allows visitors to tour the house and then relax with cocktails in what was once the dungeon area. The original bars are still visible but now part of the decor of a gift shop and bar. This transformation from site of torture to site of leisure epitomizes the problem: Jamaica is selling its trauma rather than memorializing it.

“It doesn't have to be this way,” I tell Angela as we walk the grounds. “In Martinique, there's the Mémorial de l'Anse Caffard which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.”  I explain that the large, Easter Island-like statues memorialize the area where ships arrived with kidnapped Africans. It’s also the site of an 1830 shipwreck where 300 Africans died while the 6 white crewmembers were the only ones saved. I recall meeting the artist at the memorial when I lived there. I told her I was overcome with emotion, crying openly while a white woman casually watched her dog relieve itself near the cliffs. 

I stopped talking as I relived the memory. I gazed toward the supposed grave of Annie Palmer, thinking about what real remembrance looks like, when Angela interrupts my reverie with unexpected irony, “You know l'Anse Caffard literally translates to ‘Cove of Cockroaches.’” Even genuine attempts at memorialization carry their own contradictions.

These illogicalities continue as we return to the house, where our Rose Hall guide—a woman about 25—speaks with what we locally call a “twang.” It's an affected accent that approximates American English, developed specifically for the tourism industry. The twang is both a tool and a symptom, allowing Jamaican workers to seem more familiar to American tourists while simultaneously erasing another aspect of authentic Jamaican identity. Even our language must be sacrificed on the altar of foreign comfort.

We move through rooms where Annie Palmer allegedly poisoned husbands and tortured slaves, but our guide's focus drifts elsewhere. She points out the imported drapery, the fine China patterns, the exact thread count of period-appropriate bedsheets, and how often the paneled walls must be treated to prevent mold in the tropical climate. Outside the window, I notice workers setting up white folding chairs on the manicured lawn. “For a wedding later today,” the guide explains with a practiced smile. “We host plenty-plenty every year and in October, our haunted tours are quite popular. We have actors dressed as ghosts and Annie Palmer herself.”

I hold back a sigh. As a young girl in Jamaican schools, I thought of Annie Palmer as something of a feminist icon—a woman who seized power in a patriarchal world, albeit through murder and manipulation. Now, I see how this “White Witch” nonsense transforms structural oppression into the actions of one particularly evil individual. It allows visitors to condemn her exceptional cruelty while avoiding confrontation with the everyday cruelty that was the foundation of colonial Jamaica. Not a single marker indicates where her murdered husbands might be buried, let alone the countless enslaved people who died working these lands.

The guide proudly shares how much work goes into preserving the lawns—the irrigation system, the imported fertilizers, the daily maintenance. I think about the cost of keeping this grass green versus the cost of creating a meaningful memorial.

Days later, I had a lengthy conversation with the owner’s wife of Good Hope Estate in the neighboring parish. We talked a lot about mental health before she made a careful distinction. The property belongs to her husband's family, though she lives and works there.

Good Hope was purchased and restored to be a place of healing and health, she tells me. People book the Great House and the counting house to hold retreats. Psilocybin therapy and yoga where people can address past trauma were particularly popular and something she highly recommends. Above all, she says, they are a working farm providing jobs and economic mobility to many workers who live in the countryside.

I remembered reading that of the approximately 7,000 Great Houses that once dominated Jamaica's landscape, only about 30 remain in decent condition. “Jamaicans need therapy, healing,” she says with conviction. “We carry generational trauma.”

I nod, wondering if this could be part of our reparations package from the UK—access to mental health services to process centuries of colonial violence. Then I remember the price tag: thousands of US dollars for psilocybin therapy or even a night at a yoga healing retreat. Beyond the reach of ordinary Jamaicans.

Reading my thoughts, she adds that she researched whether her family-owned slaves and concluded that the best she could do was become a “job provider.” This seems to be the moral solution. This economic framing transforms historical accountability into a transactional relationship that preserves her position of privilege while claiming to address centuries of wrongs. It echoes what I read about a prominent artist from the same milieu. It’s a benevolent identity that requires no genuine redistribution of power or wealth. You can almost set your watch to the eventuality that someone will mention a Black ancestor typically deployed to dilute responsibility for inherited privilege. This selective genealogical emphasis is common among Caribbean elites. They claim kinship with the oppressed while maintaining the economic structures their slaveholding ancestors established. Privilege constantly reinvents itself. I say nothing to dispute her rationale. She is a nice woman and I need her connections and patronage if I’m to get freelancing work on the island.

***

Driving back along Gloucester Avenue, what I grew up knowing as the “Hip Strip” later renamed to honor reggae superstar Jimmy Cliff, I consider how Jamaica struggles to reconcile its past with its present. Tourism is our economic lifeblood, yet it often requires that we perform versions of ourselves we think tourists find pleasant, versions that don't demand uncomfortable reckonings with history.

I think of Germany's concentration camps, preserved as sites of somber reflection and education. I think of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which confronts America's history of racial terror lynchings. These places say: here, something terrible happened. Here, we must remember.

Where is Jamaica's place of remembrance? Where can we, as a nation, confront the psychic wounds that continue to shape our society? Social ills that range from our persistent colorism to our economic dependence on foreign visitors? How can we move forward without acknowledging where we've been?

I navigate through Montego Bay traffic. I pass resorts, private schools, and gated communities built atop former British garrisons. I wonder what it would mean to create a space that honors not just the resistance of figures like Sam Sharpe but also the daily resistance of those who survived—those who maintained their humanity in a system designed to strip it away, those who preserved African traditions in secret, those who passed down stories and songs that would eventually become the foundation of Jamaican culture.

Perhaps what we need is not just a museum but a national conversation about how slavery's legacy continues to shape our island. Not to assign blame but to understand ourselves more fully. Until then, we remain haunted, moving through spaces marked by unacknowledged ghosts, telling incomplete stories, and wondering why the past still feels so painfully present.

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