30 KRISTA A. THOMPSON


iEOg


 1W AM J R


Figure 1. James Sands, Two Natives Nassau, Bahamas, postmarked 1936, postcard.
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. The handwritten commentary on the card reads, "How would you
like to have this to ride down Congress St. doing what Eunice always [sic] wanted
to do in an auto. Aunt Syl." Collection of author.

uncharacteristic resentment. She recalled having worked for a store on the
island that had sold a postcard of a black man and a donkey, which was
sardonically captioned "Two Natives." As my eyes rest on the title of my
postcard discovery, I remembered her chagrin. Every time she was left alone
in the shop she would secret away the card equating the black Bahamian and
animal, ensuring that tourists would neither see nor collect it as a souvenir.
Despite these covert actions by my grandmother (and perhaps other black
Bahamians), a woman identified as "Aunt Syl" on the card did precisely procure
this image to send overseas. Perhaps to Miss Gracely, the addressee on the
card, the image of the black Bahamian, so offensive to one local shopkeeper,
was representative of "Nassau," as the caption also specified.
 My concern in this essay, however, is not with senders or recipients: I am
primarily interested in the contemporary meanings of turn-of-the-twentieth-
century postcards for persons like my grandmother, in other words, for local
audiences. In recent years, these old postcards have been "returned to
sender," or at least returned "home" to their place of origin. Since the 1990s,
the century-old postcards have gained widespread visibility in the Bahamas
and throughout the Anglophone Caribbean region as local collectors have
actively acquired photographs and postcards of the islands dating from the