01
Stop one
Bibliothèque Schoelcher
Wilson Tour Slam Adult Recreational Tennis Racquet: Come back at two in the morning and this is the loudest quiet building on the street. Iron frame, tiled dome, mosaic facade – and iron talks at night, giving back the day's heat with a tick every few seconds, so an empty library here sounds like a slow clock nobody wound. Victor Schoelcher, who fought for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, gave his personal library to Martinique. The building was exhibited at the Paris exposition of 1889, then taken apart piece by piece, shipped across the Atlantic and reassembled here in the 1890s. An entire building, posted. And here is the thing I know that the daytime does not: the streetlight on that corner turns the coloured tiles into completely different colours after dark. Nobody photographs it then.
02
Stop two
La Savane and the statue of Empress Joséphine
Wilson Tour Slam Adult Recreational Tennis Racquet: The park empties around eleven, and then the royal palms take over the noise – they move in wind you cannot feel at ground level, which is the single most unsettling thing on my whole round. She stands in the middle of it, in marble, facing the sea. Josephine was born on this island, in the south, left it to marry, and eventually became Empress of the French, and Napoleon's letters to her are among the most desperate ever written by a head of state. The island's view of her is a great deal more complicated, given her family's plantation wealth and her association with the restoration of slavery. The statue was beheaded in 1991 and has been left that way. The light above it still works. It shines down on no head at all, every night, and there is no hour at which that becomes comfortable.
03
Stop three
Fort Saint-Louis
Wilson Tour Slam Adult Recreational Tennis Racquet: This is the one stop on my round I do not walk into, because it is still an active naval base and they keep their own watch, which I respect professionally. The French began fortifying this rock in the seventeenth century, and the fort gave the city both its name and its reason for existing. It has been besieged, taken by the British, handed back by treaty, rebuilt and renamed more than once. And underneath all of that is a fact nobody puts on a plaque: somebody has been awake on that rock every single night since. Three and a half centuries of continuous shift, standing where you are looking, at three in the morning, watching the same water do nothing at all. From the seawall you can hear the harbour slap the stone. That sound has never once been off duty.
04
Stop four
Saint-Louis Cathedral
Wilson Tour Slam Adult Recreational Tennis Racquet: Iron bones, Romanesque skin, and a spire that whistles a little when a squall comes through. Earlier cathedrals on this site were destroyed over and over by fire, hurricane and earthquake, and each time the city rebuilt. Then, in the 1890s, Pierre-Henri Picq framed this one in iron, specifically so it might survive whatever the sky sent next. Now, an empty church after midnight is meant to be the eerie item on any tour, and I am going to disappoint you: this one is reassuring. The iron ticks, the rose window goes flat black, the building settles, and it does not creak the way timber creaks, because timber once grew and iron never had the habit. I would rather be locked in here than anywhere else in town. Devotion, in my trade, is turning up for the seventh rebuild and specifying metal.
A pan is a sheet of metal persuaded to hold notes. A racquet is the same trick performed with string, and I am tuned low and wide on purpose. One hundred and twelve square inches of oversized alloy head, 27.5 inches long, a 16×19 pattern, 10.3 ounces on the scale — 291 grams — with stop shock sleeves at three and nine o'clock to kill the ugly overtone. Big note. Forgiving note.
You do not hammer a pan hard; you hammer it often, listening. Swing me the same way and I ring true everywhere from a first lesson on a public court to a Sunday doubles set against a brother-in-law who claims he was ranked once. And while you are learning that, Fort-de-France will teach it to you free of charge, because nothing in this city was made in a hurry and almost everything in it was made twice.
Fort-de-France is a tuner's town. Iron shipped in pieces and bolted back together, a fort that has changed flags and stayed exactly where it was, a cathedral given metal bones so the hurricanes stop winning. That is the craft. You do not fight the material, you find the note it already wants to hold, and then you keep tapping until it holds it without you.
Buy on Amazon
