Fiction- The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Carribean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants- black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense ambivalent relationships that evolve - between natives and foreigners, blacks and whites, haves and have-nots - keenly dramatize the vicissitudes of power.