There is a saman tree at Romney Manor that is older than the estate, more than four hundred years old, its branches reaching out across half an acre. People photograph the tree. The thing worth standing under, though, is the small stone bell tower nearby, because of why it is still there.
Every sugar estate had a bell. It rang the enslaved workers into the fields before light and held them there until dark. When emancipation came in the 1830s, people across St Kitts pulled the bell towers down, one estate after another, because they knew exactly what the bells had been. Romney's is the only one left on the island. It was spared on purpose. The Earl of Romney who held the estate had been the one planter on St Kitts who wanted to free his enslaved workers outright, ahead of what London was willing to allow, and the people here remembered it. They left his bell standing.
The bell that called people to unpaid work is the one monument the freed chose to keep.
The estate goes back to 1625, when Samuel Jefferson, an ancestor of the American president, built a modest house here and called it the Red House, after his Quaker plainness. For most of the next three hundred years the ground grew and distilled sugar cane, like every other estate on this coast, on the backs of enslaved Africans. The bell tower and the ruins next door at Wingfield are what is left of that.
Since the 1970s, Romney Manor has been something else. Caribelle Batik has its workshop here, in the gardens under the saman tree, and the cloth is dyed and waxed and drawn by hand on the premises. You can watch it being made. The makers will tell you that real batik reads the same on both sides, inside and out, because the wax carries the dye all the way through. It is a good thing to know standing on this ground: that the work done here now is skilled, paid, named, and the opposite of what the bell once rang for.
Caribelle is a two-minute walk from the Wingfield ruins, where Old Road Rum distils. Most people see both, and the saman tree, in one morning.