Friday afternoon we caught a cab to the ferry docks. As we wound slowly up the eastern side of Cap Vert, we saw the bay below us on the right, and various sights above us on the left: the French Embassy, luxury hotels, a palatial hospital that looked like the kind of sanitarium where colonists' wives would recuperate and take the airs. You can just picture them on the veranda, wearing their best white llinen, looking out at the sea.

The ferry runs to Île de Gorée about every hour all day. It operates out of the main port, so on the way out we saw docks full of shiny new cars and shipping containers (bound for the Bamako commissary? no, this time it's going through Lome). At Gorée, the boat was not very securely docked, and heaved from side to side with the tide as the passengers crowded by the rail and disembarked. I leapt onto the concrete pier without thinking about it, which was probably the right way to go. Best not to ponder the gap, the 15-foot drop, the boat crushing up against the pier, the gruesome consequences of a misstep.

Once on Gorée we were met by a gauntlet of potential tour guides, all of whom we brushed off firmly but as courteously as possible. "Bonjour, monsieur," said one. "Merci, non," said we. He got indignant and told us that that was not the proper response, that bonjour was the proper response, that we were rude. He was right on the first count, but I don't think we were rude. We could have just as easily said that it's rude to pretend to befriend someone when you just want to sell them something, and it's rude to persist after they have declined your offer.*

Gorée is very small, so we wandered without a map. I did not feel what my friend A. reported as a "weird vibe." Quite the opposite. There are no cars on the island, and the narrow cobblestone streets wind among colorful houses, with bouganvillea drooping down overhead and dropping blossoms on the path. The turquoise, brick red, and buttery yellow buildings are faded from the sun and the sea. Near the dock is an open public area, where groups of men, women, and children rest in the shade of palm trees.

On one path we met a small boy who spoke wonderful French. "I was born here," he told us at first, same as his big brother and his father. But later he scoffed: "Didn't you know I was kidding? I was born in France." He shook his head at our naive credulity and walked off toward the beach.

Perhaps A. got a strange feeling because of Gorée's history as a center of slave-trading. The museum in the old fort displays diagrams for packing slaves and old leg irons, and yes, I felt ill looking at those and imagining what it was like here in the height of the slave trade.

The center of Gorée's history is definitely the Maison des Esclaves. Downstairs, the old rooms where the slaves were held (I will post a photo soon showing the room for "hommes") were eerie. But upstairs, I got a very different feeling. First of all, the UNESCO exhibit "Lest we forget: The triumph over slavery" was open, with lots of excellent interpretation, in French and English.

My favorite part of the Maison was the conservator's office. Joseph Ndiaye has been single-handedly researching, recording, and interpreting the history of Île de Gorée, and in particular the Maison des Esclaves, since 1962. In 1978 the island was named a UNESCO World Heritage site and in the following decades he has continued to win international recognition for his work.

We saw Mr. Ndiaye at his desk, poring silently over a book, graying and bespectacled and seemingly oblivious to the crowds of tourists moving around him. The history of the island may be cruel and brutal, but the devotion of this one man to recording and sharing it is remarkable. Even if his work cannot exactly redeem the past, at least he has helped recreate Gorée as a place of beauty and scholarship.

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*Another example of this disingenousness that infuriates me: Walking down certain market streets alone, I am greeted by many young men who call me cherie. When I ignore them, they pretend to be offended that I ignored their greeting. But I am not your cherie! I tell them. Sometimes. It depends how irritable and righteous I'm feeling.