A Studio in the Sky: The Caribbean Names Inside the 9/11 Roll, Twenty-Five Years On

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the American story is told and retold. The Caribbean one is not. More than a hundred of the dead came from these islands, and one of them was a Jamaican sculptor whose whole life's work was flight.

On the night of September 10, 2001, the sculptor Michael Rolando Richards stayed late and slept in his studio on the 92nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a "Studio in the Sky" granted to him by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He was born in New York in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and for more than a decade he had made work about the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black pilots of the Second World War, and about flight itself as freedom and as faith. One of his sculptures, cast in 1999, showed a Tuskegee aviator pierced by tiny airplanes, a Saint Sebastian of the air. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the tower between the 93rd and 99th floors on the morning of September 11, the debris sealed the stairwells on his floor. He did not get out. No remains were ever recovered. His name is cut into the bronze at the North Pool, panel N-63. An artist who gave his life to the image of flight was taken by it, and there is no crueler symmetry in all of that day.

He was not alone. Richards was one of more than a hundred Caribbean immigrants who died on September 11, drawn from at least fourteen nations and territories: Guyana and Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Puerto Rico. Jamaica alone lost some twenty-six of its people. They are counted inside the American total of 2,977 dead, and they are rarely named in the American story.

Many of them were the people who made the towers run. On the 107th floor, at the Windows on the World restaurant, the kitchens and the dining rooms were staffed heavily by immigrants, and among the dead were Caribbean names, Joyce Smith of Jamaica among them. They were cooks and servers and stewards who had crossed an ocean for the ordinary dignity of work, and who died at the top of the tallest building in the city before most of it had woken up.

And some of them ran toward it. Karl Henry Joseph, born in Haiti, was a firefighter with Engine 207, one of the 343 New York firefighters killed that day. Kris Romeo Bishundat of Guyana, twenty-three years old, died not in New York but at the Pentagon, in the uniform of the United States Navy. The Caribbean's dead were spread across every corner of that morning, in the offices and the kitchens, in the firehouses and the armed forces.

The region felt September 11 a second time, in a wound that lasted for years. The Caribbean lives on visitors who arrive by air, and most of them are American, so when American air travel stopped, the Caribbean's economy stopped with it. Arrivals to the region fell by 18.3% in the wake of the attacks, against an 11% decline worldwide, which is to say the Caribbean was hit almost twice as hard as the rest of the planet. For years afterward the Caribbean Tourism Organization measured every later downturn against the one that followed 9/11. The towers came down in Lower Manhattan and the hotel rooms emptied in Montego Bay and Bridgetown and Oranjestad. The same event killed the region's sons and daughters and then, for a long season, took its living too.

This is why the Ledger writes the names. The world is marking the twenty-fifth anniversary with the great ceremonies it deserves: the reading of the roll on the memorial plaza, the seven silences, the two beams of light thrown up into the night where the towers once stood. But the Caribbean names inside that roll belong to us, and no one else will keep them. A hundred families on these small islands lost someone in a foreign city on a clear September morning, and twenty-five years is not nearly long enough to let them slip out of memory.

So the honest tribute is not a grand one. It is a name read slowly, and then another. Michael Richards, sculptor, of Kingston and New York. Joyce Smith, of Jamaica. Karl Joseph, of Haiti. Kris Bishundat, of Guyana. Nizam Hafiz, of Guyana. And more than a hundred others from these islands who went to work in the tallest buildings in the world and did not come home. A quarter of a century on, we say their names, because they were ours, and because remembering is the last thing we can still do for them.

Editor's note

In 2027 the Ledger will carry one voice from that day into In the Chair, Global Edition, our interview taken worldwide with the Caribbean thread intact. If you are, or you know, a Caribbean survivor of September 11 who would sit for that conversation, write to us. Some testimony should be recorded while it can still be given in person.