Before the constitution could be adopted, a referendum was to be held on the question of Anguillian independence. Fisher was back in Massachusetts--Martha's Vineyard--when, on the 10th of July, he received a telegram reading "REFERENDUM SET FOR THE 11TH IMPERATIVE YOU RETURN IMMEDIATELY BRING INTERNATIONAL OBSERVERS." He did his best.

"I got to St. Thomas," Fisher says, "and there were Anguillians--who lived in Anguilla but worked in St. Thomas--lined up waiting for a charter plane to take them over and back at $15 a head each way to go and vote. They were using half a week's pay and losing a day just to vote. And of course a lot of them couldn't get there because there was not enough space on the plane--it takes 40 minutes each way from St. Thomas. But one of them gave me his seat knowing he wanted me down; it was a little embarrassing because the reporter I had with me, an associate editor from the Washington Post, didn't make it till several hours later. They wouldn't give up the seat for a reporter."

High Standards

In the morning Fisher toured the polling places and concluded that the referendum met the highest standards of electoral honesty. "It took most of the evening to count the ballots because they would hold up a ballot and the man would say, 'the next ballot: question one [secession], yes; question two [interim government], yes; is there a challenge to the ballot?' Then they would pass the ballot around the table to see if any one of these sort of professional ballot challengers wanted to challenge it. The way the ballot was printed, it had a perforated slip across the top in which the man would sign his name, which would be torn off to show that he had voted, and that went into the pile of receipts for the ballot, and then you voted on the perforation below and there was no way to identify which perforation came from which ballot. But occasionally a man would sign his name on the ballot and the mark would come down across the perforation, and whenever this happened, someone would challenge the ballot on the ground that it was possible to go through the signature slips and find out how he voted. And we lost some 22 ballots this way. But anyway, along about midnight the vote was counted." The result was 1813 for secession, 5 against.

Fisher, on seeing this remarkable act of democracy performed, felt there should be a meeting the next day of the Island Council and other important Anguillians. To his surprise, he discovered that most of the people saw little need for further action. There had not been a great deal of government on Anguilla when it was a British colony, nor when it was an associated state, and few Anguillians wanted to start now.

Fisher recalls that he "finally got a hold of someone, and I said, 'Where is everybody'? And this fellow said, 'But it's all over. We're independent.'" Eventually Fisher did arrange a meeting, "and we got people to write on one side of a blackboard the jobs that had to be done--the roads, the hospitals, the schools, raising money, bookeeping, economic planning and development, foreign affairs, defense, police. On the other side of the blackboard, we wrote the names of people that somebody thought might be good for the job, and then we just had long discussions of who ought to do all the actual work, who ought to be in charge of the individual projects."

Racial Issue

The next step was to decide on a provisional council, and it was here that the racial issue came up or, more exactly, failed to come up. "I said, 'How about the white-black problem? I've noticed here you have four whites out of seven on the council.' They said, 'Four what?' I said, 'Well...er...excuse me, but there's a problem here...let's lay our cards on the table. Let's be sure we can live with this group and so forth,' and they said, 'No problem, no problem.' I found it hard to believe but I pressed them and they assured me. Then I said, 'There's also a little problem of geography: do you have people from different parts of the island?' And they said, 'Mr. Fisher, what do you think we've been doing all afternoon?'"

Anguilla may have a racial problem, Fisher says, but if so it is completely different from anything American. The island's 6,000 people are overwhelmingly black, but in the heat of a political debate it was possible for one Anguillian to refer cryptically to "a certain social group" and turn out to mean just that--a group of men, white and black, who saw each other socially.

Since the Fourth of July, Fisher has been back to Anguilla five times. The crisis period fell in the first weeks of August, when there was the threat of a military landing by British Marines and a peacekeeping force of Carribean powers. But last-minute negotiations and a fear of real bloodshed prevented such a landing. In any case, St. Kitts has been shown incapable or unwilling to attempt Anguilla's recapture, and the prospects for de facto independence, with the kind of assistance Anguilla now requires, are apparently improving.

Fisher, the legal adviser, says that his ultimate objective is simply to remove himself from the picture. Dictionary definitions of "colony" and "nation" have little relevance for Anguilla, but self-determination and paternalism do. And even a clear selfdeterminist like Fisher can feel occasional twinges of paternalism