The Daly name did not arrive in Montserrat clean. It arrived through the mechanism that built the Caribbean — through indentured servitude, through forced labor, through Irish Catholics displaced from Ireland and deposited on an island that was already someone else's land. The Arawak and Carib peoples had held Montserrat long before the first Irish foot touched its volcanic soil in 1632.

"In Montserrat, the Irish names are not a legacy of triumph. They are a record of erasure — and of survival from both sides of the plantation gate."

The Daly and Dowdy families became Caribbean families the way all families in that archipelago did — through collision, through intermarriage, through the synthesis that colonialism forced and that the people themselves made sacred. The Irish-African-Karib synthesis on Montserrat produced what historians call the "Black Irish" — a people who carry Celtic surnames, speak with the faint echo of an Irish brogue, and trace their African and Aboriginal ancestry back through generations that no census was ever designed to honor.

On March 17, 1768 — St. Patrick's Day — the enslaved population of Montserrat rose up while their masters celebrated. The rebellion failed. The ringleader Cudjoe was executed. But the date was never forgotten. Montserrat is still the only nation outside Ireland where St. Patrick's Day is a national holiday — and it commemorates not the Irish, but the freedom fighters who wore their names.