Finally, the clouds let us go. The sun returned. And as we approached the ferry dock, we passed the statue of a mother and child waving farewell to a man gone to sea.

I got back to Mindelo at around 6 p.m. and immediately drove out to the music festival at Baía das Gatas, a shallow bay named for the small tiger sharks that sometimes pay a friendly visit. Twenty-five years earlier, a few musicians had met on the beach here for a bonfire jam. Today, more than thirty thousand people attend the three-day concert. Some are Europeans; most are Cape Verdeans who come from other islands and all corners of the globe. As dusk fell on the festival's first night, the beach was already covered with tents. Kids jumped off a jetty, and the moon floated in the water like a yellow life-preserver.

Around 8 p.m., some half-naked dancers began to somersault through the colored fog-machine mist that wreathed the canopied stage. Paula Teixeira—a twentysomething singer based in Holland—offered an exquisite morna in which an emigrant writes from abroad, admitting he hasn't succeeded as his family had hoped. Nancy Vieira resurrected "Um Vez Soncent Era Sábe," which remembered Mindelo when the harbor was full of ships, the men had jobs, and the women wore long dresses and elaborate coral necklaces.

However, the night's central memory was of Fantcha, who floated onto the misty stage in a shoulder-baring lemon-and-tangerine gown. Her giant backlit Afro was like a solar eclipse. Switching between plaintive mornas and sprightly coladeras, she'd learned well from Cesária. Fantcha had forbidden me to leave before Paulino Vieira performed. But by 2:30 in the morning, the day's hike had begun to get the best of me and I called it quits.

The next day—my last on São Vicente—I decided to take Cesária up on her offer. Duarte and I strolled up Rua Libertadores d'Africa, past Chez Loutcha, where Cesária liked to eat. To the east was the Lombo District, the tenderloin where Cesária grew up. Her father, a musician, died when she was seven. And her mother, unable to raise five children on a cook's salary, sent Cesária to live in an orphanage. At sixteen, she met her first great love, composer Eduardo Silva, who wrote songs for her.

By the time she was twenty, she'd become popular at parties and on the radio, but two recordings she sent to Portugal were ignored, and as the years passed she grew depressed. Someone who knew her at that time told me, "If you put a bottle on the table, she would not leave until it was empty."

Not until she was forty-seven did she travel to Paris, where she soon became an international sensation. Flush at last, she moved her family out of dilapidated quarters at 7 Rua William Du Bois and built herself a three-story house not far from the Lombo. Standing outside the imposing ocher-and-yellow home, I wondered if her vintage Mercedes was in the garage. (It is said that her band members smuggle hard-to-get parts from Europe in their suitcases.) It turned out that Cesária was away on tour.