I was also nagged by a statistic: More than half of Cape Verde's 429,000 citizens live outside the country. Why was I going if they'd all left? Why were they so besotted by sad songs, their mornas? I started wondering how much Zoloft to pack.

Yet watching the Cape Verdeans board the midnight plane from Beantown, I'd never seen such happy passengers. People who had come to the United States a decade before were giddy with anticipation that, in seven hours, they'd be home. It dawned on me that these people hadn't left Cape Verde because they'd wanted to but because they'd had to. During the twentieth century, it is estimated that droughts caused the death of some 200,000 islanders. No wonder so many mornas are about rain. Famine and unemployment have driven so many Cape Verdeans overseas that expats have their own representatives in the National Assembly.

These emigrants, who stoke the economy with remittances, have made Cape Verde a country without borders. Wherever they go, however successful they become, they feel sodade—variously translated as longing, nostalgia, or regret. Indeed, "Sodade," the title of Cesária's most famous song, has become a kind of national anthem.

Lately, the cause of so much heartache has brought some relief: Cape Verdean droughts have been known to last eighteen years—which sounds heavenly to sun-worshipping vacationers. The driest islands have become the most popular. I had been told that they offer never-ending beaches, world-class windsurfing, and diving among several centuries' worth of shipwrecks. Each island was said to have a distinct flavor. There was the promise of surfing, fishing, bird-watching, horseback riding, dune-bashing on ATVs, and trekking through misty forests. I'd heard you could climb a volcano and slide down the other side. I'd also heard that there was fast, sensuous music which, far from inducing tears, ignited dancers' loins.

This woeful little country seemed to be hiding a lot of fun.

I left home with a sheaf of ten paper tickets, arriving in the capital, Praia, on the big island of Santiago, early the next morning for my connecting flight to São Vicente. Hanging out in the airport's lone café, I could tell from all the dreadlocks and nose rings that I wasn't the only passenger headed for the Baía das Gatas music festival. I was killing time with the talent. When the announcement came that the flight would be delayed, they broke out their instruments.

At the center of the spontaneous lounge act was a caramel-skinned beauty with a blond Afro the radius of a mushroom cloud. "I'm Fantcha," she said, after I'd worked up the nerve to introduce myself. "Just Fantcha. I'm singing at the festival." She was born on São Vicente but now lives in Brooklyn.

"Cesária is like my second mother," she said. "When I was a girl, growing up in Mindelo, I sang with a Carnival troupe. Ti Goi, one of Cape Verde's great composers, introduced me to her. He said to Cesária, She reminds me of you when you were young.' And Cesária said, What do you mean when I was young? Can she sing?' So I sang one of Cesária's own songs for her. She liked it."