Revealing royalty: the tale of Blair's princess

Junior Shona Chong, a member of the Blair Safety Committee, scarfs down a french fry as she turns to confront an out-of-bounds sophomore walking up the 220s stairway. The sophomore mumbles an apology as she forces him to make eye contact. But there's more behind her confidence and take-charge attitude than a patrol belt. Armed with a stack of textbooks instead of a royal staff, Princess Sambola, as Chong was called when she ruled over the 300-odd members of the Garifuna tribe of Nicaragua, has learned to keep her stateliness thousands of miles outside her royal quarters.

The story of her people reads like a legend. Slaves from Africa were shipwrecked on a Honduran island. John Sambola, one of Chong's maternal ancestors, found a naked, wild woman in the woods and took her to be his wife. Based on her advice, Sambola led a segment of his clan to a neighboring island and crowned himself king.

It was into this culture that Chong was born, a royal Sambola in status, if not name. Growing up with her grandparents, she says, seemed like a storybook life. "When I was a kid, it was all too good to be true, something from a movie," she explains.

Chong doesn't keep her legacy a secret from her teachers and friends—doing so reminds her of an era when discrimination forced the Garifuna to hide their cultural heritage.

According to Celio Cabildo of the Organization for Ethnic Community Development, the majority of the Garifuna tried to ignore traditional politics and folklore in favor of assimilation in the 1970s and 1980s.
But with the help of a Honduran faction of the Garifuna, Chong's people gradually recovered their legacy and began to return to Fe, their portion of Nicaragua. As a little girl, Chong says she remembers how pure and isolated her village seemed.

In the Nicaraguan tourist brochures about Chong's village, the ocean looks untouched, says the monarch. But, unlike the ocean, the Garifuna have not been able to stay as unscathed as she'd hoped.

It was in that same blue ocean that a 13-year-old Chong, out in a speedboat, discovered packets of floating narcotic powder. "Someone had just dumped out a load of drugs," she recalls. "And the more I looked into it, the more I realized: My people were the ones making and buying the drugs."

From that point forward, Chong's role in her community changed. No longer content to serve as a figurehead, she became a leader. She suddenly had her own dragon to slay—fighting the corruption and sleaze that came with easy money in Nicaragua.

And that job was tougher than any fictionalized empress' task. "TV princesses," as Chong calls them, are fakes. The ones in the movies have it too easy; the ones in the news are too paranoid, she says. "How can you be a good leader if you're cut off from everyone by bodyguards?" she asks.

Monarchy by empathy is what Chong prides herself on. She was part ceremonial sovereign and part confidante for the members of her tribe. But soon she found herself one of the sole caretakers of the Garifuna youth. Enforcement mechanisms were ineffective at best. Although the Garifuna trusted each other implicitly, they were subject to a corrupt police department that would throw an innocent teen in jail in order to claim the monthly bonus they received for arresting a drug lord, Chong says.

This corruption is, at least in part, why Chong's now a Blazer. Her mother felt America was less fraudulent and more opportunity-laden than her home country and ultimately convinced Chong to leave Nicaragua for an America full of frigid winters and neighbors who lock their doors, both equally alien concepts to the Caribbean-bred princess. Following in the glass-heeled footsteps of such silver screen notables as Snow White and Anastasia, Chong's given up her figurative throne for a whole new world.

As for the future, Chong's thinking of taking over her father's chain of motels and discos when she's a little older. And she's got someone new to think about: Chong wants her one-year-old, half-African daughter Tisha to be able to continue the royal lineage in something closer to luxury, she explains.

Eighteen-year-old Chong wants something else for her daughter, as well. Not necessarily a life in Fe, but at least some schooling there for Tisha, who currently lives with her maternal grandmother. "I'd like to leave her there for at least a year," she says. "That way, she'll know what she really is. I want her to have a story to tell."