Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “Qui, Papa?”

  “Qui, monsieur.” Then he warns Tyrone to get himself gone, for this is not his country. This is Africa, he hisses. “Poussé allé. Ça lan Guinée.”

  Tyrone shakes his head no and asks where they’ve gone to kill the pig. He has to see some people now, tonight, for he has important business with them.

  The old man jerks and turns himself around, wobbling on the pivot of one leg, a twitching, sudden kind of dance, almost a seizure. Then, his back to Tyrone, facing through the cluster of huts toward the sea, he speaks. His words seem jumbled at first, incoherent, uttered as chant, prayer or prophecy, Tyrone can’t tell which, but the old man’s voice and words frighten him.

  “Nèg’ nwè, con ça ou yé, y’ap coupé lavie ou débor!” A black man like you, the old man warns, will eat with you, will drink with you, will cut the life out of you. “Santa Marie la Madeleine, sonné une sonne pou’ moin, pour m’allé.” Ring a bell for me, Mary Magdalene, so I may go. “Sonné une sonne pou’ les petites nagé.” Ring a bell for the drowned children.

  Reaching forward with both hands, Tyrone grabs the old man’s shoulders, and calling him by name, “François!” as if to break the spell, demands to know where the hounfor is located. Now, he must go there now, or it will be too late in the night to do his business.

  François stops his dance, and he laughs, a long, loud, sardonic laugh. “Bien,” he says. “C’est bien bon.” He will take him to the hounfor, he says, giggling. Now. But first there must be more money passed between them.

  Tyrone unfolds a dollar bill and gives it to the old man, who limps past, mumbling and grumbling, one minute complaining about having to do this dirty business, the next promising Tyrone that he will love what he will soon see. “Ou malhonnête, compé, compé à moin,” he says. You are dishonest, my friend. And a second later, “Nan Guinée plaisi-à belle! Oh, a n’allé wé yo!” In Africa, pleasure is beautiful, as we shall see.

  François heads into the darkness, taking an invisible path off the moonlit lane at the edge of the village. Tyrone hurries to catch up to the old man’s bent form and follows him, a few feet behind, through the brush a ways, until he hears a stream nearby, where they turn right and walk upstream along the rocky bank. The old man walks quickly, more easily, it seems in rock and brush than back in the village, as if, once he stepped into the bush, his broken foot were miraculously healed.

  2

  For the Jamaican, the next five hours are difficult. He and Dubois had arrived at the Haitian settlement on New Providence later than they planned, which gave them little enough time as it was to anchor, come ashore, round up the Haitians and get out to sea again. Dubois was too cautious coming across from the Keys, afraid, perhaps, of the open sea, though he claimed he’d fished in the North Atlantic off New England in rough waters many times and this, to him, was a pleasure, easy sailing, a two-hundred-mile run due east across the Florida Straits and the Gulf Stream, south of the Biminis and north of Andros, with a mate, the Jamaican, who’s made the trip a hundred times. Even so, he held the Belinda Blue back to half-speed, not much more than fifteen knots, and when they arrived at Coral Harbour, it was already ten o’clock at night, and though they didn’t really need gas, Dubois insisted on filling the tanks. Then, because of the time, they had trouble getting anyone at the marina to sell them gas, which delayed them yet another hour.

  “Better safe than sorry,” Dubois told his mate, who nodded and said nothing, although he was already a little worried about how much time they were taking. This whole journey, once they had the Haitians aboard, ought to be made under the cover of darkness, or they were likely to be spotted in the Florida Straits by plane or helicopter and boarded minutes later by the coast guard. The surest way to get away with this was to come back across from the Bahamas in the nighttime, do the whole thing in darkness, which meant that you had to leave New Providence before midnight, and even then you risked being seen at dawn off the crowded coast of south Florida.

  Tyrone did not particularly like Boone’s idea of bringing Dubois into their smuggling operations in the first place. Dubois is a good-natured man and a good fisherman, and he handles the boat well; he is not a hard man, however, not like Boone or most of the others in the trade. And something about Dubois puts Tyrone off, makes him mistrust him. He’s too fretful, too unsure of himself, maybe too innocent, for this kind of work. And now, just as the Jamaican feared, here they are on their first job together, and they’re already taking chances they should not take.

  With the Haitians off in the bush for one of their African voodoo ceremonies, Tyrone thinks, they might as well postpone the crossing to Florida until tomorrow morning anyhow, and he hopes Dubois doesn’t panic when the mate does not return quickly to the boat, that Dubois will simply wait for him all night anchored in the bay, even if it takes Tyrone till daylight to get back, as, with these crazy Haitians, it might. Haitians aren’t like other people; everything is both more complicated for them and simpler, in ways you can’t predict. Tyrone hopes that Dubois somehow knows this and that he won’t be afraid or confused and pull anchor and run. Dubois himself, Tyrone thinks as he makes his way through the tangled bushes and scrambles over limestone rocks behind the mumbling old man, is a little like the Haitians. You never know what he might do. He seems to have his own peculiar way of seeing things, and that worries Tyrone. This kind of operation ought to be simple, he thinks, but with a man like Dubois, it can get complicated in a minute.

  The Haitians’ voodoo ceremony interests Tyrone only slightly. As a child in rural Jamaica, with his mother and aunts and uncles he attended many dances and ceremonies that he remembers now with no real pleasure and little understanding. Though the forms and content of these ceremonies are indeed the half-retained remnants of ancient African rites, they’re not much more than scraps and rags torn off the intricately woven cloth of old Dahomeyan worship, and in rural Jamaica, these worn and faded bits of song, dance and drumbeat have been patched together with no conscious model or pattern for guidance, so that what was once a gorgeous, intricately coherent robe is now an ill-fitting smock that serves as a kind of peculiarly anachronistic invitation to sing and dance oneself into a frenzy and, for many, ecstatic possession.

  That particular aspect of the Haitians’ voudon, possession, is also ordinary, common, to Tyrone, something for old women and drunken men—he’s seen it in church, on dance floors, at feasts in the maroon towns in the Cockpit Country of west Jamaica, and because he’s never wanted it for himself, he has no interest in watching it in someone else.

  As the Jamaican follows the old man up the long, gradually narrowing gorge in the Barrens and hears the drums grow louder and more insistent and the singing and chanting more coherent, as he glimpses through the bush flashes of light from candles and kerosene lanterns, he believes that, when he finally arrives at the hounfor, he will be able simply to move through the crowd as if he were at a camp meeting or revival back in West Kingston and tap each of his passengers on the shoulder and draw him or her away from the crowd and down the hill to the settlement, where they will quickly pack their bundles, take their money out of hiding and follow him down to the beach, where he will run them out to the Belinda Blue in the dinghy six or eight at a time. While he sweats and gasps for breath from the effort of keeping up with the old man, Tyrone busily speculates and worries about how he and Dubois might hide the Haitians once they are aboard, cover them with a tarpaulin, maybe, so the boat will look empty to a plane crossing overhead in daylight. Then they might be able to get across the straits and enter crowded waters by nightfall tomorrow, drop the Haitians south of Miami and be in Moray Key by midnight, drinking beer in the Clam Shack. Tyrone is an eminently practical man; he believes that someday he will own his own boat. This Haitian mumbo-jumbo is country nonsense to him, an embarrassment of sorts, because they are black West Indians and he is a black West Indian also, and white people can’t easily tell the difference between them. He’ll be glad when t
his part of the journey is over.

  Dubois will be glad too, Tyrone thinks. The man’s nervous, worried that his wife will find out he’s dealing in Haitians. As if it matters what she knows. Dubois told Tyrone his wife believes they’re taking a party of Canadians out of Nassau and will be gone for no longer than a day and a night and the next day. Now, if they’re ten or twelve hours late getting back to Moray Key, the woman will fret. And she may do something stupid, like call out the coast guard. This Dubois is trouble. Men like him should stick to fishing.

  Suddenly, the old man leading Tyrone has entered a clearing, and Tyrone has automatically followed and has found himself in a crowd of men, women and children, their faces raptly attentive to what’s going on beyond them. They are looking into a cleared space the size of a large room, covered with thatch, where a service is being conducted. The drums have ceased, and the people have been stilled, and the action de grâce, the formal invocation, has begun.

  An elderly man with spectacles and dressed in white, the prêt’ savanne, stands by the centerpost and reads from a prayerbook. In the dust at the base of the centerpole, an elaborately geometrical vever has been drawn in flour and ash, and a short ways behind the post, an altar has been set up, a long table covered with white cloth over which have been carefully arranged lithographs of the saints, a plastic crucifix and vials of holy water, lighted candles, bowls of food—rice, cassava, chicken, bananas, corn—and glasses of coffee, orange soda, Coca-Cola.

  A short way to the right of the pret’ savanne, a woman in a red satin dress, the mambo, is seated on a kitchen chair. She’s rocking slowly back and forth in the chair, her eyes tightly closed, her right hand rhythmically shaking the asson in time to the drone of the old man with the book, who chants on and on, occasionally rising to song and then falling back to chant again. Every now and then, as if to punctuate a particular phrase or prayer, the mambo calls out, “Grâce mise’corde!” and the audience repeats her call, “Grâce mise’ corde!”and the prêt’ savanne drones on, “… au nom de Dieu, au nom de Sainte Vierge de Ciel, au nom de Saints de Tè’, au nom de Saints de la Lune …”

  The Jamaican scans the crowd for familiar faces, but is momentarily distracted by the sight of a group of animals tethered to a small mahoe tree off to his right and attended by a trio of young women wearing white, full-skirted dresses and scarlet headbands. The animals are various and peaceful together, several ruffle-feathered chickens, a pair of doves, a black, yellow-eyed goat, a small gray pig and a large black boar. Beyond the animals is a cookfire and next to it a second altar table covered in white and loaded with bowls and bottles of food and drink. Tied to the top branches of a tall cottonwood tree are several white and red banners, hanging limply in the windless moonlight.

  The people all suddenly kneel, and Tyrone, the only person left standing, quickly kneels with them, as the prêt’ savanne intones the prayers, a Pater Noster, the Credo, the Ave Maria. During the prayers, Tyrone lifts his head slightly and sees that the mambo is staring directly at him, a hard, hot look that alarms him. He peers around at the crowd on his left, recognizes, despite their bowed heads, one or two of the Haitians he signed up, scans the group to his right and sights Vanise and the boy, her nephew. Vanise is praying fervently, crossing herself over and over, but the boy is watching the mambo. His gaze follows hers across the clearing of the peristyle and into the audience, and when he sees Tyrone, he smiles broadly and nods.

  Tyrone smiles back.

  There is a benediction offered by the old man in spectacles, and everyone rises, and the man shifts into a chanting, hymnlike song, accompanied now by the drums, slowly, seriously, bringing the people’s voices into it one by one, until soon everyone is singing together, and all three drums are throbbing in unison. The mambo, who has not once taken her powerful eyes off Tyrone, begins to move in time to the song, shouting as she stamps and whirls across the smooth ground:

  Poussé allé,

  Poussé allé,

  Icit pas pays oui

  Ça lan Guinée,

  Icit pas pays ou!

  Gradually, her dance circles her toward the audience, which parts for her as she spirals near, making a path that leads straight to Tyrone. Coming toward him from the other side, pushing and pulling at people’s shoulders, squirming between them, is the boy Claude. Both the mambo and the boy reach Tyrone at the same instant.

  The woman glares into Tyrone’s face, studies it sharply, bit by bit, his eyes, nose, mouth, his beard and dreadlocked hair, as if expropriating each piece of him and making it her own.

  “Icit pas pays oui” she hisses. This is not your country. “Ça lan Guinée!” This land is Africa. “Poussé allé!” she shrieks at him. Get you gone!

  Over on his left, Tyrone sees the old man with the stick, the man who brought him here, laughing and joining in with the chant, “Poussé allé! Poussé alléI” In seconds, the entire mass of people, sixty or seventy of them, has taken up the cry, and their faces have turned ugly and threatening, even that of the old man, François. There are young men and old, mothers, grandmothers and maidens, people in tattered clothes and people dressed meticulously in white, drunk men and sober, people who look sane to Tyrone and people who look insane, and all of them are raging at him, Get you gone! Get you gone! Get you gone!

  Except one, the boy, Claude Dorsinville, who grabs Tyrone by the arm and yanks him away, pulls him back into the trees and away from the crowd. The mambo wheels around and heads for the peristyle, where she takes up her dance again, and a woman is mounted by a loa, and a cheer goes up. The drums rise in intensity and pace and are joined by the clanging beat of the ogan. Another woman is mounted by the loa Damballah and throws herself face forward on the ground, where she writhes like a snake.

  Back in the bushes, in darkness and shadow, Tyrone and the boy begin to speak to one another. The boy speaks almost as much English now as the Jamaican speaks Creole, and soon they have worked out a plan. Tyrone will wait down in the gorge a short ways, and the boy will bring the passengers to him, one by one. Some of them he already knows; others Tyrone will have to read out to him, for the boy cannot read. When they have all assembled in the gorge, the boy will join them, and together the group will go down from the Barrens to the village, where they will gather their few possessions, pay Tyrone and be transported to the boat, which is waiting for them in the bay. “Den we go to America, mon,” Tyrone says. “Yout’-man, bring dem Haitians forward now,” he tells the boy, who grins and ducks back into the bushes and heads for the hounfor.

  Moments later, the boy returns with a scrawny, nearly bald man in tow, a man half-drunk, who turns obsequious as soon as he sees Tyrone. The boy disappears again, reappearing a moment later with two young men, tall, stringy twenty-year-olds who formally shake Tyrone’s hand and cross their arms over their chests and wait in shy silence. Then a middle-aged woman with two small children, and an old, half-blind woman whom Claude leads by the hand and passes over to the woman with the children as if handing her a third child. This goes on rapidly, until at last Claude has brought out of the hounfor fourteen people, all the people on Tyrone’s list but two, Claude himself and his aunt, Vanise.

  The drums have reached a frantic yet still organized and coherent pace. The voices of the singers, however, as Claude has removed them one by one from the crowd, have diminished in volume and intensity way out of proportion to the numbers of the missing members of the chorus. It’s as if every time Claude removes one singer, four others fall into silence. The Haitians surrounding Tyrone down in the dark confines of the gorge have begun to grow restless and agitated; they move about nervously, looking back toward the hounfor one minute and at each other the next, as if for corroboration or denial of the truth of what they have seen there.

  Tyrone puts his list before the boy’s sweating face and points out the boy’s own name and that of his aunt. He himself doesn’t really care if she comes or not, especially since he promised her a bargain rate, but he knows that she h
olds the boy’s fare and there is now no way he will be able to leave without taking the boy. “Where Auntie, yout’-man?” he asks the boy. “Cyan forget Auntie.”

  “Him cyan come …” the boy says, looking at the ground. “Him … him got loa en tète …” he stumbles.

  Tyrone puts his arm around the boy’s bony shoulders and steps him away from the others. “You got de money?”

  Claude shakes his head no.

  Tyrone shrugs his shoulders. “Got to get Auntie, den.”

  The boy turns and walks back toward the hounfor, which suddenly—or so it seems to Tyrone—has gone silent. He hasn’t been paying attention to the noise and flickering lights from the hounfor; he’s been concentrating on his passenger list. The Haitians in his group have grown extremely restive now, shifting their feet and looking at one another, then peering back up along the gorge to the trees that surround the hounfor and the red and white banners in the cottonwood tree, which have begun to flutter in an offshore breeze.

  The group is made up half of men, half of women, with three small children. Tyrone goes back to counting them and adding up their fares in his head, calculating his share of the profits, one-fourth plus whatever he’s able to skim off the top, when he hears someone breaking noisily through the brush behind him. He turns and sees the boy Claude, a small child slung against one side and the woman Vanise being dragged along behind. The boy is out of breath and grunting from the effort of pulling the woman through the short macca bushes and over the rough limestone, for the woman seems dead drunk or drugged, in a stupefied state with her eyes rolled back, her mouth slack, her legs and arms loose and wobbly. Her white dress has come undone almost to her waist, exposing her brassiere and dark belly, and is torn and spotted with mud; her hair is matted and awry, and her face is splotched with dirt.