Voyager

by Russell Banks

  DEDICATION

  To Chase, the beloved,

  and in memory of Ann Hendrie, James Tate,

  and C. K. Williams,

  Fellow Travelers

  EPIGRAPH

  As the voyager navigating among the isles of the Archipelago sees the luminous mist lift toward evening and slowly detects the outline of the shore, I begin to make out the profile of my death.

  —Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Voyager

  PART TWO

  Pilgrim’s Regress

  Primal Dreams

  House of Slaves

  The Last Birds of Paradise

  Innocents Abroad

  Last Days Feeding Frenzy

  The Wrong Stuff

  Fox and Whale, Priest and Angel

  Old Goat

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Russell Banks

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Early versions of some of these writings were previously published in the following magazines and journals: Brick, Condé Nast Traveler, Conjunctions, Esquire, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and Natural History. The author is grateful to the editors of these publications, especially to Klara Glowczewska of Condé Nast Traveler.

  PART ONE

  VOYAGER

  A man who’s been married four times has a lot of explaining to do. Perhaps especially a man in his mid-seventies from northern New England who has longed since boyhood for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue, and who so often has turned those longings toward the Caribbean.

  Why the Caribbean? Who can reliably say? Whether arriving as conquistador or castaway, as fugitive financier or packaged tourist or backpacking lonely planeteer, whether costumed as Ponce de León or Robinson Crusoe or Errol Flynn or Robert Vesco or the little-known American writer bearing the name of Russell Banks, early on I got yanked by the bright green islands and turquoise seas of the Caribbean out of myself and home into high-definition dreams that I projected onto my larger world like a hologram. And while some of my dreams were innocent enough or merely naive, like Crusoe’s, and some reckless, like Flynn’s, all of them got broken and re-formed by the reality of the place and the people who lived there: Ponce got slain by the natives on a south Florida beach; Crusoe, meeting Friday, learned humanity and went home a better man; Flynn, sailing to Jamaica, stepped ashore as Captain Blood; Vesco, conning Fidel, died in jail for it. And Russell Banks, that little-known writer from New England—it’s still unclear what broke and re-formed him there.

  It’s certain that something about the Caribbean draws Europeans and, especially, North Americans out of their accustomed lives. One rarely goes there solely to satisfy one’s curiosity. It’s not the semitropical winter climate and the white sands, either—although that’s the usual explanation. That’s what’s advertised. And it’s not the myth of long-delayed, long-desired release from puritanical inhibitions. Also much promoted. One travels to the Antilles driven by vague desires, mostly unexamined, rarely named, never advertised. One goes like a bee to a blossom, as if drawn by some powerful image of prelapsarian beauty and innocence, where life as one has grown used to it at home—polluted and corrupt and cold and erotically constricted and dark—has somehow been kept from the garden. One likes to believe that in the Caribbean there are no snakes. The few found there surely came from elsewhere, isolatos, outliers from the north carried by tourists in their luggage.

  I was no different. For years I, too, traveled to the Caribbean drawn by unexamined, unnamed desires, until in the late 1970s, still a young man, disillusioned by the poverty and corruption, and embarrassed and angered by what I viewed as my government’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for both, and chagrined by my fellow American tourists, who were arriving in growing numbers in packaged and cruise-shipped hordes, and humbled by my inability to cross the racial and economic and cultural barriers that fenced me in and out, after a half-dozen island-hopping tours and eighteen months of living in rural Jamaica with my second wife, Christine, and our three daughters, I finally packed our bags, and we returned home to New England—for good, I believed—where I tried to stop dreaming up the Caribbean.

  But it wasn’t that easy. I thought when I got home that I had wakened, but in my dreams I kept remembering the sharp clarity of the light, the overwhelming intensity of the landscape, the smell of a wood cook-fire in a country village, the sense-surrounding passion and brilliance of Caribbean music and speech. I remembered the excitement of learning to love a people and place not remotely my own and the stupefying wonder of colliding with a cultural and racial and geographic otherness so extreme that, no matter how hard and honorably I tried to penetrate it, I was left exhausted and confused and excluded. And alone. Especially that. As if I had finally discovered there the meaning and permanence of solitude. Not just my solitude, but everyone’s.

  One night in Jamaica I sat by a window in a Port Antonio rooming house that overlooked the silver moonlit bay below, listening to the palm trees chatter in the evening breeze. Fifty miles away, in a country village called Anchovy on the other side of the island, Christine and our three daughters were asleep in our rented house. I was studying scattered dots of light in the jungle-covered hillside that danced their way from the bay up the silhouetted side of the volcanic mountain behind me. I wondered idly if the yellow lights were fireflies—then suddenly realized that those lights are homes, you idiot, homes, where real people live out their real lives, hundreds of tiny, one-room, tin-roofed cinder-block and daub-and-wattle cabins lit by candles and smoky kerosene lamps, where men and women and children are living in a reality utterly unlike my own, a world just as subjective as mine, but infinitely more difficult and punishing, their lives and dreams putting the ease and luxury of mine to shame. In the end their inner lives and dreams were for me unknowable. Perhaps it had always been so, but somehow at that moment my own inner life and my own dreams became unknowable. As if they belonged to someone else. As if they were a stranger’s, and I myself had none of my own.

  Afterward, back in the United States, my scattered, fragmented memories slowly over the years began to attach to one another and coalesce into a narrative. When Christine and I lived in Jamaica, after years of unraveling and raveling, the sexual and political and social and economic ties and our shared love for our daughters that for more than a decade had bound us in marriage somehow at last came completely and permanently undone. We did not intend or wish for it, at the time we barely noticed it, and for long afterward neither of us could say how or why it happened.

  Narratives based solely on fading, vested memories, i.e., memoirs, are unreliable and tend to be self-serving projections anyhow. To bend, distort, and reshape those memories, hoping to make them into a coherent account I could trust, and expecting in that way both to learn and tell myself the truth of what had destroyed Christine’s and my marriage, I wrote and published a book. It was called The Book of Jamaica—a novel, I insisted, not a memoir. Set in Jamaica, it was about a white American man, a university professor more than a little like the author, married to a woman more than a little like the author’s wife.

  Reliably narrated or not, in both the reader and the writer fictions engender desire. It’s a paradox, counterintuitive, perhaps; but while an honorable, artistically ambitious, well-constructed work of fiction usually provides resolution, it doesn’t necessarily satisfy or erase one’s desire for a solution. When a novel or a story succeeds in penetrating a
mystery, it proceeds at once to raise a further, deeper mystery. In answering one question, it asks a more difficult question that otherwise would never have been raised. For a long time I ignored or simply denied the existence of any mystery beyond the dissolution of my second marriage—as fictionalized in The Book of Jamaica—until a decade later, in the late 1980s, a third marriage and divorce later, when contemplating the commencement of a fourth marriage, I found myself drawn back to that further, deeper mystery.

  I got invited by a glossy New York travel magazine to make and write about a winter-long, island-hopping journey through the Caribbean. Thirty islands in sixty days. No restrictions as to length. All expenses paid. Tempted by the thought of testing my constructed, decade-old, novelistic narrative against the mystery it had tried to penetrate, and hoping, if possible, to name the further mystery engendered there, I negotiated a sabbatical semester from my university and accepted the assignment. Chase, the woman I wished to make my fourth wife, was then teaching at the University of Alabama. She agreed to accompany me on my travels into my Caribbean past and the troubles that possibly resided there, troubles whose existence she was not yet aware of. She thought only that it was a posh writing assignment for me, one that happened also to offer her a few months away from Tuscaloosa, which was something she’d been trying to arrange since the day she first arrived from western Massachusetts three years earlier.

  At the time, my divorce from my third wife, Becky, was working its slow way through the legal system, and though Chase was living in Tuscaloosa and I was commuting between a Manhattan sublet and my classes at Princeton, we had been lovers and all but husband and wife for nearly a year by then. Even so, I was still courting her—perhaps to a greater degree than at the beginning of our love affair the previous spring. Between the onset of the madness of falling in love and the sobering formalization of that state later through cohabitation and marriage, there usually unfolds a long period of mutual courtship. It’s the period when lovers disinter their secrets and show them to each other, making it possible for both sets of secrets to be mingled into one. That’s the usual need, anyhow; and the plan. Sometimes courtship continues well into the period of cohabitation and marriage. Courtship has even been known to extend beyond the end of one marriage and get paid forward into yet a new marriage—as if one were courting one’s ex-wife or ex-husband as well, retroactively.

  Unlike fantasies, secrets don’t lie. They erupt from the depths of one’s subconscious mind and harden like lava into the topography of one’s character. Neither willed nor consciously shaped, secrets are epistemologically different from fantasies. They are not who we were or want to be; they are who we become. In revealing one’s secrets first to oneself and then to one’s lover, one makes a bond that is deeper and, one hopes, longer lasting than any tie established by merely falling in love.

  The more difficult is the first part—dredging up and silently revealing one’s secrets to oneself alone. It can be embarrassing. They will likely turn out to be those old longings for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold; those erotic and narcotic and sybaritic dreams of fresh starts, high romance, mystery, and intrigue. Which can lead one, as I had learned by now, to commit acts of betrayal and abandonment, and thence to shame: one’s secret character writes one’s secret history. Thus embarrassment leads to shame. Then comes the second part, revealing one’s secret history to one’s beloved aloud, i.e., courtship, which runs the risk of casting a cold light on what’s supposed to follow—cohabitation and marriage. Courtship is both self-revelation and public exposure and can be dangerous.

  And so, for the first time, Chase and I became travelers together. Not tourists. Travelers. Most Americans and Europeans who fly or sail to the Caribbean islands are tourists. They go for a week or two and manage to visit and explore no more than a single island or, if they’re lucky, a single cluster of islands. Sometimes they visit and explore no more than a single hotel. They rarely go like the starship Enterprise where no package tour has gone before, and consequently, no matter how many voyages they make, they remain tourists, satellites circling their home planet in low orbit.

  Our voyage was designed to last most of the winter into the spring of 1988 and touch down for a brief stay on each of thirty-two of the Lesser Antilles, from the U.S. Virgins off Puerto Rico, east through the Leewards, and south along the Windwards, looping back toward the continent by way of Jamaica—the island that a decade earlier I had almost called home. We mapped out a spiral nebula of islands circling the blue-green Caribbean Sea. After a week of exploring the Florida Everglades and Keys, we would jump off the continent at Miami, travel by jumbo jet, by seaplane and tiny STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, by freighter and ferry and fishing boat—island-hopping in the grand tradition.

  One tries not to arrive anywhere at rush hour. Landing on St. Thomas at 5 P.M. was like arriving at JFK at 5 P.M., only worse, especially if you had to travel cross-island from the airport to the East End, where most of the hotels, beaches, and marinas were located. There was no way to get there except by crawling in line by car through the town of Charlotte Amalie, a maze of alleys and narrow one-way streets built by the Danes for donkeys and pedestrians before Denmark sold the Virgins to the Americans in 1917, clogged now with Japanese and German automobiles and American and British trucks and open-air sightseeing buses and hawkers of souvenirs for cruise-ship passengers.

  In 1988 four or five cruise ships a day in season were putting in at Charlotte Amalie, and the entire town seemed to have organized itself around the cruisers’ insatiable need for ceramic ashtrays and funny T-shirts, perfume, watches, jewelry, and liquor. It’s a free port: $800 worth of duty-free goods allowed per person. They packed the streets—mostly Americans doing the buying and locals the selling, with barkers on sidewalks and in the doorways of shops pitching the goods inside as if working the crowd in front of topless bars on Rampart Street. As Chase and I crept along in our rented car I wondered why we hadn’t stayed in Key West, where we’d spent the weekend before, where exhaust-emission controls were enforced and at least the chances of carbon monoxide poisoning were not so great. We shut the windows, sealing ourselves in, cranked the air conditioner to high, and scowled.

  With fifty thousand people, St. Thomas is the most populous of the three U.S. Virgins (St. Croix and St. John are the others). It’s small, barely thirty-two square miles, and therefore very crowded, especially from December to March. It was a tart of an island, hardly a virgin, with FOR SALE signs everywhere and headlong, heedless development. It had a “U.S. flavor,” as the guidebooks say, which meant that Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald had set up shop. Triplex movie theaters and minimalls and, all over the East End, wherever there was a piece of land with a sea view, high-rising condominiums were breeding like bunnies.

  But like every Caribbean island, especially the mountainous, volcanic isles where the land rises quickly from the sea, St. Thomas—once we got out of town—was still beautiful to look at. The prismatic Caribbean sky opened up exactly as I remembered it, lyrical and turbulent and erotic. West of the airport and north of Charlotte Amalie, the narrow road wound into the hills, giving spectacular views of glistening emerald-green slopes and long ridges and craggy peninsulas tumbling into an azure sea, dotted near the horizon with islets and cays. This was another reason I’d come back to the Caribbean: the sheer physical beauty of the place, the land and sea and sky, the Edenic firmaments above and below, and the bright green firmament between. I’d come back for the bone-clear light and the depth and power of color and the abundant, tumultuous play of forms. I was here, accompanied by my friend and lover, for the sake of my eyes. I said to her, I simply open my eyes and look, and I start to feel healed from a sickness I hadn’t known I was afflicted with.

  St. Thomas, because of its U.S. flavor, which meant decent roads and adequate up-to-date services as much as it did minimalls and Mr. Pizza, might be a nice place to live—and, indeed, a lot of affluent white Americans seemed
to have retired here—but unless above all else one liked crowds and shopping, it was not the most enjoyable island merely to visit. Rising expectations combined with rigid racial and economic barriers had created the kind of racial and class antagonisms that in the 1980s one associated with inner-city life on the continent. Yes, there were lovely white sand beaches—Magens Bay, Sapphire Beach, and Coki Point—and many fine resort hotels where one never had to step outside the gated compound, especially at night. But package tours and cruise ships had come to control the economy, with the usual results—overbuilding and pervasive commercialism and abuse of the environment and a stunned, sullen, somewhat deracinated local population. We averted our gaze from the surly faces of the young black men hanging out on the streets of Charlotte Amalie and the edges of the Havensight shopping district: faces that seemed to say, How can you who are so vulgar and rude to us be so fucking rich? And: Tell me again why I’m condemned to need you?

  Near Red Hook Bay, where there was a sprawling marina and ferry service to most of the nearby islands, we checked into a small hotel in the wooded hills, accurately named Pavilions and Pools. That’s what it offered—suites, each with kitchen and small garden (the pavilion) and a private pool the size of our rented Toyota Corolla where we could skinny-dip. At night we lay in the darkness beneath a slow-turning fan and in bits and pieces told our stories to each other—our childhoods and love affairs and, in my case, marriages, three so far, and divorces, three so far, and who and what we had loved and the aspects of ourselves that scared us and those we admired: some of it we embellished and some we invented, more to meet the needs of narrative than merely to impress. Some we left out. And we made love together and with each passing night woke in the bright morning light increasingly entangled. I told her what I knew about the childhoods of my four daughters, and she told me what she knew about the childhoods and lives of her two adult sisters and her nieces and nephews. We described our parents’ marriages and divorces. We exchanged stories and appraisals of our mutual and separate friends. All a part and consequence of courtship.