Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Not to worry, I reassured Chase. In the Caribbean, when things screw up, as they always do, they usually get better.

  And indeed, our bumpy ride in a van loaded with shy but cheerful Dominicans on their way to the capital, Roseau, took us along the sparsely populated northeast coast, where the wind-driven surf crashed against volcanic rock, past the Carib Reserve, where the only surviving Carib Indians in the world resided, and through the wondrous Northern Forest Preserve, wild and impenetrable, the home of the endangered Sisserou and red-necked Amazon parrots, found now only here on Dominica. We wound through groves of ferns fifteen feet high, through rain forest climbing up to cloud forest and over the top, curling down the western side of the nearly five-thousand-foot-high cordillera, until finally, amazed, dazzled, we were let off at a roughly restored eighteenth-century country mansion called Springfield Plantation, within sight of the port of Roseau far below and the glittering sea.

  Springfield Plantation, a rambling hillside guesthouse with several adjacent cut-stone outbuildings, was owned and operated by an American, John Archbold (Princeton ’34), who had sailed from New Jersey to Dominica in June 1934 in his graduation present, a fifty-foot two-masted schooner, and had fallen in love with the island and never left. Eventually he became a cocoa, citrus, and coffee planter. And now a semiretired innkeeper.

  Evidently, we were the only guests at Springfield Plantation. Archbold had observed from the registry that I was employed at his alma mater, and later, when he invited us to join him at his table, we accepted. Chase and I had already quietly noticed that the coffee-and-milk-colored waiters and waitresses, the cook, and even the several maids and gardeners seemed to have the same bright blue eyes as old John Archbold. Chase remembers his eyes as green; my memory says blue. We both remember the strong familial resemblance. A blunt-speaking, presently unmarried septuagenarian—I later learned that he’d been married four times (what is it about four?)—he was one of the last of his particular kind in the islands, the unapologetic neocolonial who believes he earned his place in the sun the old-fashioned way and not by dint of race and birthright and can’t understand why others, especially the “natives,” cannot or will not do the same. He was not the sort of man with whom one argued the virtues of democratic socialism or reparations. He was a curiosity, an antediluvian relic from another age whose dream of the Caribbean—suggested by the portraits of the British monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth on the dining room walls—was the dream of empire, an empire in the tropics inhabited by people he had come to know and, in his perverse way, to love more passionately, perhaps, than he knew and loved the cold northern people and land he had left behind. Or, judging from the biracial appearance of his staff, maybe it was the slaveholder’s dream. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the two desires, empire and slavery, and the racial fantasies and projections they engender.

  Our dinner with our garrulous, opinionated host lasted long into the night over port and Cuban cigars. Although one could call it interesting, it was a bit like dining with a public executioner who loves his job. Archbold’s assumptions of racial and class solidarity with his two white American guests led him early on to share his low opinions of Dominicans, people like the caramel-colored waiter with half-closed blue eyes expertly refilling our wineglasses, and of Afro-Caribbean people and culture in general. I listened in silence and wondered if he would feel the same racial and class solidarity with the sunburnt, tattooed white boys on Nevis, or with the American real estate developers whose signs on Antigua pointed the way to Carlisle Bay and led nowhere, or with the throngs of white cruise-shippers with funny T-shirts at every port of call, or with the dudes at Bomba’s Surf Shack on Tortola, or with the white women with clumped dreadlocks strolling the beach at Negril with their rent-a-Rastas—all those Caucasian appropriators of the Caribbean. Would Archbold see a connection to his own atavistic neocolonial racist fantasy? Or was it the nature of the fantasy itself—and the reason it so often ends up thwarted, doomed to disappointment, frustration, and bitterness—to recognize no other?

  And what was our white people’s Caribbean fantasy, Chase’s and mine? Was ours an unexamined, equally privileged version of Archbold’s, too?

  I thought I could recognize Chase’s. It was almost scientific—tentative and exploratory and cautious and curious—with a modest, open-minded acceptance of my role in our mutual courtship as guide and narrator of her journey. She would not have made this voyage without my having initiated it. The Caribbean held no romance for her, except by way of my attachment to it. My own fantasy, however, was turbulent and moody, alternating between painful personal memories and nostalgia. Subjective in all ways. For me, this was both a compulsion and a willed return trip entered upon with a certain ill-defined reluctance, and I was confused by the conflicted emotions it evoked.

  The third night at Springfield Plantation, our last before departing Dominica for Martinique, we met a new addition to our catalog of versions of Archbold’s vision of the Caribbean. We decided that we’d had more than enough of the old man’s cranky racist company and would dine alone. We entered the dining room and saw at his table a strange-looking white man in his late forties wearing a seersucker suit, polka-dotted bow tie, white buck shoes, and owl-eyed tortoiseshell eyeglasses. His straight flaxen hair was parted in the middle, combed to matching partial bangs on his temples. Archbold waved us over and introduced us by first and last names to the man, whose name was Clive Cravensbrooke, which suited him almost too perfectly. His accent was an American version of British English, early Masterpiece Theatre. For a few seconds I wondered if he might be a clever downtown Manhattan performance artist having us all on.

  It turned out that he was an adjunct professor of the history of landscape at Colgate University and was leading a group of students on a winter-term field-study trip, his costs underwritten by the parents of his students, much as ours was underwritten by that slick New York travel magazine. The students were all staying in a youth hostel down in Roseau, he said and chuckled, while he bunked up here at Springfield Plantation with his dear old friend John Archbold.

  I did not mention my brief enrollment as a student at Colgate. Probably before his time, anyway. A mildly unsettling coincidence was all. It’s hard to escape one’s past, even this far south of it. When we turned to leave for our corner table, Clive Cravensbrooke asked Chase if her birth name was Penelope.

  Startled, she said yes. Chase was actually her middle name, she said.

  Cravensbrooke said he knew her father long ago. And how was her dear mother, Ann? Was she still living in Little Compton? And was her father enjoying his retirement from Choate? Still living alone in his cabin hideaway in the Adirondacks?

  Cravensbrooke had at hand an astonishing amount of both new and old detailed information about Chase’s entire family, as if for a lifetime he’d been compiling a dossier on them. Her uncle Dave and his wife, was he still headmaster and teaching middle school biology at Browne & Nichols? He even asked after her paternal grandmother by name. Was she still living at 436 Saint Ronan Street in New Haven?

  Chase stammered, No, not now. My grandmother, she died some years ago.

  Cravensbrooke seemed momentarily saddened, but not surprised, as if he’d already known of the woman’s death.

  Chase asked him how he knew so much about her family.

  He flashed the smile of a lizard, implying that actually he knew much, much more than she suspected, and dodged her question by asking her another batch of questions, as if showing off. Is your cousin Joe still making his beautiful furniture? And your sister Eliza, is she happy living in Standfordville? Still divorced? Her oldest must be about twelve by now.

  Cravensbrooke would admit only that many long years ago, too many to admit, he said with a wink, Chase’s father had been his Latin teacher at Choate. Which did not explain much. He remembered him, he said, with great affection.

  Clearly, he was obsessed with Chase’s entire family and had been tracking their
lives for decades. But why? Over the years she had run into dozens of her father’s ex-students, none of whom had much interest in or information about her family members or about her father himself, for that matter. There was something sinister about this man, and something pathetic and creepy. Meeting him in Dominica in the dining room of an old plantation house two thousand miles south of New England made her feel she was being stalked. Without her knowledge, it had been going on for many years. Too many, as he said, to admit.

  Months later, back in the Adirondacks, Chase and I recounted to her father our strange meeting in Dominica with the man named Clive Cravensbrooke. It took a while, but then he vaguely recalled a boy with that name, a student at Choate in the late 1950s. Chase’s father had caught the boy cheating on his final exam in Latin class, he recalled. He’d seen to it that the boy was expelled from the school. What was he doing way down there? In the Caribbean?

  He might as well have asked what we were doing way down there, in the Caribbean. Chase would have had a plausible answer, but I’m not sure I would have, or that it would have been any more legitimate than Archbold’s or Cravensbrooke’s or the tattooed boys of Nevis’s or any of the others’. I was beginning to think that all of us, in our own weird ways, were vampires.

  And that fellow who owned the hotel, Chase’s father said. What was his name?

  Archbold. John Archbold, I said.

  Oh, him I actually know! Longtime member of the Choate board. Class of 1918, I read somewhere. Small world!

  By the time we were ready to leave Dominica for Martinique, the airport fire engine had been repaired and we were able to fly out of Canefield Airport, a small strip on the coast near the town of Roseau where, happily, jumbo jets could not land. Where we were headed, however, they could land, and with them the disgorged hordes—package tours, the bane and, as some persist in thinking, the salvation of tourism in the Caribbean.

  After landing, we drove north from Martinique’s Pointe du Bout and the south coast, where most of the larger, better-known hotels and topless beaches were located. We skipped a visit to the Musée de la Pagerie, birthplace of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine, for lunch at a waterfront café in bustling, cosmopolitan Fort-de-France. Then it was up the scenic coast to Le Carbet, where Gauguin had briefly lived and painted. At the Musée Volcanologique in the town of St-Pierre, we turned inland and uphill, and once again we were in a mountainous rain forest, the Parc Naturel Régional, with deep gorges, waterfalls, and, in the distant mist, the green cone of Mount Pelée, which had erupted as recently as 1902, destroying St-Pierre and killing thirty thousand people. Thus the Musée Volcanologique.

  By late afternoon we had reached the northern tip of the island, a rolling coastal plain covered with banana trees that slowly rose to a long wooded ridge. We checked in at the Leyritz Plantation Hotel, which, instead of the restored sugar plantation described in the guidebooks, was a half-renovated ruin with a few new cabanas and a low-roofed kitchen, dining room, bar, and gift shop freshly constructed on top of and inside the shells of the original cut-stone plantation outbuildings.

  On registering, we learned that the main building, called the Great House, was not yet ready to admit guests. Though open for business, it was still a resort-in-progress. We were offered a room in the Workers’ Quarters instead, a cluster of new thatch-and-bamboo bungalows built on the foundations of the long-gone slave huts down by the Distillery, which, according to the brochure handed out at the desk, would eventually function as an educational exhibit to demonstrate the entire process of turning sugarcane into rum.

  Not sure we could sleep peacefully on top of the graves of the slave huts, we turned down the Workers’ Quarters and sprang instead for one of the more expensive suites carved out of the original main kitchen, called, naturally, the Kitchen, a low, narrow stone building tied to the half-restored Great House on the hill by an open passageway and terrace. With a separate structure for each domestic function—cooking, sleeping, dining, entertaining, maintenance, and so on—all of them linked to the main building with passageways and terraces and porches, the layout reminded us of the nineteenth-century great camps of the Adirondacks. Except for that sticky business about the African slaves.

  The hotel grounds were spacious and inviting: crisscrossed by meandering walkways that passed through elaborate, overgrown, untended flower gardens along old crumbling walls and moss-covered brick terraces and fallen columns and dry fountains with soaring royal palms lining the long, curved drive. We dined in the Sugar Mill below, and afterward, before retiring to our suite in the Kitchen, we walked slowly back up the hill. On our way we passed through an unlocked side entrance of the Great House and wandered along the ground-level halls and crossed the parlors of the empty, unfurnished Georgian building and out to the columned veranda in front and stood there and took in the silver-green fields and the blackened sea beyond. As darkness came on, a full moon rose out of the sea.

  Then suddenly the place went all eerie on us. Most of the restored plantation houses we’d visited so far had felt and looked like sets from the movie versions of Captain Blood or Wide Sargasso Sea or a Caribbean ride at Disney World, as harmless and unthreatening as kitsch. Soon Leyritz Plantation would be another romanticizing stage set, a slavery-days Potemkin village. But for now, tonight, up here on the hill by the Great House and Kitchen overlooking the glistening fields below, it was the real thing. The buildings seemed to have been only recently abandoned by the planter and his extended family, their slaves, like the livestock, left to fend for themselves in the forested hills above the fields or else swiftly captured and reenslaved by the absent planter’s white neighbors.

  We felt utterly alone in this ghostly, ghastly ruin. It was late in the season, and there was only a small, bare-bones staff. The other paying guests all seemed to have been housed someplace far from us. Probably down in the Workers’ Quarters, I muttered. Except for the soft wind, it was silent. Silver moonlight carved sharp blue shadows on the lawns. I left Chase seated on a stone bench on the terrace outside the Kitchen facing the fields and the glittering sea and the pale moon and went to our bedroom and retrieved two glasses and the unopened bottle of Trois Rivières rhum agricole I’d purchased earlier in Fort-de-France.

  I hadn’t noticed, or perhaps had merely not admitted it to myself, but over the weeks I had begun drinking a bit too heavily in the evenings, shot by shot, usually starting before dinner at the bar with rum and a slice of lime and, when available, ice, and then a bottle of wine at dinner, continuing afterward with a different rum, neat, claiming that I was only sampling the local rums of all the different islands, as if I were a connoisseur or training to become one.

  I sat beside Chase on the stone bench and poured us each a few inches of the clear liquid and thoughtfully sipped the Trois Rivières and pronounced it satisfactory. Chase left her glass untouched while I drank. She was growing concerned about my drinking and had mentioned it once or twice several islands back, offhandedly, as if in passing. But by now my drinking to excess was evident—although the reason for it was not—and undeniable, even by me.

  That’s when we started to hear them. Voices—faint voices in the wind. At first we thought that’s all it was, the wind. And maybe it was only the wind, the soft Caribbean breeze unfurling from the sea. But they were human voices we thought we heard: we both definitely were hearing them—men and women and children in the distance, laughing, singing, then weeping close by, and now moaning—just behind us, right in front, on both sides of the terrace, coming from beyond the flower gardens where the dark shadow of the Great House filled the space between the two buildings.

  We sat there for a while, silent and grieving, until gradually the voices, or the wind, subsided and eventually all was still. Chase shook herself free of the dream or vision or fantasy, whatever it was, and stood and said she was going to bed. I told her I was too sad to sleep and needed to sit here awhile longer alone. She seemed to understand, assuming that my sadness was due to the place
, the ruins of the plantation and its ghosts, and gave me a hug and a delicate kiss and went inside.

  I had not been this sad since leaving Jamaica ten years earlier, after Christine and our three daughters had gone back to the States a month ahead of me. The closer Chase and I got to Jamaica, where our courtship tour through the Caribbean was scheduled to end, the sharper and darker were my memories of that time and place. Christine’s and my marriage had been in tatters the entire year, held together solely by our shared love of our children. In order to keep from quarreling, she and I had reached a point of barely speaking to each other, except to negotiate childcare and finances. We had decided that she and the girls should go back home for school a month early without me, while I finished my research on the Maroons, descendants of eighteenth-century runaway slaves living in the isolated village of Accompong in the nearly inaccessible hills of what was called Cockpit Country. The Maroons and Accompong and a white American academic researching their history were central to my novel, which eventually became The Book of Jamaica. I had convinced myself that I could complete my research only by residing for a month alone in Accompong in a one-room cabin loaned to me by a Maroon friend, a Rastafarian ganja grower who was accompanying Christine and the girls on their return to the States. He was a man I had come to trust and in many ways to admire. He hoped to find some kind of work in our New Hampshire neighborhood as a handyman, for he was indeed handy, and in a few months earn enough cash under the table from me and Christine and our friends and neighbors to support his family back in Accompong for a year or more. At least that is how he and Christine described the arrangement when it was first proposed.

  Guilt mingled with anger creates sadness—at least for me it does. And unexpectedly the guilt and anger invoked by the ghosts of Leyritz Plantation, by the vivid tangibility of the plantation’s history from slavery days to late-twentieth-century tourism, had somehow smeared over, or perhaps by emotional association had called back the guilt and anger I had felt a decade earlier in Jamaica, when my marriage to Christine was falling apart. Add to that the guilt that was still pummeling me for having left my third wife, Becky, for Chase the year before, mingled in turn with the anger I was directing against myself for having married Becky in the first place, and you have a man falling, or pushed, down a well of sadness. A man pouring himself another three fingers of Trois Rivières, shortly followed by yet another. Until finally, hours later, his fiancée appears at his side and helps him stand and walks him to their bedroom, where he falls into the sleep of the insensibly drunk.