Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Who can bear this history? Who can stand it? My heart fills with admiration for the people of the Caribbean, who have loved and clung to these islands and insisted, against all odds, that this place is no dream, no fantasy, no self-indulgent racial or sexual projection, for in this place they are at home. As much at home as I in my Adirondack village and the city of Miami. Or more.

  Chase and I had come to the end of our passage through the Lesser Antilles, this long, complex voyage that had reconnected my imagination to the part of the world that I once loved more than any other. We had but one island left to visit, Jamaica. I knew as we boarded the plane that in returning to Jamaica I was going back to where I first learned how to do that, to love a people and a place other than my own. It was where my imagination first revealed itself to me. It was what I meant by the very term imagination.

  All over the cavernous, crowded terminal at the Sangster Airport in Montego Bay there were uniformed soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Their cold eyes scrutinized us as we passed through. Was there some danger of invasion that I somehow hadn’t heard about? I thought suddenly of Grenada and Operation Urgent Fury. Then remembered: Jamaicans had recently held an election, and after nearly a decade Michael Manley and his left-of-center People’s National Party were back in power; and as Manley had learned last time, to stay in power he had to depend on Washington’s goodwill. He was showing the Americans and possibly the ganja growers and dealers that this time he was obeying his master’s wishes and had gotten serious about “cutting drugs off at the source,” as they say.

  We drove southeast from Negril to Ocho Rios along the north coast and saw little evidence of the previous year’s devastating hurricane. But it soon became apparent that since I was here last, other terrible things had happened. There were many more undernourished wandering children and unemployed young people, and they all seemed to have come to the cities, Kingston and Montego Bay, and to the resorts where the tourists were waiting for them. And there was much less money now than there had been in the 1970s. No one had any money at all. No one. Except us, the outsiders. But since so many of the children and young people were trying desperately to sell us ganja, or more often cocaine and crack, one tended to conclude that the problem was drugs, not economics.

  It was easy to confuse effect with cause. The Jamaican dollar was worth two-fifths its value of a few years before, less than $0.20 U.S. and dropping. Manley was dealing with a $4 billion U.S. foreign debt that annually cost 51 percent of Jamaica’s foreign exchange. He had been forced to eliminate a tax on the banking industry and make it easier to import cars from nations that manufacture cars; at the same time, he had removed price supports from flour, cooking oil, and other basic foodstuffs. All this pleased the business community and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But the minimum wage hadn’t increased, and the people were enduring price rises of up to 50 percent.

  So there was a desperate quality to the selling, especially in the touristed areas of the north coast. Whether it was drugs, souvenirs, sex, or food, there was little room for dignity in any kind of exchange. People stood by the side of the road with a handful of bananas or scraps of colored cloth and thrust them out to our car as we sped past. When we stopped at a light in Ocho Rios, our car was surrounded by kids calling, “Ganja, mon, me got good sens, mon, lamb’s-breath! Crack. Anyt’ing you want, mon, me got it!”

  Chase and I settled in at Port Antonio, once a favorite haunt of mine, on the eastern end of the island at the foot of the Blue Mountains, where there were few beaches and consequently few large hotels. And, no surprise, the frenzied selling abated. We stayed at the DeMontevin Lodge, an old down-at-the-heels Victorian manse in the residential neighborhood of Titchfield, at the edge of town. The previous owners had died since I was last here and had been replaced by a young black couple. Except for the presence of a continuously running television in the living room, little had changed. It still seemed to belong in a Graham Greene novel, where the guests were conscience-stricken oddballs and international itinerants.

  My few friends in the town, it turned out, had all gone. Port Antonio looked the same, however—an old United Fruit shipping point and fishing and sailing port, with a string of bars and brothels along the waterfront, a central marketplace that my friend George Smith used to run, Navy Island in the harbor, won by Errol Flynn in a poker game, now operated as a cottage-and-cabana resort hotel, and steep hills rising swiftly toward the Blue Mountains behind. Out at the edge of town, Rastafarian squatters had taken over Folly Point, but they had already started camping and holding their “sessions” there in the mid-seventies anyhow. There was a sweet, sad quality to the place, as if I were visiting my own reluctantly abandoned past.

  But Port Antonio had always seemed deliciously melancholy to me; it was an essential part of the town’s charm. It was the New Orleans of Jamaica, where tropical lassitude and international intrigue wound together in darkly baroque ways. By comparison, Kingston, the capital, was the New York City of Jamaica—huge, bustling, as rich as a large industrialized city can be and as poor as any third-world ghetto, with little in between but chain-link fences and guard dogs. That was something you could do with ease in Jamaica—compare one part with another, one kind of town or city with a different, contrasting kind. The island was so large and complex and varied that no one place or person or group of persons could be said to characterize it. It was the United States of the Caribbean, perhaps.

  In fact, everything that could be found on individual islands in the Lesser Antilles could be found on Jamaica as well. The long white sand beaches of Negril were still stunning, and often nearly as empty of bathers as the beaches of Anguilla; the towering Blue Mountains were as overwhelming and impenetrable as the mountains of Dominica. The full-service resort hotels east of Montego Bay and in Ocho Rios were as luxurious and private as any you could find on Martinique or Aruba. Small guesthouses in the hills of St. James reminded us of the inns of Nevis. Charter fishing and sailing out of Port Antonio, scuba diving off Negril, windsurfing in Ocho Rios, compared nicely with what we had found in the U.S. and British Virgins. If one was attracted to the historic sites and restored plantation houses of Antigua and St. Croix, one might want to visit Spanish Town and Port Royal and Good Hope and Rose Hall in Jamaica. And if one liked the multiracial intensity of Port-of-Spain, one would love Half Way Tree in downtown Kingston on market day. If Carnival in Trinidad had loosened us up, we could try the Reggae Sunsplash festival in Montego Bay. In all ways, perhaps even the sad and painful ways, Jamaica was the Caribbean.

  We had one last journey to make before leaving the Caribbean altogether—to Accompong, the Maroon village in Jamaica’s nearly inaccessible Cockpit Country of Trelawny, where, back in the mid-seventies, I had spent some of the loneliest and most enlightening days and nights of my life. The descendants of the Maroons, escaped slaves, had fought the British to a standoff in a seventy-year guerrilla war during the eighteenth century and had lived in the area’s limestone pockets ever since. There were three such villages on the island, the other two in the east, but Accompong remained the most isolated. Mostly small farmers and artisans who owned their large tract of land communally, with an elected “colonel” to wield civic authority and a “prime minister” to keep the old British treaty and Maroon tales and lore alive, the Accompong Maroons were a remnant people who for more than two centuries had preserved much of their history and significant elements of their West African culture against all attempts to assimilate them. They had also, with perverse humor and argument and outrageous financial demands, resisted becoming a tourist attraction.

  It was clear to me, as our rented car chugged up the last hill to the tiny settlement, that in the years since my last arrival in Accompong very little here had changed. A rooster crowed, a dog barked, and a child ran to find an adult to come greet the visitors. The afternoon light fell softly in planes against the leaves of the banana trees and splashed off the whitewashed walls of the small h
ouses and cabins scattered along the narrow lane. Accompong was timeless, a fitting end to our journey. Martin Luther Wright, nervous and officious, just as I remembered him, was still colonel; the hundred-year-old rascal Mann O. Rowe, loquacious and tricky as ever, remained the prime minister.

  I introduced the two men to my fiancée. All three smiled self-consciously without showing their teeth and looked down, as if discovering as one that Christine was no longer my wife. Suddenly it was as if I were a stranger to Chase and my two old friends, and they to me. I was simultaneously alive in the past and alive in the present, but disassociated from both, a nonparticipant, a member of the audience, as if I were watching the same scene from two different films shot in two different time periods on the same location and with the same actors. They were not my actual fiancée, Chase, or the two old Maroon friends I had fictionalized in my novel, The Book of Jamaica, but famous actors, movie stars, portraying them. In both films, Chase was played by a woman who resembled Jamie Lee Curtis. Morgan Freeman and Don Cheadle, heavily aged by makeup, had been cast as Martin Luther Wright and Mann O. Rowe. I myself was not in either film, not as character, not as actor. I was an unglamorous bystanding stranger, that’s all—I was not even Russell Banks, that little-known American writer who back in the late 1970s had nearly become a citizen of this village. Nor was I the somewhat better-known writer twelve years later courting the woman who would become his fourth wife on a two-month island-hopping cruise through the Caribbean—I was not him, either.

  The scene, both versions, faded out, and Chase and the two old men disappeared from the screen, and then Chase and I walked arm in arm about the village together, and it was as if I had never left and twelve years had not passed and I would never leave again. But it was also in some mysterious way as if I had never really been here before, never touched down, and was only passing through on my way to somewhere else. As if it were a flyby.

  I told Chase as much. I said I felt like Voyager 1.

  She didn’t quite get it.

  I explained that ten years previously, when I first read about Voyager 1, I had felt an immediate affinity and affection for it—not quite an identification with the spacecraft as an appropriation of some of its essential character and capacities that seemed to apply to my own peripatetic life so far. Perhaps especially to my marriages and several other close, lasting relationships with women. Over Chase’s and my nearly three decades together, starting that winter and spring in 1988, when we were still courting each other and touring the Caribbean together, I have tried from time to time to explain this to her without making me sound cold and detached and fearful. Although, when I was falling madly in love over and over again, until I met and married Chase, I had indeed been all three—cold and detached and fearful.

  From the start, I was attracted to the language and terminology used by scientists and NASA officials to describe the mission of Voyager 1. The words and phrases were metaphorical to me, I said, connoting way more than they denoted. When, on September 5, 1977, around the time I returned from Jamaica and left Christine’s and my home for good, and the Titan rocket carrying Voyager 1 blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, we were told by NASA that the satellite, once separated from the rocket, was programmed not to go to a planet or moon, but to bypass all the planets and their moons and eventually exit our entire solar system. Out there it would encounter what’s known as termination shock, a condition that occurs when the stream of high-speed ionized particles ejected from the sun’s corona—the solar wind—slows to subsonic speeds. After termination shock, the satellite would pass into the heliosphere, a pear-shaped region created by the collision between the solar wind and what’s called the interstellar wind—electrons coming from beyond our solar system. Then, when it reached a point 10.8 billion miles beyond the sun, Voyager 1 would enter the heliopause, the zone where the solar wind shifts its axis to the horizontal plane and, no longer colliding with the interstellar wind, is absorbed by and merges with the interstellar plasma. Eventually, the satellite would pass into cosmic purgatory, where the number of charged particles emitted by the sun declines by half, and the interstellar particles increase one hundredfold. The outer extension of cosmic purgatory is called the heliosheath. And just as planned, on August 25, 2012, thirty-five years after liftoff at Cape Canaveral, thirty-five years after my divorce from Christine was finalized, Voyager 1 would pierce the heliosheath, cross out of cosmic purgatory, and at last enter the interstellar medium—outer space. Coincidentally, that date, August 25, 2012, was also Chase’s and my twenty-third wedding anniversary. At the time, I did not make a connection between any of these events. I made them only when I began making notes for this book, and I merely offer them here.

  There is aboard Voyager 1 a gold-plated audiovisual disc with photos of our planet and many of its life-forms, a small library of scientific diagrams and mathematical formulae and humanistic and religious quotations and artistic imagery, recorded greetings from President Jimmy Carter and the secretary-general of the UN, and a medley of “Sounds of Earth,” including selections of music by Beethoven, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Valya Balkanska, who sings the ancient Balkan folk song “Izlel e Delyu Haydutin”; plus, among many other sounds, the mating calls of whales and crying babies and thunder and barking dogs. The gold disc was designed to contain the contents of a fairly well-educated late-twentieth-century human brain. Astronomer and television host Carl Sagan was responsible for it, so maybe it’s the contents of Sagan’s brain. My brain would have included different individual items, quotations, and songs, perhaps, but a very similar mash-up.

  The satellite was aimed at Alpha Centauri, the hoof of the centaur, the star system nearest to our sun, 4.37 light-years, 25.8 trillion miles, from home. At Voyager 1’s present speed, an Alpha Centauri flyby is scheduled to occur in about forty thousand years, a time frame that in human terms is almost unimaginable: it is highly unlikely that our species will even exist forty thousand years from now. Voyager 1 might as well be aimed at heaven or hell or some other purely imaginary place, some other land of the dead. But that, too, along with the metaphoric language deployed by the scientists, attracted me. The whole project was a Blakean construct to me. And, naturally, it possessed certain moral implications.

  Here are a few that held particular meaning for me. Before a satellite could exit our solar system and reach termination shock—something we all must expect to face eventually—it had to make its way along a carefully calibrated path around and between the planets that orbit our sun, following a route designed to keep it a sufficient distance from the planets’ gravitational fields, so as not to be drawn into orbit around one of them or crash onto its surface. It also had to pass close enough to the two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, to pick up a spinning, gravity-assisted slingshot that would hurl the satellite into space at escape velocity, the speed needed for breaking free of the sun’s gravity—another intriguing metaphor, for hadn’t I spent most of my life traveling at escape velocity?—or else it would eventually circle back toward the sun and be incinerated. Having reached escape velocity, blown across the interstellar medium by the interstellar wind, Voyager 1 is expected to continue sending data back to earthlings until 2025, when its three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) run out of power to operate its scientific instruments. In 2025 I will be eighty-five. Barring fatal accident or illness, my RTGs, too, will have about run out of power. From then on, there will likely be nothing but silence. And, except for the glow of Alpha Centauri forty thousand years in the distance, darkness.

  Are we poor forked creatures, all of us, as solitary as that sad satellite, deliberately programmed by the god of evolution to sail off into darkness, silent and alone, receiving and transmitting data until our batteries dim and die? Or is that fate merely my peculiarity alone? Against all my hopes, never to be truly known and never to have truly known another seems inescapable. Yet we keep on revealing our secret selves to ourselves and to one another, even to str
angers—receiving and transmitting data back to earth—by writing books like this. As if revealed secrets somehow make us known to one another.

  In the winter of 1988, the afternoon when Chase and I visited the Maroon village of Accompong, we walked to our rented car to start back to our hotel in Montego Bay, and a pair of bulky, sunburnt white men in their mid-thirties waiting beside the car stepped forward and approached us. They were short-haired strangers with a serious purpose, clearly. But what purpose? I was frightened and, remembering our savaged Corolla on St. Thomas, put myself between Chase and the two men, who now stood squarely between us and our vehicle. Both men wore Boston Red Sox baseball caps and loose, untucked polo shirts and Bermuda shorts and running shoes. American tourists? Harmless? Maybe not. We, or at least I, had spent two months demonizing white American tourists, radically differentiating between them and us. Maybe they had finally seen us as we had been unable to see ourselves—condescending, ironic snobs—and had followed us to Accompong to have it out with us. Maybe they were Boston Irish mobsters, pals of Joker, hunting me down to shut me up for talking loose in public about the old days in the Keys. Or maybe they’d been sent from Dominica by Clive Cravensbrook (who surely had a copy of our itinerary) to report back on our last stop in Jamaica.

  But it was nothing as fanciful or absurd or threatening as any of those possibilities. The nearer of the two men said, “Excuse me, sir, but the old man over there, Mr. Rowe, he told me who you are.”