Voyager

by Russell Banks

  The island faced the open Atlantic like a medieval fortress, and on its approach, the ferry swung wide to avoid a buoy. Matshikiza explained that late in World War II an English freighter thought to be carrying General de Gaulle was sunk by Vichy guns on Gorée. “The gun placements are still there,” he said, pointing to the northern end of the island. “Deactivated, of course. Although there are three thousand French soldiers stationed on the mainland. In case de Gaulle finally shows up, I guess,” he said and laughed. “History’s not dead in Africa. It just gets recycled.”

  Gorée Island was tiny, an islet barely a mile long and half as wide, crowded with crumbling old warehouses and two-story stuccoed stone residences and the empty, decaying mansion of the long-gone colonial governor of French West Africa. Other than the elegantly restored and renovated buildings owned by the Gorée Institute, there were a few guesthouses, one small hotel, one restaurant, and several seaside cafés—for the intrepid French tourists escaping for a day from the heat and crowds of Dakar and picnicking Senegalese and for the African Americans, usually in couples—my countrymen and -women.

  I checked into my lodgings immediately, a two-room tile-roofed cottage off a village lane facing a large, multilevel courtyard with flower gardens and swaying palms and baobab and acacia trees enclosed by a high wall. My quarters were clean and bright and comfortable. There was a kitchen galley and a large tiled bath, a sitting area, and a desk. Perfect. I unpacked quickly, then headed out for dinner at the restaurant of the Hotel Chevalier de Boufflers—grilled fish, rice, good French bread, a decent French country wine, and a splendid view of the moonlit Atlantic from my table.

  Later, following the main lane back through the village to my cottage, I passed an alley and from the darkness heard drumming and the high-pitched ululations of a choir of women. Following the music, I ducked into the alley and turned onto a square with an ancient cottonwood tree at the crossing and came upon the boy drummers from the ferry and two lines of beautiful tall girls and women leaping in time, turn and turn again, dancing brilliantly in torchlight. I stood awhile, enthralled, and not until the dancers and drummers broke up and walked off in pairs did I finally head for my quarters.

  In the morning, after a long night of hard-edged, jet-lagged dreams, I looked around and saw that my lodgings were from paradise. From the window I could gaze on hibiscus and bougainvillea and ferns and tall Norfolk pines. Seedpods hung from the bare arms of baobab trees like small bombs. A rooster crowed; ground doves cooed. From beyond the courtyard wall came the thin bleat of goats and voices of children at play and the liquid vowels of Wolof as women exchanged greetings and in the distance the thrum of the engine of the first arriving Dakar ferry. Far off, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and closer, the bells of a Catholic church rang out. I made myself French coffee and a breakfast of bread and butter and a fresh orange, and toyed with the idea of staying here for the rest of my life.

  Gorée Island is about as close as you can get to the Americas and still be in Africa. It’s a preindustrial locale: no cars, no bicycles, even; just handcarts. It’s easy to get lost in time. With its narrow, unpaved streets and sandy lanes and early colonial-era stone warehouses and shops and houses with courtyards enclosed by high walls, the island looks very much as it did in slavery days. From time immemorial, the Wolof people of what we now call Senegal—a region situated neatly at the crossroads between Saharan and Equatorial Africa and between the rich interior kingdoms of Mali and the sea—have been a trading people. From the mid-fifteenth century, when Portuguese privateers first hove into view, Gorée Island has been a trading station. And with the arrival of the Europeans, there came a hunger that quickly grew insatiable and lasted for nearly half a millennium. I speak, of course, of the hunger for black African slaves.

  The traders on Gorée who built these warehouses facing the sea and the handsome, now crumbling residences were first Portuguese, then Dutch, French, and, for brief periods, British. The black Africans they traded for or captured on their own, those that survived transport, ended up in Brazil, Guyana, the Dutch Antilles, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond—peopling in time both American continents and the Caribbean archipelago between.

  Farther down the coast from Gorée, in Banjul, at the mouth of the Gambia River, and on the coasts of Guinea and Ghana and south to Angola, other European slave-trading stations were built, and the same process of trade or capture and transport of black Africans to the Americas was established. Today, one can without difficulty travel to these points along the coast of West and Equatorial Africa and visit renovated and restored warehouses, docks, and dungeons built by the European slave traders. There is usually a local guide who will lead you from chamber to chamber, exhibit to exhibit, artifact to artifact. He will explain the use of the chains and manacles and collars and other instruments of confinement and torture.

  My first day on Gorée, I learned that here, too, there is such a place. It’s called La Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves. It’s the reason those African Americans had come all this way.

  One can tour the entire island in a day. Then one either heads back to the mainland or else, as in any small town, one goes inward—which is what I did. Gorée is perfect for that. I visited the Institute library daily and read and made notes and strolled the isle. I lunched at seaside cafés, took my evening meals at the Hotel Chevalier de Boufflers, and chatted with the locals. There were enough day-tripping tourists to make beggars of the children, a thing sad to see, but most Goreans were friendly, soft-spoken, hospitable, and happy to try out their bits of English. The natives of this place did not appear to want to live elsewhere. Understandably. And the women were stunningly beautiful. There are few islands left in the world like Gorée—the Caribbean island of Dominica, perhaps, or the Seychelles. One hopes they’ll never be colonized by the soul-stealing industry of resort tourism. One feels guilty even writing about Gorée, and thus I leave out of this account more than a mere passing mention of the beaches.

  My time on the island passed all too quickly, and then one afternoon, a few days before my scheduled departure, I passed along a quiet side street, intending finally to visit the House of Slaves. For vague and unexamined reasons, I had been putting it off, as if my presence were somehow not warranted. Halfway there, I noted for the first time a small collection of craft stalls side by side in an open courtyard with a wide banner overhead flapping in the breeze. The words on the banner were in English: WELCOME TO THE FIRST FAIR OF GORÉE ISLAND // BLACK HISTORY MONTH FROM 1ST TO 28TH FEBRUARY.

  I puzzled over the words for a moment, the only English-language sign I’d seen on the island, then hurried on. Later, as I stood outside the gates to the House of Slaves, waiting behind a group of fifteen or twenty African Americans just off the ferry and a claque of French tourists, I still wondered about the sign. Whom was it soliciting? Certainly not the French tourists. Not the Africans from the mainland. Not me. I looked at the crowd of my countrymen and -women about to enter the House of Slaves. Of course, the other Americans. And said to myself, I shouldn’t be here, and quickly left.

  That night, at the Hotel Chevalier de Boufflers, I got into an intense conversation with the bartender, Mamadou, a tall, handsome Wolof who knew the history of his people. In my bad French and his bad English we discussed the collaboration between racism and slavery in the sixteenth century, how for the Europeans and Americans racism had become the moral justification for slavery, and as we talked, I remembered Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set on an island not unlike this, and my favorite lines, Caliban’s Curse:

  This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother

  Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,

  Thou strok’st me, and made much of me, wouldst give me

  Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night, and then I lov’d thee

  And
show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

  The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:

  Curs’d be I that did so!

  I remembered the passage well enough to recite most of the lines, and Mamadou smiled broadly to hear them. I paid my bill, and as I moved for the door, Mamadou asked if I’d visited the House of Slaves yet.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Should check it out. Teach you some things,” he said.

  Walking in the darkness to my cottage, I wondered if I’d been avoiding the House of Slaves solely to keep from having to stand in that baleful place alongside my black fellow Americans. It wasn’t merely to sidestep racial guilt. There was something else, something I’d only begun to understand. The African Americans had come to Gorée to be where their black ancestors had stood in chains, to meditate and reflect upon their ancestors’ and their own connected fates and histories. If I stood there, it would be for a reason only slightly different—to meditate and reflect in the literal, physical place where the American imagination, and therefore certain distinguishing aspects of my imagination, too, was born. It wasn’t born at San Salvador when Columbus dropped anchor in the Caribbean Sea; nor at Jamestown, Virginia; nor at Plymouth Rock; nor at Cumberland Gap looking westward-ho across the continent. No, the American imagination, at least as I was coming to understand it, was born right here on the coast of Africa where the African diaspora began. It was here that Othello, who was merely different, became Caliban, who was Other. To ground my imagination in historical reality, to know myself, I needed to stand in the place where that transformation had occurred.

  The links between the specious, socially constructed concept of race and its corollary, racism, and the history of the African diaspora created a chain that, even today, binds all Americans. It binds us regardless of our skin pigmentation or any other so-called secondary racial characteristics, regardless of our ethnic backgrounds, even regardless of the date of arrival in America of our ancestors—whether they came in 17,000 B.C.E. from Siberia in pursuit of the woolly mammoth or 1975 C.E. in flight from having backed the losing side in a civil war in Vietnam. The story of race is the story of America. “My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting,” James Baldwin wrote. “My birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.”

  As I arrived back at my cottage, I reminded myself that the point of travel is knowledge, not information. Its purpose is to create new thoughts. Tomorrow, before I leave for home, I will visit the House of Slaves.

  I approached the gated, head-high wall of the House of Slaves at the same time as a large tour group of African Americans. I could hear the ferry returning to Dakar for the next load. While I stood waiting at the rear of the group for the gate to open, I noticed a large, middle-aged black man looking at me with idle curiosity. The others seemed pointedly to ignore me.

  “American?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “From D.C. You?”

  I said, “Yes, American. From New York.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. We shook hands politely. His name was MacDuffy, and he was here with his wife and son, who were just ahead of him in line and watching me now with interest. He nodded toward the front of the line, where a half-dozen white people were speaking French and checking their cameras. “Not many white Americans here,” he said. “Why are you?”

  “I guess my history starts here, too,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, almost sadly. “I guess it does.” The line began to move forward then, and our conversation ended.

  The gate to the House of Slaves opened onto a courtyard. I looked across the courtyard into several small holding chambers and cells and peered straight ahead along a narrow, darkened corridor on the far side of the courtyard that led through an open archway out of the building onto the remains of a stone pier. Beyond the pier I could see the glittering waves of the Atlantic. And beyond that, America. There were ghosts in this place, the ghosts of those who were enslaved, and the ghosts, too, of those who enslaved them. That was my inheritance, in Baldwin’s sense. And I had to accept it before I could claim my birthright.

  THE LAST BIRDS OF PARADISE

  I’d arrived at Seychelles’ La Digue Island late the previous day by interisland freighter from the main island of Mahé. Then, early in the morning, I packed a bottle of water and some fruit and biscuits and, map in hand, walked from La Digue Island Lodge along the sandy lane of the village of Réunion, headed in a deliberately circuitous way for the hiking trail at the island’s southern tip, three miles away.

  I passed the Catholic church and a dozen small houses, and soon was out of the village. Farther on, simply to admire the graceful pitch of the thatched roof and the long, open veranda, I made a lingering stop at an old copra plantation house, and ended up staring at the surreal clarity of a pure white horse grazing among palms in the broad front yard with a high, rounded black granite outcropping looming behind the house and a deep blue sky hanging overhead.

  Keeping to the well-marked but seldom-used seaside trail, I passed along a string of empty white sand beaches on the southwest side of the island, where huge pink and red room-size blocks of weathered granite lined the shore. They rose out of the water and powdery sand and palmy hillsides, mysterious and atavistic, like Celtic circle stones or Easter Island heads, altars and gods from an ancient age—chthonic images that, like so much in these Seychelles islands, were strangely familiar, yet familiar in a way that I couldn’t name.

  Then I remembered reading a few weeks ago, before leaving the States, that these very beaches had served not as a site for pre-Christian religious rites but as locations for the filming of Crusoe, Cast Away, and Goodbye Emmanuelle. That’s why they looked so oddly familiar. The shockingly white beaches and colossal red rocks were background shots in soft-core and long-ago-and-far-away films I’d seen, settings for stories of mythic desire and escapist myth. So much for atavism, then. Here, merely, was a modern man out for a morning walk, all alone and more than ten thousand miles from home, and in deep escape mode, gone to where fantasies begin. On location.

  I held to the path and went from beach to beach, to where the path finally gave out and dwindled to a thin track, then disappeared altogether from my map and at my feet among rocks and jungle. On a hillside in the shade of coconut palms, I ate my breakfast and, more like a Phoenician castaway than Crusoe (this being the Indian Ocean, not the Caribbean), contemplated the wheeling frigate birds and petrels and terns and the endless luminescent sea below.

  Suffering a mild case of burnout, I’d come here and had been island-hopping in the Seychelles for weeks now, diving in the clear, reef-filled waters, climbing black granite mountains, hiking through protected rain forests, and wandering alone along chains of spectacular, unsullied beaches. I was on the mend, but greeted the knowledge with ambivalence. Soon I’d be healed and would have to leave this place. I’d learned a lot and been seduced, but I hadn’t gone over. In all the important ways, I was still the busy, harassed fellow who’d flown out of JFK fourteen days before.

  Hiking back toward Réunion, I stopped at an old French cemetery located just off the road a short way beyond the copra plantation. The still-legible dates on the stones placed it in the mid-1800s. I ducked under the low-hanging branches of a poinciana tree and sat on a moss-covered sarcophagus half-sunk in the sandy soil and lingered awhile, meditating, as one does at such a spot, on time and human history. When suddenly there it was! A paradise flycatcher—the male of the species, a jet-black bird the size of my hand, with beautiful long, glossy tail feathers—perched on a tree branch six feet from my face! This was an astounding sight. Before me was one of the rarest birds on earth. At last count there were but eighty left, and those eighty, I’d read, were nowhere else but here, on the tiny, isolated Indian Ocean island of La Digue, and even on La Digue one almost never saw them anymore.

>   No way to photograph it. I could only contemplate its beauty and singularity, its rare and fragile presence. It was a black, very intense small bird with a lovely warbling song and a brilliant stone-hard gaze. After a moment it flew off, keeping to the lower branches of the nearby trees. I waited, still stunned, standing motionless on the mossy grave, and five minutes later the bird returned and clung unafraid to the same branch as before, and for a few seconds that I will always remember, the bird and I studied each other—I one of more than six billion, he one of eighty. It seemed an almost irresponsible thought, but at such a moment inescapable. Who was worth more to the universe, I or this tiny black bird?

  The answer did not cheer me.

  To travel from New York City to the country of Seychelles, a scattered archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, four degrees south of the equator and a thousand nautical miles from the east coast of Africa, is to venture almost as far from home as a North American can go and still be on the planet. It was eight hours in the air from New York to Paris. Then eight more on the ground in Paris. From Paris, it was nine hours more, by way of Djibouti. The plane was loaded with French military men and their families headed back to the islands of Réunion and Mauritius, with a few vacationers on their way to Seychelles—divers, apparently, judging from their carry-on equipment.

  I myself was traveling light, outfitted for a few weeks of solitary hiking and tropical mountain climbing. Seychelles was known to me as a hiker’s and naturalist’s paradise. Nearly 40 percent of its mountainous land area has been nationalized and set aside in preserves laced with hiking trails; most of its coastline and coastal waters and reefs have been designated as protected, with some of the smaller islands given over entirely to bird sanctuaries. Tourism and development are carefully monitored and controlled, and new projects are allowed to proceed only after protection of the environment has been guaranteed. The country is the Vermont of the tropics, apparently. And though the government of this onetime British Colony is nominally socialist, it seems more green than red.