Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Vanise wakens. The air has changed; she can smell trees. She raises her head, moving with care so as not to waken the boy or her baby, lifts her body at the waist, looks over the rail into darkness. The engine chugs slowly belowdecks, and she can hear waves breaking nearby.

They have arrived! America! Opening her eyes as wide as she can, she stares intensely into the darkness, but she can see nothing. No lights, no hills outlined blackly against a lighter sky — nothing. But she knows, despite the blackness peering back, that they have come to America, and smiling, she lowers her body, lies on her side and lets herself drift into peaceful, trusting sleep.

If a man believes he is happy, he is. If not, not. And if a woman, a young, illiterate Haitian woman in flight from her home with her infant son and adolescent nephew, exchanges all her money for a boat ride to America, and without knowing it, gets dropped off instead at North Caicos Island, six hundred miles from America, and believes that at last and for the first time in her hard life she is happy, then she is happy. The truth of the matter, the kind of truth you would get with a map, compass and rule, has no bearing on her belief or its consequences.

Until, that is, she gets her own map, which at first would resemble one of Columbus’s early, wildly speculative drawings of where he thought he was. A person’s map tells more about where that person thinks he is than about where he is not, which is, of course, everywhere else. Columbus, when he drew this, thought he was in the Philippine Sea:

Vanise, believing she was a hundred yards off the beach at Coral Gables, Florida, would have drawn something like this:

On Vanise’s map, you are ten hours off the north coast of Haiti, and Florida is on the horizon, or would be, if you could see the horizon. It’s a dark, moonless night. Victor, whose boat this is, comes forward to where Vanise and the boy, Claude, encircle the baby like the halves of a clamshell. They lie surrounded by a crowd of eight or ten people, who are also lying down or seated hunched over, men mostly, dressed in their best clothes, shoes, hats, and clutching battered suitcases and rope-tied baskets and bundles.

Ignoring upturned faces, Victor steps over their bodies with care, as if afraid of getting his feet tangled in ropes. He is a tall, thin, nut-colored man with a skinny neck and large Adam’s apple, tufts of a beard, acne scars on his cheeks, a crumpled captain’s hat on his head. Leaning back against the bulkhead in the bow of the small boat, he studies his cargo for a moment. The boat rides the swells lightly and holds its position; the engine, cut back, throbs like a bass drum. One man from the group huddled on deck, a short, middle-aged man with a cane cutter’s body, lifts his head and broad shoulders and peers over the starboard rail. They hear waves breaking nearby.

Keep down! Victor barks, and the man drops to the deck as if shot.

Vanise believes she is happy, and she almost laughs out loud at the poor man, his sudden, wide-eyed motion, his face that of a little boy who stole someone’s pie and unexpectedly saw the victim coming along the road.

That’s comical, she whispers to her nephew, who smiles also. She squeezes the boy’s hand. She is very dark-skinned, the color of freshly ground coffee, and she is short and in the shoulders and hips small as a girl. Because of the baby, her breasts are large and full and seem to push against her blouse. Her thick black hair is wiry, chopped off a hand’s width from her skull and wrapped in a band of scarlet cloth that brings her high, strong cheekbones, broad nose and full mouth forward toward the light, giving her the appearance of a serious, powerful woman. A man would not confuse her with a girl, or with a woman he could fool easily. If she gave anything to anyone, it would be because she wanted to. Or had to — and then it would not be a gift. Back in Le Mole, when she first appeared at Victor’s pink cinder-block house, led there by the old man from the docks who does that work for him, sorting from the crowds of supplicants the few who have both the money and the need to get away, Victor looked her over carefully, first to be sure that she had the money and would give it to him, but also to see if she might be fooled into giving him something extra, to see if, like many women, she confused her need with his worth. But no, she saw Victor for what he was, despite her need, and so he had not bothered to try to fool her. He would take her money and treat her like the rest.

Beyond the reef, Victor informs his passengers, is Florida. Biscayne Bay. He says the words slowly, lingering over the consonants and lengthening the vowels, making the words sound like the name of a powerful and beneficent loa. Now, you must pay attention to me, he tells them. It is very, very difficult to get through the reef. We must do it quickly, when the tide is at its highest, which is very soon now, and then we will drop you at a landing on the shore and quickly return. Or else we cannot get back through the reef. Someone will be there to guide you to Miami. He says this word slowly also — Mee-ah-mee — and several of the people at his feet make broad smiles.

I must collect the money now, he says abruptly. There will be no time later. Because of the tide’s turning. And the reef.

There is a general groping into pockets and scarves, parcels and bags, while the captain moves among the crowd, reaching down, plucking and counting out the bills, moving to the next one, and on, until soon he has accounted for everyone. They seem relieved to have paid him, less tense than before, as if, by taking their money from them, five, six hundred dollars per person, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the bargain struck back in Le Mole, he has taken from them an anxiety, a burdensome responsibility, for now they are smiling easily at one another, whispering and nudging shoulders and thighs. They seem to feel less alone than when they possessed so much money.

The captain has moved to the cabin and has climbed up to the controls, and his mate, a shirtless, shiny, Rasta-locked youth, has replaced him in the bow of the boat, peering over the rail and down at the water. He waves to the captain like a pilot, turns and searches the water below. The engine spins faster now, and the boat moves forward, while the mate waves the captain on, holds him suddenly back, gestures to the starboard side, then to port, then leads him straight ahead again, and the wet, rattling sound of the waves breaking on the reef grows louder.

All the people on the deck are up on hands and knees now, peering over the rail, studying the white foam where the water gets slashed by the reef, looking in vain for the deep, dark cut that the captain must know is there, that the dreadlocked youth in the bow, too, must know is there, for haven’t they made this journey many times, isn’t this the knowledge and skill that Victor is famous for all over the north coast? He has taken hundreds, maybe thousands, over to Florida, and each time he has done it, he has had to cross through this reef to Biscayne Bay, they tell themselves. Even so, they pray. They pray to the loas, to the Virgin and all the saints, to their mait’-tête , if they have one, and to their parents, if they are dead. They pray to anyone who has the power to slide this small wooden boat filled with people between the shark’s teeth of the reef into the calm, deep waters of the bay.

Prié pou’ tou les morts: