Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Of course, you can never rely on Haitians the way you can rely on other people. They’re different somehow, almost another species, it sometimes seems, with their large, innocent eyes, their careful movements, their strange way of speaking. Creole. He learned it from the Haitians he worked with in the cane fields in Florida as a youth, when he was housed with them for months at a time in sweltering, filthy, crowded trailers. They drank the white rum they call clairin and played dominoes and listened to their music on the radio, and he, alone among the Jamaican workers, would join in, and before long he learned to talk with them, not well but enough to enjoy their company.

The Jamaicans, most of whom were older than he, seemed to him morose, bitter, angry, in ways he was not. The Haitians, no matter what their age, seemed innocent in ways he was still trying to hold on to. If he had been a few years older, if he had known then what he learned about the world after he fled the work camp, he might never have dealt with the Haitians, but in those days he was still a boy, and like the Haitians, he felt lucky to be where he was, doing what he was doing, suffering as he was suffering.

He sees a shadow, a man, step forward from between two cabins and then step quickly back again, a tall, thin figure with a machete or big stick in his hand. Tyrone jumps off the lane into shadows of his own.

“Moin dit, monsieur!” Tyrone calls to the figure. “M’apé mandé qui moune….”

No answer.

Tyrone takes a few tentative steps toward where the figure disappeared. “Ça nous dit?” he tries. “Ma p’ mandé coumen nou’ yè, monsieur.”

Suddenly the watery voice of an old man comes out of the darkness. “Bon soir, monsieur. Rajé gain’ zoreille, monsieur.” The shadow has become an old man wearing an undershirt, baggy pants, barefoot, hobbling on a stick.

Tyrone approaches him, then draws back. The man’s eyes are wild, red-rimmed, and he’s grinning. A madman, Tyrone thinks. “Bon soir, Papa,” he says quietly.

“Comment nous yé, monsieur?”

“Bien merci,” Tyrone says.

The old man hobbles into the lane, where Tyrone can see him clearly in the moonlight. He’s still grinning, broken-toothed, red-eyed, scrawny. “Ça nous dit? Bel Français, pas lesprit pou’ ça, monsieur.”

“Non. Mais … où est le peuple?”

“Eh?”

The people, the people who live here, Tyrone says. Crazy old man, he thinks, rum-drunk, telling Tyrone his good French doesn’t make him smart, when he doesn’t understand simple words like peuple himself.

“La famille semblé, monsieur” .

“Coté yo, Papa?” Tyrone asks. Where are they? “Eh?”

“Coté yo, le peuple? Les gens, Papa. Les Haitians.”

The old man comes closer, his rum-sopped breath driving Tyrone backwards. His movements are abrupt, angry, a little confusing to Tyrone, who’s starting to worry about time. They don’t have much time to waste; none, in fact. It’s a long trip back to the Keys in the Belinda Blue, especially loaded with passengers.

The old man is rambling in a singsong fashion, rattling out sentences Tyrone barely catches, about how he hurt his foot, why he’s here alone, who’s to blame for all his troubles. His name is François, Tyrone gathers that much, and evidently he hurt his foot because he was left unattended by the boy who was supposed to be his aide. “Gain yun grand moune qui va fâcher!” he says of himself. “Li retou ‘né pied cassé!” The old man who came home with a broken foot is going to be angry, he promises, which leads him to a litany of complaints: “Depuis moin sorti la ville, moin apé cassé piéd moin. Ça qui fait petit moun fronté.”

Tyrone stops him, draws out his list of names, says the first name on the list, and the old man explodes with wrath, bangs his stick against the ground as if to wake the dead, for the very boy who deserted him and caused him to break his foot is nephew to that woman, who is herself a jeunesse, he claims, though Tyrone, of course, knows this about her, for he met her first of this group, met her almost a month ago, when she was in the room upstairs in the shop of the man who was murdered, Grabow, and in fact was thought by some to be the murderer, for she disappeared the same night Grabow was killed. Then, a week later, in the company of a boy who spoke some English, her nephew, probably, she came one night to Coral Harbour while Boone was over in Nassau doing his cocaine business. She had the boy call Tyrone out of a bar where he was playing dominoes and asked him to carry her over to Florida with her nephew and baby. He agreed to take them for the three hundred dollars they had, but only if she could find them ten or more additional passengers, who could pay five hundred a head, and she led him to the Haitians in the settlement west of Elizabeth Town. He hadn’t asked her about Grabow; he figured that was between them, and if she did chop the man with a machete, he probably deserved it. Tyrone knew the man beat her and kept all the money she earned with her body in that tiny room above the shop. Pathetically, one night she told him, the only time she ever complained, “M’ pas ‘ti bête, m’ pas ‘ti cochon, pou’ on cové, pou’ on marré moin,” repeating in a sad, whimpering voice that she was not a little pig, a little animal that a man can keep tied up like this. Tyrone patted her tenderly on her naked shoulder, and then he walked downstairs and quickly departed, unable to look Grabow in the face. When he learned later that Grabow was dead, cut almost in half by a machete, probably by the whore he kept over his shop, Tyrone was glad.

The old man goes on complaining about “le peuple, les gens, les Haitians … dipis temps y’ap pa’lê sou moin! Pilé pied’m ou mandé’m pardon. Ça pardon-là, wa fait pou’ moin?” and Tyrone finally interrupts him and asks to know where they’ve gone tonight.

The old man sputters, “Le moin vlé pa’lé ou pas vie moin pa’lé!” When I want to talk, you won’t let me.

Tyrone slaps his hands against his thighs, spins around and takes a step away. “Non mêle kilé oudé, Nég’, non mêlé jodi-à.” We’re all mixed up today.

“Non, monsieur,” the old man calls, and scrambles after him. Then he asks for his gift, for money. “Coté ça ou ba moin pou’m alléì?”

Tyrone digs into his pocket and comes up with some change, which he passes into the old man’s outstretched paw.

“Merci, monsieur. Jé wè bouche pé,” he warns — see but don’t say. “La famille semblé …” he whispers, and he looks warily over his bent shoulder, like a dog warning off other dogs as he’s about to eat. “Soso na pé tué, soso, jodi-à!” A pig is to be killed today. “Pour Erzulie, ‘Ti Kita, Gé Rouge, Pié Sèche. Pour les loas, les Invisibles, monsieur!”

“Qui, Papa?”

“Qui, monsieur.” Then he warns Tyrone to get himself gone, for this is not his country. This is Africa, he hisses. “Poussé allé. Ça lan Guinée.”

Tyrone shakes his head no and asks where they’ve gone to kill the pig. He has to see some people now, tonight, for he has important business with them.

The old man jerks and turns himself around, wobbling on the pivot of one leg, a twitching, sudden kind of dance, almost a seizure. Then, his back to Tyrone, facing through the cluster of huts toward the sea, he speaks. His words seem jumbled at first, incoherent, uttered as chant, prayer or prophecy, Tyrone can’t tell which, but the old man’s voice and words frighten him.