Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Dubois will be glad too, Tyrone thinks. The man’s nervous, worried that his wife will find out he’s dealing in Haitians. As if it matters what she knows. Dubois told Tyrone his wife believes they’re taking a party of Canadians out of Nassau and will be gone for no longer than a day and a night and the next day. Now, if they’re ten or twelve hours late getting back to Moray Key, the woman will fret. And she may do something stupid, like call out the coast guard. This Dubois is trouble. Men like him should stick to fishing.

Suddenly, the old man leading Tyrone has entered a clearing, and Tyrone has automatically followed and has found himself in a crowd of men, women and children, their faces raptly attentive to what’s going on beyond them. They are looking into a cleared space the size of a large room, covered with thatch, where a service is being conducted. The drums have ceased, and the people have been stilled, and the action de gr â ce, the formal invocation, has begun.

An elderly man with spectacles and dressed in white, the prêt’ savanne, stands by the centerpost and reads from a prayerbook. In the dust at the base of the centerpole, an elaborately geometrical vever has been drawn in flour and ash, and a short ways behind the post, an altar has been set up, a long table covered with white cloth over which have been carefully arranged lithographs of the saints, a plastic crucifix and vials of holy water, lighted candles, bowls of food — rice, cassava, chicken, bananas, corn — and glasses of coffee, orange soda, Coca-Cola.

A short way to the right of the pret’ savanne, a woman in a red satin dress, the mambo, is seated on a kitchen chair. She’s rocking slowly back and forth in the chair, her eyes tightly closed, her right hand rhythmically shaking the asson in time to the drone of the old man with the book, who chants on and on, occasionally rising to song and then falling back to chant again. Every now and then, as if to punctuate a particular phrase or prayer, the mambo calls out, “Grâce mise’corde!” and the audience repeats her call, “Grâce mise’ corde!” and the prêt’ savanne drones on, “… au nom de Dieu, au nom de Sainte Vierge de Ciel, au nom de Saints de Tè’, au nom de Saints de la Lune …”

The Jamaican scans the crowd for familiar faces, but is momentarily distracted by the sight of a group of animals tethered to a small mahoe tree off to his right and attended by a trio of young women wearing white, full-skirted dresses and scarlet headbands. The animals are various and peaceful together, several ruffle-feathered chickens, a pair of doves, a black, yellow-eyed goat, a small gray pig and a large black boar. Beyond the animals is a cookfire and next to it a second altar table covered in white and loaded with bowls and bottles of food and drink. Tied to the top branches of a tall cottonwood tree are several white and red banners, hanging limply in the windless moonlight.

The people all suddenly kneel, and Tyrone, the only person left standing, quickly kneels with them, as the prêt’ savanne intones the prayers, a Pater Noster, the Credo, the Ave Maria. During the prayers, Tyrone lifts his head slightly and sees that the mambo is staring directly at him, a hard, hot look that alarms him. He peers around at the crowd on his left, recognizes, despite their bowed heads, one or two of the Haitians he signed up, scans the group to his right and sights Vanise and the boy, her nephew. Vanise is praying fervently, crossing herself over and over, but the boy is watching the mambo . His gaze follows hers across the clearing of the peristyle and into the audience, and when he sees Tyrone, he smiles broadly and nods.

Tyrone smiles back.

There is a benediction offered by the old man in spectacles, and everyone rises, and the man shifts into a chanting, hymnlike song, accompanied now by the drums, slowly, seriously, bringing the people’s voices into it one by one, until soon everyone is singing together, and all three drums are throbbing in unison. The mambo, who has not once taken her powerful eyes off Tyrone, begins to move in time to the song, shouting as she stamps and whirls across the smooth ground:

Poussé allé,

Poussé allé,

Icit pas pays oui

Ça lan Guinée,

Icit pas pays ou!

Gradually, her dance circles her toward the audience, which parts for her as she spirals near, making a path that leads straight to Tyrone. Coming toward him from the other side, pushing and pulling at people’s shoulders, squirming between them, is the boy Claude. Both the mambo and the boy reach Tyrone at the same instant.

The woman glares into Tyrone’s face, studies it sharply, bit by bit, his eyes, nose, mouth, his beard and dreadlocked hair, as if expropriating each piece of him and making it her own.

“Icit pas pays oui” she hisses. This is not your country. “Ça lan Guinée!” This land is Africa. “Poussé allé!” she shrieks at him. Get you gone!

Over on his left, Tyrone sees the old man with the stick, the man who brought him here, laughing and joining in with the chant, “Poussé allé! Poussé alléI” In seconds, the entire mass of people, sixty or seventy of them, has taken up the cry, and their faces have turned ugly and threatening, even that of the old man, François. There are young men and old, mothers, grandmothers and maidens, people in tattered clothes and people dressed meticulously in white, drunk men and sober, people who look sane to Tyrone and people who look insane, and all of them are raging at him, Get you gone! Get you gone! Get you gone!

Except one, the boy, Claude Dorsinville, who grabs Tyrone by the arm and yanks him away, pulls him back into the trees and away from the crowd. The mambo wheels around and heads for the peristyle, where she takes up her dance again, and a woman is mounted by a loa, and a cheer goes up. The drums rise in intensity and pace and are joined by the clanging beat of the ogan . Another woman is mounted by the loa Damballah and throws herself face forward on the ground, where she writhes like a snake.

Back in the bushes, in darkness and shadow, Tyrone and the boy begin to speak to one another. The boy speaks almost as much English now as the Jamaican speaks Creole, and soon they have worked out a plan. Tyrone will wait down in the gorge a short ways, and the boy will bring the passengers to him, one by one. Some of them he already knows; others Tyrone will have to read out to him, for the boy cannot read. When they have all assembled in the gorge, the boy will join them, and together the group will go down from the Barrens to the village, where they will gather their few possessions, pay Tyrone and be transported to the boat, which is waiting for them in the bay. “Den we go to America, mon,” Tyrone says. “Yout’-man, bring dem Haitians forward now,” he tells the boy, who grins and ducks back into the bushes and heads for the hounfor .

Moments later, the boy returns with a scrawny, nearly bald man in tow, a man half-drunk, who turns obsequious as soon as he sees Tyrone. The boy disappears again, reappearing a moment later with two young men, tall, stringy twenty-year-olds who formally shake Tyrone’s hand and cross their arms over their chests and wait in shy silence. Then a middle-aged woman with two small children, and an old, half-blind woman whom Claude leads by the hand and passes over to the woman with the children as if handing her a third child. This goes on rapidly, until at last Claude has brought out of the hounfor fourteen people, all the people on Tyrone’s list but two, Claude himself and his aunt, Vanise.