Russell Banks - Continental Drift

The drums have reached a frantic yet still organized and coherent pace. The voices of the singers, however, as Claude has removed them one by one from the crowd, have diminished in volume and intensity way out of proportion to the numbers of the missing members of the chorus. It’s as if every time Claude removes one singer, four others fall into silence. The Haitians surrounding Tyrone down in the dark confines of the gorge have begun to grow restless and agitated; they move about nervously, looking back toward the hounfor one minute and at each other the next, as if for corroboration or denial of the truth of what they have seen there.

Tyrone puts his list before the boy’s sweating face and points out the boy’s own name and that of his aunt. He himself doesn’t really care if she comes or not, especially since he promised her a bargain rate, but he knows that she holds the boy’s fare and there is now no way he will be able to leave without taking the boy. “Where Auntie, yout’-man?” he asks the boy. “Cyan forget Auntie.”

“Him cyan come …” the boy says, looking at the ground. “Him … him got loa en tète …” he stumbles.

Tyrone puts his arm around the boy’s bony shoulders and steps him away from the others. “You got de money?”

Claude shakes his head no.

Tyrone shrugs his shoulders. “Got to get Auntie, den.”

The boy turns and walks back toward the hounfor, which suddenly — or so it seems to Tyrone — has gone silent. He hasn’t been paying attention to the noise and flickering lights from the hounfor; he’s been concentrating on his passenger list. The Haitians in his group have grown extremely restive now, shifting their feet and looking at one another, then peering back up along the gorge to the trees that surround the hounfor and the red and white banners in the cottonwood tree, which have begun to flutter in an offshore breeze.

The group is made up half of men, half of women, with three small children. Tyrone goes back to counting them and adding up their fares in his head, calculating his share of the profits, one-fourth plus whatever he’s able to skim off the top, when he hears someone breaking noisily through the brush behind him. He turns and sees the boy Claude, a small child slung against one side and the woman Vanise being dragged along behind. The boy is out of breath and grunting from the effort of pulling the woman through the short macca bushes and over the rough limestone, for the woman seems dead drunk or drugged, in a stupefied state with her eyes rolled back, her mouth slack, her legs and arms loose and wobbly. Her white dress has come undone almost to her waist, exposing her brassiere and dark belly, and is torn and spotted with mud; her hair is matted and awry, and her face is splotched with dirt.

Before Tyrone can respond, however, he’s grabbed from behind. Hands like manacles clamp onto his upper arms, and he turns his head and faces a pair of large men, both carrying upraised machetes. Then the mambo herself steps free of the bushes and strides through the crowd, passes Claude and the baby Charles and Vanise without a glance. The woman in the red dress is smiling, but it’s a calculated smile. She’s carrying her rattle, the asson, in one hand, a small brass bell in the other, and as she passes, the Haitians back away in fear of her, as if her heat could burn.

Tyrone yanks against the men gripping his arms, but he can’t move — their hands are like tightened vises that simply take another turn and hold him even more firmly than before. They aren’t controlling him with their machetes; they don’t have to: instead, they hold the huge, razor-sharp blades over his head in a ceremonial way, as if awaiting a signal to bring them down and slice the Jamaican in half.

The mambo, her coffee-colored face sweating furiously, her hair and dress disheveled, shakes the asson in the face of the Jamaican and spits her words at him. “Moin vé ou malhonnet!” I see that you are a dishonest man. “Lan Guinée gangin dent’,” she says. In Africa there are teeth.

Tyrone answers in a low, careful voice: I am just passing through. “C’est passé n’ap passé là” .

Yes, indeed — she nods and smiles — he is just passing through. She makes a gesture with her rattle for the men with the machetes to release him, and then she turns to her flock. She separates Claude from the group with a push and says he, too, must pass through. Take the infant and pass along with the hairy one.

Vanise staggers when the boy lets go of her hand, and seems to be coming to, for she takes a step to follow him and Charles. But the mambo stops her with her bell. No, hounci, you stay.

Tyrone has backed off one careful step at a time, with Claude and the baby beside him, until they have moved out of the group and are standing in the gorge a ways below the others. He sees the red-eyed face of old François in the bushes next to him. The old man sneers at the mambo and shouts at her. “Nen point mambo ou houngan passé Bondieu nan pays-yà!” There is no mambo or houngan in this country greater than God.

The woman shrieks at him. “Enhé, enhé, enhé!” she curses. “Papa Ogoun qui gain’ yun mangé, tout moune pas mange’ li!” Now, she says, where are my children? “Coté petits moin yo?” She turns and looks across the faces of the crowd.

Signaling to the pair of men with the machetes, she starts back up the rocky path toward the hounfor , and they follow. The others mill about for a second, cease their movement and watch her go. Then they turn, Vanise included, and begin filing down the path after Tyrone.

As one by one they pass the old man, he cackles and taps them on the shoulder with his stick. Then at last they are gone, and the old man is standing alone in the narrow gorge, mumbling and every now and then breaking into a dry laugh, as if he knows what no one else knows.

“C’est pas faute moin!” It’s not my fault, the old man sings. “C’est pas faute moin! C’est pas faute moin!”

3

Where the stream enters the sea, the Haitians come alone and in twos and threes from their huts to meet the Jamaican. In the bay, a half mile away, the trawler rocks lightly in the soft lavender predawn light, and beyond the hook of beach that protects the bay, open sea stretches straight to Africa, where the eastern sky is born, cream-colored near the horizon, fading to zinc gray overhead. In the west, above Florida, the sky deepens to purple, with glints of stars. A pair of gulls cruise hungrily along the beach toward the sandy hook, while overhead, its huge, motionless black wings extended like shadows, a frigate bird floats, watches, prepares to dive.

The Haitians are wearing their best clothes: for most of the men, clean white shirts, dark trousers, black shoes; for the women, brightly colored cotton dresses, sandals, headscarves. They carry cardboard suitcases, woven bags and baskets into which they’ve packed a change or two of clothing, if they own that much, a few personal items, maybe a small bottle of perfume or cologne, a family photograph in a gilt frame, a Bible or prayerbook, their gardes and wangas , and food for the journey — fruit, cassava, chicken, a bottle of clairin , some tinned milk. They may own more than these pitiful few possessions, a pot and a pan, some dishes, gourds, tools, bedding, a bicycle, but they don’t hesitate to leave these things behind, for they are starting over, and soon, they know, they will own all the things that Americans own — houses, cars, motorcycles, TV sets, Polaroid cameras, stereos, blue jeans, electric stoves. Their lives will soon be transformed from one kind of reality, practically a nonreality, into a new and, because superior, an ultimate reality. To trade one life for another at this level is to exchange an absence for a presence, a condition for a destiny. These people are not trying merely to improve their lot; they’re trying to obtain one.