Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Tyrone looks back toward the tarpaulin, steps down to the deck and peers underneath. He’ll give them a bucket of water and a dipper, he says to Bob. They’ll share it out themselves.

“Fine, fine. Poor fuckin’ bastards,” he murmurs, as Tyrone disappears below. From the moment he first saw them ride out from the beach at New Providence in the dinghy, saw how astonishingly black they were, African, he thought, and saw how silent and obedient, how passive they were, he’s been struck by the Haitians. There’s a mixture of passivity and will that he does not understand. They risk everything to get away from their island, give up everything, their homes, their families, forsake all they know, and then strike out across open sea for a place they’ve only heard about.

Why do they do that? he wonders. Why do they throw away everything they know and trust, no matter how bad it is, for something they know nothing about and can never trust? He’s in awe of the will it takes, the stubborn, conscious determination to get to America that each of them, from the eldest to the youngest, must own. But he can’t put that willfulness together with what he sees before him — a quiescent, silent, shy people who seem fatalistic almost, who seem ready and even willing to accept whatever is given them.

He almost envies it. The way he sees himself — a man equally willful, but only with regard to the small things, to his appetites and momentary desires, and equally passive and accepting too, but only with regard to the big things, to where he lives and how he makes his living — he is their opposite. It’s too easy to explain away the Haitians’ fatalism by pointing to their desperation, by saying that life in Haiti is so awful that anything they get, even death, is an improvement. Bob has more imagination than that. And it’s too easy to explain away their willfulness the same way. Besides, it’s not logical to ascribe two different kinds of behavior to the same cause. There’s a wisdom they possess that he doesn’t, a knowledge. The Haitians know something, about themselves, about history, about human life, that he doesn’t know. What to call it, Bob can’t say. It’s so outside his knowledge that he can’t even name it yet.

He’s intelligent and worldly enough now, however, not to confuse it with sex. That is, even though black people are still sexier to Bob than white people, it’s only because they look better to Bob, for to him, a white man, black is presence and white is absence, which means that he can see them in ways that he can’t see white people. Which also means, of course, that he can see white people in ways he’s utterly blind to in blacks, as he learned by trying to love Marguerite. Bob has become one of those fortunate few men and women who have learned, before it’s too late to enjoy it, that sex is just sex and it’s all of that as well. He can take it and leave it, which is a much happier condition than having to do one or the other. He’s not sure how this has happened to him, but he knows it has happened and that it has something important to do with Marguerite. There was no exact moment when his conscious understanding of his own sexuality changed; there simply came a time when he behaved differently — that is, without fantasy. As with Allie Hubbell in the trailer across the lane. As with Honduras. As with Elaine.

By the same token — his intelligence and worldliness — Bob is unable to attribute to the Haitians’ poverty what he perceives as their wisdom. In the past, certainly, he sometimes regarded poor people through the cracked lens of liberal guilt, but that was before he discovered that he was a poor person himself and stopped envying the rich and started hating them. That was before he learned that what was wrong with the rich was not that they had something he wanted, but that they were unconscious, often deliberately so, of the power they wielded over the lives of others. His brother Eddie was rich for a while, and Bob envied him, until he himself suffered sufficiently from his brother’s unconsciousness to begin at last to hate him, so that when Eddie lost everything, Bob discovered he could love him again. If Bob had gone on envying his brother, if he’d never learned to hate the rich man he’d become, he would have been glad when the man lost his wealth.

Bob remembers the night he shot the black man in the liquor store, and the kid with the cornrows shitting his pants in the back room, and he shudders. The sun overhead is warm on his shoulders, and the tropical sea sparkles like the laughter of children at play, while up on the bridge, his hands clamped to the wheel of the Belinda Blue, Bob Dubois shudders as if an arctic wind has blown over him. He remembers the night he came close to shooting a man simply because the man had a haircut like that of one of the pair who tried to rob him, the night he turned the gun over to Eddie and walked out of Eddie’s house waiting to hear the sound of Eddie using the gun on himself, half of him wanting Eddie to use it on himself, the other half struggling to erase the thought altogether. I didn’t hate Eddie then, he thinks. I envied him. It was only later, on Moray Key, when it seemed to Bob that he was now truly poor, that he could begin to give up clinging to fantasies of becoming rich. Then, when it became clear to him that he has as much chance of becoming rich as he had of becoming Ted Williams, he gave up envying those he saw as rich. That’s what freed him, he believes, to love Eddie again the night he called in such fear and pain, a lost brother returned to him for only a few moments, but returned nonetheless, and for that Bob is grateful. What Eddie did to himself he did himself, but how much sadder for Bob it would have been if, when Eddie died, Bob had been glad of it.

To say that Bob Dubois is intelligent is to say that he is able to organize his experience into a coherent narrative; to say that he’s worldly is to say that he is in the world, that he does not devour it with his fantasies. Not anymore. These are relative qualities, of course, both of them depending on the breadth and depth of Bob’s experience, and depending, then, on accident, since Bob has no particular interest in, or need for, broadening or deepening his experience per se. He’s not an especially curious man. Mere psychological and moral survival will be enough for him to feel able to say, in the end, if he’s given a chance to say anything at all, that he’s lived his life well. He does not need, therefore, to poke into the mystery these Haitians present to him. What are they to him or he to them, except quick means to ends? They need him to carry them to where starvation and degradation are unlikely; he needs them to help him stay there.

He can’t stop himself, however, from believing that these silent, black-skinned, utterly foreign people know something that, if he learns it himself, will make his mere survival more than possible. They cannot tell him what it is, naturally, but even if they spoke English or he spoke Creole, it could not be told. He shouts down to Tyrone, waking him this time. The Jamaican stumbles out of the cabin and blinks up at Bob.

“Want to take the wheel awhile? I need a break,” Bob says.

The Jamaican nods and climbs the ladder to the bridge. Bob descends, ducks into the cabin, pulls a cold beer from the locker in the galley and eases himself back on deck. Squatting, he peers into the darkness under the tarpaulin, a sudden, hot, densely aromatic darkness that makes the can of Schlitz in his hand look luminous.

The Haitians are mostly lying down, a few seated on their heels and eating, one or two talking in low voices, several evidently asleep. But as one person, when Bob appears at the open end of their lean-to, they look up and, it seems to Bob, stare at him. He looks quickly away, sees the empty bucket and draws it toward him.