Continental Drift

Gan Malice O!

Two nights after the night the Haitians drowned in the waves off the beach at Sunny Isles, a man and two women lead Vanise Dorsinville from a small white bungalow in northeast Miami, out a door at the back of the house into the packed dirt yard, the ground speckled in beige and dark brown in new moonlight and shade, palm fronds beyond the rickety fence chattering in the cool breeze, cars whizzing past overhead on the throughway. They step with care through an opening in the fence, replace the loose board that hides it, and soon they are walking directly beneath the highway, Interstate 95, which swoops over them from north to south, eight lanes of steel and concrete rushing as if downhill toward the tip of the continent, with garbage, broken bottles, rusting tin cans, old tires, rats and the carcasses of cats and dogs scattered below in the tufts of long yellow grass.

Vanise leans heavily on the arm of the man, her brother and father of the boy Claude Dorsinville, who had liked and admired the white captain of the boat and had been the first of the Haitians to leap into the water, as if to show them how easy it was, and, though he could not swim at all, must have believed that he was close enough to America to walk ashore, for he made no attempt to swim, did not struggle, did not even call out, but simply went to the bottom, as if thrown surprised from a great height.

His body and the body of Vanise’s baby will eventually be found, like most of the others, bloated, purplish-gray, half eaten by sharks and birds, in the sands along the stretch of fine white beach south of Bal Harbour, by horrified joggers, beachcombers, early morning surfers and fishermen. No one will be able to identify them, although everyone will know they are the Haitians the newspapers said were cast off an American boat when the coast guard threatened to board it, a boat that slipped away while the coast guard tried to save the drowning Haitians and raced away to the south without giving up its identity or the names of the man who was the captain and the man who was his mate.

Vanise alone survived, which she believes is due to the particular intervention of Ghede, dark and malicious loa of death and regeneration, who needed one of them to survive the drownings, any one of them at all, so why not Vanise, a strong young woman with firm, warm loins, which Ghede, in his gluttony for flesh, is known to relish? Ghede, Vanise believes, wanted one of them to survive so as to feed him the others, to act as his agent, for he is a devourer of human flesh, insatiable, jackal-like, a loa who schemes endlessly to obtain what he endlessly needs. There is no other explanation for her not having drowned in the storm with the others, for she cannot swim any more than her nephew or child could, and the waters were as fierce for her as for them, the waves as heavy, the sharks as hungry, hard and swift.

People who have no power, or believe they have none, also believe that everything that happens is caused by a particular, powerful agent; people who have power, people who can rest easily saying this or that event happened “somehow,” call the others superstitious, irrational and ignorant, even stupid. The truly powerless are none of these, however, for they and perhaps they alone know that luck, bad luck as much as good, is a luxurious explanation for events. When you have even partial control over your destiny, you’re inclined to deny that you do, because you’re afraid the control will go away. That’s superstition. But when, like Vanise, you have no control over your destiny, it’s reasonable to assume that someone or something else does, which is why it’s reasonable, not irrational, for Vanise to believe that the bizarre fact of her survival, her destiny now, is due to a loa’s intervention, and because of the particulars, it’s reasonable for her to assume that the loa is Ghede.

After God, we are in your hands, Ghede Nimbo, the hounsis canzos sing to the loa who stands at the entrance to the underworld, the loa who leans wickedly on the jambs of the gate before the abyss, smokes his cigar, peers through sunglasses and in his reedy, nasal voice says, You, and Not you, and You, and Not you. He waves and pokes and even shoves you through the gate and over the abyss with his thick, stiff hickory stick, then holds back with his stick you who are to stay on this side, lifting your skirt above your hips, if you are a woman, smacking his lips voraciously and poking the men and boys on their crotches and butts, turning his back and flipping up the tails of his long black coat in a shameless prance.

Ghede is the cynical trickster, the glutton, he who foments not death but dying, not salvation but consumption, not fucking but orgasm. He celebrates the passage over from one state to another. Whether physical or metaphysical, Ghede could not care less; it’s all the same to him. Morality he scorns altogether, for he knows he is the last recourse; sentimentality he mocks in song, in his high, childish voice singing, I wuv, you wuv, she wuvs! And what does that make? L’amour! he cries, and strokes his erect penis beneath his trousers. With his motley, his costumes and beggar’s bowl, he derides worldly ambition; with his complaints about the exorbitant costs of keeping up his Dynaflow, he parodies materialism. He dresses women as men, men as women, and asserts the insipidity of biology’s brief distinctions. As clown and trickster, he’s called Mr. Entretoute. As erotic lord, he’s Brav Ghede. As cannibal, he’s Criminelle, devourer of living flesh. And when he stands before the open grave, he’s Baron Cimetière, the trickster become transformer, the clown become magician, he who has the power to animate the dead and slay the living, master of the zombis, he who can change men into beasts and who, properly placated, can bring the sick and dying back to life. And as the loa of regeneration and death, the loa of soullessness, Ghede it is whom you must please if you have lost a child and the child, in its leaving, because it has no soul yet, has stolen yours.

Such a one is Vanise Dorsinville. When her brother was taken to her by the Haitian man who found her wandering dazed along the side of the highway a few hundred yards south of the town of Sunny Isles, the man who found her, a groundskeeper walking early to work at the Haulover Beach Park Golf Course, said, The woman is gone, Émile. She says she’s gone off to be with Baron Cimetière. She knows her name and yours, but not much else.

They have worked together for several years, Émile Dorsinville and the man who found his sister, and like most Haitians in south Florida, live close to one another in Little Haiti, that section of northeast Miami between I-95 and Second Avenue where the narrow streets and alleys and the low bungalows, cinder-block warehouses, garages, shanties and boarded-up storefronts house thousands of recently arrived Haitians; where the air is thick with the smells of their food — baked yams, cassava, plantains, goat and roast pig cooked in yards on charcoal fires or in crowded, makeshift kitchens on hot plates and kerosene burners; where the quick, sexy Haitian music blasts onto the street from record shops and drifts from car radios and all day and night long from transistors set up on windowsills; where women walk barefoot along the dusty sidewalks in ankle-length dresses of gorgeously colored cloth and the men wear white shirts and dark trousers and fedoras and put one foot up on the bumper of a parked car and talk Haitian politics or sit around with a piece of Masonite on their laps and play dominoes until dawn, slamming the large ivory pieces down one upon the other in a long, superbly intelligent run, followed by a round of drinks and yet another game.

Émile took his sister home on the bus that morning, left her in the room with the women who share it with him and returned to work, scolded and docked a half day’s pay by the head groundskeeper. That night, when he arrived back at his home, he learned his sister’s story. She was asleep now, washed and put to bed by Marie and Thérèse, second cousins to Émile, fat women in their middle fifties, legal residents of America, Catholic churchgoers, kindly and without family, except for the skinny man they hide in their room and who, in return, supports them when they cannot find work cleaning the houses of white or Cuban people.

The women had succeeded during the day in getting the girl to talk, or at least to nod yes and no to their questions while they washed and soothed her. They did not learn about Vanise’s child, and they did not learn about Émile’s son Claude. Instead, they concluded that Vanise had come over from Haiti alone, as they themselves had done years before and as Émile had done.

She was on a boat, they told Émile, and there was a great storm, and the Haitians on the boat had to jump into the sea when the boat began to sink. She was saved from drowning by Brav Ghede, no other. That’s all she can say, Thérèse reported. Ghede, Ghede, Ghede.

Émile shook his head no, frowned and looked down on the face of his sister as she slept. Not that one, he said. Not Ghede. She’ll tell us more when she’s rested and has eaten.

But she did not tell them anything more. She woke and wept and murmured the name of Ghede, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière, moaning and turning in the wide bed, her face wet with sweat, her arms and legs tangling in the sheets. Émile and the two women washed her head with rags soaked with herbs — trois paroles, gâté sang and trompette — and to warm her heart and liver, made her sip a tea brewed from citronella grass.

But Vanise spoke no more words, and soon she seemed not to recognize where she was or whom she was with. She stared at the worried dark faces above her as if they were cat faces or cow faces. Émile went to work the next day, and when he returned that evening and saw that his sister was the same, learned that she had called all day long for Ghede in all his names, he went out and made the arrangements to take her to Ghede.

At the rear of a flaking white windowless two-story building with a flat roof, an abandoned warehouse located at the eastern end of Little Haiti several blocks off Miami Avenue, Émile stops and hands his sister to Thérèse and walks slowly up the rotting stairs to a loading dock, faces a door with a small square of plywood where there was once a pane of glass, and knocks. Rusting railroad tracks pass down the alley between the warehouses; from Miami Avenue in the distance comes the bustle of cars cruising late, windows open, radios blaring. A siren howls for a few seconds, then goes silent. Émile glances down the steps to his sister, held in the thick arms of Thérèse and Marie like a rag doll, limp and tiny, head lolling forward, arms hanging down, hands open as if to reveal stigmata. They have dressed her in a white frock, and she is barefoot.

The door opens a crack, and Émile steps quickly away so he can be seen. Come in, Dorsinville, a man’s voice says. Émile turns and waves the others up.

The two women hesitate, then Thérèse shakes her head no. You take her now, she says to Émile. I cannot go in there. I am Catholic. She checks Marie, who approves.

Quickly, Émile descends the stairs and takes his sister from the women’s arms. I am Catholic also! he hisses, and he turns away and hitches the girl up the steps to the platform and takes her inside. The man closes the door and drops a bar to lock it.

The man is carrying a flashlight, but aims it down, so Émile cannot see his face. They are inside a huge open space, he can feel that, despite the total darkness, and he can smell old paper and cloth, dry ticking and straw, as if the place had once been used to store mattresses.

This is your sister, eh? the man says, and he shines his light on Vanise’s face, gray now and closed to everything. Ah, he says in a low voice. Poor thing. Poor little thing.

Where …? Émile begins.

You wish to pay me now? the man interrupts. The Baron has already arrived. He’s eager to see you. Both of you, he adds.

Émile reaches into his pocket and draws out the bills, two crinkled twenties, and passes them into the man’s outstretched palm.

Come now, the man says, and he leads them into darkness, playing the beam of his light on the floor as they walk. They cross the broad expanse of the warehouse, stepping over pieces of snake-like electrical conduit, around piles of old cardboard boxes and tipped and scattered stacks of newsprint, to a set of narrow wooden stairs in the far corner. The man mounts the stairs ahead of him, and Émile sees that he is a round and not young man and is wearing white shoes, socks, trousers and shirt, with a band of red, glossy cloth tied around his thick waist. Tucked into the waistband on one side is a machete, on the other a long, narrow knife. When, at the landing at the top of the stairs, Émile gets a glimpse of the man’s face, he realizes that he has seen the man probably a hundred times on the streets of Little Haiti, a most ordinary-looking, brown-faced man, a clerk or deliveryman or barber, with round, smooth cheeks, thin mustache, high, shiny forehead with short hair graying at the temples.

The man smiles, knocks three times loudly on the door before them, then twice. The door opens, as if by itself, Émile steps inside and brings his sister with him, and the man in white closes and locks the door behind them. They are inside la chambre de Ghede.

The room, evidently at one time an office, is large, separated into two sections by plexiglass dividers and counters, with fly-spotted asbestos panels and old, tubeless, fluorescent light fixtures hanging half-attached from the ceiling, sheets of water-stained wallboard broken through to the lathing behind, several large desks pushed to the side to clear an open space in the front half of the room, where there is a gathering of animals — speckled hens, a black duck and a large black goat. The animals are hobbled by strings held in the hand of a teenaged boy in jeans, shirtless and barefoot, squatting on the floor. A crowd of people is clustered in the further space, but Émile can’t make out what they are doing, for the entire room is illuminated by a dozen or so candles in bottles placed erratically on the counters and desks and along the walls at the floor. Émile hears a woman weeping, sobbing loudly, as if grieving for the loss of a husband, though no one in the crowd seems to pay particular attention to anyone else. It’s as if they are in the dim, brown waiting room of a provincial train station, strangers all of them and bound for different destinations. A few people murmur a song, low, dirge-like, and a thin, high-pitched drum, a dun-dun or bébé, is being played someplace near the middle of the crowd.

The man who brought them in tells Émile to wait by the door and disappears into the further antechamber. Émile breathes in and peers around him, first at the animals, who look half asleep, then at the boy, who is smoking a cigarette and seems bored, as if wishing he were down on Miami Avenue with his friends. All of Vanise’s weight has fallen onto Émile’s side now, and he has to work to hold her in a standing position, grabbing her under one arm and slinging the other over his shoulder.

The air of the room is hot and ripe with the smell of sweating bodies, as if people have been dancing energetically for hours. There is also the sweet smell of white rum, cut by the smell of herbs, sharp and dry, and overripe bananas and the greasy smell of recently cooked chicken. Now Émile sees on top of one of the old desks a row of green jars and small baskets, govis, that hold the spirits of the dead, and midway along each wall, a grinning human skull set on the floor, and over his head, nailed the doorframe, what appears to be the gleaming white skull of a horse. He spins on his heels, dragging his sister’s body in a circle with him, and sees in a dim far corner of the room, beyond the animals and the boy tending them, a grave-sized mound of dirt half-covered with pale green tiles, a short cross planted at the head of the mound. In the corner opposite, three picks, three shovels and three hoes, gravedigger’s tools, lean against the wall, and on the floor before them is a balancing scale. Émile turns again, counterclockwise, and faces in the near corner a long military sword, its point up, and next to it the scabbard, lying flat on the floor. In the fourth corner of the chamber is a batch of sticks — canes and walking sticks and a furled black umbrella — leaned against the walls, as if parked there by Ghede on previous visits and forgotten afterwards.

Suddenly, the drum is beating furiously, like the wings of a hummingbird, high, tight, too fast to separate the beats, and the crowd of people in the further section of the room is falling over itself trying to get out of the way and open a path from out of its center, when a figure nearly seven feet tall seems to rise up out of the crowd of people, as if he has been kneeling in prayer among them and has stood up. He pushes them roughly aside with a thick, gnarled stick and leaves them and passes into the section of the room where Émile — amazed, frightened, grateful — stands waiting.

This is surely, truly, he, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière. This is the loa himself, with his awesome, intricate powers over death that can bring Vanise back to the world of the living. No other loa is at once so powerful and so tricky, so strong and so scheming, so kind and so cruel. And it’s a very good Ghede, too. Convincing. Émile stares up at the loa, and his breath goes away, and he is afraid that he will fall. Ghede is just as Émile hoped — taller than a man, made even taller by the battered top hat on his head, and cadaverous, with a head and face like a skull, his eyes hidden behind black, wire-rimmed glasses, his teeth large and glittering with gold. He’s wearing a mourning coat with no shirt beneath it, and his bony brown chest is slick with sweat. His striped gray trousers are held up by a thickly braided gold rope knotted over his crotch, and on his feet he wears white shoes with pointed toes. He’s a magnificent figure — awesome, frightening and delightful.

As if she’s turned magically into a light, airy bush, Vanise no longer feels heavy to Emile, and he turns to see if she has taken her own weight onto herself, but she still leans all her weight against him, her head still hanging loosely down, eyes closed, mouth open, as if drugged. Ghede, Vanise! Émile whispers. It’s Ghede!

Ghede smiles and pokes Vanise in the belly with his stick. In his high, whining, nasal voice, he says, Mine? Oh, monsieur, how thoughtful of you!

No, no Brav! Émile says. I want …

I want, I want, I want! Everyone wants, wants, wants!

Forgive me, Ghede. She’s just come from Haiti, my sister, and the boat sank, and we found her like this, only she grows worse, and she’s called for you….

No!

No?

No, no, no! Not true. Her mait’-tête is Agwé, or she’d be en bas de l’eau this moment, with all the others. Several people from the group who have gathered behind the Baron nod sagely as he speaks.

Oh, Émile says. Agwé.

Ghede scratches his chin and leans close to Vanise and studies her face a moment. He points at her nose, her chin, her forehead, with a long, extended forefinger, then reaches into her mouth and draws out her tongue and examines it with thumb and forefinger, rubbing it lightly, before putting it back into her mouth. Lifting up one eyelid at a time, he examines her yellow eyes. The pupils have rolled up and she looks all but dead to Emile.

Agwé is gone now. Gone far away. Took her from the waters, then left her, the Baron says. He seems puzzled and begins mumbling in no language Émile can understand, not Creole, not French, certainly not English. Kala, kala, diman kon, lé ké dja, lé ké dja…. His mumble becomes a chant, Kala, kala, diman kon, and he starts shuffling his feet side to side and turning in a slow circle, counterclockwise. Behind him, a wizened old man with a stringy beard picks up the rhythm of Ghede’s dance with the tiny, high-pitched drum, and several people in the knot surrounding the drummer join in the chant and commence shuffling their feet in the same odd, crablike, side-to-side step. Ghede’s face has turned to black stone, obsidian, shiny and opaque, and he dances faster and faster, over and back, from side to side, like a pendulum increasing its velocity with each new arc, and then, suddenly, he wrenches Vanise out of Emile’s arms, lurches across the room with her and tosses her onto the grave. Freed of his sister’s weight, Emile, without thinking it, has joined the dance, as if grabbed at the arms from behind by a pair of les Invisibles and thrust forward toward the other dancers and then shoved back and forth in time to their movements, until he has caught the movement on his own — then a blur, whirling motion, light creeping forward from the back of his skull, until he has been mounted, taken over, displaced by Agwé, who is immediately confronted by Ghede to learn the truth:

Ghede: Agwé Ge-Rouge, you’ve gone off with this woman’s soul, this nice young African woman here, and she’s sad, Agwé, sad and empty, a shell, Papa. A shell.

Agwé [in a dark, low, bubbling voice, as if from under water]: Not I, Brav. [Looks down at Vanise, examines her face carefully.] But she’s gone, all right. Too bad.

Ghede [angry]: You’re the woman’s mait’-téte! If she’s gone, you’re gone too!

Agwé: No.

Ghede: No?

Agwé: It’s her infant son, unbaptized, who’s gone off with her soul. The child’s en bas de l’eau, that’s where, and I’m with him now, Papa. Not her. It happens that way, Ghede. This one, the mother, she’s yours, if you want her, if you want to install yourself in her head.

Ghede: Her son’s dead, eh? And how do you account for that?

Agwé: Lots more dead, too.

Ghede: True? [Smacks his lips, leers.]

Agwé: True. This woman’s son, the infant. And also her nephew, a boy, Claude Dorsinville, the only son of my very own cheval here. A nice boy, too. All dead in the water, all of them, sad to say. But it was time.

Ghede: Time! They drowned, then, these children?

Agwé: Yes Ghede: The boat sank, and they drowned, except for this young woman?

Agwé: No. It was evildoing. Evil. A sad thing. An evil thing.

Ghede: Tell me!

Agwé: The man who owns the boat sent them all over the side in a storm, fired his gun and sent them over. Evil.

Ghede: And you went off with the infant?

Agwé: He was not baptized. It was better for me to do that than to stay with her and let him roam, a lutin. But you can have her, if you want. You want her, Ghede?

Ghede [Looks Vanise over with salacious precision.]: Well, yes, she’s a good meal, whether you’re hungry or not.

Agwé: Take her, then. I’m with the child now. As for the others, they’re baptized, they’re all fine, en bas de l’eau. Even the boy, Claude, son of my cheval, he’s fine.

Ghede: No other came out of the waters but this woman?

Agwé: No other, and she came without me. She’s yours. You brought her out this far, Ghede. Bring her the rest of the way now.

Ghede [with impatience]: Leave now, go on, leave! I know what I need to know! You go now, get out of here, you’ll get fed plenty in good time. You’ve got a good horse there, he’ll feed you. [Waves his assistant over to take care of Emile, and the man escorts Émile away from the crowd, calming him and talking him back out of his possession.]

The drum and the dancing resume, with Ghede swiftly working himself into a practiced frenzy over Vanise’s inert body on the grave, until he signals for the animals to be brought forward, and his assistant, the man in white with the machete and the knife, obeys. First the speckled chickens are cut at the throat, their blood dribbled over Vanise’s bare legs. Then the duck. Same thing. And finally the black goat, lifted by two men in the air and throat cut over Vanise, blood allowed to spurt down first on Ghede with his huge mouth open and looking up as if into rain and then on Vanise, who is now awake and alert to the proceedings. Songs, initiated by Ghede, are picked up by the rest, until Ghede leaves off singing and spins, caught by the rite. He bites at his arm, wildly chewing, until controlled by his assistant, and then he bites at the carcass of the black goat. Vanise joins him, possessed now clearly by Ghede himself, in a crab-walk dance, the two facing each other, eye to eye, as equals. Song. Smell of chicken cooking. Goat carcass dragged away to be butchered and cooked. Song.