Continental Drift

Grand Chemin

1

The captain was roan-colored, bald and heavy-lidded, almost Japanese-looking, and he wasn’t so much fat as round, round-headed, thick-necked, with a wide, hard chest and belly, powerful arms, large, cruel hands and feet. He stood on the foredeck in a dark green tee shirt and floppy, stained chinos and bare feet, staring at Vanise and the boy and baby as if they were merely three unexpected, additional bits of cargo. They had stepped from behind a batch of empty oil barrels on the pier and had quickly come aboard with the man named Robbie, who had brought them across from McKissick’s farm on North Caicos. Robbie’s price for his service was easily paid. In exchange for negotiating with the captain of the Kattina, a patched and leaking prewar island freighter, and bringing Vanise, Charles and Claude Dorsinville over from North Caicos in an open fishing dinghy borrowed from his cousin, Robbie wanted only the Haitians’ absence from George McKissick’s farm. He wanted his old job back, and he wanted McKissick angry. The absence of the Haitians obtained both.

Vanise did not ask Robbie how she would pay the captain of the Kattina, nor did either man bring the subject up. All Robbie had said was, Doan you worry none, gal, me take care of everyt’ing. Dis mon, him a fren of mine an’ long time now him owe me a payback. Then one sun-baked afternoon in October, Robbie had simply appeared at McKissick’s farm, had told her to pack her clothes in a bag and come along with him, and Vanise, with the baby in her arms, and Claude, who carried in a bundle their few clothes and some food stolen from McKissick’s kitchen, had followed Robbie across the corn fields through the palmettos and sea grapes down to the beach, where they saw the dinghy. They climbed into the boat, Robbie pushed it out, jumped in and started the motor, and in minutes they were beyond the reef and headed across the channel toward South Caicos, which they reached by nightfall, tying up in the slip next to the Kattina in Cockburn Harbour.

The fat man said nothing to her when she and the children came aboard, looked at them as if measuring how much salt they’d displace in the hold, turned and walked to the stern, where he leaned back against the rail, crossed his meaty arms over his chest and stared down at the engine and a man who was bent over, working with a wrench. The man looked up, and Vanise saw that he was a white man, shirtless and oil-stained, with long brown hair that he flipped away from his face with a toss of his head. Then a slender young brown man emerged from the cabin near the bow and strolled by her to the others in the stern, and the three men talked for a few seconds in English.

Abruptly, the white man swung himself onto the deck and closed the hatch on the engine, and the captain came forward to Vanise, steered her toward a hatch, opened it and waved her down the ladder that led into the darkness below. G’wan now, get down dere, he growled. He pushed them with one hand and held the hatch open with the other until they had descended and got their footing and saw that the hold was nearly filled with sacks of salt stacked on pallets, with water sloshing below the pallets. Then he closed the hatch, and they were surrounded by darkness, as if buried.

She heard the engine turn over and catch, heard the men walk and talk abovedecks, and suddenly the boat was moving, drifting languidly. The engine chunked into gear, and the motion of the boat shifted and became purposeful, and she knew they were moving away from the pier and the village, away from the Turks and Caicos islands, away from George McKissick and his farm, his drunken belligerence and his threats to turn them over to the police, away from his sudden visits to her mat in the tiny shack behind his house, away from the long, lonely months of hard work in the sun planting and tending McKissick’s corn fields and garden, cleaning his house, cooking his food, listening to his rambling, drunken speeches in English that she could understand only by ignoring the words and listening to the sounds as if they were of the wind and water, watching his face as if it were clouds on the horizon.

The boy said, We have to stay down here so the police won’t see us. He rarely asked questions now; it seemed to him that the baby Charles would soon be the one to ask questions. Claude knew that he was a boy rapidly becoming a man and so must learn to provide answers. Also, since coming to North Caicos, he had learned to see his aunt in a different light, for though she was, to him, clearly a serviteur and possessed a surprising knowledge of the loas and had on several occasions in his presence been mounted by Agwé, her mait’-tête, so that he suspected she had become under his mother’s tutelage a hounci canzo, an initiate, he nevertheless saw her sadness now and knew that when she was silent and seemed to be looking inside herself, as she did with increasing frequency, she was not thinking of anything. She was like an animal resting. And so, instead of asking questions, he had recently taken to making statements about the world, to which her habit was to nod agreement, as if she herself knew nothing of the world.

Claude groped his way over the bags and found a spot toward the bow where, after shoving several of the heavy sacks aside, he made a space for them to lie together. Come! he called to Vanise. Here’s a more comfortable place. He returned to where he had left her and the baby, reached out in the darkness until he felt her shoulder, took her hand and led her forward. He placed the bundle against the wooden hull and patted it with his hand. Lie down with your head here. It’s nice, he said, to listen to the water against the boat and be safe and dry inside. He moved his long legs over, made room for Vanise and the baby on his left, and stretched out in the darkness, his hands behind his head, as if waiting cheerfully for sleep.

He did not want to think about where they were going, as he had no name for the place, nor did Vanise. They knew it was not America, not Florida, not Miami, and they knew it was not back to Haiti, where, no doubt, Victor was still rounding up people desperate and frightened enough to ignore the rumors that he seldom took people all the way to America and instead dropped them off on the deserted beaches of small islands in the Bahamas. Sometimes Victor did take people all the way to America, however, and sometimes the people he dropped off in the Turks and Caicos or Inagua Islands managed after a year or two somehow to get to Florida on their own. Then one day a letter would come from America to a hill town in the north of Haiti, and Victor’s reputation as a savior would be renewed, so that often he’d find among his passengers a man he’d carried from Le Mole and dropped off in North Caicos the year before. It was never seen as Victor’s fault that the man had not got farther from Haiti than a beach fifty miles to the north. It was the fault of a baka, an evil spirit, or the fault of the passenger himself, who had not made his engagement a strong one or had failed to feed the loas adequately or had not obtained a proper garde or wanga from a proper houngan before coming down to Victor in Le Môle to arrange for the journey over the sea to America.

Claude had heard the name of the place they were going to, had heard the man Robbie promise it several times, but it was difficult to separate that word from the other words Robbie spoke and a struggle for Vanise and Claude just to understand that Robbie was going to help them escape from George McKissick, so they had come to concentrate on that, escaping, and to put the nature and name of the place they were going to, its distance from here, out of their minds. Wherever they went, they knew, the loas would be there, en has de l’eau. Wherever they went, there would be the island below the sea.

The chug of the engine from the stern, the slap of the water against the bow, the steady lift and fall of the boat and the quiet slosh of bilge water below the pallets lulled the boy, and he soon slept. Perhaps the baby Charles slept, perhaps Vanise slept, perhaps Claude slept for only a second or two, he could not say, for he woke suddenly and totally without having dreamed, when he heard far to the stern the squeak of the hatch cover being lifted, then heard it clunk shut again, and saw moving sheets and circles of light coming forward, heard a man grunt with the effort of climbing over the cargo, finally saw the man, the captain, heave himself forward, until he was kneeling next to them on their couch, his shadow large and wobbly against the dark planking of the hold, his face somber, disinterested, his small eyes looking only at Vanise. She had sat up and held her son in her arms and now looked down at the top of the baby’s head, as if searching for a place to send her spirit into his.

The fat man reached forward with his flashlight and nudged Claude, pushing him on the arm with the light. He spoke rapidly in a harsh whisper. Get now, bwoy, dis no place for you. Take dat pickney and get aft.

Claude did as he was told, gently took the baby from Vanise’s arms and moved quickly away, sliding over the wall of cargo into the shadows beyond, where he sat down and waited and listened to the sound of the man as he struggled with his trousers, listened to the man’s coarse breath as he yanked Vanise’s clothing away and his grunts as he pushed himself into her.

A few moments later, circles of light flashed against the hull and cargo, and the huge shadow of the fat man hove into view, and as the man passed Claude, he stopped a second and said to him, Don’t make no trouble for yourself now, bwoy. His voice was almost pleasant, advisory. Clause did not know what the words meant, however, and stared at the man’s large, bare feet.

Bwoy! he shouted. Cyan unnerstan’ me, fuckin’ Haitians. Bwoy, just you don’t make no trouble, dat’s all. You can be whore too, y’ unnerstan’. He reached forward and grabbed Claude’s skinny shoulder. G’wan forward dere wid sister, he snarled, and lumbered away, his flashlight beam spreading white light ahead of him in circular waves.

Claude hurried forward, the baby clinging to his hip with its legs, and once behind the wall of bags of sea salt, in darkness again, heard the fat man lift the hatch from below, heave his bulk up the ladder, then close it with a bang. The boy reached out until he felt one of Vanise’s ankles. He could hear her heavy, rasping breath, as if she had been chased by a huge, fierce animal and had barely escaped to this cavelike hiding place.

You’ll be all right again soon, he told her.

She asked for her baby, and he passed the child over. Then she asked him to find her headcloth, which she had lost.

He groped between the sacks and finally came to it and handed it to her. A few seconds later, she passed the crumpled cloth back and told him to soak it in the bilge water for her, which he did. In a few moments, he could hear the baby sucking, and Vanise’s breath had slowed and disappeared beneath the sound of the water against the hull and the engine aft, and the boy leaned back again, stretched out his legs and rested.

Sometime later, as in a dream, though it was not a dream, the slender, brown-skinned man and the white man with the long brown hair appeared in the hold together, the white man sending Claude and the baby aft with a gesture, then holding the flashlight on Vanise while the other man silently raped her. When it was the white man’s turn, he gave over the light, pulled down his trousers, said a few words in English that Claude overheard, Cunt, and, with irritation, Bloody Christ, just relax now, I ain’t gonna hurt ya, and after a while it was over, and the men had gone, once again dropping the Haitians into their pit of darkness, their cave, their black nest where the only sounds they heard were their own thoughts and the hammering of the engine and the slap of the low waves against the bow of the boat as it drove steadily west toward Great Inagua.

Back in Cockburn Harbour, when Vanise and Charles and Claude had first descended into the hold, day had gone clean away, and night now went away too, for there was only blackness, broken unpredictably, swiftly and absolutely by the men from above with their flashlight and few words and quick, violent moves that seemed to relax the men for a while, as if they were injecting themselves with a drug — the fat man, who, after the first time, came with a flask of clear rum in one hand and drank from it and gave it to Vanise to sip from when he was done with her, and the slender brown man, who came to the hold alone now and tried talking to Vanise and then got angry because she would not respond, so he slapped her, and the young white man, not much older than a boy, but hairy across his chest and shoulders, his stringy long arms and legs casting wild shadows when he took the woman, as if he were beating her. When the men were down in the hold, their flashlight shattering the darkness, the place seemed tiny, cramped, closed in upon the human beings, as if they were under a huge house; but when the men had gone and had taken their light away with them, the place seemed to open up and grow enormous, like a black tent. And with both day and night gone, all of time was gone, too, except for the scratchy, mechanical time that passed through whenever the men appeared, abrasive interruptions that Claude had begun to accept like a shift in dreams, his mind returning gratefully, as soon as the men were gone, to the sweet-flowing timeless dream of perpetual darkness — when suddenly the throb of the motor ceased, and the sound of the sea smacking the planks near his head diminished, and the steady lift and drop of the boat changed to a gentle, rocking motion.

He heard a thud against the side of the boat, and voices, the captain’s and the Englishman’s, and then, astonished, Claude heard a Haitian voice, a man shouting in Creole.

Resté arresté la! Pa wé ou, messieurs! Moin la!

Claude sat upright, and hearing now a mumbling mix of English and Creole as several people came aboard, understanding more of the English words than the Haitians seemed to and more of the Creole than did the captain and his crewmen, he decided that this was a prearranged stop, that the Kattina was picking up marooned Haitians and the captain was being paid in American dollars for it.

Haitian people, Claude said to Vanise.

How many?

I don’t know. More than two. Listen.

Police.

No. People from Haiti, going to America. The gros neg is taking money from them.

Vanise grunted. What food have we? They’ll want our food.

Maybe they have their own. We have only biscuits and cheese and some tinned beef.

I’m thirsty, Vanise said in a low voice cut with resignation, as if she expected never to drink again.

Maybe the Haitians will have water with them. Listen, he said. I believe one of them speaks English.

The men were standing almost directly overhead now, and indeed, one of the Haitians was speaking in broken English to the captain, arguing that they should be allowed to stay abovedecks, promising to go below if another boat came in sight and assuring him they’d stay out of the way of the captain and his crew. We pay money, plenty money. We have got wet from the open sea, now we must dry, or a cold will enter us, Captain. No problems for you.

All right den, mon. Stay above if dat what you want.

Ah.

Got sumpin down dere better’n up here, mon.

Yes?

Got a gal. Haiti gal down dere, jus’ waitin’ for a big ol’ black Haiti mon to come down an’ chat wid her.

Yes?

Haiti gal an’ her pickney an’ a pretty bwoy down dere wid her.

Yes? A pretty boy, eh? Massisi?

The fat man laughed. Yas, mon, him a pretty bwoy, all right, but de gal, dat de real beef. Make de journey sweet.

Yes. So we dry and warm ourself in the morning sun, eh? Then we go chat up the Haiti gal and pretty boy, eh?

Eh-eh-eh, the captain said, laughing, walking aft toward the wheelhouse. Eh-eh-eh. Dem Haitians-dem, all over de fuckin’ ocean, worse’n Cubans-dem.

The engine turned over slowly, caught, and resumed its steady, familiar rhythm, and the bow of the boat lifted slightly, and once again Claude and his aunt and her child adjusted their balance and body weights to fit the lapping of the waves and the slow rise and fall of the boat.

We will get to America now, Claude said. Because of the Haitians.

In a short time, it got very hot, still and close, and soon they were taking short, shallow, quick breaths, like dogs sleeping in the noonday sun. Claude stripped off his shirt, rolled it into a ball and stuffed it into the bundle behind his head. He was very thirsty, thirstier than he had ever been before, and he knew Vanise was also, and after a while he pulled himself slowly to his feet and made his way aft, climbed the ladder and pushed the hatch cover up.

The glare of the light hit him in the eyes like a hard slap. All he saw was white, a pure, sourceless field of white. Staggered by the blow, he looked back down into the hold. Then, shading his eyes with one hand, holding up the cover with the other, he squinted and saw through a white cloud that three Haitian men were lounging on the deck a few feet away. They were young men, under thirty, thin and wearing farmers’ clothes, short-sleeved shirts and faded cotton pants and sockless leather shoes. One of them, who looked the oldest of the three, smoked a pipe. He turned slowly and saw Claude.

Hello, boy, he said, speaking Creole. You decide to come up for some air?

The others turned and looked at him with idle curiosity.

This the massisi? one asked.

The man with the pipe laughed.

Will you ask the man for water for us? Claude said. The breeze on his face cooled him and smelled clean and fresh, and he pulled himself halfway out of the hold.

What de hell you doin’ up here! the captain called. He was at the wheel in the aft cabin. Too many fuckin’ Haitians up here already!

Him want water, the man with the pipe said.

The captain nodded and sent the young white man forward to the hatch with an old rum bottle full of water. When the Englishman handed Claude the bottle he smiled, and Claude saw that he was missing most of his front teeth and was very ugly.

Now get yer arse back down there, the white man said. These boys here are travelin’ first class. Tou an’ yer sis are steerage. He laughed, and he shoved Claude back down the ladder and closed the cover over him again.

The hold stank of seawater and burlap and body sweat and got worse as the temperature rose. They urinated and defecated into bilge water between the slats of a pallet as far from their place in the bow as they could, and the soft, hot odor of their own wastes drifted slowly back to them. There were rats now, emboldened by the stillness of the people in their nest in the bow. Twice Claude reached to adjust the bundle at his head and heard a rat scuttle away in the darkness, until he took his shirt and the biscuits and cheese out of the bundle, gave half the food to Vanise, ate half himself, and threw the bundle toward the stern, where he soon heard the rats foraging for crumbs.

They suffered silently, even little Charles, although now and then Vanise, in a weak, low voice, sang a line or two from a baby’s song and then left off, as if the effort were too much for her. And much later, when the heat lessened somewhat, the men came back down again, the brown Inaguan and the Englishman, laughing and drinking clear rum, sending Claude with the baby aft while they raped his aunt.

When the Haitian men came down, Claude was surprised, for they behaved like the others, even the man with the pipe, who tried to grab Claude when he stepped away from them, grasping at the boy’s trousers and yanking on them, and when Claude fought and squirmed free, the man hit the boy in the face with his fist and cursed at him and moved forward to where the others were holding Vanise against the sacks of sea salt.

They did not sleep, but, like small animals in shock after being hit by an automobile, they were not awake, either. It was cool for a measureless period of time, and then it grew hot again, like the inside of an oven, and when it was hot, the men did not come down into the hold, so that Claude almost felt grateful for the stifling, stinking heat. But soon it began to cool, and he knew they would come again, and they did, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two or even three, and eventually one of the Haitians, not the one with the pipe, grabbed Claude by his arms from behind so that he could not get away. The man threw the boy down, and when he had yanked his trousers down, the man jammed his knee between Claude’s legs and spread them and entered him — a savage tearing, a rip in both his body and his mind that made the boy scream and left him crumpled, burning with rage and shame and holding inside himself a dark star of pain. When the man was through with him, the boy cried, and when he could stop himself from crying, he picked his body up with pathetic care, as if it were not his own, and carried it forward to where Vanise lay with her child.

Then one time, after it had been cool for a long while, it did not get hot again as it usually did, and the boat began to surge and dip, and the waves began to smack harder against the bow, until soon the boat was lifting in the water at a steep angle, as if climbing a mountain, then tipping, sliding swiftly down into a hole. The bilge water sloshed wildly, and sacks of salt shifted and fell.

Claude and Vanise and the baby scrambled about in the hold, struggling to find someplace safe, where they could curl up against one another and not get tossed about, until at last they ended clinging to the ladder below the hatch cover. Vanise held her baby with one arm, the ladder with the other. Claude, wrapping himself around both woman and child, clutched the rails of the ladder and clamped them to it, as the boat tipped and fell, then rose again and tipped and fell again.

They could hear a wind roaring abovedecks and heard waves slam against the boat with furious force and weight. Pray for us! Claude ordered. Pray to les Mystères the way you know how. Pray to Agwé, your mait’-tête, he pleaded, so the boat will not sink and drown us. Pray to the Virgin and to the saints and to Jesus Christ, to Papa Legba and Damballah and all the others. Pray! he shouted into her ear, and Vanise began to murmur incoherently, mixing half-remembered songs and prayers and chants together as best she knew how: Coté ou yé, metté hounsi-yo dey ors, gan malice oh, cé passé’l t’ap passé. Dou quand Bon Dieu réle ou. Je vous prends pour me rendre les services que je veux, au nom de Mait’ Carrefour et de Legba, generation paternelle et maternelle, ancêtre et ancètere, Afrique et Afrique, au nom de Legba, Baltaza, Agwé, Erzulie, Ghede, Ogoun, Damballah … and on and on, as the storm raged against them.

After a long time, Vanise grew weary and confused and too ashamed to go on, for she knew only scraps and bits of the proper prayers and calls to the loas, and she said to her nephew, I can’t! I must not! We must let le Bon Dieu take us over now.

No, he said. Go on, pray for us!

And so she resumed, throughout the storm, until, at last, the roar of the wind lowered somewhat, and the boat ceased to tip and thrash about as wildly as before, and gradually, after many hours, they came to believe that the storm had passed by and that it could not have been a hurricane or even a northwester, but a squall, perhaps, for now they heard rain falling on the deck above their heads, steadily and heavily, without wind, and the sea seemed almost calm.

First Claude loosened his grip on the ladder, and then Vanise let go of it, and they slid slowly to the pallet below, where they lay collapsed around one another, like lovers, their child between them, about to fall peacefully asleep together. Yet even as they lay, they still clung to the base of the ladder, as if manacled to it.

The captain lifted the hatch cover and waved Claude, Vanise and the child up. It was night, and the rain had stopped. In the northwest, a crescent moon floated behind strips of silver-blue cloud, and the sea glittered with phosphorus.

The boat had rounded the western tip of New Providence Island, and when Claude and Vanise had pulled themselves up the ladder to the deck, it was as if they had returned from their own drownings. There was air here, fresh, cool air, and endless space that seemed tangible, and though it was night, the air was filled with light and the smells of what it was not — the sea, land, trees, fruit, human beings. They inhaled and looked at their hands and each other’s faces and rediscovered their own battered bodies. They looked off the starboard side and saw the headlights of automobiles beading the north coast of the island. Off the bow, they saw the first lights of the city, Nassau, casting a dull, whitish glow against the bruise-colored sky. They had come over three hundred miles as if chained in darkness, a middle passage, and the sight of so many of humanity’s lights at once was a sharp, confusing blow to them that left them stunned, for they had come to believe that, except for the six men on the boat, there was no one else left in the world. Now they looked out and saw high, rectangular hotels on Cable Beach a half mile away, glittery casinos, crowded restaurants, strings of streetlights, beacons blinking off North Cay at the entrance to the harbor, a jet plane taking off from the airport inland, banking southwest and disappearing, small boats and yachts passing slowly out of the harbor, and there ahead of them, the city itself, with tall pink buildings, a green and white Holiday Inn and a half-dozen more hotels, with spotlights hidden among hibiscus and casuarina trees playing against the terrace windows while shadows of royal palms fluttered against brightly painted pink, yellow, white and blue walls.

They passed the large wharf and two Scandinavian cruise ships tied up there, sleek, white and huge, with strings of lights running up the masts and stacks like Christmas tree decorations, and slowly moved farther down the harbor, with Paradise Island off the portside, downtown Nassau off the starboard, where taxis cruised through Rawson Square, turned and headed out to the casinos or cross-island to the airport for late-night arrivals from London, New York and Miami.

It was as if Claude and Vanise had been carried to another planet than the one they had known, and they stood silent and awestruck, crowded with the other Haitians into the aft cabin, where the captain had told them to stay. The three Haitian men ignored Claude and Vanise now, treated them as if they had never seen the boy and the woman before and were not in the slightest interested in or even curious about them.

The captain had instructed the Haitian with the pipe to explain to the others that they should all stay low inside the cabin until the boat was tied up, and then, when it was clear that no one was watching, they were simply to walk off the boat one by one, to move down the pier and away. No one would stop them, he said, not at this hour, if they walked quickly and seemed to know where they were going. Every one of them, including Claude and Vanise, had been listed as crew members, he said. The harbormaster wouldn’t check for them until morning, if he checked at all. Dese Bahamians, mon, him don’t care where you go, long’s you not standin’ next to him when him look for you. The captain laughed and walked forward, while the white man steered from the bridge and brought the boat safely around and put her with silent ease into a slip on the dark side of a small pier next to a pair of low turtle boats.

There was a moment of confusion and some heat, while the three Haitian men argued over who would leave the boat first, but the man with the pipe, called Jules by the others, prevailed. The youngest of the three would go first, then the next youngest, and finally Jules himself. They would meet on the street, he said, and he would lead them on the journey across the island to his cousin in Elizabeth Town. He glanced at a hand-drawn map, apparently sent to him by the cousin, and said he was sure Elizabeth Town was on the outskirts of Nassau and they would be able to arrive there before sunrise. He carefully folded the map and put it in his shirt pocket.

We will follow you, Claude announced.

The men turned and looked at him with mild surprise. No, you can’t do that, Jules said evenly. There would be five of us then and a baby, he said, and the police will want to know right away who we are. It’s bad enough we have three to travel together. And until we are outside the city, he instructed the other men, we should walk separately. That way, if one of us is captured, it will be too bad, but it will only be one of us. But you two, Jules said to Claude and Vanise, you and the infant, you’re on your own now. We don’t know you.

Claude said nothing. The boat bumped softly against a pair of old truck tires tied to the pier, and the Inaguan leaped out at the bow and tied the boat to a bollard there, then ran to the stern and tied her to another. The first Haitian stepped from the cabin and in seconds had strolled nonchalantly down the length of the low pier, passed through a chain-link gate at the end and down an alley beyond, until he disappeared behind a squat gray cinder-block storage building. They saw a car splash by on the street where he had disappeared, and a second later, the second Haitian left the boat. When he, too, had disappeared, Jules left.

What should we do? Vanise asked.

Follow them.

But you heard …

No matter. We’ll follow them. We can’t stay here, he said.

Our clothes, Vanise said, looking suddenly confused. Our bundle, it’s down there. We left it down there.

No matter. It’s better not to carry anything. Like them. Come, he said, grabbing her hand. Come! and he pulled her from the cabin, over the rail to the pier and quickly away from the boat, where the captain stood in the bow, hands on hips, watching.

The white man came forward and joined him. It’s pathetic, ain’t it? He flipped his long hair away from his face and lit a cigarette.

The captain nodded. Dem Haitians, mon, dem worse’n Jamaicans. Live like dogs, mon. Tou cyan deal wid ’em like dey was normal people.

The white man smiled as if the captain had told a joke. Ain’t that the fuckin’ truth, though.

2

It was late, after midnight, and the area around Bay Street and Rawson Square, downtown Nassau, was nearly deserted. Across the harbor on Paradise Island, however, and out along Cable Beach and east on Montague Bay, hotels and casinos were bustling with noise and bright lights as cars and blatting motorcycles pulled up and departed and sunburned white people laughed and danced, drank and gambled happily through the night.

The three Haitian men, Jules leading them by about a half block now, turned right at Bay Street and headed for the quiet, locked-up center of the city, past exclusive shops that hid behind iron grilles to Rawson Square, where the darkened straw market and Prince George Wharf were located. Taxis, like seabirds, swept in along Bay Street to the square, looped toward the harbor and discharged half-drunk ladies and gentlemen beside the Scandinavian cruise ships, then hurried back out to the hotels and casinos for more.

Claude, as he and Vanise came off the pier onto Bay Street, caught sight of the last of the three men. There! he said, and he started walking quickly, pulling Vanise along behind. At the square, Jules turned left down a quiet side street and walked casually, as if heading home from a long day’s work at the straw market, past the post office and courthouse. Palm trees shuddered overhead in the light offshore breeze, and the narrow, wet street below, shiny as polished ebony from the recent rain, reflected back streetlights and lamplit second-story windows.

Then Jules was leading them uphill, away from the harbor and the downtown area, around Shirley to East Street, with the top of the hill and a water tower in the east silhouetted against a pale, peach-colored glow from Montague Bay and the Fort Montague Hotel beyond, past old pink limestone houses shuttered against the night, until at last, beyond the city, Claude and Vanise were sweating from the effort of keeping up, out of breath, and then — as the street became a darkened road leading south from Nassau and as one by one the Haitian men ahead of them disappeared into the gloom — they grew frightened again, alone in darkness, lost.

They stopped. Behind them were the lights and streets of Nassau, the hill outlined sharply against the sky, the water tower, the harbor, boats moving in and out; ahead of them, a soft, enveloping darkness that had swallowed the three Haitian men whole and was now about to swallow Claude, Vanise and Charles as well. They could feel the rough limestone road beneath their feet, but did it narrow to a pathway, did it suddenly loop to the left or right, was there a cliff at the edge of the road, a wall, a prickly hedgerow? The sky was clouded over here, remnants of the squall that had passed over them at sea; there was no moonlight, no stars.

Charles squirmed in his mother’s arms and whimpered.

Shut up, Claude whispered, and Vanise stroked the baby’s face and soothed him.

Claude could hear the men now, could hear their hard shoes crunch against the roadway and their low, melodious voices as they spoke to one another and now and then lightly laughed. He took hold of his aunt’s sleeve and led her as if she were a stubborn child. Don’t be scared, Vanise, he said in a low voice. Les Invisibles are with us, always, everywhere. Even here.

Up ahead, Jules suddenly stopped the others. Silence, he commanded, and they listened carefully. It’s someone walking behind us, he whispered. Come, stand off the road a ways and wait for them to pass by. Moving with care, the three felt their way to the side of the road and into the stony ditch beyond, where they crouched down to wait.

Shortly, Claude and Vanise drew abreast of them, and then, when they had passed a few steps beyond, stopped.

What is the matter? Vanise asked.

Shhh. I can’t hear them now.

They have flown away, she said.

Suddenly, the men were beside them. Boy, Jules said, you are like a dog who won’t stay home.

Claude said nothing. The baby started to cry.

We’ll go back, Vanise said.

No, Claude said.

Go back to the city, one of the other men said. Someone there will take care of you.

The police, Jules said, and laughed.

The baby was crying loudly now, squirming in his mother’s arms. Claude reached over and took the child, hitched him against his hip, and the child automatically clung to the boy and quieted down.

Go now, go on back, the man said again.

No, Claude repeated.

Yes, we’ll go, Vanise said, her voice tight and high with fear.

No, Claude said. He took a step away from the man, and Vanise followed.

What shall we do with them? one of the men asked.

Jules sighed heavily. When we come onto houses or a village, he said, or if an automobile comes, we must separate as we did back in the city, so that no more than one of us can get caught by the police.

Fine, the man said. But what about them?

Where we are going, Jules said to Claude, there is no place for you. We cannot help you. Do you understand me?

Yes, Claude said.

Then go back now. You will do better in the city, where there are many strangers. No one will know you are Haitian.

No, Claude said firmly.

I’ll make him go back, the other man said, and he stepped toward Claude and reached for the boy’s shirt.

Never mind, Jules said. He drew the other man back. I thought you liked the pretty boy, he said.

Ha. Only at sea, he said, laughing. He’s white man’s meat now. We have all those Bahamian women to choose from. We don’t need to fuck a pretty little boy or a Haitian whore.

Jules turned away and started walking. Don’t be so sure, he called back. Those Bahamian girls get one look at you and they’ll run in the opposite direction. He laughed and walked on.

The others ran to catch up, joking and teasing, talking eagerly now about women. Claude, with Charles on his hip, followed. Come along, he said to Vanise.

Slowly, in silence, she came up behind him and walked there the rest of the way.

In a few hours, they reached Elizabeth Town, a village on the south coast with one street, a half-dozen sandy lanes and a cluster of pink, cut-limestone cottages roofed with thatch. Spreading from the north side of the village, like a junk-strewn backyard, was a shantytown, corrugated tin shacks and buildings that were little more than huts made of scrap lumber and cast-off sheets of iron. The narrow lanes were deserted, and except for the dim glow of a kerosene lamp behind a window here and there, the town was dark. The sky had cleared, however, and now Claude and Vanise could let themselves hang back a ways from the other Haitians and still see to follow them as they cut through the sleeping village to the shantytown beyond.

They saw Jules walk boldly up to one of the shacks facing the lane, where he knocked against the door once, then a few seconds later, again, and a third time, until at last the door opened a crack. Jules exchanged words with the person behind the door, and then the person closed the door, while the three men waited in silence outside. A few moments passed, and the door opened again, and the men passed into the house.

Claude could smell the sea, just over the low hill south of the village. A dog barked in the distance, then went suddenly silent. The wind shifted to the west, and Claude smelled oranges.

I’ll go and speak to them, Claude said. He passed Charles across to Vanise, led her out of the street to an alleyway between a pair of closed-up shops. Sit down here, he said, and rest.

She obeyed and sat down, tenderly arranging the sleeping child on her lap, while Claude crossed the street and walked to the cabin that the Haitians had entered.

He knocked, as Jules had done, and waited. After a moment, he knocked again. He heard movement inside, a chair scraping the floor, low male voices. He knocked again, sharply.

Who dat? a man called from the other side. Claude recognized the voice, Jules’s, even though it spoke English.

C’est moi, he said.

Boy, you are a pest! Jules shouted in Creole. If you don’t go away now, I am going to come out there and beat you!

Got a machete here, boy! Claude heard the other man call. Chop you up!

A woman spoke rapidly and in a hushed voice to the men, and they answered, explaining, and then the woman groaned.

I am going to chop that little massisi to pieces, the man said, and Claude heard more chairs moving, feet clumping, men and women arguing. No, no, Raymond, he will leave soon. He will leave, or the police will catch him before morning. He is only a poor country boy, and the police will catch him and send him back, if we just ignore him.

They were silent then. Claude stood before the closed door, tried the latch and pushed, but it was bolted or barred from inside. Suddenly, he smelled oranges again, they were eating them inside the house, and the boy realized that he was very hungry.

He turned and crossed the lane and walked past the shacks and huts to where he’d left Vanise. When he came around the corner of the building next to the alley, one of the few two-story structures in the village, he saw that Vanise, sitting cross-legged on the sandy ground with the child sprawled in her lap, had fallen fast asleep. Her head lay back against the side of the cinder-block building, and she looked beautiful and familiar to the boy, and for the first time in many days, he thought of his mother in Allanche and his sisters and their cabin on the ridge above the sea. Even when he and Vanise and Charles had been suffering on the boat, with the men coming down into the hold to rape them, with the rats and filth and terrible stench and heat, he had not thought of his mother and sisters and the place where he had lived his whole life, for he had been ashamed and afraid and did not want to think of his mother’s face when he felt that way. Now, however, he had gone beyond shame and fear, which he did not understand, but he knew that he would never be ashamed again, nor would he ever be afraid again. And so he thought freely about his mother, imagined her dark brown face, her large, wet eyes, her smell, the smooth skin of her hands. He heard her voice, heard her sing his sisters to sleep, Bon jour, mes infants, bon jour … and he thought he heard her say to him, Oh, my poor son, how you have suffered, and how hungry you must be. Here, let me feed you, let me prepare a meal for you, my poor son. Let me comfort you.

3

In the villages of the English-speaking Caribbean, the businesses called shops are often owned and operated by middle-aged men who are entrepreneurial dreamers, men who, with a great deal of energy, diligence, gregariousness, and with a little financial acumen, combine under the roof of one small house several different business ventures — a neighborhood grocery store, pub, dry goods establishment, hardware store, taxi service, tourist guide service, restaurant, juke joint, and so on. They also sometimes venture into backroom gambling and upstairs prostitution and have been known to invest, in a small, safe way, in locally controlled real estate development, smuggling and drugs.

It was such a man as this, Jimmy Grabow, and not the local constabulary, who caught Claude and Vanise and her baby Charles asleep in the alley next to his shop, and when he discovered they were Haitians, which he did when, by poking them with his foot, he woke them and heard them speak, he did not turn them over to the town’s one police officer, who had nothing to do that day anyhow and would have welcomed the opportunity to drive to Nassau to turn the illegal aliens over the immigration office. Instead, Grabow smiled broadly, warmly, even, and took the Haitians into his shop and out back to the tiny kitchen, where he fed them leftover jerked pork and rice and beans, gave them Coca-Colas from the cooler, imported biscuits and jam, and even offered them a fresh pack of Craven A cigarettes from the rack behind the bar, which Vanise declined and Claude accepted.

Grabow was a short, compact man with light brown skin. He had excellent teeth, large as a horse’s and white, of which he was justifiably proud, and when he smiled, he pulled his lips back and showed his teeth off. He smiled often, talked rapidly and volubly and enjoyed touching people while he rattled away at them, enjoyed putting his hands on whomever he talked to, his arms around shoulders, his hands on cheeks, arms, chests, so that most people, when they left the shop, reached for their wallet, and finding it, wondered what Grabow had taken from them, for always, after talking with Grabow, one felt that somehow he’d managed to take away something that wasn’t rightfully his.

When Grabow had led Claude and Vanise and the baby to a small room upstairs and had left them there, Claude felt this way too, felt it more strongly, perhaps, then others might, because he did not understand more than a few words of what Grabow had said to him and his aunt and therefore had paid particularly close attention to the man’s inflection and his facial gestures and physical mannerisms. And when the boy asked himself what the Bahamian had taken away from them, he concluded that he had taken what little freedom remained in their possession, that scrap of freedom they’d obtained when they stepped off the Kattina in Nassau. In exchange, they had been given a meal and a pack of cigarettes, Claude knew that much, and now, apparently, they had been given shelter also.

We should leave here now, Claude said. He stood by the curtainless window and looked down on the backyard of the place, where he saw a battered old white Toyota van, odd piles of sand and cinder blocks, an outhouse, several chickens scratching in the packed dirt, and a large sleeping pig like a long gray boulder in the shade of a scrawny breadfruit tree. Beyond the yard was the ramshackle backside of the shantytown, where Jules and his friends were now, and beyond that a field of rough, dry, slowly rising ground, pocked and rocky, with small patches here and there of withered corn stalks and pole beans.

Vanise sat on the narrow bed in the corner of the room and placed the baby on the floor, where he crawled eagerly around the foot of the bed and stood, one hand clinging to the rail at the end, the other reaching for the dresser just beyond. He seemed happy for the first time since they had left North Caicos, free, finally, of his mother’s and his cousin’s arms, to move about a room, to touch and measure things with his fat hands, to test his recently discovered ability to stand.

They argued, Claude and Vanise. She would not leave. You go if you want to, she said, but Charles and I will not.

No. We should be together, but we must leave now. This man is bad, a gros neg.

Claude walked to the door, turned the knob and pulled. It wouldn’t open. The bastard locked the door, he whispered. You see?

No, she said. Now you see.

He returned to the window and looked down again. I can jump to the ground, it’s not far. Then you can drop Charles to me, and I’ll catch him, and then you can jump down too.

No.

He won’t catch us. He’s busy in the bar now. I can hear him. Come, he said.

No.

Come!

No, she repeated, crossing her arms over her breasts.

Tempérament d’esclave, he cursed, and he swung himself over the windowsill and turned his long, skinny body against the side of the building, where he let himself hang by his hands, then let go. In seconds, he was gone.

Grabow was not angry or even disappointed that the boy had fled; he was relieved and only wished he’d taken the baby with him. But the baby kept the girl happy and busy, when she wasn’t fucking the men he sent upstairs to her room. The men, a few from the town but most of them from the fishing boats and yachts that tied up at the marina in Coral Harbour, just beyond the hook, paid Grabow for the girl’s services, and Grabow in return housed and fed and clothed the girl and her baby from his own stock and did not turn her over to the police, for which she seemed grateful. At least she did not resist or try to leave, which she easily could have done, just as the boy had. In fact, she could have left even more easily than Claude, for after a few weeks Grabow found it inconvenient to keep the door locked and have to let her out himself whenever she needed to go to the privy or had to wash herself or clean the baby. He soon allowed her to come down to the kitchen and feed herself and the child, allowed her to cook chickens and jerked pork and fish, Haitian style, with hot peppers and onions, for him and the bar customers, though he would not let her come out front or leave the building, except to go to the privy or to wash at the standpipe by the back door.

The room she lived in was bare and small, but not unpleasant, especially in the mornings, when sunlight streamed through the window and splashed across the painted gray floor and over the bed. She made up a bed for the baby in one of the dresser drawers and placed it in the corner of the room farthest from the window. Generally, when the men who visited her saw the baby asleep in the corner of the room, they lowered their voices and tried not to wake him, but sometimes they were drunk and noisy and even angry at the sight of the child in the room and complained of it afterwards downstairs to Grabow, so he took the dresser drawer out of the room and put it in a windowless storage room next door and made it clear to Vanise that she would have to keep the child there at night from now on.

The men who came to her, rarely more than one or two a night, were mostly seamen. They were fishermen and turtlers from the small open boats in Coral Harbour and sometimes Bahamian crewmen from the big charter boats, sometimes a Cuban or a Jamaican, and sometimes even a white man, an American, who came up the narrow stairs from the bar and spent an hour with her, fucking her and then trying to talk with her, which of course always failed, so they would often simply ramble on as if she understood.

A few of the men she liked, a short, round, chocolate-brown man who affected huge, winglike sideburns and operated the only taxi in town other than Grabow’s, and a Cuban, tall, skinny and black, who always brought Vanise a cold Heineken and seemed disappointed when the baby Charles got moved out to the storage room, and she liked a young Jamaican man who wore a carefully trimmed, very thick beard and finger-length dreadlocks, a man named Tyrone, who spoke some Creole and always rolled and smoked a cigarlike spliff of ganja before making love to her. She liked the smell of the ganja, perfumy and dry, and when he offered it to her, she accepted. It seemed to make the time with Tyrone a respite from the painful silence of her mind. For her mind, an utterly silent, burned-out charnel house by now, was filled with images of les Morts from the dark side, Ghede and Baron Cimitière, whose evil presence no longer frightened her, whose presence, in fact, she had begun to encourage and make welcome. She lay back in the dimly lit room over the shop and opened herself to these dark, malevolent spirits the same way she opened herself to the men she did not like, men who were dirty and quick and stunk of fish and rum and sweat, men who were drunk and half impotent, which made them irritable, men who fucked her in unusual ways, and now and then the man who slapped her until she wept and only then would he fuck her.

This last was Jimmy Grabow himself. It would be three or four in the morning, and the domino game downstairs would have broken up, the metal screen pulled down on the front of the shop, the lights turned off, and he would come trudging upstairs half-drunk and bumping against the sides of the walls in a way she recognized immediately. Then he’d come into her room and light the kerosene lantern on the small table next to the bed and stand over her, while she pretended to sleep.

Wake up, gal. It was always the same on nights like this. He reached down and yanked the sheet off her and examined her as if angry at what he saw, a young woman in bra and panties, sitting up and drawing herself away from him, covering her breasts and crotch with her hands, her eyes watching his so that the first time he swung his heavy hand at her face she’d know before he swung it that it was coming and could move her head slightly so as to catch the blow at an angle instead of directly.

That oughta wake you up. He unbuckled his pants and stripped them off, took off his shoes and shirt, and stood there a second, again as if angry with her. His penis hung limply between his legs. Then he hit her a second time, and her eyes filled with water from the force of the blow. A third time he hit her, and a fourth and fifth, back and forth, until at last she began to weep, and suddenly his penis was erect and Grabow was panting with excitement and from the effort of slapping the girl, and then he would come forward onto her and force his way into her.

Afterwards, in silence, he left the room, and she heard him lunging back down the stairs to the room next to the kitchen, where he slept. The next morning, he whistled cheerfully downstairs and throughout the day was kindly toward her, smiling that horse-toothed smile, chucking the baby under the chin with approval as she passed through the kitchen to the privy in the backyard.

Someday, gal, he said to her when she returned to the kitchen and started to prepare breakfast for the three of them, someday you gonna hafta get shipped back to Haiti. Bound to come. Everybody know you here, gal. So you better enjoy yourself while you can, get yourself fattened up now, while you can.

Shirtless, barefoot, a machete in one hand, a plastic water jug in the other, Claude peered into the low thatch lean-to where the old man lay at the back, sleeping on a rumpled blanket. They were deep in the Barrens, west of the airport and east of the golf course at Simms Point. The old man wore a dirty undershirt, shiny black gabardine trousers, and was barefoot. His empty rum bottle lay at his side, the cap scattered and lost somewhere in the lean-to among cook pots, a transistor radio, an old Playboy and the various hoes and rakes they used to plant and tend the marijuana plants and the plastic garbage bags they used to package it.

As Claude ducked and entered the shady lean-to, the old man stirred, groped automatically for his bottle, and lifting it, realized it was empty and woke. Bastard, he said. You finished my rum.

Claude sat down cross-legged in a corner of the hut and laid the machete carefully from knee to knee. He was growing weary of these attacks by the old man, but in the end, despite their both being Haitian, they had little else to talk about. They couldn’t talk about the Chinaman’s marijuana crop — Claude was a farmboy, young, sober and intelligent, and knew how to tend, harvest and guard the plants; the old man, an assistant tailor, drunk all the time and stupid, knew nothing of farming. And they couldn’t talk about Haiti, because the old man had come twelve years ago from where Claude had never been, a small town outside Port-au-Prince, and Claude, from Allanche in the north, had come from where the old man had never been. And they couldn’t talk about Nassau and the island of New Providence, for everything about the place that interested him — its geography, people, economics — Claude had learned in a matter of weeks, and the old man in twelve years had not learned one-half as much. As for the Chinaman, upon whose special needs and goodwill and trust Claude now depended, and the Haitian community, which Claude had penetrated the morning he fled from Grabow’s shop and returned to the door that Jules and the others had entered before him, and the Bahamian police, who, Claude now believed, would not bother him if nothing drew their attention to him, and the Bahamians in general, who seemed to have a fondness for Haitians, whom they saw as childlike in their honesty and exploitable in their need — about these, the old man had nothing to say that was of use to Claude. It does happen that sometimes the old have nothing to teach the young, except by sad example. The old man could not even tell Claude anything useful about how to get to America. He himself did not want to go to America. It’s all white people there, he had said, and they hate the blacks, and their own blacks hate all the other blacks. Their police will arrest you and put you in jail until they send you back to jail in Haiti. The Americans have an arrangement with Papa Doc …

Bébé_, Claude corrected.

No. With Papa. And they send you back so he can put you in jail in Port-au-Prince forever. Better to stay here in the Bahamas, the old man said. Forget America.

Claude could never forget America. Not now, not after all he’d suffered, all the pain and humiliation and fear he’d faced and overcome for it. There was an exchange that had taken place, and he’d come out with a vision, and he clung to it, like a sailor off a sunken ship clinging to the wreckage of the ship. There was a big difference now between him and Vanise, he thought, and also between the boy he had been, as recently even as when he had been locked down in the stinking hold of the Kattina, and the boy he was now, raising marijuana for the Chinaman in the Barrens on New Providence, and the difference was that while Vanise still looked to les Invisibles for definitions she could not provide herself, he was beginning to look to America for that. The loas had moved around from in front of him to the back, and in their place America had come forward, insisting, like the loas, on service and strategy, promising luxury and power, scolding, instructing and seducing him all at once, and in that way, as the loas had done before, creating him.

I know you drank off my rum, the old man said, holding the empty bottle upside down before the boy’s face, as if that were proof.

I don’t drink rum, Claude said wearily. It makes your brain mushy. Like yours. He smiled.

The old man grunted, farted loudly, and mumbling curses at the boy, Zobop … diab …, turned away from him.

Claude looked out from the shade of the lean-to at the marijuana plants, large, thick-stalked, mature plants cultivated in clots among small patches of corn so as to be indistinguishable from the corn if seen from the air. François, the boy said in a low voice. Tell me this, François. How come I work all day weeding and watering and tending the plants, while you sleep all day, and yet the Chinaman pays us the same? And how come I sit up all night guarding the plants alone, while you go into town and get drunk, and yet the Chinaman pays us the same? What’s your secret, Loupgarou?

François sat up and rubbed his eyes. He stroked his grizzled chin and said, If he paid either one of us less than he does now, then he’d be paying one of us nothing. Zero.

True.

So if you want to make more money than I do, you must ask the Chinaman for a raise.

Claude smiled. You’re not as stupid as you look, he said. No, I don’t need to make more money than you do. What I want is for you to do your half of the work.

Someone has to go into town for food and report to the Chinaman about his crop, right? He told me to do that, every day, or he’d think we stole his crop ourselves or maybe got chopped up by someone else stealing the crop or maybe got arrested by the police and were locked up over in Nassau. Unless he hears from us once a day. This is serious business, boy. We’re not out here raising yams, you know. The old man lay back on his filthy blanket and eyed the boy. Give me the water, he ordered.

Claude passed the jug of tepid water over to him. Tonight, Claude said, I’ll be the one to go into town. You can sit up and watch over the plants.

No. You don’t know where to go or what to say. I’ll have to be the one to do it.

I’ll bring you back your rum.

No, I’ll go. You stay. I know where to go. No one bothers with me. They’ll stop you.

Claude said, I know where to find the Chinaman. He’ll be with his woman, the mambo, his placée, taking all the Haitians’ money by cheating them at dominoes. I’ll just go in the back way and tell him his crop is fine, and I’ll buy you your bottle of clairin and some sardines and tinned beef and come back. I won’t stay all night and come back drunk in the morning like you and then have to sleep all day.

Like hell you won’t, the old man grumbled. You’ll get drunk, you’ll find yourself a jeunesse and get caught by the police or beat up by the Bahamian boys. They’ll find you dead on the beach in the morning. I know what happens to young boys like you. All you want is a bousin, a whore. You have to go to Nassau for that anyhow. They don’t have any whores in Elizabeth Town.

They don’t, eh?

No.

There’s one.

Which?

The one above the shop. Grabow’s whore, Claude said. You’ve heard about her, the Haitian girl he keeps there.

Yes, certainly. But that’s not for you, boy. She’s not for Haitians. Grabow, he keeps that girl for his friends and for the fishermen. If you walked in there and asked for the girl, he’d throw you out, if he didn’t feel like turning you over to the police. Or beating on you. He’s bad, that one.

Well, Claude said, no matter. I’m not going to town for a whore.

You’re not going to town at all, François said.

Claude stood up and stepped out of the lean-to into the bright sunlight. Of course I am, he said. Give me the water, he said, pointing with the machete at the jug.

Slowly, the old man reached over and handed up the plastic container. Claude took it and tipped it up and drank, spilling water in glistening sheets down his bare chest and shoulders.

Vanise did not hear him enter the room, and when she saw him she did not at first recognize him, for somehow in the intervening weeks his face had changed. His chin line was sharper, his features had lost a boy’s softness around the cheeks and brow, and his hair had bushed out, so that he looked older, stronger, more dangerous, and for a second she thought he was a man sent up from the bar by Grabow.

As soon as she recognized him, however, she was afraid. Go away, Claude! she said. You must not be here.

He smiled. The man didn’t hear me. He’s drunk, out front at a table on the street, playing dominoes with friends. I came in the back way. Besides, he said, I’m not afraid of him. Claude was wearing his short-sleeved shirt and thin, tattered trousers and was barefoot. He carried his machete loosely at his side, as if it were a plaything.

They sat down on the bed and talked in whispers, Vanise asking questions, Claude telling her about the Chinaman and the marijuana fields and old François, and also telling her about the Haitians he had found living right here in Elizabeth Town and in the bush nearby, whole communities of them, he said, many of them working in the kitchens of the hotels and in private homes as gardeners and maids.

She did not seem impressed or even surprised, which disappointed him. There was even a société here, he told her, a hounfor with many houncis performing all the services for the loas, and although he himself had not yet been to any of the services, he said, as if apologizing, he soon would go. He wished to make an engagement with the loas, he explained somberly, so as to get them over to America, which he now knew was not very far from here. Every day there were boats going across to Florida with Haitians on board, boats operated by Americans who knew how to carry you over to Miami itself, where there was a whole city of Haitians living in their own houses just like Americans, with automobiles and plenty of food to eat and nice clothes to wear.

She knew about the boats, she said, and how close America was. She told him about the Jamaican, Tyrone, who worked on a boat for a white American, a fishing boat they used for carrying over Haitians, as many as ten and twenty at a time, Tyrone had told her. Tyrone’s job was to round up the Haitians. The white man just drove the boat.

But it costs lots of money, she sighed. Too much.

How much?

She wasn’t sure. Hundreds of dollars, however.

Claude asked her about the baby. Where was Charles?

She explained that Grabow made her sleep the boy in the storage room next door.

Claude asked her to bring him so he could visit with him.

No, no, she said. He’ll wake up and maybe cry, and then Grabow will hear from downstairs and come up and find you.

That’s all right, Claude said. Are you his slave? He looked down at her carefully. She, too, had changed. It was as if the dark, hard thing, like a piece of coal, that had always been at the center of her mind had been heated with too hot a flame and had become a cinder that finally had crumbled to ash. He noticed the slight swelling and discoloration around her eyes and cheeks that he knew came from beatings, and her mouth, which used to be firm and tautly held against her teeth, seemed loose and slack, with all the old, familiar, irritated tension gone out of it, and all the force as well.

They both heard it at the same time, the clank of metal as Grabow drew down the shutters and closed the shop for the night.

Go now! Vanise whispered, her eyes suddenly wide with fear.

Claude stood and made for the door, but she stopped him with her hand. No, you can’t! He sleeps in a room downstairs, he’ll hear you.

Claude turned to her. Why do you stay? You can leave too, he said. Come with me.

No. I can’t.

Why? What can he do? Just leave with me now, you and Charles.

He’ll beat me. Or he’ll do something bad to Charles, give him over to the police so I’ll never see him again. Something bad will happen! I know it!

Won’t the loas protect you?

The loas are angry with me, she said. So I must stay here.

Claude grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her toward the door. Come! Wake Charles and bring him. We’ll leave here together. I know a mambo, the Chinaman’s woman. She’ll help you feed the loas and make a new engagement. I have some money, enough for a service. I can pay for it.

When he pulled open the door and stepped into the dim, narrow hallway, Grabow was almost at the top of the stairs. Their eyes met for an instant. Grabow took one more step, and Claude swung the machete, slicing the man across the midsection, opening him up like a piece of fruit. The man’s eyes, suddenly wild with horror, bulged and rolled, as he realized what had happened. As if he had a bellyache, he clasped his hands to his stomach, and they filled and overflowed at once with blood. He flung himself back against the wall of the corridor and stared open-mouthed at Claude, who swung again, an overhand chop across Grabow’s shoulder, slicing muscle and tendon all the way through to the joint. The man’s lungs instantly filled, and blood poured from his mouthful of scarlet teeth, and he went down.

Claude stared at the man’s body, and with both hands raised the machete over his head, held it there, then slowly brought it down to his side. He sucked in his breath, a loud, chugging intake of air, snapped his head to the right, and almost falling, turned away from the corpse and stumbled back through the open door to Vanise’s room.

She had hidden herself in the far corner behind the dresser, crouched down near the floor, and she had not seen, but she knew what had happened, and she moaned quietly.

Stop that! Claude hissed. Stop!

Slowly, she rose and faced him. He was shuddering, as if a cold wind had blown over him, and he looked like a little boy again, about to cry. Beyond him she could see Grabow’s feet, like two chunks of wood. She took a step toward the door and stopped. Is he dead? she asked.

Claude could make no words. He nodded his head up and down.

Vanise took the boy’s hand in hers, and still watching Grabow’s feet, as if she expected them to move, she said, He’s dead? You know that?

He’s meat! Dead meat! he cried, and he yanked his hand away. Now, he croaked, now you can leave here!

No! No, they will find us and kill us for this! Where can we go now?

His arms at his sides, the machete still in his right hand, dripping blood onto the floor, Claude moved away from the door, as if offering it to Vanise and inviting her to step through. America, he said.

She placed her hands over her eyes like a blindfold, shook her head slightly and took her hands away. Then, without looking at the boy, she said, Do you know how to find this hounfor?

Yes.

You know the mambo? And you have money?

Yes. Some, a little.

We must go there, then, to the mambo. Wipe the machete on the bed, she instructed him calmly. I’ll make up a bundle for our clothes and Charles’s blanket, and I’ll wake Charles. We can leave by the back door downstairs, and no one will see us, she said.

Claude nodded and obeyed.

Vanise tied some clothing in a towel and left the room for the baby. Look in his pockets, she called back. He always had plenty of money late at night. Be careful not to get any of his blood on you, she warned.

Claude stepped back to the hallway, and without looking at the man’s face or his huge wounds, carefully searched Grabow’s trouser pockets and came away with a fat roll of bills, which he showed to his aunt as she came out of the storage room, her half-awake child slung against her hip and her bundle grasped firmly in her other hand. She looked over coolly at the money and said, He must have won at dominoes tonight.

She dropped the bundle at Claude’s feet and took the money from him and stuffed it into the front of her blouse. Carry that, she said, and she stepped with care over Grabow’s legs and moved quickly into the darkness of the stairway and down. Claude picked up the bundle with his free hand and followed her.

4

A few miles west of Elizabeth Town, the road dips and slants toward the sea before it makes the bend at Clifton Point and curves back along the north side of the island to Nassau, and from the road, the land on both sides seems empty, save for the dense brush that grows to the edge of the pavement. The bougainvillea, cassia trees, mahoe and annatto, a tangled weave of flower, thorn and hardwood, rise up like a hedgerow and block the human life and cultivation that go on there from the sight of passersby — tourists in rented cars, teenagers on motorbikes, policemen from Nassau in their Toyotas, air-conditioned tour buses filled with peering, pink-skinned ladies and gentlemen from the continent.

North of the road and beyond the dense underbrush, the land rises, the topsoil thins out and short, reddish pine trees take over, with occasional bayberry and myrtle oak interspersed among the pine. This area is called the Barrens, and except for the sight and roar of the jets coming in and taking off from the airport a few miles north, one could be in the wilderness. The air is usually still here, no land breeze, no sea breeze, and the sun beats down with belligerent intensity on the heads of solitary men and boys who cultivate secret marijuana patches throughout the Barrens, hauling water in barrels and buckets long distances by hand and pickup truck over rocky paths and narrow trails from as far away as Lake Killarney beyond the airport and the ponds and marshes east of Elizabeth Town.

Also here among the pine trees are small vegetable gardens planted and tended by whole families, people from the outskirts of the towns, squatters and shack people, whose lives are official secrets. They are off-islanders, most of them, illegal immigrants from Haiti, wandering foreigners whose presence on the island is officially forbidden and unofficially tolerated, for they provide a considerable part of the huge, underpaid, unprotected labor force that is required by the tourist industry on New Providence. They wash the dishes, scrub the pots, clean the toilets, clip the grass and haul the trash for the managers of the enormous glass, steel and concrete hotels and casinos in Nassau and along Cable Beach and Paradise Island, working twelve-hour days and nights six and seven days a week for wages acceptable only to someone who would otherwise starve. They perform these tasks with gratitude, good cheer and alacrity, for in Haiti, they would have no choice but to starve.

South of the road beyond Elizabeth Town and behind the thicket of small, thorny trees and bushes, the land slopes down to the sea, and set in sandy soil among the thatch palms, invisible from the road and accessible only by means of winding, overgrown trails, are crowded settlements of shacks and shanties built of driftwood and cast-off iron and plastic from the villages and towns nearby. Pigs, chickens and goats wander the sandy pathways, skinny yellow dogs sleep in the shade and naked children play in doorways or in the yards, while idle, hungry men and women lean on the sills of open windows and stare out at the sea.

Usually, no more than one person in a large family, as often a woman as a man, a child as an adult, has been able to find work in the hotels, and this person with his few dollars a week supports the rest and bears their envy and their constant, malicious attempts to rob and cheat him. Often, if the person is a man, he drinks too much clairin, that cheap, clear, hundred-fifty-proof rum sold in bottles without labels in the village shops and kitchens, and he smokes too much marijuana, and he broods day and night on his fate, contemplating the hopelessness of his situation, until, finding himself provoked by a trivial affront, he either cuts someone with a knife or machete or is himself cut and ends up in the hospital and then in jail or ends up dead. Or else he turns to voudon and the loas, les Invisibles and les Morts, the universal spirit world from which he can draw solace and the strength of powerful allies and the sense to continue with his life.

If the person is a woman, she may not drink as much rum or smoke as much marijuana, but she, too, will brood fatalistically day and night on the difficulties of her life, its stunted, thwarted shape, and she, too, will often fall helplessly into an explosive kind of depression that can be detonated into crazed violence by an idle, careless spark, by gossip, petty thievery, a misbehaving child, a wayward man. And so she, too, in order to save herself, turns to voudon, spends her nights at the hounfor in prayer and song, gives herself over to the guidance of ritual and the superior, trained knowledge of a mambo or houngan, feeds the loas and lets herself be mounted by Papa Legba, Agwé, Ogoun and Erzulie, dances the congo dance and the yanvalon dos-bas and connects her sad, suffering moment on earth to universal time, ties the stingy ground she stands on to the huge, fecund continent of Africa, makes an impoverished, illiterate black woman’s troubles the pressing concerns of the gods.

Even before they left the road for the rocky pathway that led into the Barrens, Claude and Vanise, with Charles on her hip, heard the drums, a rapid, high-pitched, rattling sound undercut by the throb of the assator, the huge bass drum with the righteous voice of an ancient father. It was dark, very late now, and Claude, brushing back low branches and thorny macca bushes with his machete, led his aunt by the hand over the limestone outcropping and roots that crossed the path.

The sound of the drums excited and comforted them, and they quickened their pace uphill through the brush to the pinewoods, where the sound traveled more easily and where they could make out the clang of the metal ogan and then the high, chanting voice of a houngenikon, the woman who leads the singing. A moon was on their left, full and snow white, the velvety, deep blue sky splashed with stars, and they could see their shadows on the ground, small, hunched-over companions running alongside them toward the sound of the drums and the singing, as urgent and thrilled and deeply lonely as they. When they rounded the top of the low, scrubby hill where the land fell away to a dark, brush-filled gorge below, they heard the hoot of a conch shell, long, trembling calls as old as the human species’ desire to signal its presence to itself, as old as solitude and fear, and their chests filled with light.

Claude hurried on, scrambling down toward the darkness of the gorge; Vanise halted for a second a ways behind him. Listen, she said, and Claude stood still. The conch cried out, stopped, fluttered and cried again, a musical instrument making private speech public. It’s a service for Agwé, Vanise whispered.

Your mait’-tête, Claude said.

Yes. How far now?

Not far. In the trees there, he said, pointing toward the dark end of the gorge, where two moonlit ridges came together as if clasping hands above the leafless, yellow-blossomed branches of a tall wildcotton tree surrounded by darker, denser, lower trees, almond and mahogany, that hid the ground from view. The hounfor is there, for the société, he said.

It’s all right, then?

Yes. We are all from Haiti. And we have money for the mambo to make a service.

You know them, Claude?

A few … some. I work for the Chinaman, who knows them all. But I have not been here to the hounfor before. The old man told me it was here. François, who works for the Chinaman also, he said. He turned away and resumed descending to the gorge.

Vanise shifted her child to her other hip and followed.

There was a broad footpath at the bottom that snaked in darkness through the dense brush, and the drums and singing and the steady, warbling cries of the conch shell grew louder and sharper as they made their way over roots and stones, drawing them forward and out of themselves, until soon they were walking faster, almost running, and then suddenly they were free of the darkness and stood at the edge of a large crowd of people in a clearing, men and women and a few children, most of them dressed in white, their black faces large and open and sweating cheerfully as they chatted, danced, watched and argued and sometimes moved in and out of the dense center of the crowd, where the woodpole-and-thatch peristyle itself, the temple for Agwé, could be seen.

Several Coleman lanterns glowed phosphorus white beneath the roof of the peristyle, casting long shadows over the crowd, while the mambo, in a scarlet satin dress, and her assistants, young women wearing simple white dresses, passed back and forth with baskets and bowls of flowers, cakes, pigeons, bananas, yams, oranges, rice, many kinds of food and bottles of liquor, which they placed gently before the center altar, a long, canopied table covered with white cloth. Off to one side, three lean men, like athletes, worked their drums, while the houngenikon, a gaunt, tall, aged woman, sang and chanted, and the crowd around her picked up the songs and chants and enlarged, elaborated and amplified them, as more and more men and women emerged from the darkness and underbrush that surrounded the peristyle and joined in.

Between the centerpost of the peristyle and the altar table, a large straw mat had been laid out on the ground, and clean, white, embroidered sheets and pillows had been placed so as to make a wide bed for Agwé and his mistress Erzulie, with roses at the foot, perfume near the pillows and a pink, curling conch shell at the center. Tied to the centerpost stood a ram goat, its long, silky hair dyed indigo blue, its yellow eyes gently tranquil. At the right, beyond the altar table, where the mambo and her assistants brought forth the offerings to Agwé, was a large, square, boxlike structure with flat, wide-railed sides, Agwé’s barque, a raft the size of a small room, made of wood and painted bright blue with elaborate floral decorations and vevers covering the sides and rails — the mermaid that signified the presence of Erzulie la Sirène, the snakes and stars for Damballah, Ogoun’s crossed banners, the scarlet heart of la Maitresse, the crab for Agassou, the fish for St. Ulrique. Set among these designs, in holes in the rail, were vases filled with cut flowers, liquors and perfumes. And arranged carefully around the edge of the barque itself were eight men standing two to a side, as if waiting for a signal from the mambo, who ignored them, passing them by as she and the young houncis bustled back and forth with their loaded baskets, pots and bowls.

At last they had made a huge heap of offerings before the altar, and they stopped, as if to catch their breath before commencing the next stage of the rite, while the drums kept up the steady, deep pounding and the singing went on independently, rising in pitch, tempo and volume like a tide, slowly, almost imperceptibly and quite as if it could go on rising forever, until the entire earth were covered by the sea.

The mambo, a full-breasted woman with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, an attractive but fierce-looking middle-aged woman, shook her calabash rattle, the asson, and suddenly she was rushing about the peristyle, darting in and out of the crowd, giving orders, ringing a tiny brass bell in people’s faces, moving them, organizing them, shaping the mixed, affable, passive crowd of men and women into a coherent torce. The eight men by the barque, as one, lifted the raft from the ground to their shoulders. A number of women hefted the baskets and bowls at the foot of the altar, passed them back until they had all been taken away, and a slender, attractive woman in white untied the blue ram and led him away from the centerpole. The drummers rose, and still beating on their large instruments, began to leave the peristyle, followed by the houngenikon, who sang now with great joy.

The crowd parted, and the procession began, with people joining in as it passed, until the crowd had become the procession, a river of people singing and dancing, waving banners, carrying baskets of food and flowers, and the huge, brightly decorated barque as if it were a raft floating downstream toward the sea. Vanise and Charles and the boy Claude merged with the crowd and floated with it, as the people made their way along the pathway through the trees, down the length of the gorge between the ridges to where the ground leveled.

Soon they had departed from the Barrens, had crossed the road and were passing through a village of huts on the other side, where still more people came out and joined them. The sky had grayed slightly in the east, and a breeze off the sea drifted toward them. As the sky lightened, the palm trees went from black silhouettes against it to gray to green, when finally the crowd rounded a turn in the broad, sandy trail beyond the village and came to the sea, silvery and smooth in the dawn light. The waves lapped placidly at the spit of sand that ran out from the point, and fifty yards beyond the spit, anchored in shallow water, was the boat, a low turtler, broad-beamed, with a short, dark red, single sail.

The people sang and danced as they marched, clanging on the steel ogan, blowing the conch shell, the L: lambi, as if it were Gabriel’s horn, beating the assator and the tambour drums with joyous fury, and when they reached the water, as if it were not there, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, they strode on, moving directly into the sea, a black river foaming and churning down from a mountaintop to the shore and merging with the sea. Soon they were wading in chest-high water, the offerings, drums, goat, asson and barque held high as they neared the boat, and when they reached the boat, the men carrying the barque of Agwé steadied themselves a second and then slid it up and over the rail into the boat and clambered aboard, with the rest following helter-skelter, grabbing at rails on all sides, clinging and swinging themselves up and over, scrambling into the boat, even climbing the masts, until it seemed the boat would capsize from the load. And still there were stragglers trying to come aboard, among them Claude and Vanise and Charles. Vanise held her baby up above her head, as if he were an offering to Agwé, and a man took him from her. She reached out her hand, and another man grabbed it and hauled her aboard. Claude grabbed at the gunwale, and at that moment, someone on the other side hauled up the anchor and the boat shifted to starboard, and Claude lost his hold and fell back into the sea. Gasping, his mouth filling with salty water, flailing wildly, Claude cried out in terror, Vanise! Oh, Vanise, moin la! Moin la! for he could not swim, and he knew that he was supposed to drown now, because of Grabow. It was Grabow himself pulling him down and shoving the crowded boat away from his grasp, Grabow’s blood-soaked hands yanking at Claude’s legs, Grabow and all the Petro loas in dark concert working this poor, frightened boy down, when suddenly his hand felt human fingers, and he tightened his hand around another and looked up into the bland, calm face of the mambo, a sweetly organized, mother’s face.

The woman pulled, and Claude came free of Grabow’s grasp and scrambled over the rail of the boat and fell into a mass of arms, legs, bowls of food, drums, goat, flowers, the huge, awkward barque. He ended in a crouched position facing the woman who had pulled him aboard, the mambo in the scarlet dress. She shook her asson at him and demanded in a fierce voice to know who he was, where did he come from, who was his family. I do not know you, she said coldly.

Claude Dorsinville, he said. I am Claude Dorsinville. His breath came in harsh patches and grabs, and he stammered that he had come in search of her, the mambo, had come with his aunt and her infant. He nodded in their direction, and the woman glanced over, quickly returning her gaze to the dripping, frightened boy before her.

You want a service, she said, you got to pay me, boy. Mézi lagen ou, mezi wanga ou. Your money is your charm.

I … I have money, Claude said, and he looked across at Vanise, who had retrieved her child and sat comfortably on the broad rail of the boat, which dipped and caught the morning wind, despite its great load, and was headed smartly across the spreading bay toward the open sea. The starboard rail, where Vanise sat with a dozen others, flashed along near the surface of the sea, sending a silvery spray into the air, blue-green jewels in the new sunlight.

Vanise! the boy called. Talk to her, and he nodded at the mambo. Tell her what you want! he pleaded.

Vanise looked at him as if she did not know him.

He understood. He possessed the money for the service, and he had promised it to her, and she was holding him to his promise. Grabow’s money, the fat roll of dollars that had come from his corpse, had come from the loas. It was blood money. The money he had earned from the Chinaman, the dozen wet dollars in his pocket, was to be given back to the loas. An even exchange. It was only fair.

He reached into his pocket and drew out the crumpled, sopped bills and passed them into the woman’s outstretched hand. She took the money, shoved it swiftly into her clothing, so fast he could not say where it had gone, it had simply disappeared, and she said to him, The Lord of the Sea will protect you.

No, her, he said, pointing at Vanise.

Her, then, the mambo said, and she moved away from Claude toward Vanise and began there to shake her asson over Vanise’s bowed head and to pray for her. Moin la avec asson. Asson c’est Bon Dieu qui bailie li avec la foi….

The boat was now a half mile or more from land. Down in its broad-beamed belly, the bounds were busily loading the barque with offerings, arranging the food, flowers, liquors and perfumes with respectful precision, sweating under the morning sun, which had risen into a cloudless sky. The houngenikon sang as loudly as ever, with the energy of someone discovering her voice anew, and the drummers beat on as if they had found lost drums only a moment before, and the mambo, apparently finished with Vanise, stood at the mast and waved about her head a pair of white chickens held by their feet and chanted and prayed to Agwé and his mistress Erzulie la Sirène. The passengers, awash with sweat from the heat, their bodies stilled by it, nevertheless sang along with the houngenikon, keeping up the joyous pilgrimage despite the heat, the work and discomfort, the long hours it was taking.

Suddenly, one of the houncis assisting the mambo delicately plucked the white chickens from the upraised hand of the mambo and slit their throats and laid them on the barque below her, and at that moment, several women in the boat, one of them Vanise, were mounted by Agwé. She stiffened, her head snapped back on her spine and came as quickly forward and then slowly rose again, with her features changed, gone, replaced by the features of the Lord of the Sea, a powerful loa, dark and masculine, somber and even sad, a god who has watched too long the troubles of men and women on earth, who has seen too many bad times come back again. It was the very face of history that Agwé wore, skin tightened back to ears, lips grim and taut, eyes filled with watery understanding. There was no look of impatience and no look of patience, either: he was beyond the notion. Agwé in Vanise looked around the jammed, noisy, busy boat from one sweating black face to another, from the mambo to the houncis to the men arranging the barque to the sailors at the tiller and the boom, at these men and women and children from the hills of Haiti, even at the face of young Claude and his cousin Charles, and Agwé viewed them all with infinite compassion, as if for a moment a whale with a whale’s understanding of life had risen from the deep to view human life and had seen humanity’s busy terror, its complicated affections, its nostalgia and longing, its shame and pain and pride. Tears flowed down the face of Agwé. The people nearby said, Don’t cry, oh, no, don’t cry, please don’t cry.

The goat, blue as sapphire, is lifted overhead by a pair of young, muscular men, and the mambo shakes her asson in the animal’s yellow-eyed face, empties a vial over its indigo horns and chants, Agwé, Agwé, Lord of the Sea, protect your children. And taking a slender knife from her hounci, she slices open the animal’s throat. Blood billows over its silky chest, and the young men extend the goat, its eyes glazing over, beyond the gunwale. Blood splashes in sheaves into the sea, and the body of the blue ram-goat follows, drawn instantly to le zilet en bas de l’eau, the island beneath the sea. Agwé mounts a man, several women, the drums rise in tempo and timbre, the conch shell bleats, the houngenikon’s voice takes on strength and fairly shouts its affection and awe, and when the mambo signals with her bell, the young men lift to the gunwale the loaded barque. The boat dips, and the barque slides into the sea. It floats for a moment on the waters and then, as if clutched from below by a gigantic hand, is gone.

It is midday. The gods are properly fed. The wind dies, then it shifts. The boat turns, and the Haitians silently resume their separate journeys.