Continental Drift

Action de Grâce

1

A few miles west of Coral Harbour and Elizabeth Town on the southwest shore of New Providence Island, the beach hooks into the sea and offers a shallow, sandy-bottomed shelter. Inside the bay and about two hundred yards off the silvery, moonlit beach, the Belinda Blue cuts her engine and drops anchor. It’s close to midnight, under a nearly full moon in a cloudless sky, and the boat, even without running lights, is easily visible from shore, a low, wide trawler fitted for sport fishing with outriggers and, according to the antennae atop the bridge, with navigational equipment.

She rocks lightly in the quiet waters for a few moments, then there’s a splash from the starboard side. A motor-powered dinghy curves at low throttle around the stern of the trawler and heads toward shore. A black man is alone in the dinghy, half standing, one hand on the tiller, while aboard the Belinda Blue a white man can be seen making his way to the bow, where he gives several sharp tugs on the anchor line and, evidently satisfied, returns and disappears into the darkened cabin.

It’s a warm, balmy night splashed silver-blue with moonlight, and the low waves and swells in the bay are streaked with phosphorus. Along the beach, tall, gracefully arched palms lay dark blue shadows against the white sand at their feet, and a short ways up the beach, a freshwater stream down from the inland hills emerges from the brush, broadens and empties discreetly into the bay.

The black man in the dinghy nears the shore, then cuts to his left and cruises along the beach just beyond the breaking waves, until he passes the shallow gulley in the beach where the stream enters the bay and the waves are calmed, neutralized by the counterflow of the stream, and here he’s able to bring the boat in to shore easily and step from it directly onto the gravel. He draws the boat to shore and drags it a short distance into the brush.

Walking quickly inland along the east bank of the stream, he’s soon beyond sight of the trawler anchored in the bay and, moments later, of the bay itself. His eyes adjust to the darkness, and he starts to see what he expected to see, a small village set among palm trees and scrubby undergrowth, a settlement of huts and shanties. He smells old woodsmoke from cold cookfires, and he smells garbage also, and human excrement and urine, poultry, pigs and goats.

A dog starts to bark nearby, probably from underneath one of the several huts set on cinder-block posts, and then another picks it up, and then a third and fourth in the distance. The man leans down to the pathway, gropes around for a second and picks up three small stones, rough bits of limestone. He hefts them in his right hand and walks hurriedly on.

Except for the several dogs, whose harsh cries pick up and join each other and erratically leave off, the village seems deserted. The cabins — sad, tiny, patched-together shelters against rain — are closed up and dark, with no cracks of light under doors, no orange glow from kerosene lanterns or candlelight flickering through windows. The man knows country villages well, and even as late at night as this, there are usually plenty of signs of life — men on stoops talking quietly, a child bawling, a boy chatting up a pretty girl at her door. This particular village is known to him, though he’s only been here in daylight, and it was crowded then, Haitians, whole families of them and separate bits and pieces of families, too, people from all over Haiti. He did his business with them, got their names down, set the price, and said he’d return soon with the boat. Now he’s back again, and he has the boat; but all the Haitians are gone.

Moonlight falls in swatches on the tin roofs of the cabins and shacks, and thick shadows gather and shift, as if turning in sleep, as the man passes along the lane that threads through the village. He remembers a settlement in the hills behind Port Antonio in Jamaica, a place he came home to as a boy after working all week in the Port loading bananas on freighters bound for New York and Liverpool, coming home to a sleeping village, his pockets full of money, his head full of dreams of someday going to America and becoming a millionaire, like those white people on their yachts he saw every day from the United Fruit pier, where he’d stop work for a moment and stare out from under the high, corrugated iron roof of the packing house across the pier to the blue water of the bay, the sparkling, slender boats, the peach-colored people in white shorts and shirts holding frosty drinks in their hands, their pretty mouths opening and closing toward one another like the mouths of elegant birds. Six days of it, and he’d ride back up the hills on a wheezing, top-heavy, scarred and dented bus full of exhausted, sleeping workers from the piers, and he’d get off at the stop at the unpaved lane that led down to the village where he had been raised and where his mother and his younger brothers and sisters lived, and he’d begin the two-mile walk in through darkness, sudden splash of moonlight, dense shadow, between palms and impenetrable bush. Every noise from the bush made him jump, made him think, Duppy! and run a step or two, until he thought better of it, remembered he was supposed to be a man now and walk bravely through the night like one. But even so, he’d walk trembling and terrified of ghosts the whole way, until at last he reached the hamlet on the side of the ridge in the shadow of the Blue Mountains where his mother and family lived, where everyone he knew lived, and there would be a few men still playing dominoes and sipping rum by the shop who’d nod at him as he passed by, who would call, “Evenin’, Tyrone. Back from de Port fe’ good dis time, eh?” He would laugh and say, “No, mon, me home fe’ check de fambly an’ den me gone lak bird, mon.”

At the far end of the village, where the lane curves into the bush, Tyrone turns and looks back. Where have all the people gone? He expected simply to walk into the settlement, ask for one or two of the Haitians whose names he’d taken down, go to them, have them round up the others, and then leave, all within an hour. He’s done it that way before — he assured Boone and now Boone’s friend Dubois he could do it that way again — and there’s never been a hitch. The Haitians always wait for him diligently night after night, until he finally shows up with the boat, and within minutes, he’s got their money in his pocket and has got them aboard, and by morning the Haitians are in Florida, and he and the white man who owns the boat are back on the Keys counting their money.

Of course, you can never rely on Haitians the way you can rely on other people. They’re different somehow, almost another species, it sometimes seems, with their large, innocent eyes, their careful movements, their strange way of speaking. Creole. He learned it from the Haitians he worked with in the cane fields in Florida as a youth, when he was housed with them for months at a time in sweltering, filthy, crowded trailers. They drank the white rum they call clairin and played dominoes and listened to their music on the radio, and he, alone among the Jamaican workers, would join in, and before long he learned to talk with them, not well but enough to enjoy their company.

The Jamaicans, most of whom were older than he, seemed to him morose, bitter, angry, in ways he was not. The Haitians, no matter what their age, seemed innocent in ways he was still trying to hold on to. If he had been a few years older, if he had known then what he learned about the world after he fled the work camp, he might never have dealt with the Haitians, but in those days he was still a boy, and like the Haitians, he felt lucky to be where he was, doing what he was doing, suffering as he was suffering.

He sees a shadow, a man, step forward from between two cabins and then step quickly back again, a tall, thin figure with a machete or big stick in his hand. Tyrone jumps off the lane into shadows of his own.

“Moin dit, monsieur!” Tyrone calls to the figure. “M’apé mandé qui moune….”

No answer.

Tyrone takes a few tentative steps toward where the figure disappeared. “Ça nous dit?” he tries. “Ma p’ mandé coumen nou’ yè, monsieur.”

Suddenly the watery voice of an old man comes out of the darkness. “Bon soir, monsieur. Rajé gain’ zoreille, monsieur.” The shadow has become an old man wearing an undershirt, baggy pants, barefoot, hobbling on a stick.

Tyrone approaches him, then draws back. The man’s eyes are wild, red-rimmed, and he’s grinning. A madman, Tyrone thinks. “Bon soir, Papa,” he says quietly.

“Comment nous yé, monsieur?”

“Bien merci,” Tyrone says.

The old man hobbles into the lane, where Tyrone can see him clearly in the moonlight. He’s still grinning, broken-toothed, red-eyed, scrawny. “Ça nous dit? Bel Français, pas lesprit pou’ ça, monsieur.”

“Non. Mais … où est le peuple?”

“Eh?”

The people, the people who live here, Tyrone says. Crazy old man, he thinks, rum-drunk, telling Tyrone his good French doesn’t make him smart, when he doesn’t understand simple words like peuple himself.

“La famille semblé, monsieur”.

“Coté yo, Papa?”Tyrone asks. Where are they? “Eh?”

“Coté yo, le peuple? Les gens, Papa. Les Haitians.”

The old man comes closer, his rum-sopped breath driving Tyrone backwards. His movements are abrupt, angry, a little confusing to Tyrone, who’s starting to worry about time. They don’t have much time to waste; none, in fact. It’s a long trip back to the Keys in the Belinda Blue, especially loaded with passengers.

The old man is rambling in a singsong fashion, rattling out sentences Tyrone barely catches, about how he hurt his foot, why he’s here alone, who’s to blame for all his troubles. His name is François, Tyrone gathers that much, and evidently he hurt his foot because he was left unattended by the boy who was supposed to be his aide. “Gain yun grand moune qui va fâcher!” he says of himself. “Li retou ‘né pied cassé!” The old man who came home with a broken foot is going to be angry, he promises, which leads him to a litany of complaints: “Depuis moin sorti la ville, moin apé cassé piéd moin. Ça qui fait petit moun fronté.”

Tyrone stops him, draws out his list of names, says the first name on the list, and the old man explodes with wrath, bangs his stick against the ground as if to wake the dead, for the very boy who deserted him and caused him to break his foot is nephew to that woman, who is herself a jeunesse, he claims, though Tyrone, of course, knows this about her, for he met her first of this group, met her almost a month ago, when she was in the room upstairs in the shop of the man who was murdered, Grabow, and in fact was thought by some to be the murderer, for she disappeared the same night Grabow was killed. Then, a week later, in the company of a boy who spoke some English, her nephew, probably, she came one night to Coral Harbour while Boone was over in Nassau doing his cocaine business. She had the boy call Tyrone out of a bar where he was playing dominoes and asked him to carry her over to Florida with her nephew and baby. He agreed to take them for the three hundred dollars they had, but only if she could find them ten or more additional passengers, who could pay five hundred a head, and she led him to the Haitians in the settlement west of Elizabeth Town. He hadn’t asked her about Grabow; he figured that was between them, and if she did chop the man with a machete, he probably deserved it. Tyrone knew the man beat her and kept all the money she earned with her body in that tiny room above the shop. Pathetically, one night she told him, the only time she ever complained, “M’ pas ^‘ti bête, m’ pas ^‘ti cochon, pou’ on cové, pou’ on marré moin,” repeating in a sad, whimpering voice that she was not a little pig, a little animal that a man can keep tied up like this. Tyrone patted her tenderly on her naked shoulder, and then he walked downstairs and quickly departed, unable to look Grabow in the face. When he learned later that Grabow was dead, cut almost in half by a machete, probably by the whore he kept over his shop, Tyrone was glad.

The old man goes on complaining about “le peuple, les gens, les Haitians … dipis temps y’ap pa’lê sou moin! Pilé pied’m ou mandé’m pardon. Ça pardon-là, wa fait pou’ moin?” and Tyrone finally interrupts him and asks to know where they’ve gone tonight.

The old man sputters, “Le moin vlé pa’lé ou pas vie moin pa’lé!”When I want to talk, you won’t let me.

Tyrone slaps his hands against his thighs, spins around and takes a step away. “Non mêle kilé oudé, Nég’, non mêlé jodi-à.” We’re all mixed up today.

“Non, monsieur,” the old man calls, and scrambles after him. Then he asks for his gift, for money. “Coté ça ou ba moin pou’m alléì?”

Tyrone digs into his pocket and comes up with some change, which he passes into the old man’s outstretched paw.

“Merci, monsieur. Jé wè bouche pé,” he warns — see but don’t say. “La famille semblé …” he whispers, and he looks warily over his bent shoulder, like a dog warning off other dogs as he’s about to eat. “Soso na pé tué, soso, jodi-à!” A pig is to be killed today. “Pour Erzulie, ‘Ti Kita, Gé Rouge, Pié Sèche. Pour les loas, les Invisibles, monsieur!”

“Qui, Papa?”

“Qui, monsieur.” Then he warns Tyrone to get himself gone, for this is not his country. This is Africa, he hisses. “Poussé allé. Ça lan Guinée.”

Tyrone shakes his head no and asks where they’ve gone to kill the pig. He has to see some people now, tonight, for he has important business with them.

The old man jerks and turns himself around, wobbling on the pivot of one leg, a twitching, sudden kind of dance, almost a seizure. Then, his back to Tyrone, facing through the cluster of huts toward the sea, he speaks. His words seem jumbled at first, incoherent, uttered as chant, prayer or prophecy, Tyrone can’t tell which, but the old man’s voice and words frighten him.

“Nèg’ nwè, con ça ou yé, y’ap coupé lavie ou débor!” A black man like you, the old man warns, will eat with you, will drink with you, will cut the life out of you. “Santa Marie la Madeleine, sonné une sonne pou’ moin, pour m’allé.” Ring a bell for me, Mary Magdalene, so I may go. “Sonné une sonne pou’ les petites nagé.” Ring a bell for the drowned children.

Reaching forward with both hands, Tyrone grabs the old man’s shoulders, and calling him by name, “François!” as if to break the spell, demands to know where the hounfor is located. Now, he must go there now, or it will be too late in the night to do his business.

François stops his dance, and he laughs, a long, loud, sardonic laugh. “Bien,” he says. “C’est bien bon.” He will take him to the hounfor, he says, giggling. Now. But first there must be more money passed between them.

Tyrone unfolds a dollar bill and gives it to the old man, who limps past, mumbling and grumbling, one minute complaining about having to do this dirty business, the next promising Tyrone that he will love what he will soon see. “Ou malhonnête, compé, compé à moin,” he says. You are dishonest, my friend. And a second later, “Nan Guinée plaisi-à belle! Oh, a n’allé wé yo!” In Africa, pleasure is beautiful, as we shall see.

François heads into the darkness, taking an invisible path off the moonlit lane at the edge of the village. Tyrone hurries to catch up to the old man’s bent form and follows him, a few feet behind, through the brush a ways, until he hears a stream nearby, where they turn right and walk upstream along the rocky bank. The old man walks quickly, more easily, it seems in rock and brush than back in the village, as if, once he stepped into the bush, his broken foot were miraculously healed.

2

For the Jamaican, the next five hours are difficult. He and Dubois had arrived at the Haitian settlement on New Providence later than they planned, which gave them little enough time as it was to anchor, come ashore, round up the Haitians and get out to sea again. Dubois was too cautious coming across from the Keys, afraid, perhaps, of the open sea, though he claimed he’d fished in the North Atlantic off New England in rough waters many times and this, to him, was a pleasure, easy sailing, a two-hundred-mile run due east across the Florida Straits and the Gulf Stream, south of the Biminis and north of Andros, with a mate, the Jamaican, who’s made the trip a hundred times. Even so, he held the Belinda Blue back to half-speed, not much more than fifteen knots, and when they arrived at Coral Harbour, it was already ten o’clock at night, and though they didn’t really need gas, Dubois insisted on filling the tanks. Then, because of the time, they had trouble getting anyone at the marina to sell them gas, which delayed them yet another hour.

“Better safe than sorry,” Dubois told his mate, who nodded and said nothing, although he was already a little worried about how much time they were taking. This whole journey, once they had the Haitians aboard, ought to be made under the cover of darkness, or they were likely to be spotted in the Florida Straits by plane or helicopter and boarded minutes later by the coast guard. The surest way to get away with this was to come back across from the Bahamas in the nighttime, do the whole thing in darkness, which meant that you had to leave New Providence before midnight, and even then you risked being seen at dawn off the crowded coast of south Florida.

Tyrone did not particularly like Boone’s idea of bringing Dubois into their smuggling operations in the first place. Dubois is a good-natured man and a good fisherman, and he handles the boat well; he is not a hard man, however, not like Boone or most of the others in the trade. And something about Dubois puts Tyrone off, makes him mistrust him. He’s too fretful, too unsure of himself, maybe too innocent, for this kind of work. And now, just as the Jamaican feared, here they are on their first job together, and they’re already taking chances they should not take.

With the Haitians off in the bush for one of their African voodoo ceremonies, Tyrone thinks, they might as well postpone the crossing to Florida until tomorrow morning anyhow, and he hopes Dubois doesn’t panic when the mate does not return quickly to the boat, that Dubois will simply wait for him all night anchored in the bay, even if it takes Tyrone till daylight to get back, as, with these crazy Haitians, it might. Haitians aren’t like other people; everything is both more complicated for them and simpler, in ways you can’t predict. Tyrone hopes that Dubois somehow knows this and that he won’t be afraid or confused and pull anchor and run. Dubois himself, Tyrone thinks as he makes his way through the tangled bushes and scrambles over limestone rocks behind the mumbling old man, is a little like the Haitians. You never know what he might do. He seems to have his own peculiar way of seeing things, and that worries Tyrone. This kind of operation ought to be simple, he thinks, but with a man like Dubois, it can get complicated in a minute.

The Haitians’ voodoo ceremony interests Tyrone only slightly. As a child in rural Jamaica, with his mother and aunts and uncles he attended many dances and ceremonies that he remembers now with no real pleasure and little understanding. Though the forms and content of these ceremonies are indeed the half-retained remnants of ancient African rites, they’re not much more than scraps and rags torn off the intricately woven cloth of old Dahomeyan worship, and in rural Jamaica, these worn and faded bits of song, dance and drumbeat have been patched together with no conscious model or pattern for guidance, so that what was once a gorgeous, intricately coherent robe is now an ill-fitting smock that serves as a kind of peculiarly anachronistic invitation to sing and dance oneself into a frenzy and, for many, ecstatic possession.

That particular aspect of the Haitians’ voudon, possession, is also ordinary, common, to Tyrone, something for old women and drunken men — he’s seen it in church, on dance floors, at feasts in the maroon towns in the Cockpit Country of west Jamaica, and because he’s never wanted it for himself, he has no interest in watching it in someone else.

As the Jamaican follows the old man up the long, gradually narrowing gorge in the Barrens and hears the drums grow louder and more insistent and the singing and chanting more coherent, as he glimpses through the bush flashes of light from candles and kerosene lanterns, he believes that, when he finally arrives at the hounfor, he will be able simply to move through the crowd as if he were at a camp meeting or revival back in West Kingston and tap each of his passengers on the shoulder and draw him or her away from the crowd and down the hill to the settlement, where they will quickly pack their bundles, take their money out of hiding and follow him down to the beach, where he will run them out to the Belinda Blue in the dinghy six or eight at a time. While he sweats and gasps for breath from the effort of keeping up with the old man, Tyrone busily speculates and worries about how he and Dubois might hide the Haitians once they are aboard, cover them with a tarpaulin, maybe, so the boat will look empty to a plane crossing overhead in daylight. Then they might be able to get across the straits and enter crowded waters by nightfall tomorrow, drop the Haitians south of Miami and be in Moray Key by midnight, drinking beer in the Clam Shack. Tyrone is an eminently practical man; he believes that someday he will own his own boat. This Haitian mumbo-jumbo is country nonsense to him, an embarrassment of sorts, because they are black West Indians and he is a black West Indian also, and white people can’t easily tell the difference between them. He’ll be glad when this part of the journey is over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyrone smiles back.

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

Poussé allé,

Poussé allé,

Icit pas pays oui

Ça lan Guinée,

Icit pas pays ou!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claude shakes his head no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

Tyrone, the Jamaican, greets them as they arrive at the beach, and he takes each of them off a few steps from the others to complete his business with them privately, for he has agreed with them separately on the cost of the journey. When he has obtained all the money, he divides it into two packets, one thicker than the other. The thicker packet he will turn over to Dubois, telling him that’s all he was able to extract from them. The other, smaller packet he will keep in a separate pocket for himself. He feels no guilt for this; without him, Dubois would have nothing to show for his trip from the Keys but a sunburn and a gasoline bill at the marina in Coral Harbour.

When the Haitians have assembled on the beach, Tyrone drags the dinghy out of the bushes and across the gray sand to the water. He jumps in, seats himself at the stern and points out the first six and waves them over toward the bow of the boat.

He hollers to the boy, Dorsinville, and instructs him to hold the bow and help the others into the boat, and the boy jumps to the task. First the old lady and the young woman with her two children come aboard, then an old man going to Florida to be with his son and daughter, and a woman whose husband went over four years ago, and a young man whose older brother is in New York.

Tyrone signals the boy to push the boat out, which he does, and then he starts the motor, brings the boat around toward the sandbar, and in seconds he has the boat slicing through the still, velvety-gray water of the bay toward the Belinda Blue.