Vanise wakens. The air has changed; she can smell trees. She raises her head, moving with care so as not to waken the boy or her baby, lifts her body at the waist, looks over the rail into darkness. The engine chugs slowly belowdecks, and she can hear waves breaking nearby.
They have arrived! America! Opening her eyes as wide as she can, she stares intensely into the darkness, but she can see nothing. No lights, no hills outlined blackly against a lighter sky—nothing. But she knows, despite the blackness peering back, that they have come to America, and smiling, she lowers her body, lies on her side and lets herself drift into peaceful, trusting sleep.
If a man believes he is happy, he is. If not, not. And if a woman, a young, illiterate Haitian woman in flight from her home with her infant son and adolescent nephew, exchanges all her money for a boat ride to America, and without knowing it, gets dropped off instead at North Caicos Island, six hundred miles from America, and believes that at last and for the first time in her hard life she is happy, then she is happy. The truth of the matter, the kind of truth you would get with a map, compass and rule, has no bearing on her belief or its consequences.
Until, that is, she gets her own map, which at first would resemble one of Columbus’s early, wildly speculative drawings of where he thought he was. A person’s map tells more about where that person thinks he is than about where he is not, which is, of course, everywhere else. Columbus, when he drew this, thought he was in the Philippine Sea:
Vanise, believing she was a hundred yards off the beach at Coral Gables, Florida, would have drawn something like this:
On Vanise’s map, you are ten hours off the north coast of Haiti, and Florida is on the horizon, or would be, if you could see the horizon. It’s a dark, moonless night. Victor, whose boat this is, comes forward to where Vanise and the boy, Claude, encircle the baby like the halves of a clamshell. They lie surrounded by a crowd of eight or ten people, who are also lying down or seated hunched over, men mostly, dressed in their best clothes, shoes, hats, and clutching battered suitcases and rope-tied baskets and bundles.
Ignoring upturned faces, Victor steps over their bodies with care, as if afraid of getting his feet tangled in ropes. He is a tall, thin, nut-colored man with a skinny neck and large Adam’s apple, tufts of a beard, acne scars on his cheeks, a crumpled captain’s hat on his head. Leaning back against the bulkhead in the bow of the small boat, he studies his cargo for a moment. The boat rides the swells lightly and holds its position; the engine, cut back, throbs like a bass drum. One man from the group huddled on deck, a short, middle-aged man with a cane cutter’s body, lifts his head and broad shoulders and peers over the starboard rail. They hear waves breaking nearby.
Keep down! Victor barks, and the man drops to the deck as if shot.
Vanise believes she is happy, and she almost laughs out loud at the poor man, his sudden, wide-eyed motion, his face that of a little boy who stole someone’s pie and unexpectedly saw the victim coming along the road.
That’s comical, she whispers to her nephew, who smiles also. She squeezes the boy’s hand. She is very dark-skinned, the color of freshly ground coffee, and she is short and in the shoulders and hips small as a girl. Because of the baby, her breasts are large and full and seem to push against her blouse. Her thick black hair is wiry, chopped off a hand’s width from her skull and wrapped in a band of scarlet cloth that brings her high, strong cheekbones, broad nose and full mouth forward toward the light, giving her the appearance of a serious, powerful woman. A man would not confuse her with a girl, or with a woman he could fool easily. If she gave anything to anyone, it would be because she wanted to. Or had to—and then it would not be a gift. Back in Le Mole, when she first appeared at Victor’s pink cinder-block house, led there by the old man from the docks who does that work for him, sorting from the crowds of supplicants the few who have both the money and the need to get away, Victor looked her over carefully, first to be sure that she had the money and would give it to him, but also to see if she might be fooled into giving him something extra, to see if, like many women, she confused her need with his worth. But no, she saw Victor for what he was, despite her need, and so he had not bothered to try to fool her. He would take her money and treat her like the rest.
Beyond the reef, Victor informs his passengers, is Florida. Biscayne Bay. He says the words slowly, lingering over the consonants and lengthening the vowels, making the words sound like the name of a powerful and beneficent loa. Now, you must pay attention to me, he tells them. It is very, very difficult to get through the reef. We must do it quickly, when the tide is at its highest, which is very soon now, and then we will drop you at a landing on the shore and quickly return. Or else we cannot get back through the reef. Someone will be there to guide you to Miami. He says this word slowly also—Mee-ah-mee—and several of the people at his feet make broad smiles.
I must collect the money now, he says abruptly. There will be no time later. Because of the tide’s turning. And the reef.
There is a general groping into pockets and scarves, parcels and bags, while the captain moves among the crowd, reaching down, plucking and counting out the bills, moving to the next one, and on, until soon he has accounted for everyone. They seem relieved to have paid him, less tense than before, as if, by taking their money from them, five, six hundred dollars per person, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the bargain struck back in Le Mole, he has taken from them an anxiety, a burdensome responsibility, for now they are smiling easily at one another, whispering and nudging shoulders and thighs. They seem to feel less alone than when they possessed so much money.
The captain has moved to the cabin and has climbed up to the controls, and his mate, a shirtless, shiny, Rasta-locked youth, has replaced him in the bow of the boat, peering over the rail and down at the water. He waves to the captain like a pilot, turns and searches the water below. The engine spins faster now, and the boat moves forward, while the mate waves the captain on, holds him suddenly back, gestures to the starboard side, then to port, then leads him straight ahead again, and the wet, rattling sound of the waves breaking on the reef grows louder.
All the people on the deck are up on hands and knees now, peering over the rail, studying the white foam where the water gets slashed by the reef, looking in vain for the deep, dark cut that the captain must know is there, that the dreadlocked youth in the bow, too, must know is there, for haven’t they made this journey many times, isn’t this the knowledge and skill that Victor is famous for all over the north coast? He has taken hundreds, maybe thousands, over to Florida, and each time he has done it, he has had to cross through this reef to Biscayne Bay, they tell themselves. Even so, they pray. They pray to the loas, to the Virgin and all the saints, to their mait’-tête, if they have one, and to their parents, if they are dead. They pray to anyone who has the power to slide this small wooden boat filled with people between the shark’s teeth of the reef into the calm, deep waters of the bay.
Prié pou’ tou les morts:
pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran bois,
pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran dlo,
pou’ les morts ‘bandonné nan gran plaine,
pou’ les morts tué pa’ couteau,
pou’ les morts tué pa’ épée,
pou’ tou les morts, au nom de Mait’ Carrefour et de Legba;
pou’ tou generation paternelle et maternelle,
ancêtre et ancètere, Afrique et Afrique;
au nom de Mait’ Carrefour, Legba, Baltaza, Miroi….
Then, suddenly, they are through. The reef and the white crashing waves are behind them, and before them lies the land, extended like a dark wall beneath velvet sky, with a white seam of beach between the water and the low palmettos. A rickety pier reaches like a bony arm from the beach, with a clearing in the trees beyond and what looks like a sandy road or lane leading inland.
The captain cuts quickly from the reef across the bay and brings the boat around and against the pier.
He shuts down the motor, and the mate leaps from the boat and swiftly ties the bow and then the stern to the pilings.
Be quick! Be quick! he says, and the people scramble from the boat, lugging suitcases and baskets, shoving one another to get free of the boat. Quickly! the mate repeats. Already he is untying the line at the stern.
Suddenly, with one arm curling her baby against her breast, Vanise steps away from the group of refugees and touches the mate on his naked shoulder.
Eh? What do you want?
With her chin, she points toward the shore and the bush beyond. This, she says, This is not Miami.
He’s silent for a second. Over there, he says at last, pointing east along the beach. Then he runs forward to untie the bow of the boat. They’re ready to depart. The captain races the engine impatiently.
But Vanise has pursued the mate, and when he stands to leap aboard the boat, she grabs his wrist and yanks him back. Where is the man to help us? she demands. Where?
Soon! Let go of me! he shouts. Then, suddenly, his voice changes, goes soft, and looking way down at her, he says, Don’t worry, miss. Miami’s not far. We land you here to avoid the American police. It’s not so easy now as it used to be. Just don’t be afraid.
She releases him, and he takes one long stride and is aboard the boat. The captain guns the motor, the propeller churns a foamy wake behind it, and the boat wallows a moment and pulls rapidly away from the pier. Vanise watches the small, dark boat cross in a straight line the silky waters of the bay and slow briefly before the low white ridge marking the reef, where it picks its way through, and is gone.
Then, slowly, in silence, the people walk one by one down the narrow length of the pier toward land, step to the hard-packed beach and begin their wait. Some lie down on the witchgrass and watch the sky, star-pocked, circle overhead, some stroll slowly up the beach a ways and talk in low, nervous voices to one another, some sit on the pier and dangle their legs over the edge. Vanise and her baby and the boy, Claude, walk to the end of the pier and look out to the sea, to where the boat has gone, back to Haiti.
This is not America, she says in a low, cold voice. The boy places the basket down, and Vanise sits on it, opens her blouse and starts nursing her baby.
Are we lost! the boy asks, his voice about to break.
No! she answers. Then, more softly. No. But this is not America. Vanise, landed, dropped off, abandoned on the north coast of North Caicos Island, a nearly empty, flat, impoverished island six hundred miles from where she’d expected to land—what’s one to say to her now? Sit down, Vanise, be rational and find out where you really are, Vanise, and then find out where America really is, and then Haiti, Le Mole, Allanche, your sister-in-law’s hurricane-battered cabin up on the ridge. Get it all in perspective.
No, Vanise, don’t. Don’t find out where you really are. That will only make you believe that you are indeed lost. To the boy’s frightened question, Are we lost? you would have to say, Yes, Claude, lost.
To be lost is not to be able to return or go on, for the world is not lost, you are. It’s the fear behind the old joke told by parents about their child, who, they say, got lost, and when they found her the child calmly said. No, I wasn’t lost, you were. And the parents chuckle gratefully, knowing that if the child had not believed that she would have fallen into terror.
In one sense, Vanise knows where she is. She just doesn’t know where America is. She’s standing on a hard white beach at high tide in the Caribbean. The wind blows from the east. Immediately before her is a lane that winds into the low bush, and when she walks along the lane, she discovers that it connects to a marlpaved road, chalky white, now that the moon has risen. As she walks, her map gets extended ahead of her to the horizon, which keeps receding in the distance. Her map is a living, coiling and uncoiling thing, moving in undulant waves before her the way a manta ray sweeps the bottom of the sea. Her map is a process, the kind of map you must keep moving into, if you want to read it.
By dawn, Vanise and her infant and the boy are within sight of the inland village of Kew. Though they do not know the name of the place yet, they do know that this is still not America. There are goats here, tethered in the gutters alongside the road, and roosters crowing, and tin-roofed cabins the same as in Allanche, set off the road a ways, with tiny outhouses and laundry lines in back, patchy vegetable gardens, pole beans, yams, spindly corn stalks. A scrawny brown dog yips at them as they pass, and Vanise hurries the boy along ahead of her, looking back over her shoulder.
What are we going to do? Claude asks his aunt. Where are we?
Don’t worry! she snaps. We’ll find out soon what we’re to do. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as if to scold the boy.
The sky is turning pearly white, like the belly of a fish, and the palm fronds, the glittery leaves of nmhoe trees and the pebbled sides of cabins stand sharply forward from the shadows. It’s a familiar light to Vanise,’falling at the same crisp angles with the same clear intensity as at this hour and season in Haiti. But the soil is different, pale gray here instead of blood red, and the houses seem more scattered, less clustered against one another, with narrow, unpaved roads instead of footpaths leading from one house to another.
The roosters arch their short backs and cut the still air with harsh calls from the edge of town down to the square in the middle and back out to the opposite side, and soon the dry, clean smell of new woodsmoke reaches Vanise and the boy, and they realize at once that they are hungry.
The boy speaks of it first. Should we stop to eat? he asks. We have the ham. And the yams, he reminds her, and the rose apples and guavas they picked on the walk from Allanche to Le Mô1e—when was it? Only yesterday morning? Is the last dawn they saw yesterday’s, and that on Haiti? Has it all happened so quickly? How did they move so soon from a known world to an unknown one, and why aren’t they more frightened than they are? The boy cannot understand this. He can ask the questions, but he cannot answer them, and that frightens him more than any answers might. He feels like a boy in a dream, not quite responsible for his actions. If something appears in the dream that can kill him, he knows he will just fly up and over it.
At the center of the town there is a crossroads and a low wall encircling a Cottonwood tree. Here Vanise stops and sits. The boy stands before her, looking around him at the four roads that seem to come from above to this low place in the middle, there to cross and rise up on the opposite side. A half-dozen houses, mostly un-painted masonry buildings tacked onto smaller, older, daub-and-wattle cabins, face the several roads, with overgrown yards in front and here and there an old American car, dented and rusting, parked beside the house. Doors open now and then, and a person, usually a child, appears, runs to the outhouse and returns slowly, languidly, walking barefoot across wet grass, opens the door and disappears into the warm darkness inside. Little girls in short cotton smocks march out and back, little boys in white saggy underpants, lean shirtless men wearing jeans or gym shorts, fat women in sleeveless, baglike dresses.
It’s as if no one sees the young Haitian woman in the red headscarf and blue-gray skirt and blouse, her baby in her arms, and the boy, a lad slightly taller than she, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants and black sneakers. Their baskets lie at their feet next to the low marl wall, and while the woman sits on the wall and nurses her infant, the boy gropes through the baskets in search of breakfast—fruit, a pair of egg-shaped, pale green jambosien and a pair of lemony goyaoiers. It’s almost as if the strangers are invisible in this tiny town, for though no one stepping from his door could fail to see them at the crossroads in the milky dawn light beneath the tall cottonwood tree, no one calls them or even hails them with a tentatively raised hand.
Vanise and Claude hear them call and hail one another, however: Tyrone, you fetch me wood now, bwoy, or me beat you! And: Get dat dog from out de house! G’wan now, get ’im from de house, y’ hear? There’s a familiar enough roll to the words, the grumpy, early-morning soun
ds they themselves make back in Allanche, but Vanise and Claude can’t understand the words. It’s garble to them, as if the people are speaking backwards. The boy’s eyes open wide in wonder, and Vanise cocks her head, listens more closely. She hears music from a radio, not Haitian music, certainly, and nothing like it, either, not calypso or reggae or salsa. It’s a twangy, slow music, and though thinned by the cheap transistor radio inside the cabin, it’s unmistakably American country and western music. They’ve heard that sound before, now and then, from the radio and on records brought back on holidays from Port-au-Prince by cousins returning to the country intent on impressing those who refused or weren’t able to move to the city.
The boy says, Maybe this is America. Only not Miami, that’s all. Miami’s probably someplace near here, that’s all.
Vanise looks at him with scorn. America doesn’t look like this, she says in a low voice, almost a whisper.
But where are we, then?
Vanise shoves her face close to the boy’s and hisses. We’re in the center of a village, at a crossroads, and we’re eating our breakfast there! Anybody can see that. You can see that. She’s not angry at the boy, but she sends her words to him as if they had been heated and cast into cold water. Give me the jambosier, she says.
He passes her the fruit, and she tears off a fleshy chunk with her teeth. The baby, finished sucking at her breast, has fallen asleep and lolls back against her shoulder. Holding the rose apple with her teeth, Vanise buttons her blouse quickly and resumes eating. She hadn’t realized how hungry she had become, with all the excitement—first the fear of the boat ride and the sea, then the joy at the sight of land, and then the disappointment and anger, and now the complex fight to stave off being lost—and she’s almost startled by the intensity of her own hunger and the pleasure she takes from satisfying it. The boy, too, eats ravenously and with sudden joy.
Continental Drift Page 14
