Continental Drift (18 page)

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.

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.