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.
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.