Two nights after the night the Haitians drowned in the waves off the
beach at Sunny Isles, a man and two women lead Vanise Dorsinville from a small white bungalow in northeast Miami, out a door at the back of the house into the packed dirt yard, the ground speckled in beige and dark brown in new moonlight and shade, palm fronds beyond the rickety fence chattering in the cool breeze, cars whizzing past overhead on the throughway. They step with care through an opening in the fence, replace the loose board that hides it, and soon they are walking directly beneath the highway, Interstate 95, which swoops over them from north to south, eight lanes of steel and concrete rushing as if downhill toward the tip of the continent, with garbage, broken bottles, rusting tin cans, old tires, rats and the carcasses of cats and dogs scattered below in the tufts of long yellow grass.
Vanise leans heavily on the arm of the man, her brother and father of the boy Claude Dorsinville, who had liked and admired the white captain of the boat and had been the first of the Haitians to leap into the water, as if to show them how easy it was, and, though he could not swim at all, must have believed that he was close enough to America to walk ashore, for he made no attempt to swim, did not struggle, did not even call out, but simply went to the bottom, as if thrown surprised from a great height.
His body and the body of Vanise’s baby will eventually be found, like most of the others, bloated, purplish-gray, half eaten by sharks and birds, in the sands along the stretch of fine white beach south of Bal Harbour, by horrified joggers, beachcombers, early morning surfers and fishermen. No one will be able to identify them, although everyone will know they are the Haitians the newspapers said were cast off an American boat when the coast guard threatened to board it, a boat that slipped away while the coast guard tried to save the drowning Haitians and raced away to the south without giving up its identity or the names of the man who was the captain and the man who was his mate.
Vanise alone survived, which she believes is due to the particular intervention of Ghede, dark and malicious loa of death and regeneration, who needed one of them to survive the drownings, any one of them at all, so why not Vanise, a strong young woman with firm, warm loins, which Ghede, in his gluttony for flesh, is known to relish? Ghede, Vanise believes, wanted one of them to survive so as to feed him the others, to act as his agent, for he is a devourer of human flesh, insatiable, jackal-like, a loa who schemes endlessly to obtain what he endlessly needs. There is no other explanation for her not having drowned in the storm with the others, for she cannot swim any more than her nephew or child could, and the waters were as fierce for her as for them, the waves as heavy, the sharks as hungry, hard and swift.
People who have no power, or believe they have none, also believe that everything that happens is caused by a particular, powerful agent; people who have power, people who can rest easily saying this
or that event happened “somehow,” call the others superstitious, irrational and ignorant, even stupid. The truly powerless are none of these, however, for they and perhaps they alone know that luck, bad luck as much as good, is a luxurious explanation for events. When you have even partial control over your destiny, you’re inclined to deny that you do, because you’re afraid the control will go away. That’s superstition. But when, like Vanise, you have no control over your destiny, it’s reasonable to assume that someone or something else does, which is why it’s reasonable, not irrational, for Vanise to believe that the bizarre fact of her survival, her destiny now, is due to a loa’s intervention, and because of the particulars, it’s reasonable for her to assume that the loa is Ghede.
After God, we are in your hands, Ghede Nimbo, the hounsis
canzos sing to the loa who stands at the entrance to the underworld, the loa who leans wickedly on the jambs of the gate before the abyss, smokes his cigar, peers through sunglasses and in his reedy, nasal voice says,
You,
and
Not you,
and
You,
and
Not you
. He waves and pokes and even shoves you through the gate and over the abyss with his thick, stiff hickory stick, then holds back with his stick you who are to stay on this side, lifting your skirt above your hips, if you are a woman, smacking his lips voraciously and poking the men and boys on their crotches and butts, turning his back and flipping up the tails of his long black coat in a shameless prance.
Ghede is the cynical trickster, the glutton, he who foments not death but dying, not salvation but consumption, not fucking but orgasm. He celebrates the passage over from one state to another. Whether physical or metaphysical, Ghede could not care less; it’s all the same to him. Morality he scorns altogether, for he knows he is the last recourse; sentimentality he mocks in song, in his high, childish voice singing,
I wuv, you wuv, she wuvs! And what does that make? L’amour!
he cries, and strokes his erect penis beneath his trousers. With his motley, his costumes and beggar’s bowl, he derides worldly ambition; with his complaints about the exorbitant costs of keeping up his Dynaflow, he parodies materialism. He dresses women as men,
men as women, and asserts the insipidity of biology’s brief distinctions. As clown and trickster, he’s called Mr. Entretoute. As erotic lord, he’s Brav Ghede. As cannibal, he’s Criminelle, devourer of living flesh. And when he stands before the open grave, he’s Baron Cimetière, the trickster become transformer, the clown become magician, he who has the power to animate the dead and slay the living, master of the zombis, he who can change men into beasts and who, properly placated, can bring the sick and dying back to life. And as the loa of regeneration and death, the loa of soullessness, Ghede it is whom you must please if you have lost a child and the child, in its leaving, because it has no soul yet, has stolen yours.
Such a one is Vanise Dorsinville. When her brother was taken to her by the Haitian man who found her wandering dazed along the side of the highway a few hundred yards south of the town of Sunny Isles, the man who found her, a groundskeeper walking early to work at the Haulover Beach Park Golf Course, said, The woman is gone, Émile. She says she’s gone off to be with Baron Cimetière. She knows her name and yours, but not much else.
They have worked together for several years, Émile Dorsinville and the man who found his sister, and like most Haitians in south Florida, live close to one another in Little Haiti, that section of northeast Miami between I-95 and Second Avenue where the narrow streets and alleys and the low bungalows, cinder-block warehouses, garages, shanties and boarded-up storefronts house thousands of recently arrived Haitians; where the air is thick with the smells of their food—baked yams, cassava, plantains, goat and roast pig cooked in yards on charcoal fires or in crowded, makeshift kitchens on hot plates and kerosene burners; where the quick, sexy Haitian music blasts onto the street from record shops and drifts from car radios and all day and night long from transistors set up on windowsills; where women walk barefoot along the dusty sidewalks in ankle-length dresses of gorgeously colored cloth and the men wear white shirts and dark trousers and fedoras and put one foot up on the bumper of a parked car and talk Haitian politics or sit around with a piece of Masonite on their
laps and play dominoes until dawn, slamming the large ivory pieces down one upon the other in a long, superbly intelligent run, followed by a round of drinks and yet another game.
Émile took his sister home on the bus that morning, left her in the room with the women who share it with him and returned to work, scolded and docked a half day’s pay by the head groundskeeper. That night, when he arrived back at his home, he learned his sister’s story. She was asleep now, washed and put to bed by Marie and Thérèse, second cousins to Émile, fat women in their middle fifties, legal residents of America, Catholic churchgoers, kindly and without family, except for the skinny man they hide in their room and who, in return, supports them when they cannot find work cleaning the houses of white or Cuban people.
The women had succeeded during the day in getting the girl to talk, or at least to nod yes and no to their questions while they washed and soothed her. They did not learn about Vanise’s child, and they did not learn about Émile’s son Claude. Instead, they concluded that Vanise had come over from Haiti alone, as they themselves had done years before and as Émile had done.
She was on a boat, they told Émile, and there was a great storm, and the Haitians on the boat had to jump into the sea when the boat began to sink. She was saved from drowning by Brav Ghede, no other. That’s all she can say, Thérèse reported. Ghede, Ghede, Ghede.
Émile shook his head no, frowned and looked down on the face of his sister as she slept. Not that one, he said. Not Ghede. She’ll tell us more when she’s rested and has eaten.
But she did not tell them anything more. She woke and wept and murmured the name of Ghede, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière, moaning and turning in the wide bed, her face wet with sweat, her arms and legs tangling in the sheets. Émile and the two women washed her head with rags soaked with herbs—trois paroles, gâté sang and trompette—and to warm her heart and liver, made her sip a tea brewed from citronella grass.
But Vanise spoke no more words, and soon she seemed not to
recognize where she was or whom she was with. She stared at the worried dark faces above her as if they were cat faces or cow faces. Émile went to work the next day, and when he returned that evening and saw that his sister was the same, learned that she had called all day long for Ghede in all his names, he went out and made the arrangements to take her to Ghede.
At the rear of a flaking white windowless two-story building with a flat roof, an abandoned warehouse located at the eastern end of Little Haiti several blocks off Miami Avenue, Émile stops and hands his sister to Thérèse and walks slowly up the rotting stairs to a loading dock, faces a door with a small square of plywood where there was once a pane of glass, and knocks. Rusting railroad tracks pass down the alley between the warehouses; from Miami Avenue in the distance comes the bustle of cars cruising late, windows open, radios blaring. A siren howls for a few seconds, then goes silent. Émile glances down the steps to his sister, held in the thick arms of Thérèse and Marie like a rag doll, limp and tiny, head lolling forward, arms hanging down, hands open as if to reveal stigmata. They have dressed her in a white frock, and she is barefoot.
The door opens a crack, and Émile steps quickly away so he can be seen. Come in, Dorsinville, a man’s voice says. Émile turns and waves the others up.
The two women hesitate, then Thérèse shakes her head no. You take her now, she says to Émile. I cannot go in there. I am Catholic. She checks Marie, who approves.
Quickly, Émile descends the stairs and takes his sister from the women’s arms. I am Catholic also! he hisses, and he turns away and hitches the girl up the steps to the platform and takes her inside. The man closes the door and drops a bar to lock it.
The man is carrying a flashlight, but aims it down, so Émile cannot see his face. They are inside a huge open space, he can feel that, despite the total darkness, and he can smell old paper and cloth, dry
ticking and straw, as if the place had once been used to store mattresses.
This is your sister, eh? the man says, and he shines his light on Vanise’s face, gray now and closed to everything. Ah, he says in a low voice. Poor thing. Poor little thing.
Where …? Émile begins.
You wish to pay me now? the man interrupts. The Baron has already arrived. He’s eager to see you. Both of you, he adds.
Émile reaches into his pocket and draws out the bills, two crinkled twenties, and passes them into the man’s outstretched palm.
Come now, the man says, and he leads them into darkness, playing the beam of his light on the floor as they walk. They cross the broad expanse of the warehouse, stepping over pieces of snake-like electrical conduit, around piles of old cardboard boxes and tipped and scattered stacks of newsprint, to a set of narrow wooden stairs in the far corner. The man mounts the stairs ahead of him, and Émile sees that he is a round and not young man and is wearing white shoes, socks, trousers and shirt, with a band of red, glossy cloth tied around his thick waist. Tucked into the waistband on one side is a machete, on the other a long, narrow knife. When, at the landing at the top of the stairs, Émile gets a glimpse of the man’s face, he realizes that he has seen the man probably a hundred times on the streets of Little Haiti, a most ordinary-looking, brown-faced man, a clerk or deliveryman or barber, with round, smooth cheeks, thin mustache, high, shiny forehead with short hair graying at the temples.
The man smiles, knocks three times loudly on the door before them, then twice. The door opens, as if by itself, Émile steps inside and brings his sister with him, and the man in white closes and locks the door behind them. They are inside
la chambre de Ghede
.
The room, evidently at one time an office, is large, separated into two sections by plexiglass dividers and counters, with fly-spotted asbestos panels and old, tubeless, fluorescent light fixtures hanging half-attached from the ceiling, sheets of water-stained wallboard broken through to the lathing behind, several large desks pushed to the
side to clear an open space in the front half of the room, where there is a gathering of animals—speckled hens, a black duck and a large black goat. The animals are hobbled by strings held in the hand of a teenaged boy in jeans, shirtless and barefoot, squatting on the floor. A crowd of people is clustered in the further space, but Émile can’t make out what they are doing, for the entire room is illuminated by a dozen or so candles in bottles placed erratically on the counters and desks and along the walls at the floor. Émile hears a woman weeping, sobbing loudly, as if grieving for the loss of a husband, though no one in the crowd seems to pay particular attention to anyone else. It’s as if they are in the dim, brown waiting room of a provincial train station, strangers all of them and bound for different destinations. A few people murmur a song, low, dirge-like, and a thin, high-pitched drum, a
dun-dun
or
bébé
, is being played someplace near the middle of the crowd.