Continental Drift

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.