Continental Drift

“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.

That particular aspect of the Haitians’ voudon, possession, is also ordinary, common, to Tyrone, something for old women and drunken men — he’s seen it in church, on dance floors, at feasts in the maroon towns in the Cockpit Country of west Jamaica, and because he’s never wanted it for himself, he has no interest in watching it in someone else.