Continental Drift

The drums have reached a frantic yet still organized and coherent pace. The voices of the singers, however, as Claude has removed them one by one from the crowd, have diminished in volume and intensity way out of proportion to the numbers of the missing members of the chorus. It’s as if every time Claude removes one singer, four others fall into silence. The Haitians surrounding Tyrone down in the dark confines of the gorge have begun to grow restless and agitated; they move about nervously, looking back toward the hounfor one minute and at each other the next, as if for corroboration or denial of the truth of what they have seen there.

Tyrone puts his list before the boy’s sweating face and points out the boy’s own name and that of his aunt. He himself doesn’t really care if she comes or not, especially since he promised her a bargain rate, but he knows that she holds the boy’s fare and there is now no way he will be able to leave without taking the boy. “Where Auntie, yout’-man?” he asks the boy. “Cyan forget Auntie.”

“Him cyan come …” the boy says, looking at the ground. “Him … him got loa en tète …” he stumbles.

Tyrone puts his arm around the boy’s bony shoulders and steps him away from the others. “You got de money?”

Claude shakes his head no.

Tyrone shrugs his shoulders. “Got to get Auntie, den.”

The boy turns and walks back toward the hounfor, which suddenly — or so it seems to Tyrone — has gone silent. He hasn’t been paying attention to the noise and flickering lights from the hounfor; he’s been concentrating on his passenger list. The Haitians in his group have grown extremely restive now, shifting their feet and looking at one another, then peering back up along the gorge to the trees that surround the hounfor and the red and white banners in the cottonwood tree, which have begun to flutter in an offshore breeze.

The group is made up half of men, half of women, with three small children. Tyrone goes back to counting them and adding up their fares in his head, calculating his share of the profits, one-fourth plus whatever he’s able to skim off the top, when he hears someone breaking noisily through the brush behind him. He turns and sees the boy Claude, a small child slung against one side and the woman Vanise being dragged along behind. The boy is out of breath and grunting from the effort of pulling the woman through the short macca bushes and over the rough limestone, for the woman seems dead drunk or drugged, in a stupefied state with her eyes rolled back, her mouth slack, her legs and arms loose and wobbly. Her white dress has come undone almost to her waist, exposing her brassiere and dark belly, and is torn and spotted with mud; her hair is matted and awry, and her face is splotched with dirt.

Before Tyrone can respond, however, he’s grabbed from behind. Hands like manacles clamp onto his upper arms, and he turns his head and faces a pair of large men, both carrying upraised machetes. Then the mambo herself steps free of the bushes and strides through the crowd, passes Claude and the baby Charles and Vanise without a glance. The woman in the red dress is smiling, but it’s a calculated smile. She’s carrying her rattle, the asson, in one hand, a small brass bell in the other, and as she passes, the Haitians back away in fear of her, as if her heat could burn.

Tyrone yanks against the men gripping his arms, but he can’t move — their hands are like tightened vises that simply take another turn and hold him even more firmly than before. They aren’t controlling him with their machetes; they don’t have to: instead, they hold the huge, razor-sharp blades over his head in a ceremonial way, as if awaiting a signal to bring them down and slice the Jamaican in half.

The mambo, her coffee-colored face sweating furiously, her hair and dress disheveled, shakes the asson in the face of the Jamaican and spits her words at him. “Moin vé ou malhonnet!” I see that you are a dishonest man. “Lan Guinée gangin dent’,” she says. In Africa there are teeth.

Tyrone answers in a low, careful voice: I am just passing through. “C’est passé n’ap passé là”.

Yes, indeed — she nods and smiles — he is just passing through. She makes a gesture with her rattle for the men with the machetes to release him, and then she turns to her flock. She separates Claude from the group with a push and says he, too, must pass through. Take the infant and pass along with the hairy one.

Vanise staggers when the boy lets go of her hand, and seems to be coming to, for she takes a step to follow him and Charles. But the mambo stops her with her bell. No, hounci, you stay.