Continental Drift

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.