Poussé allé,
Poussé allé,
Icit pas pays oui
Ça lan Guinée,
Icit pas pays ou!
Gradually, her dance circles her toward the audience, which parts for her as she spirals near, making a path that leads straight to Tyrone. Coming toward him from the other side, pushing and pulling at people’s shoulders, squirming between them, is the boy Claude. Both the mambo and the boy reach Tyrone at the same instant.
The woman glares into Tyrone’s face, studies it sharply, bit by bit, his eyes, nose, mouth, his beard and dreadlocked hair, as if expropriating each piece of him and making it her own.
“Icit pas pays oui” she hisses. This is not your country. “Ça lan Guinée!” This land is Africa. “Poussé allé!” she shrieks at him. Get you gone!
Over on his left, Tyrone sees the old man with the stick, the man who brought him here, laughing and joining in with the chant, “Poussé allé! Poussé alléI” In seconds, the entire mass of people, sixty or seventy of them, has taken up the cry, and their faces have turned ugly and threatening, even that of the old man, François. There are young men and old, mothers, grandmothers and maidens, people in tattered clothes and people dressed meticulously in white, drunk men and sober, people who look sane to Tyrone and people who look insane, and all of them are raging at him, Get you gone! Get you gone! Get you gone!
Except one, the boy, Claude Dorsinville, who grabs Tyrone by the arm and yanks him away, pulls him back into the trees and away from the crowd. The mambo wheels around and heads for the peristyle, where she takes up her dance again, and a woman is mounted by a loa, and a cheer goes up. The drums rise in intensity and pace and are joined by the clanging beat of the ogan. Another woman is mounted by the loa Damballah and throws herself face forward on the ground, where she writhes like a snake.
Back in the bushes, in darkness and shadow, Tyrone and the boy begin to speak to one another. The boy speaks almost as much English now as the Jamaican speaks Creole, and soon they have worked out a plan. Tyrone will wait down in the gorge a short ways, and the boy will bring the passengers to him, one by one. Some of them he already knows; others Tyrone will have to read out to him, for the boy cannot read. When they have all assembled in the gorge, the boy will join them, and together the group will go down from the Barrens to the village, where they will gather their few possessions, pay Tyrone and be transported to the boat, which is waiting for them in the bay. “Den we go to America, mon,” Tyrone says. “Yout’-man, bring dem Haitians forward now,” he tells the boy, who grins and ducks back into the bushes and heads for the hounfor.
Moments later, the boy returns with a scrawny, nearly bald man in tow, a man half-drunk, who turns obsequious as soon as he sees Tyrone. The boy disappears again, reappearing a moment later with two young men, tall, stringy twenty-year-olds who formally shake Tyrone’s hand and cross their arms over their chests and wait in shy silence. Then a middle-aged woman with two small children, and an old, half-blind woman whom Claude leads by the hand and passes over to the woman with the children as if handing her a third child. This goes on rapidly, until at last Claude has brought out of the hounfor fourteen people, all the people on Tyrone’s list but two, Claude himself and his aunt, Vanise.
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.