Vanise has come to North Caicos Island, an easy place to locate exactly. With a map in hand, you can sit at a table in a city in North America, and by marking a point at 21 degrees 55 minutes north, 72 degrees 0 minutes west, you can locate where the Haitians will land tonight. Or you can draw lines, 100 nautical miles north from Cap Haitien, 400 nautical miles south-southeast from Nassau, 575 nautical miles southeast from Miami and 150 nautical miles north-northeast from Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba. The four lines will converge over North Caicos Island, where there are a few tiny villages, Kew, Whitby and Bottle Creek, a small hotel and miles of deserted white beaches.
Vanise wakens. The air has changed; she can smell trees. She raises her head, moving with care so as not to waken the boy or her baby, lifts her body at the waist, looks over the rail into darkness. The engine chugs slowly belowdecks, and she can hear waves breaking nearby.
They have arrived! America! Opening her eyes as wide as she can, she stares intensely into the darkness, but she can see nothing. No lights, no hills outlined blackly against a lighter sky — nothing. But she knows, despite the blackness peering back, that they have come to America, and smiling, she lowers her body, lies on her side and lets herself drift into peaceful, trusting sleep.
If a man believes he is happy, he is. If not, not. And if a woman, a young, illiterate Haitian woman in flight from her home with her infant son and adolescent nephew, exchanges all her money for a boat ride to America, and without knowing it, gets dropped off instead at North Caicos Island, six hundred miles from America, and believes that at last and for the first time in her hard life she is happy, then she is happy. The truth of the matter, the kind of truth you would get with a map, compass and rule, has no bearing on her belief or its consequences.
Until, that is, she gets her own map, which at first would resemble one of Columbus’s early, wildly speculative drawings of where he thought he was. A person’s map tells more about where that person thinks he is than about where he is not, which is, of course, everywhere else. Columbus, when he drew this, thought he was in the Philippine Sea:
Vanise, believing she was a hundred yards off the beach at Coral Gables, Florida, would have drawn something like this:
On Vanise’s map, you are ten hours off the north coast of Haiti, and Florida is on the horizon, or would be, if you could see the horizon. It’s a dark, moonless night. Victor, whose boat this is, comes forward to where Vanise and the boy, Claude, encircle the baby like the halves of a clamshell. They lie surrounded by a crowd of eight or ten people, who are also lying down or seated hunched over, men mostly, dressed in their best clothes, shoes, hats, and clutching battered suitcases and rope-tied baskets and bundles.
Ignoring upturned faces, Victor steps over their bodies with care, as if afraid of getting his feet tangled in ropes. He is a tall, thin, nut-colored man with a skinny neck and large Adam’s apple, tufts of a beard, acne scars on his cheeks, a crumpled captain’s hat on his head. Leaning back against the bulkhead in the bow of the small boat, he studies his cargo for a moment. The boat rides the swells lightly and holds its position; the engine, cut back, throbs like a bass drum. One man from the group huddled on deck, a short, middle-aged man with a cane cutter’s body, lifts his head and broad shoulders and peers over the starboard rail. They hear waves breaking nearby.
Keep down! Victor barks, and the man drops to the deck as if shot.
Vanise believes she is happy, and she almost laughs out loud at the poor man, his sudden, wide-eyed motion, his face that of a little boy who stole someone’s pie and unexpectedly saw the victim coming along the road.
