Continental Drift

The novel opens with an invocation in which the narrator calls upon Legba, a Haitian loa (Vodou spirit) of the crossroads, to serve as a "mouth-man," a speaker who makes words present rather than merely remembered. The story of Robert Raymond Dubois begins in December 1979 in Catamount, New Hampshire, and ends in February 1981 in Miami, Florida. The narrator frames what follows not as a recounting but as an accounting, driven by pity, anger, and shame.

Bob Dubois is a thirty-year-old oil burner repairman earning $137.44 a week, married to Elaine, with two young daughters, Ruthie and Emma. On a snowy Friday evening, a nameless rage overtakes him. He visits a bar, sleeps with Doris Cleeve, a woman he has been seeing intermittently, and arrives too late at Sears to buy his daughter's Christmas ice skates. He methodically punches out every window of his station wagon. At home, he tells Elaine their life is dead, that he is becoming his father, a mill worker who never escaped. Elaine proposes they start over. Bob suggests Florida, where his brother Eddie owns a liquor store in Oleander Park.

The narrative widens to a meditation on global migration, comparing the movement of displaced peoples to ocean currents and tectonic shifts, before focusing on northwest Haiti. There, the novel's second protagonist, Vanise Dorsinville, lives in the settlement of Allanche with her sister-in-law, her infant son Charles, and her adolescent nephew Claude. When a hurricane strikes, Claude steals a ham from a wrecked delivery van. Fearing the local police chief will punish the family, the sister-in-law gives Claude and Vanise American dollars hidden under the floorboards and sends them toward Le Môle, where a boatman named Victor carries people across the sea.

Bob and Elaine drive south. Eddie sets them up in a trailer and gives Bob a job managing his liquor store, insisting he keep a handgun for protection. Bob grows restless. When his elderly Black stock clerk George Dill introduces him to his daughter Marguerite, a nurse, Bob becomes obsessed with her. He withdraws from Elaine, who is pregnant with their third child, and the marriage deteriorates. Late one night at the store, two armed Black men attempt to rob him. Bob retrieves the .38 and kills one; the other, a young man with cornrowed hair, escapes.

Vanise, Claude, and baby Charles board Victor's boat expecting Florida but are deposited on North Caicos Island, 600 miles away. Vanise draws a vever, a sacred symbol, for Papa Legba in the dust at a crossroads and waits. A three-legged dog she interprets as Legba's manifestation leads them to George McKissick, a Caicos Islander who shelters the Haitians in exchange for labor but rapes Vanise at night. Months later, they escape aboard a cargo freighter called the Kattina.

Locked in a pitch-black hold, Vanise is repeatedly raped by the crew and by Haitian passengers who board at Great Inagua. Claude is also assaulted. After weeks, the boat reaches Nassau. A shopkeeper named Jimmy Grabow locks Vanise in a room above his shop and forces her into prostitution. Claude escapes, finds work, and returns weeks later to rescue Vanise, killing Grabow with a machete. They flee to a hounfor, a Vodou temple, run by a mambo, or priestess. During a ceremony for the sea loa Agwé, Vanise is mounted by the spirit, who weeps through her. Claude pays the mambo for a protective service.

Back in Florida, Bob quits the liquor store and Eddie, deeply in debt, lets him go. Bob's friend Avery Boone arrives from the Keys and proposes that Bob captain his fishing boat, the Belinda Blue. Bob agrees, moving his family to a trailer near Islamorada. Business is poor. On the night Elaine goes into labor, Bob is with Marguerite. He arrives at the hospital after his son, Robert Jr., is born. Standing over Elaine's bed, Bob perceives her goodness and resolves to end the affair. When he later spots in Marguerite's car a man he believes is the escaped robber, he chases the man into a bar with his gun drawn, then confronts Marguerite at home. Her father George tells Bob he can see the gun, and Marguerite orders Bob to leave.

Poverty deepens. Ruthie needs mental health treatment they cannot afford. Bob erupts in a violent rampage, destroying the trailer's contents, stopping only when he sees Elaine cowering with the baby. Eddie calls, desperate: He owes $130,000 to dangerous creditors and begs Bob for money, convinced Bob earns large sums from smuggling. Bob insists he is broke. He drives to Oleander Park and finds Eddie dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car.

After the funeral, Ave proposes that Bob make money by smuggling Haitians from the Bahamas to Florida. Tyrone, Ave's Jamaican mate who speaks Creole, will recruit passengers in Nassau; Bob will drive the boat. On New Providence Island, Tyrone finds the Haitians gathered in the bush for a Vodou ceremony. Claude Dorsinville helps extract the passengers, dragging the entranced Vanise out by hand. Sixteen Haitians board the Belinda Blue.

The Gulf Stream pushes them north of their planned drop-off near Bal Harbour. A coast guard cutter spots them in heavy seas. Tyrone insists they dump the passengers and fires a rifle into the air. Claude is the first to leap and vanishes beneath the waves. The remaining Haitians are driven into the water. Fifteen drown. Vanise alone survives, dragging herself ashore at Sunny Isles.

Police search the boat but find nothing linking Bob to the Haitians. Tyrone is arrested and deported; Ave has already been arrested for cocaine trafficking. Bob is released. A Haitian groundskeeper finds Vanise wandering near the highway and brings her to her brother Émile in Little Haiti, Miami, where a Vodou ceremony involving the death loa Ghede restores her shattered spirit.

Bob cannot sleep or eat. Elaine tells him she no longer knows what kind of man he is. They agree to return to New Hampshire, but Elaine insists the Haitians' money must stay in Florida. Bob drives to Little Haiti carrying the bills, determined to return them. He tries a grocery store, a bar, a restaurant, and a Christian missionary handing out food. No one will take the money. Four young Haitian men agree, for a fee, to lead him to the surviving woman. They guide him through alleys to a warehouse loading dock, where Vanise stands beside the towering figure of Baron Cimetière, the loa of death. Bob thrusts the money at her. She turns away and walks into the darkness. The four men advance with knives, and Bob steps forward. They stab him to death.

In a closing envoi, the narrator reflects that Bob was a decent but ordinary man whose death shifts a number from one statistical column to another. Elaine will return to Catamount; Ruthie will drop out of school; Emma will develop an alcohol addiction; their son Robbie, born Robert Jr., will join the navy. The narrator argues that celebrating Bob's life and grieving his death can deprive the world of "some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself" (366). The novel ends with a directive: "Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is" (366).