Cross Current by Christine Kling Page A

behind trash cans that smelled sweetly of fresh-cut grass. I propped the business card for Racine Toussaint up on the Jeep’s dash and pulled a map of Broward County out of the glove box. The address was off Hammondville Road in Pompano Beach. I’d read about that part of the county, but I’d never been up there. Back in the fifties, the area was all agriculture, and the mostly black farmworkers had lived in lousy conditions in farmworker housing on Hammondville Road. There was still a good deal of poverty in what was now called Collier City and Western Pompano, and some people would say I was being unwise to go up there alone.
    There was a saying about South Florida: To get to the South from here, you had to go north. There was a small kernel of truth in that, but in areas like Hammondville Road in Pompano, I suspected aspects of the old Deep South were still right here. In spite of the glitz and glamour of Broward County’s waterfront and modern facade, racial tensions and segregated neighborhoods were still the norm in much of the county.
    Traffic was sparse on 1-95 and Lightnin’ held her fifty-five-mile-per-hour average in the slow lane. The old Jeep wasn’t an expressway vehicle, and given the roaring engine and flapping canvas, I was relieved when I pulled off the interstate at Atlantic Boulevard. In much of South Florida, affluent neighborhoods abut squalid government-assisted housing, so I wasn’t surprised to see the new, gleaming, well-lit gas station and mini-mart, the kind that has disembodied voices that speak to you each time you pull up to the pump, while just beyond the fresh black asphalt were dirt yards around small cinder-block homes and businesses of the old district.
    The Haitian Baptist Church, a clean and new-looking structure, indicated how this neighborhood had changed in the last twenty years. This was truly the New South. The huge influx of Haitians and other Caribbean immigrants was apparent in the signs in the stores, the smells of fish and plantain frying, the sound of Creole being spoken on the street.
    I located Racine Toussaint’s house a few blocks north of Hammondville and fairly close to Old Dixie Highway. I was pleased to see the place looked so well tended and prosperous in comparison with many of the other houses in the area. The house stood alone on almost an acre of land and looked home-built of gray unfinished cinder block, the mortar between the blocks smoothed out neat and clean. Floral-print curtains fluttered between the bars that protected the front windows, and the wood door was painted a bright sea foam green.
    When I turned off the Jeep, I could hear the breeze rustling the branches of the tall Australian pines scattered about the dirt lot that stretched between the house and the road. There were no children’s toys or old abandoned vehicle parts like those that decorated the vacant lots and the yards of many of the houses I’d passed on my way here. Behind the house, a giant strangler fig tree loomed large, the huge limbs framing the house with prop roots supporting the heft visible around both sides. The tree blocked out all sunlight and looked as though it would engulf the house if the inhabitants dropped their vigilance for only a few months. Aside from a couple of free-ranging chickens that darted behind the house when I drove up, there was no sign of life.
    I knocked on the green door, wondering if my decision to come alone had been wise after all. Why would the card of the woman who lived at this address be on board the Miss Agnes ? But then that is why I was there: to find out if Solange was on that boat. To find out something that would help her stay in the United States.
    The place was too quiet. The sound of the traffic out on Dixie and Atlantic was the only noise. For a moment I thought I heard drums from inside the house, but then the amplified voices of angry rappers blasted from a bright orange Impala lowrider that cruised by, the gold rims glinting,