• Impatient, intolerant, argumentative, domineering, “cocky,” or critical of others.
• Frequently worried, anxious, nervous or tense; given to moods.
• Prejudiced toward groups, races, or nationalities.
• Given to exclusive and absorbing friendships, i.e., to “crushes.”
• Lacking in humor, or in the ability to take a joke.
The ability to take a joke seemed at first an odd prerequisite, for we did not yet understand how essential it would be to be able to laugh at our shortcomings. In the category of physical condition, the pastor rated them both as rugged, though my father earned the additional commendation: I have hiked with him once and I know he is vigorous. He is a healthy, handsome and courteous young man.
In his summary paragraph, Pastor Noizumi maintained that he had no reservations about my parents’ decision to enter missionary life, nor were there any indications that their decision was significantly influenced by:
1. a desire for travel, adventure or cultural development
2. a desire to exercise power or control over less privileged people, or
3. a desire to escape a difficult personal, family or vocational situation
This was perhaps not entirely accurate—adventure was certainly a motivating factor, although to my parents’ credit, they had no conscious intention of exerting control over less privileged people. It is, however, no small task to screen would-be altruists for signs of incipient imperialism. For who among us can know how we will respond when the dynamics of power and privilege suddenly shift without warning?
* * *
I was at Grandma Lois’s trailer when my father called to announce that we’d be moving to Haiti. The rest of the family was still in Idyllwild. My father had promised that he would drive me down to the desert for my first day of kindergarten, but it was forest-fire season, and he had a mountain to protect. He had been on duty at a wilderness lookout tower when a lightning storm blew in, and his eagle eyes spotted wisps of smoke that no one else had seen. Given the chance to keep working on his day off, he proudly answered the call of duty, which meant that the Forest Service dispatcher was given the unenviable job of calling my mother to inform her that it was now her responsibility to round up her three daughters so that she could drop me off at Grandma Lois’s trailer for the month (no one else in my family being willing to leave the Idyllwild cabin).
At five years old, alone at the date ranch, I felt my tangled hair whip my elbows as I spun flips on the trampoline. I missed my sisters and hated the long walk home from the bus stop, so I wasn’t overly worried at the news that we’d be moving again; we already packed up twice a year to go from one house to the other. The coiled springs rebounded and hurled me so high against the sky that I felt I could almost brush my fingers against the woven baskets of the hot-air balloons as they wafted over the date trees. I hung suspended as the earth slowly tilted on its axis. Gravity had not yet taken hold. I could land anywhere.
* * *
By Christmas 1981, we had shiny blank passports and visas stamped with palm trees and official signatures from the Haitian government. Our shoulders ached from last-minute immunizations. Battered suitcases from the Salvation Army flopped open on the floor of the trailer like books with broken spines, half-filled with silverware, toys, swimsuits, and sheets. The missionaries we were due to replace had instructed us, via a typed letter, to pack multivitamins (to compensate for the nutrient-depleted soil) and a cassette player, along with an apologetic disclaimer that we might find it difficult to adjust to life without a television. My parents scoffed at this; they’d never owned one. We were also warned to watch the Haitian customs officials closely when they searched our suitcases, lest any of our valuables disappear, but apart from this one confusing directive, we set off more or less unencumbered by cross-cultural training.
My parents knew next to nothing about the history of colonialism, the lingering imbalance of power, resentment against white rule, nor any other significant details from the nearly two hundred years of Haitian independence. Nor were the church members who applauded our commissioning service any more politically savvy. A few assumed that we were moving to Tahiti. At least one mistook Haiti for Hades.
Everyone, of course, had heard of zombies and voodoo, which was enough to get my mother backed against the wall by a livid octogenarian who accused her of being an unfit mother for dragging her three precious little girls into such a dark, heathen nation. My mother offered a strained smile and tried to placate: Thank you for praying, I’m sure God will take care of us!
* * *
It took me years to understand this fear disguised as pity. Haiti, as the first Free Black Nation to shake off the yoke of slavery—more than half a century before the country whose founding document had declared that all men were created equal—seemed to be prefaced always by its tagline: the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere. It was a quick, dismissive epithet. A way to denigrate what could not otherwise be understood. Poverty provided a reliable excuse for self-congratulatory concern; a salve to our imagined superiority.
* * *
A few days before we were to begin our career as missionaries, my father asked my mother to cut his hair extra-short, even though she protested that it made his ears stick out. He hauled an orange vinyl chair out of the trailer and stripped off his T-shirt. She stood behind him, snipping wisps of coarse brown hair. His exposed back glared white and pale beneath his sunburned neck, a farmer’s tan.
Three-year-old Meadow stood on the seat of the tricycle in her underpants, her arms held out like a circus acrobat’s. I hollered at Rosie to quit ringing the school bell on the dollhouse because it was shaking my classroom full of plastic Little People. My father twisted his head around to intervene, and my mother grimaced and took the comb out of her teeth. —Hold still! she complained, positioning his head back in place. Rosie shook her head sulkily, an armless Fisher-Price figure in her mouth.
There was no reason to assume that we knew what we were doing. Like the proverbial bear tromping over the mountain to see what he could see, we had set our course for altruism or adventure—as missionaries, as explorers, for the hell of it. It was a chance to pick up a new language, to help out however we could. How hard could it be?
* * *
It was our first airplane ride, the first time my sisters and I had ever seen the Los Angeles basin from the air. I shimmied my seat belt down around my knees to press my nose against the glass. The lights disappeared behind us. The horizon twinkled like a miniature engineering set, the kind you could take apart and put back together on a whim.
As the flight attendant made his way down the aisle to hand out orange juice and headsets, I reminded Meadow to sit still. This was uncharted territory, and we needed to be on our best behavior. We wiggled plastic headphones into place and poked at the buttons. I pulled a strand of hair into my mouth and chewed as I listened to the story of the Little Match Girl. Shivering in the streets of London, she struck her last match and died, the flame flickering in her cupped palms. I shivered with her.
My father reached over us to pull down the window shade. California was already behind us, the lights of Los Angeles fading into the dark.
One row behind us, Rosie woke my parents several times, hollering like a banshee as my mother lifted her blouse to nurse, but Meadow and I slept deeply, our arms and legs intertwined, chests rising and falling as we twitched and nestled against the seats. My mother had to reach over and untangle our hair from the headphones while we dreamed, the tinny murmur of the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities still schmaltzing in the background.
At three-thirty a.m., California time, my father shook my mother awake: Flip, look!
She pushed up the shade as sunlight flamed across the clouds. Beneath us was Florida. Beyond that, the Caribbean.
My father propped Meadow and I groggily upright for the descent, and a businessman across the aisle glanced over and smiled indulgently. He as
ked if we were on our way to Orlando to visit Disney World.
My mother flashed him a winning smile: We’re going to be missionaries to Haiti!
If They Tried to Warn Him, He Didn’t Listen
The Caribbean, 1492
THE ISLAND OF Ayiti, rechristened Hispaniola by Columbus—the western half of which was later renamed Saint-Domingue by the French, and Haiti by the freed slaves—erupted during the Cretaceous era as volcanic fissures forced granite batholiths upward through the crashing waves, and the submerged mountains, encrusted with sandstone and lime, met the sky.
Slowly, over several millennia, airborne seeds took root and forests rose from the red clay. The wide, upturned leaves released moisture into the air, forming high cumulus clouds. Rain fell in torrents, careening down through the dense canopy, seeping into the earth, slowly filling the water table.
Storms swept across from the mainland, with animals caught in the branches of uprooted trees. Beds of kelp hid shy, lumbering manatee (which Columbus later mistook for mermaids).
This New World was discovered in approximately 4000 BC, when the first humans paddled east across the narrow strait from the Yucatán Peninsula and settled along the coast of what is now Cuba, moving slowly into the Bahamian islands and Ayiti. The Casimiroid peoples gathered fruit and guáyiga roots and hunted to extinction the slow-moving sloths.
Two thousand years later, yet another wave of humans, Ortoiroid settlers, arrived from the tip of Venezuela and moved north. They looked primarily to the sea for their food, hunting crocodiles, turtles, and shellfish, as well as the occasional whale. Ayiti, with its densely forested mountains and wide alluvial plains, marked the contentious border region between the two competing migrations.
It was an age of confrontations. In Europe, the Romans were pushing the empire into Gaul, and the Gauls were resisting. In Palestine, a relatively unknown Jewish man whose gospel would come to have such unanticipated consequences in the Caribbean was setting off a religious upheaval in the Judean desert. On Ayiti, a new civilization was emerging.
The Taínos—the good or noble people, as they called themselves—were, like their forebears, equally at home in the forest and at sea. Raised beds carved out of the jungle yielded corn and cassava; traders skimmed across to neighboring islands in sleek dugout canoes that could hold a hundred and fifty warriors. Poets composed ballads in Arawak for the great feasts. Artisans carved elaborate ritual figures of zemis on amulets and stone outcroppings—the spirits who hid in the trees and rivers and whispered mysterious counsel.
The Taínos did not yet know that they would have a scant millennium to enjoy their tenure in the Caribbean before Columbus arrived and laid claim to it.
* * *
On that first voyage, sailing into the unknown, Columbus studied in his gently rocking ship’s cabin a fifteenth-century map marked with the islands described in Marco Polo’s Travels. He calculated where he thought they should touch land: somewhere near Cipango (Japan). Marco Polo’s tales were already two centuries out of date, but few books about the Far East had been translated into the languages of Europe; Columbus marked his with careful notes in the margins.
He never did discover Polo’s streets paved with gold or the men with tails, but he did find the mermaids. They were a disappointment. He wrote:
Yesterday when I was going up the Río del Oro, I saw three sirens that came up very high out of the sea. They are not as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face of a man.
Columbus had defied the odds and found land—by sheer luck, his mathematical calculations having grossly underestimated the distance to the Far East—but to the end of his life, he refused to believe that he had stumbled onto a new continent, and remained firmly convinced that he was just off the coast of China.
He handed out tiny tinkling hawk’s bells and Venetian glass beads, which the inhabitants of the islands repaid with hand-spun cotton thread and a kind of dry leaf that Columbus, not yet initiated into the virtues of tobacco, found puzzling. In his ship log, he recorded the shocked observation that the natives were as naked as their mothers bore them. In his letter home to the king and queen of Spain, however, he described them as a well-mannered and gentle people, useful as servants.
Columbus understood from their gestures that they believed he had come down from heaven, and was flattered. He did not understand that, according to their own origin stories, they, too, had descended from the sky. Perhaps as they pointed and gestured, they urged him to escape while he still could.
If they tried to warn him, he didn’t listen.
Baptized
Haiti, 1982
WE WERE BAPTIZED into missionary life on a muggy January afternoon in 1982. I had turned six a few days before, and the hot, wet air made my dress cling to my back as I clanged down the metal steps of the airplane onto the tarmac. In the sweltering Duvalier terminal, my mother let go of my hand to protect the slumped head of baby Rosie, which left me free to take it all in. The clickety-clack whir of ceiling fans, the gold-plated jewelry on soft wrists, the jumble of armpits ripe with sweat and perfume.
My parents hovered watchfully during the customs inspection, but nothing went missing. Ken Heneise, Ivah’s son, recognized us from the photos we’d mailed ahead and waved. He was tall and gangly, with dark sunglasses and an impressive mustache. My mother pushed back her damp curls and beamed with flustered charm. My father extended a firm handshake. When uniformed airport attendants grabbed for our bags, Ken brushed them aside with a confident flick of his wrist.
Emerging into the tin-can glare of Port-au-Prince felt like an explosion of noise and light. Overloaded buses honked and veered around kids in gingham school uniforms, donkeys piled high with woven baskets and plastic jugs, a wheelbarrow filled with sugarcane. The rules were inscrutable—clearly, no one was restricted to just one side of the road—but there was a swaying, animated rhythm, as if everyone but me were following the steps to some complicated dance.
Ken shouted over the wind that whipped through the open windows as he drove down the dry central coast road, hemmed in by mountains. He had been born in Haiti in the 1940s, a few months after his parents moved into a grass-roofed house on a former rubber plantation. He was six when Hurricane Hazel hit, nine when Papa Doc Duvalier declared himself dictator for life. Those had been terrifying years, but politics had settled down a bit, he assured us, once the son, Baby Doc, took power.Haiti still had plenty of corruption, and police checkpoints, but there was far more stability than there used to be.
When Ken was a teenager, his missionary father’s eyesight started to fade. Ken taught himself to fix vehicles by leaning over the engines while Harold gave instructions by memory. Ken left the Limbé Valley to spend a few unhappy years at a boarding school in the States, followed by college at Cal Poly Pomona (the very same ag school, they all realized, that my own parents had attended—though Ken had graduated before they arrived). Still, he insisted, Haiti was his motherland.
At a serene white-sand beach near Montrouis, he pulled over so we could dip our toes in the Caribbean Sea for the first time.
—It’s warm! I shouted as Meadow and I raced to collect the pink-lipped conch shells that dotted the sand. I pouted, disappointed, when I realized that every single one had a gaping hole knocked into the otherwise perfect crown. Ken explained that the rubbery lanbi meat was harvested for food, but I wanted an unblemished souvenir; surely it was my right as an explorer.
(I had so much to learn.)
On the four-hour drive to our new home, I stared out the window at kids my age who bathed in a river beneath a bridge, tossing water over their bare shoulders. In the green, flat Artibonite Valley, men on skeletal donkeys picked their way along the shoulder. Women with head scarves lifted and tossed rice in woven baskets, the wind scattering the dry husks like confetti. At roadside markets, hands thrust sugarcane candy and tiny yellow bananas through the open windows. Schoolchildren in checkered uniforms shouted: Blan! Blan! as we
drove past.
—What are they saying? my mother asked. Ken explained. Even though he’d been born in Haiti, he was still considered a blan, like us. Blan meant white but was the pejorative used for any foreigner. We were a novelty; we didn’t belong here.
I dangled my fingers out the window and breathed in the sharp tang of salt air. Brightly painted buses roared past on blind corners, horns blaring, as chickens and goats scattered. Ken slowed to inch around a recently tipped-over kamyon, bald tires belly-up. There were no policemen with whistles to direct traffic, no ambulances or fire trucks. We thumped over torn burlap sacks and squashed mangoes. Dark red stains on the highway buzzed with flies.
My father let out his breath with a low whistle. Later, in a postcard to Grandma Lois that would be displayed proudly on the church bulletin board, he’d confess: The thought that I will soon be driving these roads is frankly terrifying.
The engine groaned as we climbed the mountains above Gonaïves. Blood-red blossoms of flanbwayan trees trembled in a rainstorm, and rivulets of topsoil washed across the highway. My father asked if erosion was much of a problem. Ken laughed. Trees took years to grow, he explained, but it didn’t take long to cut down an entire forest for charcoal. And few Haitian farmers seemed interested in replanting what they harvested, he added—which was why the agricultural center was so important, to teach farmers a better way to manage their land.
By the time we descended into the Limbé Valley, the sun had just begun to slip behind the mountains. Ken pointed out a collection of whitewashed houses on the other side of a low cactus fence: Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, the Baptist hospital run by the Hodges family.
Dr. Hodges, Ken explained, was a Renaissance man—not only a medical doctor but a self-taught archaeologist as well. The Hodges and Heneise kids had grown up together, all eight of them crowded around Ivah’s dining room table for school or off on expeditions to Indian caves or pirate ruins with Dr. Hodges on Saturday afternoons when the clinic was closed.
The Gospel of Trees Page 4