The problems with the floundering rabbit project were manifold: though it was designed to supplement the perceived paucity of the Haitian diet with a cheap source of protein, rumors had nevertheless gotten out that ingesting rabbit meat would lead to raised boils on the skin. It seemed that the entire venture was just another missionary blunder—it looked great on paper but faltered as soon as it hit the ground.
To this day, my father claims that the rabbit banquet was his idea, but I suspect the credit belongs to my mother. Feeding guests is her gift and her calling. And she is usually able to talk my father into her schemes.
If a feast was to be served, they would need to cull the herd. They could also use the unsold rice from the Ag Center fields. For one night, at least, all the employees would eat well. And to pique the interest of the guests, my father offered a prize for anyone brave enough to taste the unfamiliar meat: a live rabbit to take home and raise.
He talked up the scheme during his morning Bible study with the ag technicians, and the men spent an entire afternoon separating the soft downy pelts from the lean, tender meat.
On the night of the feast, my father hoisted Rosie onto his shoulders and Meadow hugged our mother’s shins as we made our way into the echoing cafeteria, transformed for a night into a banquet hall. The cooks set out steaming cauldrons of rice and beans followed by spoonfuls of warm, rich rabbit—fried in hot oil, then slow-cooked over charcoal with shallots and tomatoes until the meat shuddered loose from the bone, everything glistening under a golden glaze of fat.
The first in line for the bounty was skinny Mueller Jean-Jacques, a twenty-year-old Ag Center employee with big hair and an even bigger grin. I liked Mueller. He always stopped to chat if he found me wandering around the farm, and he cheered on my clunky, half-baked Kreyòl. My father complimented Mueller’s two enormous plates of food as he took his seat at the table, for not a single grain could have been added to his perfectly mounded portion of rice and beans, after which came yet another plate heaped high with rabbit.
It was a feast to be remembered, a banquet to set the mouth aquiver with juices. Farmers, even when famished, seldom spent their money on food (a luxury of the shortsighted) but on this night, every stomach, including mine, was taut and swollen with the sacrificial rabbit. Meadow leaned against Mom, taking it all in. Rosie was already asleep, her blond curls draped over Dad’s shoulder, her round belly leaving a stain of sweat on his chest.
As the men leaned back in their wooden chairs and sighed, their tongues loosened. They clapped each other’s backs and shouted encouragement when one from among them stood to regale the others with a joke.
My parents, who spoke just enough perfunctory Kreyòl to have issued the instructions to prepare the meal, watched with dumbfounded pleasure as the evening unfolded. Guests at their own banquet, they strained for familiar words, studied the faces of the others for clues, and leaned down over our nodding heads as we tried to follow the words that flew through the air around us. The concrete walls resounded.
Mueller, no longer reduced to patiently pantomiming words for foreigners, was masterful. His raspy voice swelled, soared, and thundered, then dropped abruptly to a whisper. When he dove in for the punch line, it was with the confidence of a tightrope walker, the pride of an unchallenged king.
The room exploded with laughter as he sat down and another stood to take his place—to tell the unfinished story, to sing the unbroken song of Haiti.
A song of defiance and survival.
A master parable of persistence against all odds—which could never be adequately translated into the broken half-language of foreigners.
A riddle of resistance.
Annou leve kampe Rise with me and we will take our stand.
* * *
My parents left the banquet hall that night—as did all of the guests—with a rabbit cage in hand, complete with a nose-twitching, leg-thumping bunny.
Ours lived under the mango tree in the front yard until our year of missionary service was complete. My sisters and I took it upon ourselves to see what rabbits might be willing to eat, given the opportunity (plenty, we discovered: plantain peels, mango skins, hibiscus leaves, petals). The rabbits, in return, peppered the decorative gravel with untidy round brown droppings that the real missionaries were left to clean up—horrified to discover that their carefully manicured front yard had become a compost heap, presided over by a cage of unsightly rabbits, which they relegated to the animal sheds where they belonged.
When Ken tried to lecture my father about the chaos we’d left behind, my father gave him a thin smile and shook his head, stubborn as a mule and just as unrepentant. Plus, we’d already promised Joanna that we’d be in Limbé by August, which was where his real work was to begin—to reforest woefully eroded Haiti, one scrawny tree at a time.
Front-Row Seats
Coachella Valley, 1983
AFTER OUR YEAR at the Ag Center was completed, we touched down in California for six short months. We had left the Coachella Valley as nobodies; we returned as homegrown celebrities. A low-budget regional paper, the Press Enterprise, devoted a sensationalized paragraph to us in the local gossip column, as explorers with firsthand accounts of distant lands. The write-up was as glib and condescending as anything that ever popped out of a missionary’s mouth (and at least we knew better than to use words like “primitive” or “the natives,” having acquired the bare minimum of sophistication after a year abroad):
Giant rats, mosquitoes, and malnutrition among children are facts of life in Haiti, but helping the natives learn to support themselves is very rewarding, reported Jon and Flip Anderson on their recent return to Coachella from that primitive land. The Andersons will go back to Haiti for another two-year stint of agricultural missionary work in August. Meanwhile, their three daughters, Apricot, 7, Meadow, 4, and Rose, 2, are learning about life here.
What had we forgotten in one year’s time? The buzzing drone of Grandpa Lee’s baseball games on the radio, the damp whir of the swamp cooler. My mother went back to hanging up our wet clothes on the line. My father planted a crop of organic spaghetti squash that no one would buy—in our absence, the price had dropped from eighteen dollars a box to three dollars. It disgusted him that just on the other side of the ocean, farmers in Haiti didn’t have enough to feed their families, whereas in the U.S., he had to disc a perfectly good crop into the dirt.
Joanna had offered to put us on the payroll at the missionary hospital, but only if we raised our own support—a savvy fund-raising strategy. I rather liked getting dolled up in my bright red Haiti Handicraft sundress, as if, by tying the straps over my thin shoulders, I could now claim to be a Haitian girl (the dresses, embroidered by Haitian artisans and promoted by Ivah, were worn almost exclusively by tourists and missionaries), but I yelped when Mom held my chin firmly and stuck bobby pins into my braids to keep the tiny woven baskets from slipping off my head. I was annoyed that I needed the help; on trips to the beach, I had seen plenty of Haitian girls my age balance forty-pound loads down a steep mountain trail without once losing their footing.
Sometimes, all five of us took the stage like the Von Trapp family to sing hymns in Kreyòl, which the little old ladies loved. But to really wow the church audience, we’d grab the bony ankles of the chickens that we’d brought along as props and flip them upside down, wings fluttering, until they stopped squawking and we could proceed into the sanctuary, the carpet tickling our bare feet, the baskets on our heads tipping precariously as we turned to face the delighted applause. In church circles (albeit not in the wider world), being a missionary was almost as good as being a movie star.
* * *
My parents wrote endless thank-you notes for the crumpled five-dollar and twenty-dollar bills that filled the velvet donation bags at the end of each presentation, not to mention the more substantial pledges of fifteen dollars a month, but I began to feel like a jackrabbit in the Palm Shadow Produce vegetable patch: trapped in the glare of the spotlight. I
squirmed away from the too-soft hands of church ladies who patted our shoulders and assured us that they were praying. The audience was too gullible, too easily charmed by our showmanship. Our stage act was a parody of the splendid, cacophonous world we had left behind.
I couldn’t begin to explain all the things that I missed about Haiti—the lizards that puffed green throats against the ceiling, the crack of thunder and the roar of rain on tin, snorkeling in bathtub-warm beach water, the buzzing cicadas, tap taps bouncing over potholes with music blaring—but it seemed like the only stories our church supporters wanted to hear were about how sad and poor everyone must be in Haiti, and about how much good we must have done, bringing God’s light into such a dark place. I gave up trying. They didn’t get it.
Joanna, at least, knew exactly what stories to tell, and sent a personalized form letter from Limbé for the donations our church in Coachella had collected for orphans in Haiti, complete with a poem:
Dear Children of Daily Vacation Bible School
This month to you we send our thanks,
Your gift has done the trick
It’s helped to buy so many things
To provide succor for the sick
Each day the lines grow longer
As they mill about the yard
The sick ones sprawl and moan and groan
“Which one?” to choose is hard
But each day many seek health here
So the Doctors thump and probe
The lab pricks fingers for their blood
To diagnose by a small microbe
They stand in line to get their pills
And holler at a needle
But they fuss the most whene’er they learn
Their health is back and there’s no return!
Greetings from Limbe, Haiti and the Hôpital le Bon Samaritain. We are more than thankful for your most recent check gift of $115.00 which we will use to help buy milk for our orphaned children—the babies in the maternity nursery whose mothers died when they were born. Thank you so very much—they will grow big and strong with all this good milk.
Thank you so much.
Most gratefully,
Joanna & Bill Hodges
Grandma Lois had already photocopied and passed around to relatives and supporters a stack of Dr. Hodges’s newsletters (sample titles: “Of God, the Tropics and Wood,” “The Cultural Significance of Christian Medical Care,” and “Charité—Do the Haitians Have Gratitude?”), leaving my parents with an additional responsibility: to explain how a missionary doctor in rural Limbé had time to publish such insightful essays about Haitian culture and history.
Nor was his reputation limited to church circles; when the president of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, visited Cap-Haïtien, no less a person than the president of Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, had requested Dr. Hodges’s presence at an exhibition of historical articles.
But it was the Doctor’s most recent accomplishment that was the clincher. Joanna broke the good news via newsletter: a team from the University of Florida had arrived to excavate the site that Dr. Hodges believed was Columbus’s first settlement in the New World—an archaeological puzzle that had haunted historians for five centuries. My father grinned whenever he let this detail slip. We would have front-row seats on history.
La Navidad
Ayiti, 1492
IT HAD STARTED off so well—Columbus, kneeling on a beach on the north coast of Ayiti, to claim the island for the crown and Christendom. The curious Taínos who gathered to watch. The hawks’ bells and glass beads; the hammered thin fragments of gold they pressed into his hands.
Later that afternoon, rocking at anchor in the blue, quiet Baie de L’Acul, Columbus rhapsodized that in twenty-three years at sea he had never seen a harbor so protected and vast that it could contain, he wrote, all the ships of Christendom.
As he set down his quill, more than a hundred canoes closed in around the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. According to Columbus’s records, over the next several days more than a thousand Taínos arrived to pay their respects to the visiting Spaniards, holding gifts above their heads: cotton cloth, parrots, cassava bread and fish, earthenware jars of water infused with aromatic seeds, and gold. Some, he claimed, swam the distance, though he estimated that the ships were anchored several miles from shore.
For two days and one night—perhaps longer; the dates in the ship’s log grow confused—the Spaniards did not sleep. In the log, Columbus made particular note of the Taíno women, who, he explained, were quite beautiful.
Exhausted, just before sunrise on Christmas Eve, Columbus gave the command to weigh anchor. A chieftain named Guacanagarí, from a village nine miles distant, was said to have summoned representatives from all of the Taíno kingdoms, and a gathering was to be convened—or so Columbus understood from the men he had kidnapped earlier in his travels and kept as translators. Envoys were already said to be en route from the interior, where there were rumored to be gold mines.
When the wind rose, the three ships crept up the coast toward what is now Cap-Haïtien. For days the air had been too stagnant to fill the sails, and Columbus was eager to make up for lost time.
Just before midnight, when the first watch ended, Columbus took to his cabin with a splitting headache. Soon thereafter, the sailor he had left in charge, who also had a headache, gave the wheel to the ship’s boy—a lapse in judgment that had been expressly prohibited, but the sea was calm, and the captain was sleeping.
When the vessel ran aground some hours later, it happened so gently that the jolt felt like a caress. Only as the rudder dug into the sand and the waves began to push the ship broadside did the boy cry out and the crew realize their fate.
Columbus tried in vain to save her. The men hung lanterns over the side to gauge the depth of the water and shouted warnings in the dark. By the dim light of unfamiliar stars, Columbus gave the order that the ship’s mast be cut to lighten her.
But it was too late; the water was too shallow. The boat seams strained with the force of the waves. The great burgeoning Santa María, named for the Virgin who had given birth on this night, heaved and swayed, swollen with unplanned cargo. The waters broke. The hull opened. The flagship was lost.
By dawn on Christmas Day, Columbus and his men stood on the deck of the much smaller Niña, which had sailed back, somewhat reluctantly, to assist with the rescue. Columbus sent a rowboat to beg the cacique Guacanagarí for help.
By noon, Taíno canoes had rescued every single flask and barrel from the broken ship, every flake of gold and woven basket of spices. Columbus concluded that not a single treasure had been lost. Moreover, the great chief had emptied several of his own houses and provided guards to stand watch over his guests’ possessions. Columbus was moved as Guacanagarí wept openly at the Spaniards’ loss.
When it came time to summarize this seeming catastrophe for the benefit of the king and queen of Spain, Columbus castigated not only his men, who had against orders left a mere boy at the helm, but also the people of Palos, Spain, who had provided him with such a faulty and cumbersome vessel, so ill suited to the work of discovery.
Guacanagarí and the Taínos received nothing but praise:
They are an affectionate people, free from avarice and agreeable to everything. I certify to Your Highness that in all the world I do not believe there is a better people or a better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the softest and gentlest voices in the world and are always smiling. They may go naked, but Your Highnesses may be assured that they have very good customs among themselves, and their cacique maintains a most marvelous state, where everything takes place in an appropriate and well-ordered manner.
He concluded piously, having chosen thirty-nine men to leave behind:
I recognized that Our Lord had caused me to run aground at this place so that I might establish a settlement here . . . All this was the will of God: the ship’s running aground so easily that it could not be felt, with neit
her wind nor wave; the cowardice of the ship’s master and some of the crew . . . ; the discovery of this country.
Columbus understood the importance of putting a good spin on the narrative for the sake of the donors. The first European settlement in the New World had been conceived in desperation, but it was christened in triumph: La Villa de la Navidad.
By the will of God, victory had been snatched from the wreckage. The fortress, built to protect the thirty-nine men he was obliged to leave behind, would be constructed with wood salvaged from the wrecked Santa María. The additional precaution of a tower and a moat would protect the Spaniards from an (as yet inconceivable) attack. Columbus fully anticipated that when he returned, he would find barrels of gold awaiting collection, the first payment of tribute from the mines. He had laid claim to Hispaniola, and its people had showered him with gifts.
All this Columbus recorded in his logbook as his two remaining ships set sail, heavily laden with the spoils of conquest: gold and parrots, tobacco, a few slaves taken at gunpoint from smaller islands.
For a brief moment—before anyone challenged his version of the truth—he would be the most celebrated man alive.
In Defense of Missionaries
Limbé, 1950–1983
HôPITAL LE BON Samaritain, before the missionaries intervened, had begun as a much humbler enterprise: a Haitian pastor dispensing donated medicine from under a mango tree in his front yard. But it was not long before the missionary influence was felt.
In 1950 Pastor Ludovic St. Phard joined forces with fiery Ivah Heneise, who lived four miles away at the Baptist seminary. Ivah had a certain gift for persuasion (my parents were among the many who eventually fell under her spell) and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. With two infant sons to cuddle and a seminary to run, she and her husband parted company on Sundays so that tall, soft-spoken Harold could drive the Jeep to a church on the other side of a mountain, while Ivah left the children with a cook and rode her bicycle four miles to the Baptist church in Limbé to teach Sunday school.
The Gospel of Trees Page 7