The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  Ivah, too, opened a small outdoor clinic near her home, and though the two small clinics, in Limbé and Haut-Limbé, could do little more than offer quinine for malaria and pills for worms and dysentery, they were quickly overwhelmed by patients who walked or were carried down the steep mountain trails. Their collective medical expertise was negligible, but the needs were impossible to ignore.

  Pastor St. Phard used his influence in Limbé to form a Haitian Baptist committee to purchase a karo of land—slightly more than three acres—for a future hospital. Ivah’s job was to squirrel away the meager Sunday school offerings until the small pile of gourdes and centimes began to take on the promise of materiality.

  Three years later, land was purchased, and parishioners from the Limbé Baptist church heaved smooth round river rocks on their heads, the foundation stones falling with a thud onto the dusty building site that would one day become the Hospital of the Good Samaritan.

  The red ribbon was cut in 1954 by none other than the president of Haiti, Paul Magloire. Ivah baked a giant homemade cake in a dishpan (whose inelegant proportions she concealed under thick swirls of patriotic blue and red frosting), and Magloire sipped four glasses of good Baptist grape juice—served in lieu of the explicitly requested presidential champagne. Hôpital le Bon Samaritain was open for business.

  Finding a trained doctor who was willing to administrate the tin-roofed Baptist hospital was an entirely different challenge.

  Haitian politics did not aid the cause. President Magloire, accused of misappropriation of funds in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel, lost the support of his military generals. When a coup d’état seemed imminent, he left Haiti in the capable, merciless hands of Papa Doc Duvalier.

  Duvalier’s secret police, the Tonton Macoutes, paid midnight visits to enemies of the state. Time magazine christened Haiti the snake pit of the Caribbean. Pastor St. Phard, unlike the Heneises, did not have the safeguard of American citizenship to protect his family. He weighed his options and emigrated. It was an age of exodus.

  If Ivah felt momentarily daunted by this rapid-fire reversal of fortunes, she didn’t mention it in her letters home to her mother, later published as a slim paperback: By the Light of My Kerosene Lamp. She and Harold simply packed up their family, now grown to four children, and set off for a year of furlough at a Baptist seminary to reassess. It was there, in the tinder-dry foothills of California, that Ivah’s gift of persuasion met its highest match.

  * * *

  The dour young William Herman Hodges and his pink-cheeked wife, Joanna, still awaiting a missionary assignment from the American Baptists, were not, at first glance, the most likely candidates to administrate a barely-on-its-feet Baptist hospital in rural Haiti. The doctor, like Columbus, had his sights set on the Far East, not the Caribbean. Having served during World War II as a meteorologist in Japan—which he deemed a very clean and civilized country—he and his family had joined a Japanese Baptist church in Los Angeles while he completed his medical residency. He and Joanna even went so far as to give their four children culturally appropriate middle names: Reiko, Kikuye, Kazuo, and Takeo.

  The only unforeseen obstacle was that the American Baptists didn’t own a missionary hospital in Japan and didn’t intend to open one. Missionary posts to the Philippines and Burma likewise fell through. Which is right about when Ivah Heneise spun into Bill and Joanna’s orbit.

  The four Hodges children, roughly the same ages as the four Heneise children, sized each other up in the hallways of the Baptist seminary, recognizing allies. Ivah thrilled at the thought that she might have found, at long last, her dreamed-of administrator for the Limbé hospital: a bona fide missionary doctor—as yet without an assigned post.

  It wasn’t an easy sell.

  Joanna remembers grumbling after Ivah’s preliminary sales pitch. —Who wants to go to Haiti? If you’re a missionary, you want to get on a boat and go somewhere. Haiti’s practically in Florida’s backyard, that’s not going anywhere!

  But Ivah knew how to bait the trap.

  It was no secret that the doctor happened to be a history buff, so Ivah casually let it slip that in almost five hundred years, no archaeologist had ever been able to find the ruins of Columbus’s first fortress in the New World, La Navidad.

  It was a well-aimed lure. Columbus was one of Dr. Hodges’s childhood heroes. Without telling Ivah, he dropped by the public library and returned with a heavy stack of books. The children peered over their father’s shoulder at pictures of donkeys loaded with green cooking bananas and women who balanced wicker baskets on their heads. He was the kind of man to read gross domestic product statistics aloud to his children, and Haiti’s numbers were depressing, even for the post–World War II era—a mere $236 per person per year. There was also the gruesome history of slavery, revolutions, dictators, and poverty to consider. But it was the 1950s. Optimism was in.

  After a week of deliberating, Dr. Hodges closed the history books and announced to the excitable Joanna (or at least this is how she remembers the conversation): I think we’ll go to Haiti. We’re going to find Christopher Columbus’s fort.

  If he had second thoughts, Joanna never faltered. As the daughter of an itinerant pastor, missionaries had been the heroes of her childhood. At eight years old, she had stood up in front of her father’s church and announced that she wanted to share God’s love in some dark corner of the world.

  Two decades later, she radiated confidence at her commissioning ceremony. Dark hair framed high cheekbones as the camera bulbs flashed and the room broke into applause.

  In the photograph taken just before they left, Joanna smiled broadly, her hand resting lightly on the head of her youngest son. Paul was three, barely old enough to remember the country he was about to leave behind. Beside them were trunks packed with crinoline skirts, medical textbooks, and unbreakable dishes meant to last a lifetime. Barbara, a timid eight-year-old, buried her hands in her pockets and rocked on the edges of her feet. Susan, one year older, faced forward with her feet firmly planted and grinned. Only seven-year-old David held luggage in his hands—his mother’s purse, lest it be left behind in the excitement.

  Joanna remembered fondly the white camellia tucked into the buttonhole of her red Christmas coat; she loved how it whirled around her when she walked into a room. The Doctor jammed his hands into his pockets and leaned on the edge of one foot. He looked distinctly uncomfortable at the center of so much attention.

  * * *

  Dr. Hodges’s first night in Haiti was a hard one. Ivah met them at the airport, but after six hours on substandard roads, the young doctor discovered that the much advertised hospital was little more than a few concrete rooms with bare lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The squalor and noise seemed almost unbearable. Bedded down on army cots in Ivah’s living room, Dr. Hodges worried that he had ruined his life and the lives of his children. His heavy sighs distracted Joanna, who was happily counting fireflies.

  And yet despite his misgivings, he wasn’t a quitter. Within weeks, he had evicted the wriggling tadpoles from the hospital water tank and repaired the broken generator. He dutifully waded into his first day at the new clinic with a French-English dictionary under his arm—his new Bible, as it were. The laboriously memorized Japanese kanji with which he had prepared himself for missionary service were now as useless as outgrown crutches.

  Strangers in the Limbé marketplace lifted up his daughters’ skirts to see their crinoline undergarments, and his children came home crying after other kids rubbed their skin to see if the white would come off. Joanna was usually able to cheer him up again.

  —Well, he would concede, —we’ll give the Lord two more weeks.

  He called himself an optimistic pessimist.

  When it was Joanna’s turn to feel overwhelmed, he would pour her a cup of coffee, listen to her litany of complaints, and then advise her to go wash her face and do something nice for somebody (she liked to bake cookies).

  Joanna and Ivah patched to
gether an improvised school for the children, with biology labs at the hospital and archaeological forays on the weekends. The missionary school also included a family who had fled genocide to begin a new life in Haiti. Uncle S——, as he was known among the missionary children, was an exceedingly charming man who would dangle upside down from the branches of trees when they went on outings to the beach, and was always up for a long prayer session or a chat over coffee with the missionary wives. It wasn’t until years later that his other, hidden legacy was disclosed. Such things were not discussed among the missionary families.

  On weekends, Dr. Hodges scoured the coast for Columbus relics and found Taíno petroglyphs and the remains of a pirate settlement along the Limbé River. He gained a reputation as a man who valued the detritus of history, and patients at the clinic brought him pre-Columbian pottery and Spanish coins they’d unearthed from their fields, as well as buccaneer swords and decaying colonial diaries.

  In the evenings, after he had pushed his chair back from the dinner table, cleared his throat, and excused himself, he settled into a chair in his study and taught himself to read colonial French and Spanish with a dictionary at his elbow, reverently turning the pages of leather-bound tomes by Bartolomé de las Casas, Abbé Raynal, and Cristóbal Colón.

  Over the years, his amateur field research earned him commendations from the preeminent Caribbean archaeologist at Yale, Irving Rouse, and he began to correspond with the luminaries of the Haitian intellectual community: the novelist Jacques Roumain; the philosopher Jean Price-Mars; the sculptor Albert Mangonès.

  From his beloved history books, he discovered that the property of Hôpital le Bon Samaritain had once been a slave plantation—one of the first to be burned to the ground during the slave rebellions of the eighteenth century. Limbé, he noted with interest, had been a hotbed for insurrection.

  * * *

  The Hodges family, after five years in Haiti, were no strangers to upheaval, having arrived a year after Papa Doc Duvalier seized power. Rural Limbé was somewhat sheltered from the brutality of the capital, and missionaries were more protected than ordinary citizens, but even the Hodges had witnessed the violence firsthand. A patient in the missionary hospital who had been savagely beaten was dragged from his bed by Duvalier’s rural militia. When the Doctor protested, the militia turned their guns on him.

  Shielded by their American citizenship, Bill and Joanna had felt relatively safe from harm, but in May 1963, as tensions escalated between Duvalier and the Dominican Republic, the Hodges family huddled around a crackling Voice of America radio broadcast as the announcer warned all American citizens in Haiti to stand by for evacuation.

  A night of terror followed. In the streets of Limbé, suspects were dragged from their houses and shot. Hospital staff members, shaken and terrified when they reported for work the next morning, described relatives murdered and houses ransacked. The Hodges children ranged in age from eight to thirteen years and pleaded that they didn’t want to leave their home and their friends behind. But Bill and Joanna weren’t willing to take unnecessary chances. Theirs was a rare freedom: They could leave if they chose.

  At three-thirty a.m., having loaded the family station wagon, they braved the long, hazardous route to the capital. The countryside was eerily quiet, aside from the military checkpoints, and there were few other vehicles on the road. There were no streetlights. The moon had already set. There were only the faint outlines of the mountains against the stars and their own small headlights fading into the dark.

  When morning found them safely in Port-au-Prince, Bill and Joanna tried, exhausted, to secure an exit visa and seats on the next plane, but ran into a quagmire of bureaucracy. A politely evasive Haitian official folded his hands on his desk and explained that the evacuation was merely a political ploy; if the Hodges family were to leave, the people of Haiti would not forget. There would be no return.

  The Doctor cleared his throat and explained that in five years’ time, he and his family had not once taken a vacation. The official pursed his lips and slammed the necessary exit visa onto the paper.

  No more planes would be leaving that night. Having hardly slept in the past thirty-six hours, Dr. Hodges drove to the mountains above Port-au-Prince to stay with missionary friends. The Turnbulls, veterans of seventeen years, assured them that it was indeed a political power-play—the U.S. government just didn’t want Duvalier to stay in power (a suspicion that would be confirmed decades later by declassified information from the embassy).

  The Doctor, not knowing what to believe, went straight to bed after supper. As Joanna tells the story, she shook her husband awake early the next morning, feeling strongly that the Lord wasn’t ready for them to leave.

  —Besides, she reminded him, —what are we going to say to our supporters back home? We told all the young people in Sunday school that we were going to the ends of the earth!

  Their spirits fortified by having reread the Great Commission in their Bibles—surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age—they drove back to Limbé later that afternoon. The roads were empty aside from vehicles racing south to the airport. One expatriate warned Dr. Hodges that he was surely going back to his death.

  By the time they reached Plaisance, perched on the spine of the northern mountains, still over an hour’s drive from Limbé, bystanders began to recognize the missionary station wagon.

  —Woy! Woy! Dr. Hodges! He came back! former patients shouted as they ran alongside. In Limbé, a pro-Duvalier/anti-American rally turned into an impromptu parade. A crowd accompanied the Hodges family into the hospital yard, clapping and singing: Port-au-Prince is not the only one to have a Papa Doc, we’ve got a Papa Doc right here!

  Local dignitaries hurried over to declare: Dr. Hodges, you have voted with the people. Everyone shook hands.

  As Joanna told the story in subsequent newsletters—for it was to become a defining moment, told and retold—the Hodges family had shown solidarity with the Haitian people. Willing to sacrifice personal safety for the good of the community, they had won the trust of those whose lives they had come to save.

  The only detail that Joanna was expressly forbidden from mentioning in print was the Papa Doc song; François Duvalier, like Dr. Hodges, had started out as a simple country doctor, but Dr. Hodges found the comparison odious. Joanna kept her promise—loosely. No newsletter ever contained the lyrics, though she was fond of regaling visitors with the tale.

  * * *

  In 1969, six years after the Hodges family’s triumphant return to Limbé—in spite of Duvalier’s threats—Christianity Today published an article that described missionary hospitals as underfunded and poorly administrated, and asserted that the era of the “White Father” was over; it was time for missionary doctors to seek new roles.

  Dr. Hodges typed an indignant rebuttal from Limbé: “A Bruised World still seeks Good Samaritans.” Rural Haiti, he argued, was poor, and disease was rampant. Illiteracy was widespread. Well-educated families too often left for better opportunities elsewhere, and the vast majority of physicians—Haitian as well as foreign—aspired to social diversions unattainable so far from an urban center. This condition keeps away all but the most determined idealists . . . The world is crying for men and women who are so motivated and are willing to pay the cost.

  In his letter to the editor, Dr. Hodges did not explicitly address the underlying critique of missionary paternalism—a complaint that, in the post–civil rights era, was being raised not only by Christianity Today but also, increasingly, by local Haitian pastors.

  Ivah took detailed notes on the strained conversations between the newly formed Haitian Baptist Convention and the missionaries, during which Haitian Baptist leaders voiced their dismay at the seeming reluctance of missionaries to recognize the competency of national leadership, or to delegate authority, and pointed to a subtle but pervasive spirit of paternalism. Missionaries who had devoted their lives, as they saw it, to serving the Haitian people found the accu
sations painful. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society weighed in from afar to recommend a gradual transition of authority from the missionaries to national leaders. The Hodges family, among others, argued that a rapid transfer of authority could be disastrous; putting Haitian pastors without medical training in charge of the hospital budget would leave fragile patients at risk.

  No one disputed that the foundation of Hôpital le Bon Samaritain had been laid by stalwart parishioners of the Limbé Baptist church, ordinary Haitian citizens who had purchased the land, slowly and methodically, through their own labor. But onto that foundation other stones had been laid. The rudimentary clinic had grown to include a maternity ward, a pediatrics wing, a laboratory with X-ray and sterilization equipment, and a pharmacy—and all this progress rested squarely on the capable shoulders of the Hodges family. Furthermore, Dr. Hodges had just begun an ambitious hydroelectric project on the Limbé River, funded by a German not-for-profit organization, to provide electricity and clean drinking water to the town. Barren hillsides were in the process of being replanted through an experimental forestry program administered by the missionaries. The four Hodges children, who had left for boarding school in Port-au-Prince or college in the States, were slowly returning to help manage the hydroelectric dam, the pharmacy, and the growing facilities.

  * * *

  By the time my family moved to the compound, it had been a solid quarter century since the Hodges family had first touched their feet to Haitian soil, sighed, and committed themselves to backwater Limbé.

  Every morning, Dr. Hodges walked over to the hospital to deliver babies, combat virulent tropical diseases, and dispense prohibitively expensive pharmaceuticals for less than the price of a marmite of rice (he kept his rounds brief on Sundays so that he could teach Sunday school). Joanna presided over the office, tapping out cheery newsletters to raise yet more money for the missionary enterprise. The hospital’s nominal fees were heavily subsidized by churches in the U.S.: the price to give birth in the safety of the hospital, attended by trained nurses with sterilized equipment, was only one dollar; it was free for those who couldn’t afford that. A twenty-four-hour generator ensured that doctors would not have to probe a dehydrated child’s flattened veins by headlamp, or deliver a baby by the flickering light of kerosene lamp. A pump and a well provided up to eighty thousand gallons of clean water per day, and also supplied the five public fountains in Limbé, which prevented the spread of waterborne viruses and intestinal parasites.