The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  Prior to the Haitian revolution, Dr. Hodges tallied 124 coffee plantations, 19 indigo plantations, 22 large sugar plantations, and 13 water-powered sugar mills in the Limbé Valley, all of which produced more than 4.5 million pounds of sugar annually. By the 1780s, 60 percent of the coffee sipped in gold-rimmed cups in European coffeehouses was imported from French-owned Saint-Domingue.

  Ayiti, the Pearl of the Antilles, had become the richest colony in the New World under the brutal whip of slavery. Ayiti’s eight hundred thousand subjugated Africans represented a third of the transatlantic slave trade. The introduced overpopulation put strains on the local environment, touching off formerly unheard-of famines and drought. Slaves, driven by hunger, hunted down the animals that had survived the wholesale loss of habitat. Colonizers who had hoped to build an empire in the New World failed to recognize that it was eroding beneath them.

  When the slaves finally revolted and declared independence in 1804—the initial call to arms having been sounded half a century earlier in the fierce and unbroken north by a slave named François Makandal, who had escaped from Limbé to raise an army of Taíno and Maroon warriors—it was too late to reverse the ecological devastation. The hated plantations fell into disrepair, and ever smaller garden plots were cut into the sides of the mountains as land was divided and redivided among the descendants of those first proud, unbroken revolutionaries. But the years of abundance were over.

  The forests that once released moisture into the air and caught the raindrops in their tangled branches, replenishing the hidden aquifers, had been cut down. The trees had been cut down because the farmers had no money for food, or school, or hospital bills; at least charcoal could be sold in the marketplace.

  It seemed to be a riddle without an answer, but it was one that my father was determined to solve.

  * * *

  The two-hundred-foot expanse of trampled earth that my father managed on the compound was envisioned as a staging ground for the eventual reforestation of northern Haiti—an ambitious goal but one shared with equal fervor among the various agricultural development agencies that operated in the north, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as well as its Educational, Scientific and Cultural arm, UNESCO, which frequently contracted with the hospital to supply trees.

  Dr. Hodges had seized on the importance of reforestation soon after he arrived in Haiti, although he’d stumbled into it indirectly, by way of archaeology. In August 1959, Bill and Joanna and their four children had discovered a spindly stand of native pine trees on an otherwise denuded peninsula overlooking the blue, peaceful Baie de L’Acul. The soil was a rich red color, and the young doctor noticed evidence of a roughly dug long-abandoned mine. He also noted a small cross etched into a rock—perhaps carved by the Admiral himself. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World was still thirty years distant, which, he hoped, would leave him ample time to track down undiscovered sites from the First Voyage.

  Hoping to preserve these archaeological relics, the Hodges family purchased the 120-acre peninsula on behalf of the hospital and began an experimental reforestation project. Slowly, against all odds, they reclaimed the barren land. Over the course of decades, thousands of drought-resistant seedlings—mahogany, pine, Haitian oak, and cedar—put down roots. Birds nested in the rustling canopy. Springs, desiccated for years, bubbled up from the soil.

  The trees in this restored Eden supplied the lumber for building projects at the hospital and could be harvested to fund the retirement accounts of the Haitian staff. Once a week, my father drove thirty minutes over the mountains, followed by a motorboat ride across the Baie de L’Acul, the wind whipping his hair, to ensure that all was well on the missionary property. When one of his younger brothers back in California couldn’t figure out what to do after graduation, my father recommended finding a job that feels like vacation most of the time.

  The successful rebwazman of Morne Bois Pin—Pine Tree Mountain—seemed the fulfillment of the missionary dream, but what my father wanted most was to persuade the Haitians themselves to transform their own eroded land, just as the Hodges family had done on Morne Bois Pin.

  And he was pretty sure he had an idea of where to start.

  Sept. 20

  Went to Kreyòl Bible Study. The full moon was beautiful through tropical trees as we walked home. Just had a crazy idea. To send some guys to the market one day to sell trees.

  The Limbé market roared to life on Tuesdays and Saturdays with bellowing goats, skinny kicked-aside dogs, and chickens that danced like upside-down can-can girls, their wings flapping like petticoats as they dangled from the arms of thick-wristed women. There were neat green pyramids of sweet-as-candy mangoes, sour limes, and watery militon; trays of red beans, black beans, rice and corn and manioc. Machann with wide-planted knees and inscrutable faces dangled pipes from their lips—queens of the banana regime, of the drowsy-scented pineapple.

  The rest of the week, the open square of hard-packed dirt was a playground for barefoot soccer stars who, in the absence of a rubber ball, scored dazzling, heart-pounding goals between a pair of rock goalposts with a wad of tape that had been wrapped around an inflated inner tube.

  In Haiti, the marketplace was where the Fates held court, where destiny tumbled like rice into a battered tin cup, where kingdoms rose and fell (the Limbé market, Dr. Hodges had learned, squatted on the two-hundred-year-old ruins of one of King Henri Christophe’s many palaces). My father saw it as a staging ground for innovation. If the market was the place to introduce a new idea, then that was where he’d go to sell his trees.

  * * *

  Giving trees away was a well-established tradition among nongovernmental aid organizations, but my father’s logic was that if a customer considered the purchase an investment, then perhaps he or she would do a better job protecting the trees.

  The next morning, during staff devotions at the nursery, my father opened his Kreyòl Bible and read aloud a verse from Jeremiah about how God’s people were to be like trees planted by streams of water. God loved the earth, he insisted, and wanted the empty hillsides full of trees again, so that the rains would return and people would no longer have to fear drought.

  If it had been up to him, my father would have gladly spent the day chatting up passersby at the mache rather than beat his head against administrative details on the compound, but since he was the missionary (read: authority figure), he had to delegate.

  Sem and Obed, his most trusted assistants, made it clear that they were less than pleased with my father’s new scheme. As educated, gainfully employed professionals, they did not relish being chained to a tray of drooping seedlings in the midday heat.

  My father, on the other hand, had no qualms about embarrassing himself for a good cause. He would even go so far as to grab a cicada off a nearby tree and roast it over an open fire to prove that it was a good protein source (he’d first experimented with cicadas in college, after he read that the Cahuilla Indians ate them roasted). If an aghast Haitian farmer tried to knock the bug out of his hands, he’d haul out his Kreyòl Bible and point to Leviticus—cigalle was right there at the top of a list of kosher foods that the Israelites were allowed to eat while wandering in the desert. Mostly, though, he just liked to wow an audience.

  Sem and Obed, disgruntled by my father’s foolhardy idea, quickly determined that Limbé was a disinterested market. When nary a soul purchased a wilting tree, my father, following Joanna’s advice, decided to give some of the smaller nearby markets a go. The next day, he decided to show Sem and Obed how it was done. In a dusty village a few miles up the highway, he positioned himself next to his unwilling recruits, ready to pitch a sale to any would-be arborist who lingered long enough to get an earful. He was convinced that if the Haitians could just see the benefit of trees, they quickly would become converted to his cause. His sales pitch was that for the price of a large mango, customers could take home a tree that in just ten years could be ha
rvested to pay for a wedding or to send a child to college.

  One older man laughed and asked: Why should I plant a tree? I won’t sit under its shade.

  The barefoot boys in ragged shorts, still young enough to outgrow the seedlings, were even less interested: Three centimes for a tree? one argued. —I can buy a lottery ticket for the same price and win a fortune!

  We weren’t well-situated, my father wrote in his journal afterward. Sold 4 cinnamon trees. Later some people came and bought grapefruit trees.

  Not yet willing to give up, my father staged his next trial run in Camp Coq, a modest village with a police station (though no electricity) where the weekly market bustled with vendors hawking mangoes, rice, batteries, plastic sandals, flavored ices, and bouillon cubes from burlap sacks spread out on the dirt. My father was thrilled when, after paying two men to sit in the Camp Coq mache for an entire afternoon, they had this meager success to report: They sold 11 cinnamon trees and expected they could have sold 50. Two people even signed up to have trees planted on their land.

  The reason for this apparent triumph, although my father didn’t realize it yet, was that Camp Coq was home to a fellow tree enthusiast who would eventually become my father’s mentor, ally, and fellow renegade. For it was in Camp Coq that he stumbled across a wiry, resolute farmer named Joseph Alexandre, who introduced himself simply as Zo.

  My father met Zo while he was standing beside a box of seedlings, trying to convince a few teenagers to buy his cinnamon and papaya trees. Zo needed no convincing. It was Zo who, after a day of lackluster sales at the market, led my father up a steep, crumbling hillside to see forests of mahogany, Leucaena, labapen, and Haitian oak that Zo had planted—without the help of missionary tree nurseries. Zo had simply scattered seeds in the dirt before the rains began.

  Over the years, Zo had seen a parade of development projects come and go in the Limbé Valley, and he told my father a cautionary tale: In the 1970s, a well-meaning NGO had hosted a seminar in Camp Coq on the benefits of trees—free food, an open-air lecture, plus a box of seedlings for every participant to take home and plant on his or her own land.

  The local farmers sat through the seminar as bidden. They ate the food. They even took the boxes of trees. But as soon as the farmers were out of eyesight of the well-meaning foreigners, they pitched the trees into the ravine to rot.

  —Why? my father asked, incredulous.

  Zo explained. The farmers assumed that there must be some hidden agenda in this foreign scheme—you couldn’t expect them to trust the blan after a hundred other high-minded projects gone wrong.

  Perhaps the donated trees were the latchkey to some secret plot; if the farmers followed the foreigner’s suggestions and planted American trees on their land, the U.S. government might claim ownership. It wasn’t completely far-fetched. Stranger things had been known to happen.

  On the surface, the development project seemed to have gone off without a hitch—brilliant photo ops, the glossy full-page write-up for the benefit of the donors—but in the end, all that well-meaning effort went, quite literally, down the ravine. It was a bleak comedy more improbable than fiction.

  Tired and beat at the end of this week, my father recorded glumly in the journal. He had sent Sem and Obed to a village called Dirisie, just down the hill from another of the hospital’s tree plantations, anticipating an enthusiastic response from the local farmers. Surely, after witnessing the benefits of reforestation firsthand, the people of Dirisie would be eager to plant trees on their own land. Instead, Sem and Obed got an earful—the trees shaded out the gardens; the ground was as good as ruined if it couldn’t grow food.

  Discouraged, my father went to check on the compound rabbit cages before dinner. On the floor of the cage next to a female that he had bred a few weeks earlier, to no apparent success, he found two tiny skulls. He hadn’t realized that she was pregnant, so he hadn’t been supplementing her diet. The ravenous mother had consumed her own offspring.

  * * *

  My father took a shovel to the thick, rubbery grass in front of our volunteer cottage. If he couldn’t convince the farmers to plant trees, then at least he could help the kids at Jericho School appreciate the pleasures of gardening. He stabbed bamboo stakes into the dirt to make raised beds. He was, however, predictably disappointed by our work ethic. They got hot pulling weeds, he noted irritably after a solid hour of reminding us not to get distracted.

  —Come on! he berated Meadow and me after the rest of our classmates had slunk home. —Don’t you know how to work? Whose daughters are you, anyway?

  If my father’s shoulders were starting to stoop under the weight of the accumulated disappointments, Joanna’s chipper enthusiasm, miraculously, never appeared to waver. When bean stalks curled up the trellises at the Jericho garden, she wrote a thrilling newsletter about all the new skills that the missionary children were learning.

  Truth be told, we were pretty pleased with ourselves, despite my father’s scolding. Meadow’s green beans were as long as her outstretched arms, and my sunflowers were taller than anyone else’s in the garden—even taller than Peter’s, whose sheer proximity when we knelt beside each other in the dirt was enough to set off a hurricane in my thumping rib cage. He didn’t seem annoyed when I chattered away about the story that I was writing in class—a dramatic mythology about coconuts—and when I tried to organize everyone into a game of tag at recess, he gave a quiet shrug and said it sounded fun. I tore around the zanmann tree, cheeks flushed, as the fine, silty dust turned to wet paste between the toes of my sandals—cheap blue glittery plastic from the marketplace, but they made me feel like a warrior princess.

  I did not in a zillion years expect Peter to return my affections. My knees were perpetually scuffed from chasing lizards around the yard, and no matter how fervently I wished to be cute like Meadow, with her soft voice and bright blue eyes that squinted shut whenever she was embarrassed, I was bossy and opinionated and couldn’t for the life of me learn to keep my mouth shut.

  Rosie had it easiest—at three, she was blond, feisty, and adorable. In the evenings, while Meadow and I jostled at the kitchen sink and took turns twirling a soapy washcloth over the plates, our father slung Rosie onto his shoulders and took her for walks around town, just as he used to do with me when we lived in the California desert.

  One of his favorite rambles with Rosie was to the garbage dumps at the edge of town, where they liked to catch toads, but sometimes they detoured through the empty Limbé market, littered with mango husks and discarded bags of syrup-ice, to watch the boys play soccer. It was on one such night, having left the dusty square to walk under the mahogany trees behind the museum, that a realization dawned on my father: the Limbé market was almost entirely devoid of tree cover.

  The barest outlines of an idea began to coalesce in his mind. What if the entire town could be replanted, starting with the marketplace?

  Rosie was as excited as he was when they returned from their walk, for he had just taught her to spell her first word. She proudly performed for us, perched on his shoulders with the canopy of night at her back, to the applause of the cicadas. For several weeks running, she signed her name T-R-E-E instead of Rose.

  * * *

  By the end of October, my father’s wilted enthusiasm had begun to revive. With Zo at his side, he presided over a revival meeting in Camp Coq with the goal of converting the local farmers to the gospel of trees. At least sixty people, most likely inspired by Zo’s example, professed that they wanted trees on their land. This is a harvest of sitting in the market place, my father noted in his journal, euphoric.

  Confident that his incremental efforts had already begun to make a difference, my father moved the dusty, treeless Limbé market to the top of his agenda. He strategized with Obed until they came up with what felt like a foolproof plan. First they paid house calls to local officials: the mayor of Limbé, the police chief, the leader of the Boy Scouts, the pastor of the Baptist church. Next they measured the m
arket, which incited curious conversations among the onlookers.

  —Is the blan buying the marketplace? small boys asked, watching my father and Obed lay out measuring tape. —Is he going to build a bigger one?

  One elderly gentleman with white hair and watery eyes informed them that when he was a boy, there had been many, many trees in the marketplace; he had been afraid to hike alone into the mountains for fear of what might be hiding in the forests.

  Obed, his memory stirred, also remembered two tall trees that once spread their branches over Limbé, though they had long since been cut for firewood.

  Perhaps, my father dared to hope, this symbolic act of replanting shade trees in the market would be the turning point.

  * * *

  It was to be a day like no other, full of fanfare and ceremony, a day for photographs and handshakes with shovels in hand; a day for the newsletters—the day the missionaries bequeathed a canopy of trees to the Limbé market.

  On the appointed afternoon, now long weeks in the planning, the mayor himself tossed the first shovel of dirt over the tender roots. A choir from the Limbé Baptist church lifted their voices to bless the day, and the sun shone benevolently on the straining necks and arms of the Boy Scout leaders in their neckerchiefs and knee socks, not to mention the glad-to-be-escaping-our-schoolwork missionary kids of Jericho School.

  We scooped handfuls of rich dark earth around the trunks of two hundred drought-resistant seedlings that my father had purchased from a small backyard Haitian nursery started by one of his former employees (he didn’t want to repeat the Camp Coq misadventure and plant American trees).

  No detail had been overlooked. There were designated caretakers to water the trees in the dry season and bamboo slats to keep the goats at bay, though it seemed an unnecessary precaution; even goats didn’t like the taste of neem trees.