We gave hugs and one last kiss. Rosie cried, but I didn’t. Everyone on the compound—except the Doctor and Joanna—left sooner or later. It was safer not to get attached.
My sisters and I tagged along as far as the carport to watch Cherylene leave. She seemed happy enough, tucked against her aunt’s hip, her chubby legs showing under her dress as her father, straight-backed and purposeful, strode out the hospital gates.
Joni was kicking a soccer ball by the fishpond, so Meadow and I drifted over to join him. Rosie climbed up on a row of propane tanks by the carport, punchy and a little off-balance without her afternoon nap. When she jumped, the hem of her dress snagged on an empty propane tank and it tipped over in slow motion on top of her. I came running as soon as I heard screaming. Meadow tore down the sidewalk for Mom.
Rosie ended up with a big red welt on her forehead and a few scrapes but otherwise seemed fine.
—You darn kid! my father shouted when he got home and heard the news. —What did you think you were doing?
It was just as well I didn’t read his letters until years later.
April 16, 1985 letter to Grandma Lois:
Well my trip to MBP went well . . . Sure enough no one was working . . . There’s more to the story but I’m tired and am really writing about something else. When I got back I found out that Ti Marcel was gone. Her father and his sister had come to get her . . . I’m glad I wasn’t here. I would have cried.
When I opened that letter for the first time, in my mid-twenties, I was surprised at how the dust-winged specter of jealousy fluttered out at me from the page. I had to blink angrily to keep its claws out of my eyes.
My mother, predictably, had a different take on the situation.
April 16, 1985 letter to the Divine grandparents:
Dear Divines, Greetings from your faraway but not forgotten daughter. We received two letters from you on Saturday so I better return the favor. Well the big news is that Ti Marcel is on her way home to Gonaïves with her father and aunt. Her new name is Cherylene! That was mighty tough news for Daddy Jon and Rosie . . .
I took Rose through Pediatrics to look for another baby to love and there were plenty of little, hardly alive, bony kids . . . Jon beat me to bed so will see you tomorrow.
Ti Marcel had received her allotted miracle—she had gone home with a father who wanted her. Meanwhile, back at the hospital, the lineup of brokenhearted babies was just as long as before.
* * *
Maddening, beloved Ayiti Cheri, land of myriad contradictions: the orphans who appeared half starved and abandoned on the hospital doorstep, only to be reclaimed later by smiling, guileless parents; the reforestation projects mangled by goats; the donated infant formula pocketed on the sly by opportunistic employees.
Each frustrating scenario held a yet more complicated layer hidden underneath. Peel back the mattress of the donated hospital bed and find a nest of cockroaches. Peel back the pages of the missionary account books and discover no one willing to pick up the tab for malnourished orphans except little old ladies in American Baptist churches who knit garish yellow and pink sweaters for children in the tropics.
Demand change, by all means. Yet know this—you will not be the first to fail. Such endeavors look easy only from a distance. It is only after the clouds have evaporated that gritty reality holds sway.
* * *
With little more than a month to go before our imminent departure from Haiti, my father tried to cram in as many farewell adventures as possible. He was ready to be done with compound life, which he saw as a burdensome luxury; if we did ever return, he had promised himself that we’d find a small house in a rural community where my sisters and I could grow up speaking Kreyòl and playing with Haitian friends. My mother agreed—at least initially.
In the tiny village of Soufrière, along a river called Suffering, our truck broke down and we had to roll a flat tire across the dirt for an hour and a half before we could flag down help (the spare was flat, too). On a sailboat ride to Île de la Tortue, hunkered down between bags of charcoal and rice, my mother and Rosie both got seasick. I panicked when the wind caught the mast and tipped the overcrowded fishing boat so far that we nearly capsized. When the storm subsided and the sails went limp, men grabbed the oars to heave us through the rocking waves, the knotted muscles in their backs straining and easing, straining and easing, as the passengers sang us to shore, an invocation to the spirits to carry us over the depths.
My father’s enthusiasm never faltered; he was convinced that the whole trip had been worth it just to see the color of the sea after the storm—absolutely the most beautiful deep blue—but my mother’s wanderlust was spent. By the time we made it back to Limbé, after flagging down a tap tap and leaving the Daihatsu parked on the wrong side of a swollen river, each of us girls taking a turn on the backs of strangers while my mother waded across alone, my mother had concluded that America might be boring, but Haiti was far too stressful.
My father, however, wasn’t about to leave until he’d seen for himself that Ti Marcel was being properly cared for. She had missed her first checkup at the hospital, but he and my mother returned pleased from their surveillance mission. Some of Cherylene’s relatives had emigrated to Canada, and the money they sent back helped to pay the living expenses of the rest of the family. Marcel had been tending his gardens a few miles outside of town, but Cherylene stayed during the day with one of her aunts in a well-kept house with cement floors, electricity, and a television—which was more luxury than my father allowed us. Meadow and I were at Jericho School and didn’t get to see her, but my mother assured us that she looked cute and healthy and had barely recognized them after a month away. She was crawling all over the place and strong enough to stand and inch along the wall—it wouldn’t be long before she was ready to push off and walk on her own strong legs.
Rose was so happy to see her. We all were, my father updated the grandparents.
* * *
Having finally located our missing passports, I leaned down and whispered into the ears of the black Labrador retriever: tell Peter I will miss him. We leaned our heads out of the car windows and waved frantic goodbyes as the missionary compound disappeared behind us, and inhaled one last deep breath of kasav roasting over a charcoal fire. A kamyon swerved around us going the opposite direction, the blare of its bugle-call bus horn followed by the clamor of chickens as they fluttered away from the thundering tires. Men on the roof straddled shifting bags of mangoes and manioc, their laughter exploding and then fading to silence as they hurtled past us toward an uncertain future.
As we lifted above the runway on a missionary plane, Haiti receded, the dense green thickets of bamboo, Leucaena, and cactus giving way to barren hills.
Into one of our going-away cards someone had tucked an unexplained pamphlet: “Are Missionaries Unbalanced?”
* * *
We read Joanna’s next newsletter under the scrub oak tree at our cabin in Idyllwild, which announced that the Jon Anderson family had moved out at noon on a busy June day in 1985; by three p.m., Joanna’s daughter Susan, husband, Ron, and their six children had moved in to replace us. It was a bona fide Hodges reunion, and their ranks were growing. Paul Hodges, Bill and Joanna’s youngest son, flew in from Mauritania with his wife and nine-month-old son a few days later, and settled into an apartment above the museum. David’s wife, Emily, gave birth to their second child. And Barbara agreed to take in eleven-year-old Olynda, whose beleaguered mother had begged the Hodges family to give her daughter a chance at a better life.
Steady, quiet-voiced Peter was so jealous of his newly adopted sister that, during a game of catch, he threw the ball as hard as he could against her thin chest.
Dr. Hodges was sixty-one years old, and Joanna was sixty-two. With four children, five adopted children, and umpteen grandchildren gathered about them, they decided to purchase land a few miles outside of Limbé, as it appeared that they would be spending the rest of their lives in Haiti. Dr. H
odges explained to a friend from medical school that he still hoped, after his retirement, to dabble in medicine, archaeology, and museology—the latter being a nice quiet occupation for befuddled old men.
He was being modest. A reporter from the New York Times had recently spent five and a half hours in Dr. Hodges’s study to find out more about the La Navidad excavation, and a two-page article was about to be published in that illustrious newspaper: “Columbus’s Lost Town: New Evidence Is Found.”
Bill and Joanna’s retirement property overlooked the very same two-headed mountain that Columbus had christened Dos Hermanos, the Two Brothers, and which was known in Kreyòl as De Tèt. The Doctor had unearthed zemi amulets on the summit, and found petroglyphs carved into rocky outcroppings, an experience that had inspired him to poetry:
During the rainy season dark gray, scudding clouds are drawn to the mountain, plunging it into deep shadow, and on the heights, a cold penetrating wind makes one forget that the foot of this peak stands in the tropics. As on all cloud-wreathed summits, where the ground recedes in all directions into a boiling mass of vapor, the impression is one of mystery and grandeur.
In the shadow of these mountains, Dr. Hodges surmised that perhaps he might finally escape into relative peace, working intermittently on various subjects that had piqued his curiosity. The years here haven’t really been what you might call easy, he mused. When we sailed off into the blue those many years ago . . . I had many misgivings. I believe, however, that God has been faithful to our vision.
To read those letters now, knowing precisely how that vision unraveled, is to tempt my own missionary impulse—I want to reach back and shake his stooped shoulders.
Surely, I tell myself, if he had known what was coming, he could have found a way to walk away before it destroyed him. But perhaps I am too optimistic. Even if we could foresee our own demise, would we really have the strength to prevent it?
BOOK TWO
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree.
W. S. MERWIN,
“PLACE,”
THE RAIN IN THE TREES
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
T. S. ELIOT,
“THE DRY SALVAGES,”
THE FOUR QUARTETS
The Burned Village
Ayiti, 1493
ON HIS SECOND voyage, Columbus returned to the New World flush with fame. The ships that accompanied him were crowded with men eager for their share in the wealth—former prisoners freed by the crown to help civilize the islands, priests eager to convert the heathens. But of Columbus’s proud first settlement, La Navidad, only burned timbers remained. None of the thirty-nine men had survived.
The gracious Guacanagarí pled innocence. Fragmentary stories emerged that the Spaniards, savage with infighting, had commandeered as many as five Taíno women apiece. Death came by disease, by swordpoint, and, it was rumored, at the hands of Caonabo, a cacique from the south of Ayiti who—having sworn no loyalty to the Spaniards—was rumored to have administered the judgment that the lawless men brought upon their own heads.
Enraged that his vision had so quickly unraveled, Columbus ordered retribution. Caciques were captured and sold as slaves, or hanged, like the poet Anacaona, Caonabo’s widow, whom the Spaniards believed to be in alliance with the devil because the feast that she served her ungrateful guests included roasted iguana—which the superstitious colonizers mistook for dragons.
The cacique Hatuey from the province of Guahaba ordered his people to throw their gold into the murky depths of the Limbé River and flee. But even this precaution could not save them. Hatuey, targeted by the conquistadores as an incendiary symbol of native resistance, was eventually hunted down in the mountains of Cuba and condemned to the stake. A Franciscan priest urged Hatuey first to be baptized; Hatuey, tied to his funeral pyre, asked if there would be any Christians in heaven. Assured that there would be, Hatuey proclaimed that he had no wish to go to such a place. At these blasphemous words, Spanish soldiers set him alight, and Hatuey’s enslaved people were condemned to the mines.
The gaping irony, that those who claimed to speak on behalf of God seemed to be concerned only with wealth and power, did not escape the ire of the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. Outraged, he wrote a blistering Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and demanded protection from the Crown for indigenous peoples. He described how two Taíno boys brought parrots to the conquistadores—and the ones who call themselves Christian took the parrots and just for the fun of it, cut off the heads of the two boys.
Less than thirty years after the arrival of the gold-hungry Europeans on Hispaniola, the Taíno population—their garden plots destroyed by free-ranging Spanish cattle, vulnerable to smallpox, and weakened by famine—had shrunk, according to a 1519 census, from an estimated one million inhabitants to only twenty-five hundred.
Spanish settlers accused Columbus of having inflated his stories about the great wealth of the New World, and he was removed by the Crown for failing to keep order. He was taken back to Spain in chains.
Ironically, it was Bartolomé de las Casas, the passionate defender of the Indians, who suggested that the shrinking Taíno labor force be replaced with imported African slaves—though he later repented of his advice. For what followed was unimaginable. Cramped slave ships. Bodies fed to the sharks. Brutalities that defied comprehension. When Spain eventually abandoned the western half of Ayiti for more profitable colonies in the New World, and ownership passed to the French, an eighteenth-century etching by a shocked gentleman witness showed a punishment designed by plantation owners: a hole dug just deep enough to cradle a pregnant woman’s belly so that the owners could beat her as close to death as possible yet still harvest the unborn slave she carried. That this same colony poured such vast wealth into the coffers of Europe made the depravity that much more chilling.
* * *
On the night of the great slave uprising in 1791, in a dark stretch of woods along the north coast of Haiti, the rebel leader Boukman rallied his fellow slaves to seize their destiny and fight for their freedom.
Boukman’s fierce cry was later imagined and set down in words that every Haitian schoolchild would recognize:
The God who made the sun, who stirs up the sea and makes the thunder roar, is ordering us to vengeance.
He will help us throw down the image of the colonist’s God,
who is thirsty of our tears.
Listen to the freedom that is speaking to our hearts.
I swear I will never let the blacks live in slavery.
A thousand plantations in the rebellious north—including Limbé and Acul—burned to the ground. The slaves carried as their standard a spear with the impaled carcass of a white baby.
Ayiti’s soil was thick with blood: slaves, colonizers, Taínos, missionaries, all heaped together in their torment. The land was torn apart by their suffering. Hills, topsoil, forests gone, washed out to sea or burned until nothing remained but charcoal. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Christian conquest of the New World had accomplished a desecration so profound that five centuries would be insufficient to heal the scars.
There Goes My Life
Idyllwild, 1989
MOM AND DAD say we’re going to Haiti by the end of the summer—or whenever we get the money, whichever comes first. There goes my life!
I put down my pen and closed my journal. When I turned thirteen, my father had dug out the dirt under the porch of our Idyllwild cabin so I could have a room of my own. The damp earth floor had been tamped down and covered with a sheet of plastic and a carpet remnant, and there was one tiny window that the raccoons rattled at night. My head almost grazed the five-foot ceiling, but when I clicked on the lamp and curled up in my sleeping bag, it was the perfect place to decompress my whirling brain.
I had whole notebooks
full of various attempts at stories and poems, although I rarely finished any of them, frustrated that I couldn’t force the words on the page to match the fierce rhythm in my head. I hadn’t forgotten my promise to Suzette to dedicate my first book to her, but my seven-year-old confidence had fizzled out.
My little sisters, ages eight and eleven, still slept upstairs on bunk beds in the one-room cabin, while my parents had the loft. I was careful never to invite classmates over to the house, having won a scholarship to a prep school in Idyllwild that offered Latin and rock climbing; I would have died a thousand deaths if any of my friends found out about our pit toilet. Nor did I disclose that my father’s idea of a good time was to drive out to empty campgrounds on the weekends and raid the dumpsters.
My father's excuse for these excursions was that he wanted me to learn to drive stick shift in the green pickup, which backfired constantly and had rust holes under the passenger seat, so that I had to scoot the floor mat in place or get splattered with muddy runoff from the wheels.
In the empty parking lot of the Pinyon Flats campground, I hunched behind the wheel, mortified, while my father swung one leg over the metal lip of a dumpster and jumped inside. I could see the top of his head as he clambered over bedsprings and flattened cardboard.
—Come here and give me a hand with this! he called moments later, his voice echoing against the metal. —Perfectly good clothes, he grumbled, handing down a ripped plastic trash bag. —What people in this country throw away!
I talked him out of bringing back a skirt for Mom, but he still made me spin doughnuts in the empty parking lot before he drove us home. I clenched one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift as he tried, exasperated, to explain how to shift into second gear without stalling out.
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