My father rounded the corner, took one look and marched over, his shoulders rigid. The teenage boys scattered.
On the drive home, I glared out the window. When I felt the sting of salt in my eyes, I angrily wiped away the tears. I archived my growing list of parental injustices:
My parents SUCK. They have these stupid “dress code rules” that they come up with off the top of their heads whenever they feel like it. It was just another case of some lame, horny guys trying (I repeat, trying) to pick up a girl but Dad told me that it was because I was wearing shorts. He was serious! He really thinks I am a slut. I got this huge, 45-minute lecture about “decency” and “being a proper example to our community.” And after that, Kirsti and Ana walked out wearing even shorter shorts than I had!
We returned to a huge pile of letters with, once again, none for me. Sometimes I feel so confused as to where I really belong.
Weekends in Haut-Limbé held a cavernous loneliness. Our house was separated by a dirt road from the main seminary campus, and every time I pushed open the metal gate, I felt like an idiot trying to stammer out greetings in Kreyòl, my grammar as clunky as a six-year-old’s. The Haitian seminary students were all older than I was, and few spoke English.
Nine-year-old Rose, at least, had a friend her age—Laura Rose, Ivah’s granddaughter, who was fluent in both Kreyòl and English—but Meadow and I had only the novels we borrowed from Casso and Laurie’s bookshelves. Casso, who always seemed to be in conference with someone about the administration of the Baptist seminary, would nod politely and hold open the screen door when we knocked. Laurie was usually at the piano giving music lessons, but being a missionary kid herself, she understood what we were after. We could at least imagine ourselves into other worlds: St. Petersburg, Prince Edward Island, the Warsaw ghetto, Omelas. A book was a door in the wall. An escape.
My father, exasperated that we appeared so uninterested in learning Kreyòl (it was not taught at the missionary school), hired a tutor named Manno, an ambitious young man in his early twenties whose dark eyes, under long, curling lashes, held my gaze and did not look away.
At first I reveled in this attention, but when Manno held my hand in his and insisted that we go on a walk to practice my Kreyòl, something about his confident refusal to take no for an answer made my chest tighten. Unable to admit even to myself what I was afraid of (I could not explain to my unconscious mind that Manno—although persistent and older than I was—was not the nineteen-year-old on the scuba trip), I instead ducked out the back door when I heard him coming.
After weeks of my evasions, Manno finally exploded to Meadow: You do realize that your parents are paying me for this?
In a rare show of solidarity, all three of us eventually managed to convince my father that it would be irrelevant to continue language lessons; all our friends on the compound spoke English. Worn down by our complaining and embarrassed on Manno’s behalf, my father eventually threw up his hands and gave up.
* * *
I never knew what to do with male attention once it had been won, and in that respect I was very much like the heroines in Jane Austen novels, whom I admired and longed to emulate. I adhered, unquestioning, to a dualism that my faith professed to deny but that every rule of propriety had etched in stone: My spirit might be pure, but my body was corrupt, an untamed beast that I must bring under control or risk unimaginable consequences. The missionary parents hinted at the terrifying specter of pregnancy, which lurked at the edges of unchaperoned teenage gatherings, but beyond that we did not discuss it. Birth control was anathema; abstinence was our iron-clad rule of law. (Ashamed, I hid my period for months until my father realized that I was stealing my mother’s tampons.)
No one stopped the teenage boys on the missionary compound if they set off for a long bike ride in the hills, but the feminine ideal seemed to imply that one should suffer beautifully in silence, disappearing into an inner landscape of muted colors and soft edges, safe within a gilded cage—a standard of self-restraint I could never quite live up to. I shrieked and howled and cavorted during volleyball games at Jericho School, wore gold hoop earrings as big around as my neck, and hung my head backward over my chair and laughed until I could not breathe, making a fool of myself just to make everyone else laugh. If prizes had been awarded for trying too hard, I’d have won a chest full of clanking medals.
Only when I was alone did the frenzy subside into loss. Sent to the hospital pharmacy after lunch so that I would not distract the other students, I bent over an electronic scale and counted pills into recycled baby-food jars while Barbara Hodges leaned back in her office chair to argue effortlessly with the drug reps in either French or Kreyòl over the cost of prescriptions. Behind us, at dimly lit windows, Haitian pharmacy workers filled orders and dispensed the donated milk powder.
If I turned right past those windows and went down the raised pathway along a narrow courtyard lined with benches, past market women with bright lengths of cloth and enamel dishes, past beggars and stray dogs and foraging chickens, I would arrive at the pediatric ward, from whose overcrowded cribs my father used to bring home orphans for my sisters and me to love.
The pediatric ward was a magnet for expatriate female volunteers to the hospital, who spent hours patiently rocking the babies and playing with the abandoned children in the urine-stained wards. Even dour, sarcastic Susan Smith, Joanna’s eldest daughter, who wore a permanent scowl and her gray-blond hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck, was transformed. She complained when Joanna hounded her into writing a newsletter—I have been requested to write a HAPPY story!—but her pride was evident when she described a boy named Aristotle, suffering from kwashiorkor, who had been dying slowly of starvation until his mother brought him into the hospital.
Well, you should see my little family now! Aristole is sitting up and chugging down plate after plate of food. He smiles . . . and Jesus’s love just glows around their corner of Peds, like a halo! Although a stranger may only see rags, and dirt, snotty noses, and a bad smell, I feel sorry for that person’s blindness.
Susan, for all her prickliness, was a devoted, generous nurse. I was one of the blind. On the one and only visit I paid to the pediatric ward, at fourteen, a boy with white-blue cataracts grabbed my dress and kept trying to pull me down to his arms. A girl who looked to be my age, with vacant eyes and atrophied arms, moaned softly, leaning against a wall. The smell of urine and diarrhea was thinly veiled by disinfectant. I wish, I just wish that they could all have homes, a place to love and be loved, I wrote in my journal, but I did not return.
I weighed pills and tallied patients’ charts and helped count the thin and wrinkled piles of gourdes on Friday mornings in Joanna’s crowded mayhem of a payroll office, but I could not bear to look into the faces of the orphaned children. Our meager kindness, as missionaries, felt so limited and unsubstantial. It hurt less to turn away.
* * *
Some days, while I waited for my mother to pick us up after school, I’d climb the labapen tree just to be alone with my thoughts. Occasionally, Tamara would keep me company, perched on the edge of the picnic table, her blind eye white and staring. I remembered the outlines of her story—how she’d been left at the pediatric ward and adopted; how she had willed herself back to life—but we had never talked about it.
—I feel like God isn’t really there, she confided once when the two of us were alone in the yard. Sometimes her laughter had a cold, sharp edge.
I didn’t know what to say. Was God actually watching over us? My own family’s return to Haiti seemed less ordained by God than strong-armed by my father. I could still recite the Psalms that Suzette had us memorize when she lived on the compound—If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast—but they no longer felt a talisman against harm. Tamara had seen so much more suffering than I could begin to imagine. Why did she feel so alone? Why did I? Surely God must
have noticed.
Tamara sat on the bench of the picnic table and dug her cane into the dirt. I rearranged my back against the labapen tree.
It was hot and muggy—it was always muggy—and leaves circled down from the zanmann tree. A wash lady sat behind the Hodges house, folding laundry into a wicker basket. A pair of broad pink underwear shook on the line. Tamara changed the subject for me.
—Don’t drink coffee, it will stunt your growth; you’ll end up like me! Her crutch smacked the sidewalk like an exclamation mark as she limped away.
* * *
To be able to forget, if only for a few hours, the heartbreaking lament of Haiti—a scratched and broken record, endlessly stuck on repeat—was in part why I climbed trees and barricaded myself behind books.
Trips to the beach, though far rarer, achieved the same effect. On the few and glorious afternoons when the missionaries loaded sunscreen and cameras into sisal bags for a ride on the hospital’s wooden motorboat, the sea grew wild as the fishing villages and the curved Baie de L’Acul receded behind us. For an afternoon, the tiny island of Île-la-Rat—once a buccaneer stronghold, now a stranded white hillock of sand—was ours alone to savor: a serene and undefiled oasis. There were no forlorn children to linger and stare at our pleasure, no voyeurs to make us wonder why we’d come. The gently splashing waves throbbed a siren song to which we gladly surrendered.
My mother grabbed a snorkel and slipped into the water. Meadow and Rose hunted for hermit crabs along the shore. I folded my journal open on my knees, burying my toes in the warm sand.
Sometime later, I glanced up and realized that Peter had wandered over to join me. I was startled when he sat down beside me and asked how I was adjusting to life in Haiti. I confessed that it all felt a bit confusing.
He admitted that he, too, was anticipating culture shock—he’d be leaving for college at the end of the summer and had never lived in the States before. I sympathized; it could be disorienting to move back and forth between such different worlds.
We sat for a while in companionable quiet, then found snorkels and drifted over the coral reefs. Blue and yellow fish darted beneath our feet.
It wasn’t uncomfortable silence, I noted in my journal afterward, as if trying to decode a mystery.
On the trip home, my father, one hand on the outboard motor, pointed out a distant flock of pink flamingos. I was perched in the prow beside a five-year-old girl, recently adopted, who was learning to speak English. Angelina and I dangled our feet over the waves and laughed whenever a wave leaped up to splash us, then she fell asleep in my lap, lulled by the rocking waves. I watched her sleep and wondered what sorrows she had already faced and what courage she had found to pull around her.
Dèyè Mòn, Gèn Mòn
Haut-Limbé, 1990
THREE MONTHS AFTER my family moved back to Haiti, in March 1990, protests erupted in Port-au-Prince demanding that General Prosper Avril step down as president. I didn’t understand that he had been accused of human rights abuses, or that the demonstrators were agitating for justice. I knew only what my father told me—that there might be roadblocks in Cap-Haïtien, which was why he took back roads from the airport after picking up the mail. My sisters and I, along for the ride, were far more interested in an upcoming movie night on the compound: a chance to forget for a few distracted hours that Haiti might be on the brink of yet another military uprising. By the time we reached the Limbé Valley, all danger, we assumed, had been left behind.
We had just crossed the bridge over the Limbé river, cattle egrets lifting from the rice paddies, when my father slammed on the brakes. Boulders and burning tires blocked the national highway. Through the smoke, gun-toting soldiers waved us to a halt.
My mother began praying aloud in tongues. I hugged my sisters in the back seat. My father leaned his head cautiously out the window and, after a brief negotiation, was told that we could proceed. Soldiers grabbed bystanders by their clothes and shouted orders to heave the rocks from the road. Heat crackled from the burning tires as we crept forward through the inferno on our fool’s errand.
Safe on the missionary compound, we heard more stories of violence. Ken and Debbie Heneise had been caught in tear gas in Cap-Haïtien but had managed to get away. Port-au-Prince was in chaos. By the time we summoned up the courage to drive back across the bridge and down the highway to our home in Haut-Limbé several hours later, my father was careful to offer rides to three Haitian acquaintances at the hospital so that we wouldn’t simply be perceived as the privileged blan, sailing heedless through the wreckage of Haiti’s political aspirations.
That night, my mother sat on my sister’s bed and strummed her autoharp, singing praise songs to keep the fear at bay. Her high, clear soprano echoed down the concrete hallway. Poor Meadow cries herself to sleep at night, I noted in my journal. I wish there was something I could do.
Even after martial law was declared, my father continued to hike several days a week up to Rey, until a truck full of armed men intercepted him, demanding an explanation for the notebook in which he took down the names of local citizens and made notes about their gardens. Apparently, the police station in Limbé had heard suspicious stories about an unknown blan, a possible agitator, but the farmers along the path to Rey rushed to my father’s defense and no charges were made.
—Well, you should be glad I’m not in prison, he announced as he kicked off his shoes by the door.
If he was afraid, he did not let on. My mother’s reaction was equally unreadable. In theory, I understood that yes, we were protected by God, not to mention our American citizenship, but I felt an uncomfortable tightening in my chest when I thought about our Haitian neighbors, most of whom had no means to escape should the situation escalate. When my father hinted that there might be more political unrest to come, Meadow’s forehead scrunched into worried lines. Rose, at nine years old, seemed willing enough to trust that we were going to be okay, but I couldn’t figure out how safe we actually were.
Nor was there any discussion of whether or not Haiti could, in fact, be helped by our feeble efforts.
Letters from our supporters were full of concern. Calm here, my father updated the grandparents. But no guarantee it will remain. My father’s run-in with the Limbé police only seemed to strengthen his determination to make a difference, but the stories he retold around the dinner table were increasingly bleak. The lay pastor in Rey, Frè Reynold, supplemented his meager income by buying and reselling kasav (a local Taíno delicacy, pounded manioc leached of its toxins and baked into a chewy flatbread) in the capital. Usually, Frè Reynold could expect a profit of fifteen U.S. dollars for a four-day round trip, but he had arrived in Port-au-Prince just as the military coup was unfolding. His unsold merchandise rotted in the streets. He lost fifty-eight dollars—two months’ wages—and instead of the usual five-hour kamyon ride home, it took him twenty-four hours to get past all the roadblocks.
Other farmers in Rey were already uprooting their withered green stalks of corn to feed hungry livestock. The early rains, which had lured them into planting their seeds too soon, had come and gone, leaving only dust. A woman with seventeen children called my father over to her three-rock fire to let him taste the only food she could find to cook: green bananas with dried fish and onions.
* * *
My journal, written in pink and teal ink, could not have been more different from my father’s:
[Jon journal] 3/12/90: Started raining early this AM. Just what is needed to calm country down. Planted sugar cane and papaya and kudzu seeds. Also planted Kajou seeds. A few Pele are finally germinating. Went with Reynold to show him Zo’s rabbits and visited his tree plantings. Impressive. He loves trees. Cinnamon flowering.
[Apricot journal] 3/13/90: The country seems pretty stable. We saw not even one glimpse of a soldier. This morning I received another extremely demeaning lecture. This time it was informing me how spoiled I was (now there’s a confidence builder) because I didn’t eat breakfast. See if you
can figure that one out! I HATE Haiti.
My mother, meanwhile, admitted to a friend:
This has been an extremely hard week for me. Usually Jon gets a hold of my letters and writes all over them. But this week’s letter is just between you and me. I could use a good friend right now.
Tomorrow is supposed to be big day for revenge in Cap-Haïtien. They want to dechouke (uproot) all the old Duvalier people who are supposedly armed.
The girls are missing the things we left behind in America. There have been days when I’ve cried and cried. Mostly I think it’s because I’m trying to balance the needs of both husband and daughters. Jon has such high expectations for all of us.
The more my father immersed himself in the agony of the Haitian farmers, he further he retreated from our family, as if embarrassed by our luxuries. My mother seemed dismayed but I, for one, was glad that he wasn’t around—he only criticized. As far as I could tell, he believed that our family’s only purpose was to serve Haitians, which meant that Mother’s Day was neither remembered nor celebrated, until my mother burst into tears and he hastily threw together a shell-collecting expedition. Tenderness was an emotion he reserved for delicate vegetable starts, seedling trees, and babies.
Only once was my mother able to convince him to drive to the beach for an afternoon swim after running errands in Cap-Haïtien. At thirty-seven, she still had the body of an athlete, lean and strong. She slipped off her dress and dove in, pulling her arms through the water in long, even strokes, the wake rippling from her shoulders. She wanted him to forget Haiti, if only for an hour. Instead, he sat with his straw hat jammed onto his forehead as if, by denying himself this one indulgence, he could make amends for having taken time off work in the middle of the week. When they got back into the car to drive home, she refused to speak to him.
The Gospel of Trees Page 17