Dust Doesn’t Rise Without Wind
Pousyè pa leve san van
Limbé, 1990
I DID NOT piece together until decades later that at the same time I was trying to negotiate my independence from my father behind the closed doors of our volunteer cottage, the Hodges family was embroiled in parallel conversations with the board of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.
The Foreign Mission Society, which had changed the name on its letterhead to International Ministries to reflect the changing times even though the original title was retained on legal documents, had dropped increasingly forceful hints over the years that it would prefer to see more cooperation between the missionaries and the local Haitian Baptists. Dr. Hodges, by way of argument, pointed out in carefully typed letters that his daughter Barbara played the piano and directed a church choir; he himself taught Sunday school at the Limbé Baptist church. As for the suggestion that members of the Haitian Baptist Convention be given a titular role at the hospital, the Doctor pointed out firmly that the pastors had no medical training.
This potential conflict had rumbled just below the surface for decades, with negligible impact, until Dr. Hodges turned sixty-five years old. At which point the board of International Ministries, whose official policy eschewed any authority structure that smacked of colonialism, asked Dr. Hodges to either choose a successor or relinquish financial control to national leaders, as mandated by mission policy.
The initial conversations were cordial, until Dr. Hodges announced that he saw no need to tinker with a system that had more than proved its efficacy, and he had no immediate plans to retire.
The American Baptist Board of International Ministries, thrown back on its heels, reconsidered its strategy. The men on the mission board visited once every few years for official ceremonies, but had no precise role in Haiti. They could not claim to have carried the foundation stones for the hospital; nor could they boast of patients healed, generators fixed, or trees planted. And yet they were, technically, Dr. Hodges’s superiors, conduits of the monies that poured in monthly from distant supporters. And in rare cases of extreme insubordination, the American Baptist Board of International Ministries had the power to strip errant missionaries of their title and authority—although such a thing was never mentioned in polite company.
My father overheard enough to understand that the Hodges children feared losing their homes and responsibilities should the leadership at the hospital change hands. (The Hodges children were not shy in voicing their opinions.) But as the date for the presidential election in Haiti approached and the missionaries gathered in the evenings to listen to Voice of America radio broadcasts in the Doctor’s study, the far more pressing conflict seemed to be the escalating violence in the Haitian countryside.
* * *
When I was fourteen, my understanding of Haitian politics was ill informed and filtered through cynicism. I had noted in my journal, just after we’d been caught in the roadblock in March: A woman president (temporary for three months—until the “election”) was sworn in at 10 a.m. (well, it was scheduled at 10:00, but it ended up happening around noon. That’s Haiti for you!)
What I did not understand until years later was that three days after the coup d’état of Prosper Avril, General Hérard Abraham, the acting head of state, had ceded power voluntarily, and in his place a provisional president had been sworn in, with a mandate to organize what some were calling the first free and fair elections in Haiti’s history.
Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, who had already made history as the first female justice appointed to the Haitian Supreme Court, admitted that she preferred the solitary pleasure of books and classical music to the public eye, but declared that she would accept her heavy task in the name of Haitian women. Democracy, for the first time in decades, was poised to take her seat at the National Palace.
Over the next nine months, twenty-four separate candidates for president vied for the favor of first-time voters—including the former head of the Tonton Macoutes, a man named Roger Lafontant, who had returned from exile and made no attempt to hide his Duvalier connections. The two front-runners were Marc Bazin, a former World Bank economist who had worked as the Haitian minister of finance and believed that a stable economy was the key to prosperity; and his ideological opposite, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest with strong connections to Vodou and social justice, had made his name in the slums of Port-au-Prince, with fiery liberation theology sermons about how it was long past time for the rich to share their wealth with the poor: We must end this regime where the donkeys do all the work and the horses prance in the sunshine.
Dr. Hodges, during his three decades in Haiti, had done his best to steer clear of politics but he was concerned that Aristide’s rhetoric seemed to place missionaries on the wrong side of the divide. Instead of being seen as generous benefactors, missionaries, for the first time that Dr. Hodges could remember, were cast as privileged oppressors with access to foreign funding.
When the more politically conservative presidential candidate Marc Bazin swept into the hospital yard on a campaign stop, the Doctor cleared his throat and shook his hand uncomfortably; he did not want to appear to be taking sides. Aristide, however, showed no interest in hobnobbing with the missionaries. His supporters danced through the streets of Limbé shouting—Oh! Ah! Oh! Ah!—as they swayed to the rhythm of drums and whip cracks. My father caught a glimpse of the bespectacled priest through the barbed-wire fence behind the tree nursery. For a moment, the two men locked eyes, then the flatbed truck rolled on, past the water fountain, as the slim priest was swallowed up by the ecstatic crowd.
My father, like Dr. Hodges, was skeptical of Aristide’s campaign promises; redistributing wealth sounded like a slick way to justify more violence. Aristide promised a new and prosperous Haiti, but to my father it seemed like the only real social agenda was to target new scapegoats. And if owning four karo of land—about twelve acres—instead of one tiny garden plot was enough to make someone a target, then Haiti was in trouble.
Better to skip the campaign speeches and do something useful, my father grumbled as he pedaled his bicycle up the highway to visit Zo. Another round of violence was the last thing the country needed right now. People were already too nervous to plant trees or plan for the future.
Wading across the Limbé River, my father was startled to find an open basket where the paths forked at the kafou. Flies buzzed over the strange apparition: short, glossy brown hair, a dark mane. A horse’s severed head, the glazed, milky eyes flung open.
As my father stepped closer to study it, a swarm of flies erupted into an erratic spiral. It looked like it had been a beautiful horse. Possibly a revenge killing. Or maybe a threat? Surely people wouldn’t sacrifice their own animals to appease the lwa; they’d have to be desperate.
My father was, at least, pleased to find that Zo’s trees, even in the midst of the drought, were thriving. Zo had clearly been hauling water out of the river. Even the vegetables looked lush and vigorous. Zo waved my father over to see the new cedar tree he had just planted. Sèd, Zo explained, was used to make coffins. It kept the spirits at bay.
When my father asked about the offering at the crossroads, Zo was circumspect. He lived in a small community; he had learned to be careful. —It is easier to make a snake stand than to change a Haitian, Zo offered by way of a reply. A proverb that my father was free to interpret as he wished.
My father turned Zo’s words over in his mind as he pedaled his bicycle back to Limbé.
The proverb could certainly be read as a criticism of the violence, but it was also true that the snake, though hunted, had figured out how to survive—refusing to stand when it already knew how to glide along the surface of the earth, to drink in the sun’s heat, and to slip between the rocks for protection.
* * *
On the long-awaited and historic date of Sunday, December 16, 1990, citizens across Haiti took to the polls to elec
t a president. The results were to be announced the following afternoon, a day that my father and his fellow nurseryman on the compound, Ron Smith, spent disciplining a thief who had been caught stealing trees on missionary land.
The Morne Bois Pin peninsula, just as it had been when my father was in charge, was distant enough from the oversight of the compound that an enterprising opportunist, sizing up the situation, might hope to harvest a tree or two and escape detection. A pile of freshly thinned logs on Mon Bwa Pin had gone missing, and when local authorities informed the missionaries that they had the suspect in their custody, Ron, who had managed the backbreaking reforestation project for the better part of two decades, wasn’t about to let Aristide’s share-the-wealth speeches give people the idea that they were entitled to steal the hospital’s trees.
Ron didn’t want the man thrown in prison or beaten for his crime, but he also didn’t want to lose any more trees, so he convinced my father and a visiting medical student from Australia to help him stage an improvised charade to give the accused a good scare.
Ron, claiming to have close personal connections to the head of the Haitian army after his years in Port-au-Prince (he was bluffing), promised that terrible things would happen if any more trees went missing. My father held up a broken camera to make it look like he was taking photos. The accused man was forced to hold in front of his chest a piece of paper on which was written Volè. Thief.
The intimidation routine was something of a gamble. If Aristide followed through with his campaign speeches and power swung to the powerless, this kind of hazing could put the missionaries in considerable danger. Nor was the heavy-handed bullying a very Christlike example. Christ, like Aristide, had preached on behalf of the poor. And he had expressly forbidden his followers from repaying evil with evil.
As Ron, my father, and the visiting medical student drove back to the compound, having successfully executed their staged drama, my father felt edgy and exhilarated, like a sheriff in some Wild West frontier town, tracking down a cattle thief. The three blan were still laughing about the scared expression on the face of the accused when Aristide supporters closed in around the missionary vehicle, chanting a victory song. The election results had been announced: Aristide, just as he’d campaigned, had won by a landslide.
The medical student from Australia slid down his seat in terror, having heard horror stories about mobs bent on dechoukaj, but no threats were made as the missionary vehicle inched through the dancing throngs who swayed and clapped, waved palm branches, and blew on conch shells, seized with elation that the long wait was over—that a new and more just society was, after all this time, about to begin.
The View from Dancor
Limbé, 1990
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, which the missionaries had fretted over for weeks, had come and gone without violence (though my father and the Hodges men still insisted that things could turn sour at any moment). Drumbeats echoed down the dirt streets of Limbé to celebrate Aristide’s triumphant victory. He had secured an overwhelming 67 percent of the popular vote; Bazin, who came in second, garnered only 14 percent.
Meadow cut delicate paper garlands of lords and ladies dancing. I helped my mother weave strands of ragged pine branches to hang from our ceiling by a red ribbon; another missionary family had given us five chopped-in-half candles to use for our Advent wreath.
It was as restful a Christmas break as I could have wished for, aside from my anxiety over how I would feel when Peter stepped off the plane after his first semester at college.
I hung back when he stood on the front porch of the Hodges house with the other missionary kids. Those just home from boarding school carried a brash, confident energy that felt distinctly, disquietingly American. They lugged suitcases full of new CDs and talked casually about trips to Chicago to visit car shows. Belle and Paul’s son Loren, who had been away at boarding school his entire high school career, made even the missionary moms swoon with his broad shoulders and easy banter. Whatever uneasiness these fellow missionary kids had felt while masquerading as average American teenagers was now unrecognizable under their sleek haircuts and clothes that anyone could tell hadn’t been purchased at the open-air market or from a mail-order catalog. Even Peter and Ana, expatriates for only three months, seemed transformed. It was I who now felt foreign, overshadowed, awed.
I climbed alone onto the roof of the school after a noisy welcome-back game night around Bernice Rogers’s dining room table. I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter. He’d asked what books I was reading, what I thought of the elections, what the chances were that I’d be able to beat him at a game of spoons. He’d met my eyes and hadn’t looked away. When he listened to me, he seemed so serious that I told him he was a sixty-five-year-old man poorly disguised as a nineteen-year-old. I was relieved that I could still make him laugh.
I leaned back against the roof, my head in my hands, and took in the high chirruping notes of the night insects, the dank undertone of desire in their discordant song. Silence was a mirage, a memory I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A shimmering insubstantial thing that I tried to remember between the murmur of an unseen radio, a trumpet-call kamyon horn from the highway, the scuff of a dog’s feet trotting across the dried leaves, the roosters that crowed at all hours. In six short months, we would be leaving Haiti so that I could finish high school in the States, just as my mother had promised, but at this precise moment I did not wish for any other life but this.
* * *
The 1990 Christmas edition of the Jericho School Journal included a tongue-in-cheek wish list of gifts that we students would have liked to be able to bestow: for Angelina, tap shoes and a dress; Olynda, lots of cats; Apricot, the largest pair of hoop earrings in the world; Flip, a good night’s rest for a year.
On Christmas Eve, Steve and Nancy James popped out of their kitchen with a flaming plum pudding, singing: Please put a penny in the old man’s hat, if you haven’t got a penny then God bless you! Then we dashed off, jolly as you please, for the annual pageant at the Baptist church in Haut-Limbé. Mary perched atop a bony donkey, and shepherds chased a herd of live goats down the aisle. King Herod, who had a tendency to steal the show, draped himself in Christmas lights and plugged himself in. Steve James, the resident pacifist, was particularly pleased when the soldiers sent to kill the innocents in Bethlehem instead dropped their fake guns in front of the manger and worshipped the baby Jesus.
We played board games and watched White Christmas. My mother made caramel corn. My father read John Muir.
Olynda and I, calculating that the parents were sufficiently distracted, found bikes and pedaled to the open-air market. We told Tamara, perched on the front porch of the Hodges house, that if anyone asked for us, we were out of toothpaste.
We’d been friends for almost a year, but it was the first time that the two of us had escaped the compound without adult supervision. I fell off my bicycle in front of the Catholic church and plowed into a woman with a basket of soap balanced on her head. Olly apologized for me in fluid Kreyòl, then laughed all the way to her aunt’s house. I had never met her aunt—I hadn’t even realized that she still lived in Limbé—but the soft-cheeked matriarch welcomed us with a kiss on each cheek and pulled out her best chairs in a cool, tiled front room.
If Olynda felt any resentment over how she had been treated as a child, she didn’t show it. She was her warm, gregarious, teasing self—even more at ease, it seemed, than when we were on the compound. Nephews and neighbor kids flitted in and out of the open doorway, and I discovered to my flat-out surprise that I could follow the flow of the conversation—a spirited, comfortable banter, mostly about school and relatives and food.
I waded in once or twice. Kreyòl seemed to be a language of interrupted monologues and interjections that functioned as a Greek chorus would: commentary; call-and-response. An emphatic language, honed over the centuries to communicate what could not be openly declared, punctuated by accusatory music. Startled laughter deepened lik
e a hollowed-out drum that bounced and rumbled even after the mallet had been set down.
When we reluctantly said our goodbyes and biked home, it struck me that for one gorgeous afternoon I had not been trapped in the role of the blan—the giver of gifts; the visiting expert. I had been no more than a member of the choir.
I felt giddy with possibility: if Olynda and I could explore Haiti on our own terms, without parental interference, maybe I could actually learn to feel at home here. Was such a thing even possible?
* * *
Even my father seemed to be in a temporary good mood when he slipped back into ranger mode to organize a hike on the last day of December. I couldn’t talk Olynda into coming with us, but Peter said that he wasn’t about to let me beat him to the top of Dancor.
Cool mountain air from the summit filled our lungs as my father pointed out, three thousand feet beneath us on the valley floor, the black-sand beach of Bas-Limbé and the green promontory of Morne Bois Pin. Île-la-Rat was a speck along the blue edge of the sea. The stone Citadel, to the north, jutted from the horizon like a raised fist; to the south was Crête Rouge. At the time of the Haitian revolution, twenty-two fortresses had perched, unconquered, along the mountains’ spine, an unbroken line of defense.
As we hiked down, it dawned on me that exactly one year earlier, upon learning that we’d be moving to Haiti, I had scrawled: There goes my life. I had been wrong. I had been yanked into a wider, more complicated world where sorrow and beauty lived under the same leaky roof.
The Gospel of Trees Page 20