For this privilege—a perilous trip across the ocean to Miami in an unreliable boat, with no guarantee of survival, much less a warm reception if one did make it onto U.S. soil—three hundred dollars was demanded of each would-be illegal immigrant, even though the holding pens at Guantánamo were the most likely end to the journey, followed by a humiliating return to Haiti.
In the end, the United States sank more than a hundred small wooden boats in an attempt to keep the Haitians out of Florida. Racketeers stole the hospital’s wooden rowboat and demanded three hundred dollars for its return. Dr. Hodges announced that he didn’t have the time or the men to go battle for it. Without the rowboat, the Hodges family finally lost their foothold on the Morne Bois Pin peninsula. The trees on that famously reforested peninsula were soon to follow, pillaged for housing projects or sold on the black market. Within a year, Pine Tree Mountain was as barren as when Dr. Hodges first set foot on its ruined soil. The small rock outcropping carved with a crusader cross—perhaps notched by Columbus himself, the Doctor had conjectured—was no longer shaded by leafy branches. Eden had been plundered. History on repeat.
Even as the political situation imploded around him, Dr. Hodges remained a man who felt most at home in the past. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World was an event about which he had dreamed for decades, and he was unswerving in his allegiance to the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, even after scholars began to accuse the great man of genocide (Dr. Hodges admitted ruefully in a letter to a friend that his loyalty might be construed as an isolated relic of earlier times).
When filmmakers from WGBH in Boston arrived in the Caribbean to make a documentary about the upcoming quincentenary anniversary, and invited Dr. Hodges to participate, he was eager to set the record straight. But when the program aired in the midst of the U.S.-backed embargo, he clicked off the VCR and never watched the tape again.
* * *
A decade after the documentary aired, I hunted down a copy of Columbus and the Age of Discovery and found myself on the floor beside a stack of videocassettes, fast-forwarding through the slow parts. I was surprised that it had warranted such a violent reaction from the Doctor. There were positive things mentioned about Columbus’s skills as a navigator, for example, and his perseverance in spite of the odds. But it no longer seemed possible to pretend that Columbus hadn’t participated in the destruction of the Taínos.
As the WGBH-sponsored sailboat The Westward rocked at anchor in the glittering blue Baie de L’Acul, a handful of Haitian fishing boats drifted in loose companionship around the stern. The camera pulled back through the boughs of a ragged Caribbean pine to follow a worn straw hat in the corner of the frame. Dr. Hodges emerged, carrying under his arm a thick black doctor’s valise.
It felt strange to see him again after so many years. He seemed more vulnerable than I had remembered. His high-waisted gray cotton pants were held in place by a pair of red suspenders, and his right foot slipped slightly on the loose soil, though he quickly rebalanced without losing his dignity and glanced at the camera at the appropriate moment. He smiled faintly, an indulgence that none of the other experts had allowed themselves. He looked like a boy who hoped to be recognized for his discoveries.
The copper mine on Morne Bois Pin, which Dr. Hodges had discovered shortly after he arrived in Haiti, was little more than a rough depression in the soil. With the red earth cut open at his feet, the Doctor announced to the camera with the confident authority of one accustomed to pronouncing diagnoses: If my interpretation is correct, and I believe it is, why, this is one of the first pits or hard-rock mines dug in the New World.
He smiled, a collection of loose pens crowded into his breast pocket, a living artifact from a more idealistic age. I was surprised that he seemed so oblivious to the implications of his statement. The mines had been excavated by slave labor and had touched off widespread deforestation; Columbus’s arrival in the New World had precipitated genocide.
The copper mine slowly faded from view, but the narrator’s voice-over continued, qualifying Dr. Hodges’s enthusiasm with the more wry observation: Greed and the promise of gold changed Hispaniola forever.
The Doctor’s final appearance in the documentary took place in the consulting room at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, where he explained the exchange of diseases during Columbus’s first voyage, although, to judge from his flat, disinterested expression, he would have preferred a less contentious subject.
The historical evidence pointed to the transmission of syphilis from the Taínos to the Spaniards; the Spaniards, for their part, inflicted smallpox and a host of other diseases. For a moment, between questions, the Doctor’s professional confidence faltered. I had never seen him in this light; he looked like a man tired of contemplating contradictions.
Dr. Hodges’s dispiriting voice-over continued as the camera showed him scratching notes on flimsy triage tickets on the porch of the hospital, a solitary figure engaged in a Sisyphean struggle.
And then the hospital disappeared altogether, fading into a dusky blue oceanscape as The Westward raced on to more compelling historical events. Coming up next: the Santa María runs aground on a submerged reef outside Cap-Haïtien!
I turned the tape off. I already knew how the story ended.
* * *
In 1992, while the rest of the world chose to ignore the holiday, Dr. Hodges held a defiant, sparsely attended five hundredth anniversary celebration to honor Columbus’s ill-fated inaugural city, La Navidad. He was aware that his hero’s legacy was now in question, and that he, too, was considered a controversial figure by the board of International Ministries for refusing to submit to their orders. In the commemorative photographs that Joanna mailed to us, along with a snappy write-up of the event, her gray hair tumbled over her ears, the Doctor’s thin-lipped smile was etched with wrinkles.
There were no TV cameras or foreign dignitaries in attendance, but the embargo would have deterred them even if they had wanted to come. It was a bittersweet ceremony, although there was something fitting about the way that the gathering was in itself a statement of opposition—in the world, but not of the world, as if it were a verse lifted out of context from the King James Bible.
* * *
After the second missionary evacuation, it took almost a year before any of the doctors and nurses who had fled to the U.S. felt safe enough to move back to Haiti. Some never returned. The imported fruit trees at the Ag Center in Cap-Haïtien died, and Ken Heneise visited only long enough to close down his remaining projects.
My parents, like the board of International Ministries, did not learn the full story until after the paperwork had already been signed, but as the embargo wore on, making it all but impossible to buy fuel for the hospital generators without documented not-for-profit status—a legal technicality that Dr. Hodges had never bothered to obtain—the family took matters into their own hands.
With the help of a Haitian lawyer, the hospital was registered as a not-for-profit foundation in Port-au-Prince. The name Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, however, had already been taken, so the family came up with an alternative for the official documents—Havre de Bonne Santé, the Harbor of Good Health—thereby preserving the “HBS” initials and allowing the hospital to maintain the illusion that nothing had changed.
The Hodges family also, unbeknownst to the board of International Ministries, set up a board of directors to oversee the hospital. But the clause that sparked the greatest controversy—when it was discovered—was the one stating that the board must include two members of the Hodges family, both of whom would have veto power over the remaining board members.
It was an unprecedented exploit in the history of American Baptist International Ministries. Sundquist flew down for a tense conference during which he accused Bill and Joanna Hodges of violating a sacred trust.
—People stood up and actually swore, Joanna recalled with a prim flutter of indignation. —In a missionary meeting.
The Hodg
es family, from her perspective, had willingly sacrificed their personal ambitions for over thirty-six years to keep Hôpital le Bon Samaritain afloat, with very little help from the mission board. She did not see any harm in wanting to preserve an institution they had paid for with their own sweat and blood.
Sundquist, responsible for missionaries in almost ninety countries, found it incredible that the Hodges family alone believed that they did not have to defer to the indigenous church.
It feels to me like you have confused yourself with the hospital God has created, he wrote to Dr. Hodges. I do not like unilateral decision-making, ultimatums, or threats. They have no place between Christians, but Bill I am soon going to be forced to act. Our understanding of missions is that no matter where we serve, no matter who we serve, our missionaries work alongside of the people of the country, preparing them to assume responsibility and ownership of all ministries. A family-controlled institution is in direct conflict with the very core of our Missiology.
Dr. Hodges tapped an indignant rebuttal: If placing two family members on a board of five, in a land that is melting away under our feet . . . is an attempt to gain personal advantage from a dilapidated medical service in Limbé . . . then I must either be demented or deluded . . . Who would want to own an unstable, run-down, crowded medical service in a small tropical town, where charity considerations alone demand an infusion of at least $10,000 a month?
The possibility that the Doctor, like Columbus, had mismanaged the mission that he had been entrusted with was a verdict he could not bear to accept.
My father, reading Joanna’s dramatic updates, felt his loyalty torn. He wrote a long letter to Dr. Hodges and confided his own tangled family history regarding the date business that hadn’t survived the transition from one generation to the next. He felt a deep loyalty to the Doctor but he worried that the family’s reactionary strategy didn’t seem viable long-term.
The Hodges children, as to be expected, voiced strong opinions. Susan had moved to Florida to be reunited with her children and husband after a year apart, but wrote to say: I want to tell you both how proud I am of you. I’m so glad you are both “grenadier” and not on the retirement list!: playing golf or growing roses, flying to Hawaii . . . Joanna and Bill had taught their children the lyrics to “Grenadiers à L’assaut” when they first moved to Haiti in the 1950s, a fighting song from the Haitian revolution: Grenadiers, to the assault! He who dies, that’s his affair!
David Hodges, who had kept his wife and children in Limbé throughout the chaos of the military coup and the subsequent embargo, stormed and shouted, convinced that the mission board was waiting to kick the Hodges family off the compound as soon as they had the chance. Barbara and her brother Paul weighed in as well.
Dr. Hodges briefly considered walking away and letting the board of International Ministries have Hôpital le Bon Samaritain. He could finally devote himself to his archaeology and historical writings; he could even open a small clinic if he so desired—his children assured him that half of the staff from Limbé would probably follow him.
But he couldn’t let go of what he had built. He claimed that he was too old to start over; if he had been ten or twenty years younger, he might have attempted it, but he had just turned seventy. He had spent too many years trying to force the unwieldy institution to resemble the ideal he carried in his imagination: a sanctuary of hope in the midst of suffering.
Joanna urged him to hold his ground. And in truth, no one really believed that the board of International Ministries would follow through with their threats. Dr. Hodges and Joanna had been loyal, productive missionaries for almost four decades: Why would the mission board turn its back on them now, over something so small as veto power?
* * *
Outside the compound walls, Haiti was in full-scale meltdown. Aristide supporters had convinced the U.S. government to reinstate the deposed president using Special Forces commandos (a betrayal by his own countrymen that the Doctor felt keenly). During Operation Uphold Democracy, Green Berets took over the Limbé police station and blared psych-ops rock music as a warning to anti-Aristide rebels. Helicopters thundered over the valley. Anti-American sentiment skyrocketed.
Dr. Hodges holed up in his study after long hours in the clinic, numbing himself with American movies. He was haunted by At Play in the Fields of the Lord, about missionaries in South America who destroyed the very community they had come to save. Pretty Woman entranced and confused him; it was an artifact from a civilization he no longer recognized as his own.
He informed the board of International Ministries that it was a bad time to press the issue of leadership and asked for a year’s reprieve.
The board of International Ministries refused.
In March 1995, Sundquist flew to Haiti for one final negotiation. Bill and Joanna met him at the Hotel Roi Christophe in Cap-Haïtien. The encounter was, in one sense, a wry fulfillment of the old witticism that Baptists can’t stand authority and no authority can stand them. Neither side was willing to surrender.
Sundquist, a confident, broad-chested man who had made it his business to stay abreast of the latest missiological debates, insisted that it was long past time for the Hodges family to defer to local leadership; the White Man’s Burden was no longer a defensible strategy.
Dr. Hodges, quick to dismiss the insights of a man who spoke no additional languages and who had never lived outside the U.S., concluded that Sundquist simply didn’t understand the harsh reality of Haiti. If the hospital were surrendered to the Haitian Baptist Convention, funds would be swiftly redirected to local pastors’ pet projects, and the hospital would cease to function.
In the end, Dr. Hodges and Joanna were informed that if they refused to relinquish veto power, HBS would be cut off from financial support by the American Baptist Board of International Ministries as of July 1, 1995. All missionaries who remained on the compound after that date would be fired.
It is hard not to be bitter, Joanna wrote to her supporters. I guess you might say Bill gave it a “gung-ho” but we struck out. And life goes on. The tickets have to be given out in triage this a.m. Breakfast must be prepared, letters written, and problems solved. The sick people must still have care and so life goes on . . . with chin up . . . Joanna.
Two days later, John Sundquist drafted an official statement on International Ministries letterhead:
Dear Colleagues in Christ,
It is with real sadness that I write to inform you that Dr. William and Joanna Hodges have legally made the Good Samaritain Hospital in Limbé, Haiti, a family-controlled institution.
HBS continued to function after the board of International Ministries cut off support, thanks in no small part to Joanna’s relentless fund-raising, but the conflict splintered the missionary community. Loyal friends who had spent twenty years at the hospital packed their bags, convinced that God was calling them to move on to other work. Steve and Nancy James were the only ones who defied orders.
—You can fire us, they told Sundquist, —but we feel that Jesus is asking us to stay in the midst of this difficult situation.
Dr. Hodges had little strength to continue the work. His one pleasure was the class he called HHGG: Haitian History, Geography, and Geology, which he taught to his grandchildren and the few remaining missionary kids at Jericho School. He had discovered a Taíno settlement behind his retirement house at Chateau Neuf, and on Saturday afternoons he took the children foraging through the dried-grass stalks to search for fragments of broken pottery.
In the two weeks before his death, the Doctor finished several historical newsletters. One was on the ruined palace of Sans Souci, the elegant throne room of Haiti’s first king. He had obtained a coin engraved with the figure of a rising phoenix, alongside Roi Henri Christophe’s motto: Je renais de mes cendres. I am reborn from my ashes.
* * *
He never finished his last newsletter. On Wednesday, when the clinic closed early, he invited Steve James to accompany him on a hike.
He intended to photograph Vodou flags for an upcoming newsletter—a historical explanation of how the flags corresponded with African tribal identities. At Christophe’s inauguration, the newly freed slaves had marched under the flags of Africa, announcing to the world that they had not been broken by slavery. Despite their suffering, they had not lost their identity.
Steve carried his one-year-old son, Micah, in a backpack as the two doctors forded a stream and climbed the narrow footpaths to the top of a nearby mountain. The embargo had forced Dr. Hodges to change his blood pressure medication (the pills he usually took were unavailable), and he had to stop occasionally to catch his breath as it was a two-hour hike to the summit, but Steve noted that he was in reasonably good shape for a seventy-one-year-old.
When they reached their destination, a Vodou priest and his wife were sitting in their front yard with their children. Dr. Hodges greeted them cordially. Over the years, he had treated almost everyone in the Limbé watershed, and bòkò often referred patients to him. He had a reputation among Vodouisants as a man who worked with two hands—one hand blessed by God, the other by magic—though he himself scoffed at this analysis. He was a rationalist; he had little patience with the supernatural.
While Dr. Hodges made polite small talk, the bòkò’s wife disappeared inside the house and returned with a sick child. She requested a triage ticket, and Dr. Hodges obliged. He advised her to bring the ticket to the clinic the following day, or on Friday, adding: If I’m still alive.
—No, Dr. Hodges! You’re not going to die, the woman said, readjusting the sick child on her hip. —You’ll live forever.
Dr. Hodges cleared his throat. He snapped the photos he had come to find, then hiked back down the mountain.
The Gospel of Trees Page 29