My father returned from these forays with five-gallon buckets full of native seeds that he cleaned while watching foreign films checked out from the library, his berry-stained fingers rustling through the husks, his work forever unfinished. He covered the dining room table with fine-mesh screens that he used to separate the seeds from the chaff.
My mother scolded him for the spiders that spun dusty webs inside the car windows, and for stealing her measuring cups, her sieve, and her blender, but there was a tenderness in her voice that I hadn’t remembered.
For years, they led parallel lives. My mother led the church youth group on canoeing expeditions and joined the board of various evangelical not-for-profits, filling her passport with trips to Indonesia, Italy, China, and Mali—trips that my father was usually too busy to join. He put in long hours in the garden and at the nursery, counting down the months until he could go back to Haiti. The proceeds from their u-pick blueberry stand paid the salary of a Haitian agwonòm named Edner, who hiked through the villages around Limbé and taught farmers how to build living terraces and graft fruit trees, since my father was no longer there to insist on it.
My father lived for the weeks when he bumped along dirt roads on the back of Edner’s motorcycle, visiting Zo and checking on the gardens. When he returned from these adventures, he offered everyone who stopped by the house a hunk of dry, chewy kasav and answered the phone in Kreyòl.
* * *
David was with me when I traveled with my parents to Limbé for the first time in a decade. We visited trees that my father had helped to plant in the village of Rey and spent a day with Zo. Joanna regaled me with stories.
—You smile more here, David told me on our last night in Cap-Haïtien. —Maybe it’s the sun on your skin and the extra color in your cheeks. You seem very comfortable here, almost more comfortable than you are back in the States.
I had told David only the painful stories, where the trauma eclipsed the beauty. I had forgotten so much.
* * *
My relationship with my father, even after our trip to Limbé, remained tempestuous. I realized that I was like him in the ways that Haiti had gotten under my skin. Just as my sisters and I were once forced to sit, motionless in the heat, and listen to a three-hour service in Kreyòl, I now cornered my parents and insisted that they recount the intimate details of our lives there—our arguments, our adventures, our betrayals. My mother squirmed, wishing for any other topic of conversation. My father rose to the occasion, using the opportunity to preach, once again, the gospel of trees.
He was still far more liable to express his disappointment in me than offer a compliment, and more than once he hung up on me or told me via email that I was clueless. But as I pored over his journals and struggled to evoke him on the page, he became, for the first time, a character with whom I could empathize. I had been marked by his anger and high expectations, but I hadn’t understood his buried fears or his unswerving devotion to his calling. As my mother explained, when the topsoil in Haiti washed away, part of my father went with it. Even after so many years away, he had not managed to uproot himself from that fertile, devastated soil.
* * *
When I first began to write about Haiti, before my sons were born, I did not yet imagine that those first resentful drafts would become a meditation on love, in all its complexity. Or that what I had to learn from that troubling, joyful, infuriating missionary compound would become an inheritance that I would one day want to pass on to my own children.
When David placed their first grandson in my parents’ arms, my mother rocked him for long minutes, singing and crying as she welcomed him into this world. My father recited the Latin names of trees over his pink, scowling face—and then spoke to him in Kreyòl.
Tranbleman de Tè
Oregon, 2010
ON JANUARY 12, 2010, my sister Rose was about to call and wish our mother happy birthday when she saw a news headline flash across her computer screen. A 7.0 earthquake had struck Port-au-Prince.
My mother had planned to celebrate with a long walk and dinner in town but after Rose’s phone call, she fell face first onto her bed to sob and pray. My father spent hours on email, trying to contact everyone he knew from Haiti.
My sisters and I stumbled through the week in a daze. Friends from the missionary compound, loosely reconnected on Facebook, posted images of dust-covered survivors emerging from collapsed buildings as the death toll climbed: 200,000; 230,000. An estimated 1.5 million people had lost their homes.
My father called Portland every few days to update us on the latest news. I juggled the phone, tripping over LEGOs on the kitchen floor as my youngest son grabbed the receiver to say hello to Grandpa Jonny.
Limbé, a hundred miles north of the epicenter, hadn’t experienced any significant damage, but as refugees straggled out from the capital, even Cap-Haïtien was running low on supplies. Dr. Steve James, who had left Hôpital le Bon Samaritain to support several small rural clinics around Haut-Limbé, drove down to the epicenter with his colleagues to help however they could.
Dr. Manno, the Haitian director of Ebenezer Clinic, filled the pickup with as many refugees as he could bring back to the Limbé Valley. As aftershocks shook the ground, Steve James and others set up an emergency response center under the trees in Gressier, just outside of Léogâne, one of the hardest-hit slums in Port-au-Prince. For two weeks, they slept in tents and improvised splints from cardboard and duct tape. Faced with the magnitude of the devastation, their meager supplies were quickly depleted. Nancy James leveraged contacts in the U.S. to send bandages, Tylenol, and gauze for expedited delivery on the missionary plane.
A week after the earthquake, I strapped the boys in their car seats and drove down to my parents’ farm for the afternoon, just to be around others who had loved Haiti. I could hardly concentrate. The country had already survived so much, how could it be asked to endure one more round of devastation?
My mother poured cups of tea while the boys played at our feet. The earthquake was all we could talk about. Cell phone towers were down in the capital, and the infrastructure had collapsed, which meant that it had taken hours—sometimes days—for people in the north to realize what had happened. Laurie and Casso’s son Tony, who had been Meadow’s classmate at Jericho School, had been among the first to drive down from Cap-Haïtien after the earthquake. His wife’s family lived in Port-au-Prince, as well as his cousins on his father’s side, and after seeing the extent of the damage, he returned to install satellite telecommunications systems for the Red Cross.
Lolo, the daughter of Haitian-American artist friends, fluent in at least three languages, had lost her home in Port-au-Prince and was sleeping in her car with her two sons. Olynda, in Florida, was in the process of gathering donations. Anticipating that the foreign news agencies would soon arrive to put their own spin on the earthquake, Lolo met the arriving journalists at the airport, determined that they should have access to accurate translations; we later heard her voice on the BBC.
It was jarring to realize that my parents had originally planned to be in Haiti during the first two weeks of January 2010 for an agricultural seminar. If the conference had not been rescheduled at the last minute, they would have been in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit.
—I don’t know if I would have been able to come out of the rubble singing, my mother admitted. —I hope that I would be able to do that, but I don’t know if I could.
We held the unspoken in silence.
The grandsons, well aware that we were too busy talking to pay them any attention, devolved into anarchy. The younger one threw a wooden block, and the older one howled when his carefully balanced tower clattered to the floor. My mother offered to take a nap with the sobbing four-year-old. My father suggested a walk with the feisty little brother.
It was a cold afternoon in late January, and tiny shoots of winter rye grass glinted in the dark earth. My son, not quite two years old, sat on his grandfather’s shoulders as we w
alked across the fields. He pointed with fat childish fingers at the moon. —Dark! he said, frustrated.
—Moon, dark. He had read Goodnight Moon; the moon was supposed to come out at night, not during the day. These things should not be.
As we rounded a copse of trees and the winter fields opened up before us, I asked my father if he knew what had became of Ti Marcel, the little girl he had brought home from the missionary hospital twenty years earlier. Could she have been in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake?
He explained that he had visited the family in Gonaïves a few times after we left Haiti. Once, he had spent the night as a guest of Cherylene’s relatives and had taken a bucket bath in the courtyard of their concrete block house just like the rest of the family. A gang of kids had watched, awestruck, as he stripped to his underwear. A little girl shouted with surprise: Li blan toupatou! He’s white all over!
The following morning, he had gone to see Cherylene. She had moved into a slum at the edge of town, where, at eleven years old, she was responsible for her two younger cousins, whose mother was dying of AIDS. Cherylene was on her way back from the water fountain with a five-gallon bucket balanced on her head when my father caught his first glimpse of her. Her slight body bent and swayed under the sloshing forty-pound load. Her bare feet were caked with mud.
—It was hard to see her like that, my father admitted. —You girls never had to live like that.
I nodded. There was nothing to say. The world’s deep inequity was an ache that never healed.
My father explained that when he had returned to the home of Cherylene’s wealthier relatives later that afternoon, he met a woman he had never expected to see: Cherylene’s mother.
She had a long jagged scar across her forehead.
—I thought you were dead, my father blurted out, then immediately regretted his words, as Cherylene’s mother turned on her relatives in a fury: how dare they pretend she was dead, she had never been dead, she had no plans to die. The others shouted back that she was as good as dead, causing a scene like this: Moun fou, crazy idiot. Now get out of the house, they commanded.
She left, still shouting. Her milk had dried up before she understood that she had a child. She was equally prone to outrage and careless joy. Occasionally, she threw rocks at strangers. The scar on her forehead was from a rock that had once been hurled at her.
My father never saw Cherylene’s mother again. Several times he wrote to the relatives in Gonaïves but received no response. The silence was notable, weighed against the stack of tissue-thin airmail envelopes he received from other Haitian acquaintances—each new letter replete with graceful prose, fervent wishes for our good health, and then, invariably, a request for funds. My father sent money for funerals, for a new house about to be constructed, for school uniforms, and for businesses just about to get off the ground, but he never sent anything to Cherylene. Her family either did not receive his letters, or they did not want his help.
—Do you think she’s still alive? I asked my father. She would have been in her mid-twenties, a few years younger than Rose.
—It’s hard to know, my father admitted.
We were on our way back across the field, my son asleep in his grandfather’s arms, slumped and peaceful against his chest.
The earthquake had been only the most recent catastrophe. In 2004, on the two hundredth anniversary of Haiti’s independence, Hurricane Jeanne had torn across the mountains above Gonaïves. The treeless hillsides funneled the rainwater into the ravines, creating a river of mud twenty feet high that all but leveled Haiti’s third largest city. It was impossible to know if Cherylene had been one of the survivors.
—I used to think back then that she was better off with her family, and that if she had a family to take care of her, then she should stay with them, my father said.
—You don’t think so now? I asked.
—It would have been complicated to adopt her, and it wouldn’t have been easy for her, either, growing up a black girl in a white family, he admitted. —If we had adopted her, I probably would have thought by now that it would have been better to let her stay with her own family.
He let out a brief, pained laugh.
No matter what path we could have taken, we would have failed her: love’s inevitable sorrow.
My son shifted and breathed a deep sigh.
—It was so amazing that she survived when she was a baby, my father said. —There was one time when we went to Port-au-Prince for a few days, and when we came back, they told us that eight or nine babies had died that weekend. She was still alive.
The blackberry vines tugged at our clothes as we cut through the trees. I followed behind with a fallen kid glove and a rain boot. The evening sun made a halo of my son’s curls.
—I used to think that she must have been saved for a reason, he confessed.
—And now? I asked.
—I don’t know, he admitted, kicking off his rain boots onto the porch. —Perhaps it’s made me more cynical.
We stepped inside, and he gently settled his grandson into the green chair where I had been born. My son stirred. My father rocked him with a callused hand until he fell back to sleep.
Could I have shared him with her? Let him be a grandfather to her children as well as my own? I had been so jealous of her when I was younger, but had we adopted her—if her family had permitted it—she would have become ordinary: a sister to quarrel with and defend, whose faults I could have listed as readily as my own.
Now that I was a mother, I understood my father’s impulse. I wondered what I would say to Cherylene were I able to find her again. I wondered what she would say to us.
Mon Blan
Port-au-Prince, 2010
IN THE WEEKS after the earthquake, my father contacted every organization he could think of to offer his services, but it seemed that without medical training, he would be of little help in the recovery efforts; there were more volunteers than flights to carry them, and food and water were in short supply in the capital.
Then, unexpectedly, he received an email from a forester in Port-au-Prince with whom he hadn’t spoken in decades: How soon can you get here?
The missionary forester had been charged with restoring safe living conditions to two hundred thousand children and families in tent cities under the auspices of an American NGO. My parents were asked to fly down as community liaisons for a four-week assignment. There would be room to set up a tent in a courtyard with the other volunteers. One large meal would be provided each day.
My parents booked tickets for four days out, giving them just enough time to prune the apple trees, find someone to feed the hens, and to pack their suitcases with enough dried fruit and beef jerky that they wouldn’t be a burden on the local economy.
I was surprised by how strongly I wished to join them. I hadn’t returned to Haiti in years. David’s work as a software consultant had moved us to London after our first son was born, and when we returned to Oregon I had been involved in other projects—refugee resettlement in Portland; an Artists-in-the-Schools residency; an oral history of a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification. At fifteen, I had seldom ventured outside the missionary enclave, my understanding of Haiti distorted into a one-sided narrative. But I had learned, through the oral histories that I had helped facilitate in Portland, that the quality with which we listen determines the stories that we will be told. To listen was to bear witness—to enter into another’s world. I longed to finally step across that divide.
An hour before my parents left to catch a red-eye to Miami, I learned that I had received an assignment to report on earthquake recovery efforts for the Public Radio International program This American Life. I would meet my parents in the north of Haiti one month into their trip, though it would mean leaving my husband alone for ten days with our four- and two-year-old boys, longer than I had ever left them. I didn’t even contemplate turning down the assignment, though it startled me to realize how much like my father I had become.
It was all too easy to ignore my own children, whose needs suddenly seemed less important, being less urgent. In my husband’s exhausted but unflagging support, I glimpsed my mother’s old weariness.
* * *
My parents, whenever possible, kept in touch with my sisters and me from Haiti via Skype and email (gone were the days of cassette tapes mailed to the grandparents).
Port-au-Prince was still choked with decay when my parents set up their tent in a dusty courtyard above the city, one month after the quake. Volunteers had flown in from Korea, Guatemala, the U.S.—and work began at four a.m., when the roosters started crowing and the jangling cell phones in the courtyard began to ring.
My parents were the only married couple on staff. My father, with his gruff smile and corny jokes, made friends quickly with his Haitian coworkers, and as my mother joined in, her Kreyòl began to sound less awkward, more conversational. Men and women who had worked as journalists and teachers before the earthquake confided their frustrations and ambitions and my parents listened and asked questions. My parents were sobered by the obstacles faced by their Haitian colleagues but impressed by their stamina. The Haitian staff arrived for work each morning impeccably dressed in crisp shirts and creased pants, but it wasn’t until my father visited the tent cities and saw the sunlight piercing the gaps in the tarp that he realized that his young colleague’s carefully ironed clothes were her only possessions.
The president of Haiti, René Préval, declared three days of national prayer and mourning shortly after my parents arrived, and as the sun broke over the mountains my parents joined fervent Haitian Christians to fast and pray for their country. My mother was humbled by the unshakable faith of those around her. She had felt so isolated, living on the compound. This time, the sorrow was just as intense, but it was shared sorrow. It was not her responsibility to save Haiti—it never had been—but she could at least accompany others in their grief.
The Gospel of Trees Page 31