I learned of Barbara’s death in a newsletter from Joanna a few months later, which included an anonymous poem: When you are lonely and sick of heart . . . bury your sorrows in doing good deeds.
Barbara’s paintings still hung on the wall of the Rose Cottage, graceful silhouettes of Haitian women with baskets balanced effortlessly on their heads. I paused before asking Joanna: Would it have changed your mind if you had known that you would bury two children and a husband here?
—No, Joanna answered firmly. —You have to take life as it comes. I didn’t even think about that.
She explained that when she was eight years old, she had told her mother that she wanted to be a sunbeam and light up some dark corner of God’s earth. —And now that I am getting older, I tell the Haitians that I am trying to be a koukouy for Jezi. She grinned impishly.
—A firefly for Jesus?
—Yes. And the Haitians, they like that. You know, we saw fireflies our first night in Haiti. I looked up and I said to Bill: How nice of God to light up the dark corners!
The Doctor, having learned that Bartolomé de las Casas had caught fireflies so he could read his Bible at night, had given it a try. Joanna lowered her voice dramatically, as if telling a story to a grandchild.
—He turned out all the lights . . . and it worked! Her scraggly eyebrows lifted like a flock of wild birds, and her eyes twinkled.
A faded photograph captured Joanna and the Doctor at their stubbornly defiant five-hundredth-anniversary celebration of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. But Columbus’s empire, like so many of the conquerors who followed, had dissolved beneath him.
—This is one of my favorite pictures of Bill, Joanna confided, noticing my interest. —Do you know that when he died, he had about twenty pairs of suspenders? All the men in the yard asked me if they could have a pair. It was the only thing of his they wanted.
She grinned.
* * *
I walked slowly around the compound after I left Joanna. The sidewalk to Jericho School was cracked and buckled by the roots of a towering eucalyptus. Smooth gray bark pulled away from the trunk in tattered strips, blood-bright against the tender, exposed green. The flat roof where I used to climb up and stare at the stars was hidden from view.
It was hard to imagine that Joanna would ever give up on the hospital; she would rather die fighting than admit she had lost. But the irony of the tropics was that all institutions eventually collapsed: termites burrowed into rafters; there were rodents, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes. Things decayed, and as they disintegrated, old stones were taken for new buildings or housed behind glass in a dusty museum. Unless one was ruthlessly and tirelessly engaged in preserving the empire—at all costs—it would return to the jungle from which it was carved.
—I will go this far, Joanna had admitted to me when I was first trying to piece together the history of the hospital and its rupture with the board of International Ministries. —Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t have done what we did. But we did it. What can you do?
I walked beside Joanna when she hobbled over to the pediatric ward later that afternoon with candy and a bag of plastic toys. She leaned heavily on my arm. She was pleased that people in Limbé now called her Grann—Grandmother. She liked to spend an hour each day playing with the orphans, though her own health was increasingly fragile.
As we moved slowly through the hospital, a barefoot woman in a head scarf stopped to thank Joanna for her dedication, the famous wife of a famous doctor who had saved the lives of thousands.
Fewer earthquake victims had come to the hospital than I’d expected, but there were more options for medical care in the Limbé Valley than there used to be, including clinics staffed by Cuban doctors.
The upstairs chapel where we had held our ill-fated medieval feast had years ago been converted into a storage depot, its shelves lined with donated shoes, bed pads, plastic Easter eggs, bathing suits, sweaters, eyeglasses, toothpaste, and a Mexican doll with an oversize sombrero marked “50 cents” in crumbling masking tape—gifts from supporters eager to help the missionary cause. Everything was dirty.
The children in the pediatric ward sat in wooden chairs in a loose semicircle around Joanna as she fumbled with the sticky wrappers of donated candy canes. A blind boy reached into her apron pocket for more candy, and she tickled him under the chin. I remembered how uncomfortable I had felt when I visited the pediatric ward as a teenager, but Joanna seemed utterly at ease.
—I used to just bring them toys, Joanna explained, —then someone sent M&M’s and they really liked them, so then I got suckers and cheese bits, and someone suggested that they might like peanut butter—but the cooks scolded me for that in the kitchen, said I was using up what they bought for the doctors.
A boy with emaciated legs jabbed at a wobbling M&M, but he could not make his fingers close around it, so he slid off his chair and lay on the floor to lick at it.
—What do you enjoy about this? I asked Joanna, still trying to understand why she kept coming back year after year to dispense such meager kindness.
—I think it’s nice to see them happy. She squinted up at me, her wrinkled face beaming.
Toys spilled across the table, and children grabbed favorites. A boy squeezed a toy monkey, which thrust out its tongue. A red plastic car raced across the cement floor until it bumped against my foot and rolled over.
Joanna seemed happy dispensing treats to adoring children. At almost ninety, she was still chipping away at her life’s work. If any of her nine hundred–plus supporters complained of toothaches or swollen knees, Joanna replied with a poem: Oh, a trouble’s a ton, or a trouble’s an ounce, or a trouble is what you make it. And it isn’t the fact that you’re hurt that counts, but only how did you take it?
Joanna’s optimistic newsletters were largely responsible for the salaries of the nearly one hundred Haitian nurses and lab technicians, pharmacists, yard workers, cooks, and doctors on the payroll. —Keep praying for us, the hospital needs it, she instructed when I leaned down to say goodbye. Her parting words into the microphone were: Don’t forget to delete the bad stuff!
She waved jauntily, a wrinkled empress of a dilapidated kingdom.
I knew already that I would fail her. I could not tell the story of the compound without the hurt and heartache, the moments of betrayal and doubt. Even in the Bible that Joanna loved and had built her life around—a book that I, too, found mesmerizing, though half the time, like my father, I wanted to hurl it through a window—the bitter stories had not been left out.
The broken shards were part of the whole: a mosaic composed of all that we feared, hoped for, trusted, sacrificed, loved, and lost. There was beauty, but not in the soaring, redemptive way we imagined when we loftily hinted to our supporters that we were bringing hope to Haiti.
I suspected that, at her best moments, Joanna realized the truth—the truth of all philanthropic enterprises: that she needed Haiti and the hospital more than they needed her. She wanted to die with her boots on, just like her husband. A firefly for Jesus.
* * *
Perhaps, after she was gone, a rapprochement would become possible between the missionary hospital and the Convention Baptiste d’Haiti. I wanted to believe that the community that had laid the foundation stones so many years earlier could recruit a team of visionary professionals to reassess the hospital’s priorities and restructure the aging institution to reflect the future instead of the past. To take on the burden of responsibility for Haiti’s welfare, without recognizing the self-sufficiency and determination of the Haitians themselves, could lead only to grief.
As I stepped outside the hospital gates, children sprinted through twisting alleyways, and women balanced sloshing buckets of water on their heads. Music from a tinny radio floated over into the empty compound. Life was on the other side of the walls.
Cherylene
Gonaïves, 2010
I HADN’T SEEN Cherylene in almost a decade. Having spent so much of
my childhood resenting her, I wanted to make peace, if at all possible; I wanted to know that she was okay. Having already scouted the area, my father had given up hope. Still, I managed to convince him to at least help me look for her.
In Gonaïves, we climbed down from the back of an open pickup and brushed the dust from our backpacks. The heat pressed in like a damp towel. My father thought that he recognized the old bus station, but most of the streets had changed locations after the floods. The concrete block house where Cherylene’s relatives had lived was nowhere to be found.
On a dusty side street, we paused to ask strangers if anyone knew a young woman named Cherylene who once lived in this neighborhood. She would be in her mid-twenties and would have a pink scar on her chest from a cooking accident. We didn’t know her last name.
At first no one remembered her. Then a woman with a raspy voice stood and gestured for us to follow. She led us down an alley to a small unpainted house.
She knocked confidently. A barefoot girl opened the door, perhaps six or seven years old. With her hair in braids and her lower lip trembling, she looked like a more delicate version of the saucy six-year-old I remembered, the girl who had asked to keep my sunglasses.
I knelt down to explain that we were looking for an old friend named Cherylene.
The girl answered shyly that yes, her mother was named Cherylene.
—Does she have a scar on her chest? my father asked.
She nodded yes, then shook her head no. She rocked slowly from one foot to the other as if embarrassed by the attention.
A few minutes later, the girl’s mother returned. She smiled but looked confused.
My father shook his head. It was not Ti Marcel.
* * *
She had survived other calamities: infancy; childhood; the burn that left the skin on her stomach and arms bubbled and pink.
I wanted to believe that Ti Marcel’s luck had held. It was not unreasonable to expect that she would have survived adolescence in the slums of Gonaïves, where my father had last seen her, in the crooked house whose walls buzzed with insects in the dry season and whose floor in the rainy season was clammy with mud.
Whenever she could invent an excuse, I imagined, Cherylene would have visited her wealthier relatives in the concrete-block house whose solid walls kept out the rain. Perhaps, if they forgot she was there, she sat on the floor to listen to the radio with the volume turned low. She would have been aware of the injustice. Adolescents are keenly aware of inequity.
But she was nothing if not a fighter. And I hoped that she had emerged into young adulthood with her fighting spirit intact.
She may have watched her aunt die slowly, seen the slow collapse of beauty into despair. But she must have understood, too, the heedless joy of children, their bare feet pounding the dirt in a game of tag, their ragged shirts flapping like sails as they shouted and ran.
I could imagine her, like Olynda as a girl, sorting through piles of rice and beans, her callused hands deftly seeking out the hidden pebbles and the blackened, rotten culls as she sent them flying across the swept dirt.
Did she wish at times that my father had adopted her? That he had challenged her father’s parental claims and uprooted her from her homeland? My sisters and I never balanced sloshing buckets of water on our heads to cook the evening meal. We were expected to make our beds, fold clothes, set the table. If we complained, my father was the first to remind us that, indeed, life was not fair: just ask the kids in Haiti.
Adrift in the world, Cherylene must have learned how to fend for herself, to disbelieve in saviors. She never wrote my father a letter, never asked for a handout.
At times—like every girl poised on the edge of womanhood—she must have hated her body, hated the slick pink scar that swirled like a hot flood across her torso, wished instead for the smooth, unblemished skin of the models on the hair-product advertisements. On other days, I want to believe, she would have paraded through her universe like a Taíno chieftess, deigned to snarl at the critics, and ignored the rest. She would have savored a fresh mango when it was in season, sheltered under the overhang of a tin roof to wait out a storm.
I could imagine her at the river, sent to do the washing with the other ti moun, the cast-off poor relations, standing to survey her territory with her hands on her hips. Though her nerves may have been worn down to wire shards by the wet heat and the endless slapping of soiled laundry against smooth round river rocks, I wanted to believe that she nevertheless would have dabbled her toes in the water just to feel the delicious softness flutter over her skin.
Hers was a loud laugh, a disquieting laugh, and when it seized her, she covered her mouth with her hands, slapped her palms to her thighs, clapped, roared, fell in a heap in the dust, gasped, wiped her eyes, and then broke out laughing again. She was alive.
Is she still?
* * *
Perhaps, like hundreds of other young women, Cherylene moved to Port-au-Prince to find a job. Before the earthquake, perhaps she was able to set up a food stand to sell Chiclet gum and Maggi bouillon cubes from a wooden tray at the edge of a sewer-clogged gutter. Or perhaps she found work at a missionary school for orphans, where she wrung out the laundry or swept the floors.
But perhaps I picture her this way—envying the luxuries of those more fortunate than herself—because it reflects my limited imagination. Perhaps the poverty is mine, not hers.
When I take stock of all that I possess (running water, Internet access, a mortgage, a passport), I cannot conceive of a world in which Cherylene feels herself this fortunate. And yet why should I presume that because I possess more material goods than the daughter of a subsistence farmer and a mother without access to mental health care, I therefore possess a life that is more worth living? I want to believe that she knows her own inestimable worth and pities my ignorance.
* * *
Perhaps, like me, she found someone who looked her in the eyes and understood the value of a woman who knew how to fight. Perhaps she let herself be cradled: dropped her defenses, buried her face, and let herself be held while her body shook and sobbed its heartbroken, lovesick anger at the world’s deep injustice and defiant beauty.
I want to believe that she cradled children of her own, that she looked down and touched their downy heads as they nursed, her body rippling with pleasure and pain as they gulped her body’s very substance transmuted into breast milk. The miracle she never tasted.
* * *
The truth of Cherylene’s life—what she loved, feared, hated, and hoped for—was a story that only she could tell. I could only guess at it and, like my father and countless others, spend the rest of my life haunted by what I had failed to understand.
With or without intervention, Ayiti would continue to survive—just as it always had—leaving a far deeper imprint on its would-be saviors than any faltering legacy we might leave behind.
No more could I look down from on high, smug with pity. The cloud chariots had dissipated; all of our fates were intertwined. Those of the farmers on the eroded hillsides, the activists and executives cushioned by privilege, the schoolchildren, the lovers, the prisoners. We all belonged to this broken, beloved earth. And the earth’s sorrows would leave a mark on all of us.
Work and Rest
Oregon, 2012
I AM STILL working to make peace with my parents, though I think I have made my peace with Haiti. Proud, unbroken, resilient, beautiful, devastated Haiti no longer seems to me a nation that is waiting to be saved.
My father also believes this, and then forgets. He still wants to go down in history as a man who made a difference, in his own country as well as in Haiti. He hikes through old-growth forests to collect yew berries, the red seed of immortality, or along railroad tracks in the rain, stung by yellow jackets and oily with poison oak, to collect snowberry and mahonia for his seed-collection business in Oregon. He laughs when I point out the obvious metaphor: how, in the waning years of his life, he collects seeds to bury in th
e ground so that new life will emerge. He assures me that he does not feel old.
Like the ant in the parable, he is driven to put away resources against the coming winter. He picks wild plums for jam, grows half an acre of vegetables in a garden that extends further every year, tends the chickens, plants native trees along the creek. He rests only in winter, when the last of the native seeds have been gathered, and then he goes back to Haiti, to walk the eroded hills.
I recognize this same obstinacy in myself and fear it. I must choose deliberately to rest, to make time for my children, to make time for joy—struggling, always, against the guilt that I inherited. Will we ever be free from the burdens our parents carried?
When I finally made it home to my children after reporting on the earthquake, my boys dove into my arms and refused to let go. A canceled flight out of Cap-Haïtien had left me stranded for two extra days in Florida, where I stayed with Olynda and her utterly charming seventeen-year-old son, who kicked his skateboard under the couch and showed me images of his latest clothing design projects.
My two-year-old son, who had stayed up past bedtime to meet me at the airport in his pj’s, fell asleep as soon as I curled up next to him in bed, his breathing soft and even.
When I tucked in my eldest, he asked: Mom, why did you have to go?
I rubbed his back and tousled his hair. —To listen to people’s stories, I said, trying to keep my voice light.
—But why? he asked. His voice was plaintive; it was as close as he would get to saying that he had missed me.
I paused, suddenly aware that I was filling my father’s shoes. —I didn’t have to go, I told him. —I chose to. I wanted to be there.
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