N'ap Boule

What's happening?

My heart is so heavy in the last week. I may be biased, but there's been such a hopeful energy in this election term recently, despite the fact that I'm very independent and sort of politically homeless in a two-party system, despite the fact that there's been so much more divisive rhetoric on (one of) my formerly favorite social apps, despite all the bad things happening around the country, and despite the fact that it's somehow still a very close race. 

Watching the debate, I shook my head and smirked when Trump talked about the dogs and cats and pets, just like Kamala did, because he says wild stuff like that all the time. I was cheering for the moderators when they fact-checked him on it, although I wish that Harris had done more to set it straight as well.

Then, the issue blew up. Talk about Haitians eating pets and geese, racist enough on its own, turned into talk about voodoo and crime and savagery. And all this from people who claim to be Christians. Outrageous lies and the most specious stories got elevated to the level of a presidential debate, and while some on the right have either qualified the claims or outright apologized and condemned them, most have gone out of their way to perpetuate these vicious attacks. 

I grew up in the 80s in North Miami, when the neighborhood was changing. Caribbeans of all sorts were moving in, and other families were moving out. On our block, close to 135th Street, a kind of cultural thoroughfare in the city (you had to be there), the school buses started picking up a lot more kids from Jamaica and Haiti and other islands, until I was one of the few white kids on the bus to North Miami Senior High. There were two old white ladies on the same side of the street with us, who'd lived there for almost thirty years and both buried husbands in that neighborhood. When they died and their kids sold their houses. Two new Haitian families moved in, and there were a few more kids on the block to ride with on weekdays and run with on Saturdays. 

I don't know why my parents didn't move out when other families did. I don't know if it was financial or political or just stubborn. It could have been a mix of both, or it could have been that they didn't care. We never talked about it. All I knew was that there were a lot of kids with hyphenated last names like Jean-Baptiste and Jean-Pierre, and Saint-Fleur at my school. And I got an education that, apparently, a lot of people outside of our neighborhood. It was a time when these same slurs about voodoo and foods were rampant.

Now, in retrospect, I know that a lot of that was just regular racism, coupled with that "wet foot, dry foot" campaign to let more white Cubans into the country, while turning away Black Haitians by the droves, even though both groups were, ostensibly, leaving the same types of poverty and political violence. At the time, all I knew was that people were saying nasty things, things I didn't understand, about people who were so tidy they insisted I take my shoes off in their house, even when the parents weren't home because they either ran a business, had two jobs, or worked and went to college at the same time.  All I knew was that they were so Christian that they could rarely come out to the park to play ball after school, because they were in church four times a week, for a couple of hours each time. My own parents had no such rules about keeping their floors clean, and we thought we were super-religious because we went to church on Sunday morning AND Wednesday night. All I knew was that the people saying all these nasty things couldn't possibly know my friends, zanmi mwen yo.

Obviously, another part of my education was learning a little Kreyol, partly because I needed it to order food from the trucks and the corner store, partly because we used it to call plays when I played basketball (poorly) on the Optimist team in Pepper Park, and partly because some of those Haitian girls at school were beautiful. What I lacked in looks, I tried to make up in charm and guile by speaking a little Kreyol. It was not very effective. 

There's a word in Kreyol that a lot of Haitians use to refer to their countrymen - zoe. The word itself means "bone," but in this context, it means a lot more, depending on who you ask. When you're a zoe, you're hard as bone, tough to break, but able to heal from the worst destruction. Or it can mean something like "bone of my bone," brethren, the same through and through. Either way, it's a word I'm using in all my prayers for my Haitian friends these days, past, present, and future. I pray that you remain strong as bone, hard to break and hard-hitting as well.