The Haitian Connection

Created -- 11/26/2002

          The first time I can remember that the term Haitian had any meaning for me was on the baseball-field of Deerfield Beach Middle School in 1977. Two Black boys were going at it verbally, getting down and dirty with that your mama’s so …stuff, when finally one couldn't come up with a more debasing description and found himself at a loss for words. The first boy taunted him even more viciously for the others failure to respond and finally the second boy, in apparent desperation, blurted out "Haitian"! Moments later they were rolling around in the clay near second base and the coaches were charging out to stop them. Neither of the boys was Haitian, but that's what made the slur so devastating. It was the court of last resort's, the black feathered arrow, the gauntlet across the face. In that particular context, it demanded a response.

          Although I heard the term used in this way before, I think that was the first time I realize the depths of the insult. It was delivered in the form of a rather slanted racial slur. But it was more than just a racial/ethnic slur, in this context; it was more of a social hierarchy attack. As in; I may be Black -- which itself has always been representational of the bottom of the totem pole in the realm of racial, ethnic and the social class hierarchy in the U.S. -- but you're the lowest of the low, you're a Haitian. Although I put it together in my head at that moment, maybe for the first time, it wasn't really surprising and didn't really even seem out of place to me as a sixth grader. And even now as an adult it has a kind of disturbing symmetry that is familiar, if not comfortingly so. After all, for more than a century immigrants who came to America and found themselves skirting the bottom of social ethnic stratification could always look or point down at the African-American and be comforted by the rationale; I may be a Jew, Mick, Whopp etc. but at least I'm not a Nigger. It would seem natural, in this type of construct, for those relegated to the basement to wait and watch in hopeful expectancy for some group who would nudged them up line.

          I also remember the term Haitian followed or preceded by number of unflattering descriptive terms like; "stank ass, dirty, ugly black etc." or a string of expletives directed at Haitians as an insult, mostly by other Black children. Those looks on their faces, brow's furrowed, mouth open, searching for a response, but never really able to defend the fact that they were indeed Haitian. How do you respond to that kind of an attack, an attack on your identity? I felt some empathy at the time I remember, because on occasion I had been called "Jew" with the intonation that said you are less. Depending upon who said it -- I had a friend who like to refer to me as Jew-boy, much to the chagrin of my mother, though coming from that direction it never really bothered me -- but usually it had a tendency to bunch my stomach and create the desire to spew fourth everything in illustration and defense of my heritage. But of course, I had already learned at a much earlier age that such attempts were futile and only opened you to further attacks. So I would simply respond with an eloquent "Fuck you, cock sucker." Words I had learned from my grandfather who grew up alone on the streets of Chicago. But those dark young Creole and French-speaking girls and boys seemed far too well mannered and conservatively raised to respond in kind. With their broken English and thick accents they would make dismal attempts at a response in some intelligent manner. Only after years of such abuse would they realize that a gutter rejoinder was the only true defense. At the time I didn't considered any kinship I might have shared with these people, but years later the parallel occurred to me. Only then did I begin to explore how history reveals a stigma within a people.

          The island of Hispaniola lies some 800 miles off the Florida coast. It was one of the first places Columbus visited on his voyage to the New World in 1492. At the time it was populated by a group of Native Americans known now only as the Tainos Indians. At first they were welcoming to the European newcomers and Columbus remarked in his diaries on the childlike naïveté of the natives, suggesting they would make good slaves. But the Tainos didn't respond well to slavery or the host of virulent contagions the people from the Old World brought with them, to which the natives had no immunity. Sixteen years after their first contact with Europeans, the Tainos population of 400,000 had dwindled to less than 60,000. By 1525 they were all but extinct. Today only the merest genetic trace remains within the inhabitants of Hispaniola.

         The island's history over the next five centuries is rife with war, rebellion, social strife and death, death approaching Holocaust proportions. By the end of the 18th-century it was the largest most valuable sugar and coffee producing colony in the Caribbean, more valuable than all of the other Caribbean colonies combined. Two-thirds of France's foreign investment was based in St. Domingue. At the core of the island's capacity to produce sugar, for which Europeans had developed an insatiable hunger, were Africans abducted from the continent and forced into what is described as slavery, although that term took on new meaning in this context. It wasn't the kind of slavery seen in Rome 1500 years earlier, nor was it the type of slavery practiced throughout much of North Africa and the Muslim world hundreds of years previously. The primary focus of those indentured conditions was to provide human resources specifically for the service of other human beings. For the most part this created a class of workers and servants who were unpaid but more often than not, looked after relatively well and at times even treated as members of families, albeit as poor stepchildren. No, what arose in the Caribbean at the beginning of the 16th-century was wholly apart from other contemporary definitions of slavery and altogether driven by the economic gain. It would push the envelope of human capacity for intense labor. Not until Karl Marx was anyone able to truly encapsulate this approach to turning human beings into eminently replaceable parts of a capitalist machine. Parts whose sole purpose was the production of wealth for individual gain.

          As civil society supplanted monarchic rule, speculative capitalism began to become a driving force in European economies, which had been relatively stagnant for centuries. The New World, although difficult and hazardous to reach, provided a wealth of opportunity for this kind of economic expansion. The peoples of Africa, conveniently viewed by Europeans as hardly human beings at all, were a perfect source for cheap available labor. They were categorized much like draft horses, for the amount of work they could provide in a day. While by the end of 18th-century healthy young male slaves were selling in the Americas for upwards of $2000, during the early part of the 17th-century that same slave/person would seldom bring in more than the equivalent of $40. Even by the standards of the day, this was extraordinarily inexpensive and would lead to what would later be seen as a wasteful squandering of a resource. But in those early times it was far more economically feasible to work slaves to death and replace them with new slaves, then to try and maintain them or bother to breed them. It was simply a matter of production output vs. labor replacement cost. The humanity in the equation was simply never considered.

          It's interesting to note, in light of the reparations movement here in United States, that the origin of the fortunes of many of Europe's most prominent wealthy families can be traced back in an unbroken line directly to this island. A shining example of early capitalism that was actually taught and held up as a model of efficient production at universities in France and Spain throughout the 18th in 19th-century.
By the time of the revolution in Haiti in 1791, it was estimated that between three and five million slaves had been imported onto the island since 1540. That same year the island's population was around 556,000, 500,000 of which were black slaves. The mortality rate for abducted Africans forced into the rigors of chattel slavery was around 50 percent in the first three to eight years. The French observer Hilliard d'Auberteuil estimated that, during a roughly 100 year period beginning in 1680 over 800,000 slaves were imported into the port of Saint Domingue, but in 1776 the slave population was 290,000.

          Of the 25 nations or tribes from which slaves originated, many had strong beliefs in an afterlife. The Ibos were one of these and they would often commit suicide in large numbers in order to escape bondage. Whole laborer populations were devastated overnight by these events. Plantation managers and overseers would rail against these slaves describing these mass suicides as attempts at destroying them financially.

          Inevitably slaves fled these conditions whenever given the opportunity. Those who escaped slow death under the forced labor conditions of the plantations faced even more horrific consequences if captured. Among these were; being tied to a skewer and roasted to death, white hot slates applied to the ankles and soles of the feet, being stuffed with gunpowder and then blown apart, boiling cane syrup poured over their heads, sickeningly creative genital mutilation and whole host of less refined punishments. One which particularly stood out in my mind was being thrown into ovens and consumed by fire. My grandfather chose to be cremated after his death. Many of my family members resisted this. We don't burn our dead anymore -- too many bad memories.

          As the number of escaped slaves who reached the relative safety of the wilderness and mountains grew, organized resistance sprang up throughout the island. Soon terrorism and retribution stalked the countryside. At times entire plantations and even small towns were purged, Black, Whites and Mulattos, men, women and children all slaughtered. Mass poisonings were also common and used to eliminate slave populations as well as Whites. Basic military tactics, win by knocking out your enemies resources, win by attrition -- a terror war with no noncombatants. The French and Spanish governments both threw enormous resources at this problem, and were able to quell every uprising until the revolution. But the resistance movement and those who would fall under the definition of terrorists today were never completely overcome by military force. And it would seem history repeats itself in Israel, Chechnya, New York and Iraq.

          But those who openly resisted were always in the minority. The vast majority of resistance was in the form of those day-to-day actions that subverted their conditions. Sowing doubt in the minds of their oppressors as to their own superiority.

          Haitian soldiers fought alongside Minutemen in the U.S. war of independence. Two battle hardened companies fresh from defeating napoleons invading troops in Haiti, came to reinforce Washington along the Potomac. They were former Marechaussee (a kind of police force that hunted down runaway slaves) and Maroons (escaped slaves who became rebels and resistance fighters). For more than 200 years, these two opposing subcultures had butchered each other in some of the most vicious no quarter guerrilla fighting in history. Putting aside their differences, thay came together to fight the French. During the American revolutionary war they were matched against Hessian mercenaries, some of the toughest and most feared fighters in Europe. The Hessian soldiers returned to Germany with frightening stories of the Schwärze (black) Devils who had ambushed them in the New England forests, dropping their muskets to fight in close quarters with cane knives. There is historical evidence to support the assertion that the hit-and-run techniques the Americans used to combat the superior British forces were perfected if not gleaned directly from the influence of Haitian troops.

          The more recent contributions Haitians make to the United States are as easily overlooked. Almost anywhere you go in South Florida, there they are, the new "Invisible Man" and woman, working in the kitchen of that restaurant, driving that cab, guarding that building, caring for the elderly, cleaning up someone else's mess. Doing those jobs that no one wants to do, jobs that disfranchised African-Americans long ago learned lead nowhere. Illegal Haitians often work construction for minimum wage or less. I wonder how many million-dollar homes they've built in Weston and Boca and Wellington. They may never returned to those homes once built, but their wives might clean them, never knowing that their husband laid that floor or finished that wall.

          After the revolution in 1791 and the abolition of slavery in 1794, Haiti boasted one of the earliest democracies in the Western Hemisphere. But by the 19th-century constitutional government rarely existed and the country sank into economic decline. At the beginning of the 20th-century, the U.S. became involved financially and politically in Haiti and occupied the country for geopolitical and strategic reasons. In 1934 the U.S. pulled out leaving Haiti no better off then when it had entered. As it had in the past, the island's economic strength was centered in eastern half where the Dominican Republic is located. Haitians had long been working as migrant laborers in the cane fields across the border. By the 20th century, even the poorest Dominicans refuse to do such work viewing it as beneath them. But hatred between the two countries in 1937 led to 10,000 Haitian migrant workers being rounded up and slaughtered in the Dominican Republic. In the late 1940s following the war, local roughs drove through the black neighborhoods in Fort Lauderdale and Pompano with clubs and guns rounding up African-Americans and taking them to the local fields to pick beans. Haitians starving on their island at the time would have been glad to pick bushel baskets for just a handful of those beans.

          Hunger and political oppression continues to drive Haitians out to sea in hopes of reaching America. Before 911 George Bush wanted to grant citizenship to the more than one million illegal Mexicans in the Southwest. Haitians were specifically excluded from this proposal that was termed immunity. Now everyone is going to be treated the same, according to Bush -- except Cubans of course because they're being politically oppressed. At least those who managed to touch their foot to dryland in the U.S. are. Those that never make it to shore are just looking for a job.

          I didn't come along till the 1960s when Poppa Doc Duvalier was running Haiti with the iron fist of his Tonton Macoute. Eventually his son Baby Doc Duvalier took over from his father through the '70s and '80s. He continued the practice of placing tires around people and burning them alive in the streets to discourage dissent. The U.S. government took little or no notice and definitely no action as thousands of political dissenters were murdered by the Duvalier regime. Dick Cheney stood before Congress and decried calls for U.S. intervention in Haiti, saying that we had no economic interests there. Cheney, one of the staunchest supporters of the South African apartheid government at the time, after watching a video showing high school age student nonviolent protests cut down with automatic weapons, responded that United States doesn't interfere with the internal political problems of sovereign nations.
          When elections finally came again to Haiti and the Jean-Bertrand Aristide government came to power, the U.S. did support the democratically elected government and when members of the military attempted coup in the '90s, the U.S. intervened. But now the Aristide government seems to be sinking into a complacency that has eroded much of his early popular support. The realities of running a country with little or no economic resources limit the number of options available to any leader in Haiti.

          Elements in the Bush administration despise Aristide and have successfully held up $146 million in aid from the Inter-American development Bank alone. Money that was earmarked for medicine and clinics designated to reduce infant mortality and juvenile death rates; to provide clean drinking water and improve infrastructure. The Miami immigration attorney Ira Kurzban claims that "the United States has created economic havoc in Haiti," in order to undermine the Aristide government. He believes that the Bush White House is encouraging opposition groups to rebuff Aristide, thereby creating the very gridlock within Haiti that the administration can use to blast the Haitian government for being ineffective. The ultimate goal being to create so much economic chaos inside Haiti as to promote civil unrest, said Kurzban.

          Louis Lanpham, senior editor for Harpers magazine, describes the moral vacuum with which U.S. policy is implemented around the world. This in combination with a lack of long-term thinking leaves us to not only to face the same problems again and again, but it creates problems for ourselves and world that would not have arisen if we could apply the same value standards we set for conduct within our own country to our foreign policy. In a State Department memo of the early 1980s, the first sentence began "Human rights and chemical weapons aside, the interests of the United States and Iraqi run roughly parallel." It shouldn't surprise us that so many countries spend so much of their resources on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. If nothing else, with this kind of power you can't be ignored and if you wanna play in the big game you have to have some chips.

          Hilliard d'Auberteuil had a chance to observe slaves away from the confinement of their daily laborers. He saw them as they conversed among themselves and in his book described them as the most intelligent of all peoples. His book was banned on the island. In those moments of respite, when they escaped to remember who they once were and where they came from maybe they found hope. In the heavy downpours of the rainy season slaves would slip away into the opaque mists of the falling rain and gather in the forest, arrange banana leaves above a smoky fire to shield it from the drenching rain and gather in the fellowship of their captivity. They would dance, finding freedom in the drum and movement of their bodies.

          I am reminded of my own people and their time in Egypt. I also understand the deprivation that comes with having your connection to the past cutoff, losing touch with the progenitors from whence you came. My great-grandparents knew what it was like to have dozens or hundreds of relatives, people they were connected to, people who knew and cared for them, and then one day they're gone and all those connections are cut. To be left floating in the world without the support of that lineage -- starting from scratch. That's what it must have been like for those early Africans.

          Sometimes when I look into the eyes of my Haitian friends and trace the lines of their faces I can imagine the hundreds of faces which came before them, back to the face of that person who made the journey across the Atlantic, cutoff from everything they were and everything they would have been. Pressed into something they could have only imagined in some deep nightmare. A life of constant fear, that’s what it is to be a slave.

          The phrase once we were Kings is in vogue within African-American culture. Seeming to tout the idea of boosting esteem through finding a connection to the highest of social classes -- Kings and Queens. But examine the life of any ruler and if you follow the hierarchy down through the generals and vassals and servants, finally you come to the slave. An existence without accolade or reward, an existence often without hope -- to have nothing, not even yourself, and to continue under those conditions -- to go on living regardless. To look back and know that I came from someone like that, for me, it is far more ennobling and proper to say, once we were slaves.