Norfolk’s history with the long-running tragedy in Haiti runs deeper than recent rescue missions. It began with the dawn of revolution in that Caribbean country and an event that sent shock waves throughout our new nation.
Toussaint L'ouverture, hero of Haiti's revolution.
Had you been out on Hampton Roads one day in July 1793 you would have seen an amazing sight: 137 square-rigged vessels packed with refugees – along with a half dozen French warships – sailing into the lower Chesapeake Bay. Most of them continued on to Baltimore and beyond, but 20 ships peeled off and journeyed up the Elizabeth River to Norfolk.
These were not Haitian blacks who jammed the vessels to the gunwales but white French families who were fleeing the specter of a bloody slave uprising. A few, ironically, brought what slaves they still had. Together, the two groups, bedraggled and starving, presented Norfolk with a refugee crisis, and the state responded by sending aid.
In his book, Norfolk Highlights, 1584-1881, George Tucker wrote, “Those who remained – and there were a great many…became the ancestors of many Norfolk families today.”
The assimilation of refugees was not the end of the Haitian matter, but rather part of the beginning.
The island of Hispaniola, an “earthly paradise” discovered by Columbus in 1492, had teetered back and forth between Spanish and French control. At the time of the uprising, Saint-Dominique, as it was called, was a colonial goldmine for France, with huge profits generated by sugar, coffee, cocoa and other crops. But the economy was totally dependent on increasingly brutal slave labor.
Taking their cue from the French revolution, slaves in Saint-Dominique aligned themselves with various liberators and eventually defeated a sizeable French army. Haiti, taking its name from the Creole Ayiti, “land of high mountains,” became in 1804 the second independent nation in the Western World. But this was not greeted with open arms by slave-owning Americans who feared a similar revolt in their backyards.
President Thomas Jefferson, who had tried to assist the French in thwarting the revolt, cut off Haiti’s lifeblood with a trade embargo. Historians trace Haiti’s long decline to that period. Two centuries of turmoil have made it an international basket case. It was not a pact with the devil but a systematic rejection by Haiti’s neighbors that has doomed it.
I have a personal story.
Seventeen years ago, while editor of Calypso Log, the magazine of the Cousteau Society, I toured Haiti to learn about environmental and economic conditions. In city after city, village after village, the answer was the same: So prevalent was the grinding poverty and the ruined landscape, a growing number of Haitians were moving toward the brink of sickness and starvation.
A boy of about 10 at Léogâne, a once-thriving fishing village west of Port-au-Prince, had been out fishing all day without a catch or a bite to eat. Photo by Paul Clancy.
I went to Cité Soleil, the infamous Port-au-Prince slum. Perched atop a landfill on the waterfront, at least 200,000 people were crammed into cardboard shacks and mud-floor lean-tos. Streets were lined with chest-high ridges of smoldering garbage. Open sewers ran through fields where children toddled. Night was falling and I was quick to leave. The place was under the thumb of army-backed thugs who set up barricades, robbed visitors and terrorized the populace.
And yet, there were pockets of hope. At Barbe Pagnole, a mountain village where I stayed, a farmer and his sons had built a rock wall and behind it the earth, mixed with straw, was spongy and black and three-day-old corn had shot up like rockets. The farmers had embraced soil conservation techniques. What trees they had left were treasured and guarded.
Elsewhere, there seemed a palpable energy about people as they walked along the roadside with fruit or water or laundry balanced on their heads. Whether selling art near hotels, bartering at markets or fixing broken-down cars beside rutted roads, there was an eagerness to scratch out a living. Given half a chance, I thought then – and I think now – they could still make it.
