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By Root 606 0

gray morning over the blue-green hills of Beauséjour. The sun was slowly rising, burning through the fog that merged with the clouds over the highest mountains. My uncle, oval-faced, with a widow’s-peaked hairline, mustached and pudgy, as he would remain for most of his life, was making his way down the winding trail that joined the village where he and his parents and five younger brothers and sisters lived, with the market town in the valley below. He had started from his parents’ farm with a mule loaded with carrots and plantains and newly harvested pigeon peas that he planned to sell at the market. Running late, he tapped the mule’s bottom now and then, encouraging it to hasten its steps. It wasn’t doing much good. The mule was tired and seemed to want to stop and sniff each patch of dew-laden grass and muddy rock it encountered along the way.

Uncle Joseph was growing exasperated when he spotted a young woman on the same path. With her high cheekbones and pouty lips she looked like a calendar girl or carnival queen. She was wearing a thin cotton dress, which seemed glued to her body by the water still lingering from the early-morning bath she’d just taken in a nearby stream. On top of her head was a brown calabash, sealed with a piece of dried corn husk. The calabash was resting on a piece of cloth, wrung into a circle to serve as a base. Ignoring the mule, he stopped to watch her. She was one of the prettiest women he’d come across in his twenty-three years. How could he not have spotted her during all his trips to and from the market?

Unsupervised, the mule wandered into a nearby garden and spilled some of my uncle’s merchandise. The young lady was the one who first noticed the mule stomping through a row of young cocoa plants. Rushing forward, she motioned in its direction. As her body swayed back and forth, her arms waving wildly, she dropped her water-filled calabash and it broke.

My uncle offered to pay for the calabash. She insisted it was not necessary, but he talked her into taking a few pennies, a lot more than the calabash was worth.

“So began a conversation between Denise and me,” my uncle later told me. “Every time I went by afterwards on my way to the market, I had to see her. We talked and talked for a few months and then we took action.”

The action was to notify their families at the beginning of 1947 that they were moving to the capital together. The oldest of his sisters, my aunt Ino, was already living in Bel Air, a hilltop neighborhood overlooking Port-au-Prince harbor, and they decided to settle there.

Though they did not marry, they bought a plot of land together and built a three-room cement house, topped by a corrugated-metal roof. The house had a large front gallery that extended into the alley that curved toward the main road, Rue Tirremasse. The entire house was painted salmon pink, both inside and out, except for the floors, which were covered with terra-cotta clay tiles.

The hill in Bel Air on which the house was built had been the site of a famous battle between mulatto abolitionists and French colonists who’d controlled most of the island since 1697 and had imported black Africans to labor on coffee and sugar plantations as slaves. A century later, slaves and mulattoes joined together to drive the French out, and on January 1, 1804, formed the Republic of Haiti.

More than a century later, as World War I dawned and the French, British and Germans, who controlled Haiti’s international shipping, rallied their gunboats to protect their interests, President Woodrow Wilson, whose interests included, among others, the United Fruit Company and 40 percent of the stock of the Haitian national bank, ordered an invasion. When the U.S. Marines landed in Haiti in July 1915 for what would become a nineteen-year occupation, Haitian guerrilla fighters, called Cacos, organized attacks against the U.S. forces from Bel Air. Bel Air also boasted one of Haiti’s oldest and most beautiful cathedrals, as well as one of the island’s best public schools for boys, the Lycée Pétion, which was named after Alexandre