I first fell in love with Haiti when I was about 12 years old. That’s why news of the earthquake there hit me especially hard.

Something deep within tells me that’s wrong. A devastating earthquake anywhere should elicit the same reaction. But I didn’t fall in love with just anywhere when I was 12; I did fall in love with Haiti.

More specifically, I fell in love with that immortal, unbelievable, extraordinary black man known as Toussaint L'Ouverture. It happened this way.

I was a seventh grader at Harlem Park Junior High School in Baltimore. Harlem Park was, even nine years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down, a still overwhelmingly black junior high school (middle schools were unknown entities then) located deep in the heart of predominantly black West Baltimore.

Those were the times when our teachers would choose one day per week to let us roam free in the school library, pick out a book, and have us just read for the entire period. (It wouldn’t hurt today’s black students one iota if their instructors returned to that practice.) I stumbled on a biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture and eagerly gobbled it up.

As I read the heroic story of how L'Ouverture and his army of black slaves fought – and defeated – successive expeditions of British, Spanish and French troops sent against them, I recall reacting with probably my most racist observance of my life.

“Boy, white people are stupid,” I said to myself. Yes, it was 1963 and the civil rights movement was in full swing, but many whites still clung to the delusion of white supremacy and race superiority. And yet they let a book about L'Ouverture get within a 50-mile radius of young, impressionable black minds like mine.

It’s almost impossible to describe in words the impact of reading about L'Ouverture and Haiti had on me. The experience was not only exhilarating, but also downright therapeutic. Remember what happened on Sept. 15, 1963: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were all killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Ala. The deaths of those four black girls hit black America hard, and me, especially hard.

But reading about how L'Ouverture and his army gave the business to whites bent on keeping them enslaved gave me a measure of what I can only describe as some kind of weird, retroactive revenge. Blacks of L'Ouverture’s era were even more impressed. Read what Laurent Dubois, author of “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” had to say about Louverture and the impact of the Haitian revolt.

“Images of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution were an inspiration to people of African descent throughout the Americas. In Rio de Janeiro in 1805, soldiers of African descent wore medallion portraits of the emperor (Jean Jacques) Dessalines. In Cuba, a free black named Jose Antonio Aponte, who was accused of conspiring to revolt in 1812, had portraits of Henri Christophe, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean-Francois and Dessalines in his home ... Years later, Denmark Vesey, who had lived for a short time in Saint-Domingue, would promise his followers the help of Haitian soldiers once they had taken the city of Charleston ... Frederick Douglass, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Haiti after diplomatic relations were reestablished, declared in 1893 that when the ‘black sons of Haiti’ had ‘struck for freedom,’ they had ‘struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.’”

There could well be black folks here, in the United States today, who are every bit as in love with Haiti as I am. .....

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Nice fairytale, It should have concluded with: "and they all lived happily ever after. The End". Funny how Haiti has progressed much past the era of L'Ouverture. Seems that Haiti would be better off today it had been colonized by the Brits so long ago. Perhaps it would be a territory of the U.S. What good has come from their revolt, Wyclef?

by   
MacBen
January 21, 2010, 11:17 am
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Thank You for sharing your experience with so many of us who are on the outside looking in. My heart and spirit sits with the people of Haiti as well as the family.

by   
Tabasco
January 21, 2010, 7:47 am
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