Unlike Emmanuella, Anya has some recent memories of Haiti. Until the earthquake, she spent most of her summer vacations there. She told me that she returned to Port-au-Prince just once after that, in 2014. Parts of the city were still “in rubble” she said. Buildings remained destroyed. Roads and bridges were under construction. But the country was as green as ever and “so beautiful.” She remembers going to Guilou Beach, west of Port-au-Prince, where she ate fresh conch and crab, grilled on the beach and served to her as she waded through the water.
Emmanuella’s memories of Haiti came in impressionistic flashes: a big house in Port-au-Prince, a courtyard, servants, kids playing out front, animals roving among the houses. She thought her house was at least two stories, because she could remember racing up and down the stairs with her sister. Growing up, she would sometimes wonder if her family should have stayed. “But we would have probably been persecuted, killed, hunted down—whatever the case is,” she said. She could still read and write Creole, but she spoke with a heavy tongue and an American accent. She had no family in Haiti anymore. Everyone had left. “What am I going to go back to?” she asked. “Where am I gonna set up? I don’t even know the roads. I don’t know anything.”
On a Wednesday in August, we were discussing her situation outside of a coffee shop before she left to spend another afternoon with the eight-year-old, who was about to start school. Emmanuella looked across the street and pointed at a row of red-brick apartment buildings. “In Haiti, the houses are not brick,” she said. “I want to say they’re, like, stone-ish.”
She stared for a moment longer, then picked up her phone and dialled her mom, who was saved in her contacts as “Birth Giver 😑.”
“Hey, Mom,” she said. “You remember our house back in Haiti? What was it made of? What did it look like?”
“Concrete,” her mother said.
“It was two stories, right? Because I remember going upstairs.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “Two stories.”
“And how was life back then?” Emmanuella asked. “You can tell me if I’m wrong, but in my head, I always said I had a great, great life back there.”
“It was,” her mother said. “When life was good in Haiti, oh, my God, that was good.”
“You want to go back?”
“Not to live,” her mom said. “But I would like to go back. Everybody wants that: have your houses there, spend a few months enjoying the country, then you come back.”
“Yeah, you wish,” Emmanuella said.
“We know what it was when it was good. But, hopefully, God will do something for the country. God will find some people and use them to build back that country.”
Emmanuella looked at me, dryly. “Yep,” she said. “It just needs to get fixed.” Once it was safe, she told her mother, the family—all of “us”—could take a vacation to see the country again. Emmanuella paused. “Well, by us, I mean you,” she said, ruefully. “I’m staying here.” ♦
