Istwa Nou

Jeanne Perez addressed her published letter to her niece Marie-Madeleine Price-Mars. One day, she wrote, climb the steep slope of the Bonnet a l'Eveque and speak with the ancestors there, by thinking hard and by wanting it. At the foot of the old dungeon, stop. Lift your head and look at the heroic dream of a Black heart written into those steps, which more than a hundred years have failed to bring down. A feeling you have never had will make you small. Perez then set the fortress and the country side by side. Like the Fatherland, she wrote, the Citadelle is cracked and storm damaged and its injuries show. All of it is magnificent anyway, because it was forged by a Black heroism that time and carrion birds have not managed to finish off. The letter is three things at once: a note of love to a small girl, a set of instructions for keeping revolutionary memory alive, and an argument that a wounded thing can still be the proof.

Perez told her niece that one visit would not be enough. A butterfly in love with light goes back to the flame and burns its wing, and the girl would go back to the Citadelle again and again to put her soul into the living spring of what the ancestors believed. Then the letter turned. The work up on that mountain is titanic, Perez wrote. What have we done since? Do giants beget dwarves? The questions are addressed to a four year old and aimed at everyone else. Haiti in 1936 had just come through nineteen years of American occupation and was sliding into the personal rule of Stenio Vincent, and a generation was being asked to measure itself against a fortress raised by people who had been slaves and had then beaten Napoleon's army. Perez did not answer her own question. She left it in print, where the readers of a women's newspaper would have to.

Perez wanted the boys to make the journey too. Let our sons go up on a pilgrimage of love for the country, she wrote, to the enormous present a bronze skinned king left them. Let them climb where the weeping queen climbed, and the princes and the counts, up the great ruined staircase that watched the body of Henry Christophe pass down it for the last time. Those stairs had known the king's working life, his torments and every one of his victories, and he took to the grave a plan for a Haiti that would be grand and magnificent. Let the sons greet the ancestors in what remains of yesterday's glory, and let them come away wanting to be large and decent Haitians. Christophe shot himself in 1820 when his own troops turned on him. Perez put his widow at the head of the procession, ahead of the titled men, which set a woman's grief in the middle of the inheritance she was handing on.

Jeanne Perez was in love with her niece and in love with Haiti, and the letter about the Citadelle came out of both. She was still carrying the memory of standing under the walls, and she was already anticipating the day the girl would stand there herself. What she did next is the part that matters. She put the letter on the opening pages of La Voix des Femmes, where the editorials went. A private note became the paper's lead, and the league's readers were handed a working example of how one generation passes an idea to the next. Perez was explicit that this had nothing to do with a lien de sang, a bloodline. What she was describing was the sensation of being seized by something older than herself, an ancestral call to arms that arrives without warning and without any regard for who is related to whom. She thought it could reach anyone willing to climb the mountain.

Jeanne Perez grew up in a working class household run by women, raised by her mother and her sister, and she took the care women give to girls seriously because she had been on the receiving end of it. In Haiti the matant or tante, the auntie, and the marraine, the godmother, are not honorary titles. They are working offices, held by relatives and by women who are no relation at all, and whoever holds one is expected to think about a particular child and prepare her. Perez did the job. She spoiled her niece, and she also served as insurance against loss, as somewhere to go when things at home stopped making sense, and as a source of the particular advice that comes from a godmother rather than a parent. Her feminism and her aunthood were one practice at two scales. The public campaign for the rights of Haitian women grew out of the private business of looking after one specific girl.