Istwa Nou

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.

Theodora Holly wrote early in the twentieth century that an outsider could not grasp how far standing as godparent to a friend's child deepened the friendship between the adults. Some Haitians told her the tie was more binding than blood, and she thought they were right. The nearest translation she could give of what the office meant in Haiti was the word co-parents. Holly was describing an arrangement that colonial law and church practice never invented and never managed to displace. The household that European modernity carried to the Caribbean assumed two parents and their children in one economic unit. Haitian families spread the work of raising a child across a wider set of chosen adults, each with a name and a recognised standing. The arrangement held under conditions that broke households. A child who lost a parent did not thereby lose the adults responsible for her, because responsibility had been distributed in advance and in public.

Long before anyone needed words like blended, extended or multigenerational to describe a family, Theodora Holly had set out the Haitian version, in which parents and godparents hold a child in common. Jeanne Perez lived inside that arrangement. The niece she wrote to belonged to her sister Rosa Clara Perez and to Rosa Clara's husband Jean Price-Mars, the ethnologist whose work on the religion of the Haitian peasantry had changed how the educated class talked about the African inheritance. The three adults shared the guardianship and the friendship that came with it. What Perez did next was widen the circle past the family. Publishing the letter in La Voix des Femmes handed Marie-Madeleine and every girl her age to Haitian women in general. A note between an aunt and a child became a public undertaking, and the readers of the paper were enrolled as co-parents responsible for the political education of the generation coming up.

Grace Sanders Johnson calls what Jeanne Perez was doing othermothering, and keeps it separate from the celebration of motherhood as biology or as national duty, which the league picked up and put down at different points in its history. Othermothering in this sense is care that tends the past and the present in a single motion. The published letter worked as an archive, holding Perez's day at the Citadelle and the revolutionary history that had produced the feeling. It also worked as a summons. A veve is the ground drawing traced in flour or ash at a Vodou ceremony to call a spirit down into the room, and Sanders Johnson compares the letter to one. It was not only writing. It was an inscription meant to bring an ancestral impulse into the present and fasten it onto people, including people not yet born, which is a large claim to make for a column in a monthly newspaper.