The Bench Under the Mango Tree
Haiti: 70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou. Arithmetic as theology, joke as truth, truer than any census the government will ever take. Three cosmologies, one spine, tempered by occupation, dictatorship, and gangsterism until belief itself becomes the fourth religion. Poverty, the fifth. In Creole, the whole country fits into one breath: Sentespri, Bondye, Papa Legba—one melody, French bent into African shapes, pauses as Haitian as the vowels. Not signaling. Code for survival. In the shadow of those saints and spirits, we learned other codes: how shades of skin could tilt a door open or closed, and how merchants (Lebanese, Syrian, Jewish) once found in Haiti a refuge even as many born there were forced to leave, a paradox Laurent Dubois hits in The Aftershocks of History.
We never chose between faith and function; we tried to serve both and often served neither. Even in prayer, we refused to kneel. Our most powerful origin story is sliding into a punchline, surviving like an old word passed hand to hand, stripped of its grammar. In it, a centenarian stood as a threshold, and a priest knew the hour when the war-clocks struck thirteen.
Four months later, when grief tried to pass for weather, running got easier. My cousin stayed dead; so did the gods who once claimed people from our world. In Vodou, Kouzen is the spirit of peasants and memory. It was also what he called me. When asked, “What religion are you?” I say, “I grew up Catholic.” The truth is, I was never shackled to the Church. I grew up nothing.
What disappears when the living no longer speak to the dead? When culture is stripped for parts, and loss is downgraded from a public duty to a private inconvenience? Maybe that’s why we give the dead more dignity than the living. The dead never need healthcare, and they don’t complain about taxes.
June 10, 2025. The street was empty of dog walkers. At 6:00 a.m., that’s all a runner can hope for: no loose dog between you and its owner. That morning, the only threat was heat. August was weeks away—season of storms and distant drums. I didn’t yet know why that mattered. I went out thinking about hydration and came back thinking about burial. By the time I got home, not pleased with my heart rate, I knew I would spend the next few weeks writing about my cousin, dead since November 2021. I had no idea I was about to excavate everything that left with him, including spiritual technology.
Meanwhile, the world is busy rehearsing utopia: robots building robots, energy free for all. Listen to the diction: metallic, efficient, inhuman, singularity. Is decency an engineering problem? What will we say when the human parts still fail? Let the future come in wires and abundance; I will not applaud while a child in Haiti drinks from a rusted pipe, in the same country where the gods once snapped chains and dared men and women to be free.
What happened to Haiti happened to every Haitian family: the same amputations. Land seized by decree or gun. Rituals sold for bread or passage. The price wasn’t paid in francs, euros, or dollars but in a currency no bank keeps and will never exchange. Titles changed hands, saints changed names, and the gods learned new hours. Statistics will always be statistics; in places like Haiti, they miss the wounds etched into daily life. Each loss left its scar. Unseen by the census, it remained permanent in the bone.
That tension is stitched into our founding story. Bois Caïman, August 14, 1791: a clandestine Vodou ceremony that helped ignite the Haitian Revolution. Boukman the organizer, Fatiman the prophet, the gods the guarantors. Without it, no uprising. Without the uprising, no Haitian state.
Cecile Fatiman was said to have lived 112 years. In 1791, as James Madison counted the last state votes on a Bill of Rights he never meant to share, Boukman summoned the gods without asking Louis XVI. Fatiman danced until her body became a doorway. African cosmology broke daylight, and the Haitian Revolution began. Three worlds met. One refused to kneel.
The clearing at Bois Caïman looks ordinary enough, but the soil must remember. Thousands of Saint-Domingue refugees who had first sought refuge in Cuba later flooded New Orleans, doubling the city’s population in the early 1800s. Without that tide, Congo Square never acquires the Kreyòl tongue that taught brass bands how to make solemnity swing.
Koupe tèt, boule kay: four Creole words, better known than the anthem. They didn’t just scare French officers; they set off the chain reaction that turned Louisiana from imperial prize to bargain sale. Cancel the Haitian Revolution and Napoleon keeps the Mississippi hinterland, a buffer against the young republic. No westward surge. No Manifest Destiny. No transcontinental railroad. No Senate seats filled by men who think history began when they arrived. The same calculus that cut Haiti from its spoils cut Haitian families from theirs. Flip the coin of destiny: heads, punishment; tails, impoverishment.
That’s the part buried beneath the fireworks: Haitian blood greasing the hinge of U.S. expansion. Without it, what puts Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore? John Locke’s borrowed genius? Equality drafted by a man who kept children in chains? The man who broke Napoleon’s grip, Toussaint Louverture, is invisible to tourists gazing at four presidents carved into Lakota land.
This is not retroactive score-settling. It is a question of how glory gets assigned. The name in bronze or granite is rarely the one who did the work. Rewind history by a moral heartbeat, and Jefferson’s head might not make the cut. Or there would at least be room for Locke and the men who humbled Napoleon: Toussaint and Dessalines. But history doesn’t always travel well; even pilgrims from New Orleans could stand at Bois Caïman and feel nothing. The air remembers; the monuments do not.
Picture those pilgrims now, the pencil still on the floor. Maybe this time, someone from the old Vieux Carré would know what to say. I learned that language from following my aunt through rewired terrain. Boukman opened the fight; Fatiman opened the gate. My aunt had no gods or generals, only a suburban church and a checklist for grief.
She didn’t split herself; she chose between obligations. In political terms, I’d call her a radical moderate. Whether she lit candles or cooked for church guests, the impulse came from the same place. Like most Haitians, Bois Caïman is in her. Christianity is logistical.
I don’t know when she went back to work, only that bills didn’t wait. Hunger and grief fought for space. Some call it adaptation; I call it surrender, the kind that silences our own drums before the funeral home can. Danbala, the serpent god who once coiled healing around broken bones, now meets “Do Not Disturb” signs. Erzulie Dantor, who danced revolution into being at Bois Caïman, now sits in Haitian church basements with the smell of bad coffee in the air. The idea of spirits speaking through family—women in headwraps and white dresses—makes third-generation Haitian origin teenagers check their phones every few seconds.
The funeral home package came with a fixed price in 1992. The real price was spiritual. It absolved her of sacred responsibility. Professionals handled everything by protocol. Everyone else grieved briefly and returned to work. She would meet the next death as she had this one—as a pragmatic Protestant, but Haitian all the same, with Bois Caïman still in her bones.
In Haiti, Vodou still answers death on its own terms. Peristyles burn. Preachers brand the Lwa demonic. Yet the tradition insists on a nine-night vigil. Paradoxically, these same sanctuaries have become rare refuges for LGBTQ Haitians, where spirits ignore the borders society enforces. Migration and violence strip this spiritual technology for parts, but what survives still refuses the funeral-home bargain. Even under gang fire, some peristyles serve both the dead and the living who find no welcome elsewhere. In these hidden rooms, the spirits still come, and grief still gets an answer.
What once took days of drumming and prayer now fits into an afternoon in a rented hall. Life in the diaspora compresses everything. What once unfolded in open sanctuaries now takes place in basements or borrowed parks, though these days they host more lost dogs than liturgies. In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a few still call on Gran Bwa. Some know which trees listen. Most just hope the spirits can still find them.
Which is why, in that church in Florida, the silence that followed the drop was deafening. When someone finally picked up the item—an usher who had been measuring the room with his eyes—it was just a pencil. But watching twenty adults calculate whether retrieving a child’s pencil was worth disrupting a program about eternal life, I understood: we had been trained to treat even the smallest disruptions as crimes, to confuse obedience with reverence.
The funeral ran forty minutes over. When was a church ever neutral ground for sorrow? Outside, a dry December sun bleached the hearse’s chrome. Inside, the line shuffled in pairs and threes, dressed in the usual gray of mourning. My cousin would not have cared. Stretching it out undid nothing. He died of COVID. The rest was Bible verses.
Near the front, a girl colored. Her pencil rolled toward the coffin and stopped, as if it knew the way. No one moved. I might have, but kept fussing with my mask, tasting my own breath and feeling the missed patch of stubble on my cheek. My brother sat beside me, still missing not just a cousin but his best friend. Next November, nothing would have changed.
Eighteen months of pandemic discipline had taught us to keep muzzled, and the church had long trained us to do the same. We waited for permission to ignore a child’s need.
There it was: grief reduced to a program, ritual as social anesthesia. The bystander effect in formalwear; everyone sensing the moment but fearing the cost of breaking rank. The absurdity? We had gathered in our best clothes to remember someone gone, because a program told us how. The pencil fell by chance; the indifference was rehearsed. Lesson noted: grief must be orderly, spiritual hunger private, bystanders never innocent, and we’ve agreed the dead must never disrupt Monday’s clock-in.
Our reaction wasn’t a choice; it was the reflex of centuries. That silence in the church was the last echo of an old hush once enough to unnerve Louis XVI, now enough to keep the program on schedule. Kings fall; habits don’t.
A few weeks after my June 10 run, I visited my uncle. Seventy-three, still able to bench-press two hundred pounds, and the family’s archivist. He hadn’t seen the pencil, but as soon as I sat down, his words about his father flowed effortlessly.
“Papa m,” he said, “would have left that pencil where it fell.” He would have spoken to it, not picked it up. Only on the ninth night would it be moved, set beside the bowl of water, the white candles, the photograph in the mirror because the dead, apparently, must see themselves before leaving. There’s no proof they do, of course. But in a country where evidence is a luxury, ritual is what stands in for it.
While he lectured, I ate the kalalou gumbo with crab and white rice he had made. I came hungry, and with questions I already knew the answers to. The songs still live in my blood, but I never lit candles or learned what to say to a stray dog or a fallen pencil. I wanted him to carry that for me to keep some gold from the old world burning. I had outsourced the role of spiritual valet and stayed a tourist in my own cultural closet, assigning him homework while I kept eating.
When I asked for milk, he offered Gatorade. I took it. That was the order of things until now.
It was the order I had seen in that church: grief arranged in rows, everyone staying in their place. Back then, a girl with no ambition to go to heaven or fear of hell took the pencil back and kept drawing. While we adjusted our masks and worried about saying the right things, she remained present to whatever absence we were all supposedly honoring but avoiding. She didn’t need to believe in God or any gods. She was practicing something older than belief: attention.
At eighty-eight, my aunt still toggles between her South Florida kitchen and front porch, taking in the Atlantic breeze whenever the air-conditioner grows louder than her breathing. Her daughter Joujou lived just two blocks away with her husband and children, yet they shared the same pew every Sunday and traded food and gossip most weeknights across that five-minute walk. Their closeness deepened in the 1980s and 90s, but my first memories reach back to the 1970s, when Joujou and I were in Port-au-Prince. She was a few years older, and I couldn’t yet anticipate the devotion that would define her later years. I can still feel the firmness of her hand in mine as she threaded us through Port-au-Prince traffic. Generosity was her resting heart rate.
In 1993 I reached the ICU too late. Shock first, burial second. No drums. Her clock stopped at 33. The pastor stood by, as startled as the machines. We waited for permission to mourn. As if cruelty needed clearance. The service was quieter than a grave. My aunt’s smile never vanished, but you could see it retreat behind her eyes, slipping away to find Joujou.
More than thirty years on, she has one hope: that heaven will return her daughter. “They abandoned me for God,” she tells me. “I abandoned them for comfort.”
Joujou never left a space empty. Long before side-hustle was a buzzword, she and her husband ran a business without Excel or strategy books. She understood sunk cost better than most people I’ve worked with. She managed throughput, raised kids, served her church, and lifted others. In a world with efficient talent allocation, she would have scaled before scaling had a name. Instead, she built her own economy in the margins, with sweat and agency. She dared the void to take one more thing from her, leaving the rest of us out of excuses. In the end, it did. Loss never waits for clearance. I have since known, it could come for me the way it came for her: shock first, burial second.
Her death broke something in my aunt, yet she never shut the world out. She laughs at bone-scan results, talks about her death without flinching, and can pivot to stories of Haiti before I was born. Sorrow managed without drama. I once thought strength was built like muscle; she showed me it’s redirected, like heat in a house with too many cold rooms.
No one has taught me more about living with loss, or outlasting neglect, than my aunt. By day she built her life on grief’s foundation; by night, she kept it running. Infrastructure on one side, function on the other. Haiti and Haitians everywhere must do the same—build by day, survive by night—and live forever short of what was promised.
When I took those two dozen steps to the podium on December 4, 2021, she was there, behind her glasses, watching. I remembered my grandmother’s voice—not the one who called the gods, but the one who sang the songs that brought them close. I hadn’t made it to Haiti for her funeral. Joujou, my aunt, my uncle had. So on December 4, thirty-five years late, I paid my respect with my feet.
Standing there, I welcomed the chance to remove my mask but hated the voice that came out. I regret not preparing my remarks, but even if I had, every word would have been filtered through a decorum I no longer had patience for. Still, I said the kind words expected of me, because grief in such places must squeeze through small containers. Just a few feet from the overpriced casket, another one closed: the one holding my faith in inherited ritual.
Later, at the graveside, the coffin hit bottom with a hollow thud. Each scoop of dirt landed like it was filling a pothole no one planned to fix. His body—once laughing as he fixed my car—was now just weight lowered into earth that would never remember his name or call me Kouzen.
None of it brought back the voice that had gone quiet weeks before the end. And yet, I still think: it happened fast. As if the cosmos were in the business of equity.
My cousin lies in ground that will never again hear my grandmother’s songs. And the girl from the church will grow up taught to fear the very capacities that once defied every earthly authority that prefers obedience to liberty. That’s how it works: the songs fade, the child is distracted, and the rest of us pretend it was choice.
Why didn’t Danbala heal my grandfather's eyes? No one poured libation at the tree that might have remembered him. Call it betrayal or neglect. It was as fitting as it was final. My uncle said my grandfather had already closed his eyes to the old gods, turning toward the man from Bethlehem a couple of years before his death. Christianity offered obedience in exchange for cosmic certainty. Vodou demanded community participation and social risk in exchange for intimacy with the dead. Under occupation and poverty, the practical choice seemed obvious.
Seventy years with the Lwa, then a pivot to a savior whose name he had never spoken as a child. Why that cross? Not the banner of a god who marched beside his ancestors, but the emblem of the one who arrived with the whip. By then, the chain of habit, neurons, hormones, and circumstance had already made the choice for him. Faith or fear. By the time the cross lay in his hands, it was less a decision than the last link in a lifetime’s wiring. He died not just blind but severed.
I wasn’t surprised he turned to God. Faith runs deep where I’m from. But which god? The one who marched beside his ancestors, or the one who arrived with the empire, whip in hand?
My parents sent me to École Jean-XXIII, run by the Sacred Heart Brothers, where the catechism they drilled into me still feeds my weakness for Catholicism. It wasn’t just the Lord’s Prayer and arithmetic I took home. That’s where I received my first pencil. On report card days, Joujou waited outside, arms crossed, already knowing what I wouldn’t say: ready to take me home anyway. I also learned to play soccer and got into more than a few fistfights. That training worked, and I’m still not sure whether I’m grateful or trapped.
I abandoned the scripts not because I forgot them, but because they had already rotted through. Calling it a choice flatters the idea of free will; the truth is, the same Caribbean breeze I was raised with stripped them bare long ago. If the dead were ever close, they never proved it and the living rarely do. Pretending otherwise is complicity, a sentimental lie dressed as heritage.
I prefer to believe my grandfather lived as if meaning were possible—as if the living were close—even when the world insisted otherwise.
One evening in late summer, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I was on a call I couldn’t interrupt until my older daughter’s name kept flashing. When I finally answered, she said, “Dad, are you home? So-and-so is bringing you mangoes.”
I went outside. A plastic bag, knotted at the top, leaned in the corner of my front door—about a dozen mangoes and a note. I’ve loved mangoes since my grandmother spoiled us; in our family, a mango was never just fruit. These came from a friend’s backyard in Florida. Close in miles, still carrying the taste of survival across worlds. I thanked her (my daughter in all but name) and pictured the mango tree in my grandmother’s yard, where fruit was an offering before it was a snack, and where we, not time, decided which ritual could be abandoned.
I didn’t know it yet, but that night those mangoes would remind me that some things cross borders intact, while culture spoils faster than fruit.
Funny how you don’t get to choose which parts of your past stay with you, just as you can’t know what parts of the future will stick. Sometimes it’s mangoes. Sometimes it’s the discipline of Headmaster Vernet, whose presence could quiet and steady the entire École Jean XXIII schoolyard. We feared him, but at six or nine-years-old (or even twenty-two) you don’t yet know that fear and respect sometimes share the same mask. When he was transferred, the place changed. I couldn’t say how, only that it had. It was the first loss I couldn’t name.
I’ve written elsewhere about how knowledge turns into fiction once memory loses its guardians. Bois Caïman was one such hinge in 1791, when an August storm could plausibly change the course of history. But its real gamble wasn’t “kneel or stand.” It was whether to act before fear outran courage. Fear compounds faster than interest; each day the pool of people willing to stand shrinks. In a week, it halves; in two, it can disappear. Some uprisings are like tattoos: once the needle breaks the skin, the pain is the point. You’re marked in a way no weather, army, or later regret can erase. After that, the question isn’t “should we?”; it’s “how far before it kills us?” That’s the physics of revolt, whether in Haiti, in any protest before or since, or in the smallest family dispute. Wait too long and the allies you counted on are gone, converted, or swearing they never knew you.
No one poured libation at the tree that might have remembered my cousin. If the gods never came for him, at least no one faked the performance. I hope the tree still stands, but I know the songs are gone. The bench under its shade stays empty.
That night, in my kitchen, bowl and knife in hand, I ate two mangoes for supper. These had traveled fifteen miles; others in supermarkets go farther than most Haitians ever will. Migration chooses its own survivors: mangoes make the trip, rituals don’t. And if the dead spoke, I doubt they’d text me; they’d be too busy asking why we buried faith with the bodies but let superstition run for office and preach on Sundays. They’d add nothing; except confirm that survival without illusion is the only honest inheritance.
Mangoes still pass through customs, for now. Even fruit can be seized. Memory is no different: you either let it vanish or smuggle it in plain sight and damn the inspectors. That’s the same choice at Bois Caïman: to kneel or to stand. And the bench will bear witness or rot in the sun, if you let it.
