Haitians in the here, now

No one in the Camouche Hair Salon talks about what was supposed to be a proud year for Haiti, its 200th anniversary of independence. Some independence. Foreign soldiers again occupy the island country, and some of those peacekeepers are from France, the very nation the Haitian slaves threw out in 1804.

In the beauty salon the soldiers are a topic to avoid. The women burble in a mixture of Creole and English of Easter plans and hair relaxants and new shops on Linden Boulevard in the heart of southeastern Queens. Until the anniversary comes up again, and sad eyes sink into the mirrors. Only the dryers can be heard humming.

Marie Claire Placide can be pleased when she turns to her mirror. She is beautiful, with flawless skin, red lips and an elegant figure. Although she now lives in a faraway suburb, on the Tuesday before Easter she slips into town, back to the familiar Camouche, to have extensions plaited into her dark hair and the braids twisted into a bun. “I’m really not a city girl,” she says.

Placide spent her first seven years exploring the fields around her grandmother’s house in Haiti and fishing in the Caribbean. And even after she finally moved to Montreal to be with her parents, she returned to Haiti whenever she could. After an arranged marriage, she moved first to a two-family house in Queens, then to a larger place on Long Island, and recently to a 1-acre spread in Pennsylvania.

With each “step up,” she “mixed it up” with neighbors who were as likely to be Jamaican or Indian or African American as Haitian. She describes herself not as American or Canadian but as Haitian; yet she hasn’t visited “home” in years, instead vacationing in Disneyland, the Bahamas and time-shares in Florida. “I’ve been too busy with the girls,” says the mother of three.

But that’s not why she doesn’t go back. She again gazes sadly in the mirror, this time not at her lovely profile but at the other women around the shop: “We are not political,” she begins, the way Haitians who worry about retribution against kin back home often do, “but we are scared to go there. There is no security.”

It has been a few weeks since the latest regime change in Haiti, the 32nd coup since it became the first black republic in the West. But for the large community of Haitians in New York, this may be when hope runs out.

What next?

In this city, there are whole institutions created by refugees who realized at some point they would never go back. That’s where the Haitians are now. People who used to send their children home for long stretches or planned to retire there don’t anymore.

After months of unrest and violence, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, was exiled in late February and replaced by a new prime minister. Nobody knows what comes next for the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The weekend Aristide left, many of the 200,000 or so Haitians in the New York area -- as large a concentration of emigres as in South Florida -- argued politics at the same time they listened to the popular Brooklyn-based Radio Soleil for the latest news about the thugs shooting up Haiti’s cities.

Six weeks later, a distressing calm has come over Haitians here as they puzzle over the future. After eking out the most basic existence at home, many have been able to make a better life in this concrete landscape.

Yet as they forge a new identity here, whether as a cab driver in Brooklyn sharing a basement apartment with three others or a nurse living with her middle-class parents in Queens, they share the quandary of what to wish for next for Haiti.

But many are fed up with the constant upheaval. And even though they had resisted giving up their Haitian citizenship, they are ready to become American citizens, says Herold Dasque, who runs Haitian-Americans United for Progress Inc., a service organization.

“I have a cousin who said he’d never become a citizen because of the way America treats blacks,” says Dasque. “But recently he said, ‘Herold, bring me an application.’ He stopped listening to radio, stopped reading the paper.”

These are not people who easily give up when there is trouble. There was a robust reaction in 1990 when the U.S. government considered barring Haitians from giving blood to safeguard the public’s supply from HIV-infected donors.

One afternoon, more than 50,000 Haitians and supporters thronged across the Brooklyn Bridge to Federal Plaza in protest. Haitians similarly rallied against the New York cops who brutalized immigrant Abner Louima. And year after year, the Haitians in exile send an average of $800 million home to their friends and relatives.

But the diaspora was never so united as when the Duvaliers, the family of Haitian dictators that dominated for 30 years, were finally ousted in the mid-1980s. There was a belief that finally Haiti’s future held promise, and the elite-in-exile in those brick houses in Queen’s Cambria Heights almost immediately began planning their investments back home.

Instead, the intervening years brought one failed government after another. Although Haiti achieved democracy, eliminated the army, and in Aristide had a wildly popular and, at first, progressive president who was well thought of internationally, today the country is worse off -- more consumed than ever by crime, poverty and AIDS.

“After 200 hundred years we are safer, where? In Queens?” asks Maylou Abury, a burly woman of 49 who emerges from the dryer at Camouche only to whip off her black suit jacket. She starts fanning herself with the Bible she has been reading. “What we women do for beauty!” Aubry says, laughing as she starts pulling jumbo curlers out of her hair, unable to endure another moment cooking under the dryer.

Aubry is an all-purpose activist in Haitian circles. When she is not running an English-language program for new immigrants out of a storefront or organizing Haitian cultural events, she has her sleeves rolled up helping a friend who owns a Haitian take-out/catering place near her office.

Last fall, she was so excited about the 200th anniversary she organized an “ambassador’s ball” to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria. But she couldn’t come up with a down payment and the ball never happened. “We were counting on the money from Haiti,” she says. “But leaders there were too busy filling their own pockets to come through.”

Aubry can’t imagine what comes next for her country. Maybe now the best way is to concentrate on a Haitian life built here, in Queens and Brooklyn and New Jersey. On her way to work, Aubry points to a barbershop, a car service, the office of a female lawyer, a new convenience store. “Haitian, Haitian, Haitian, Haitian,” she says, proudly. “They’re all owned by Haitians.”