than just that scary-looking metallic church. There were many Brownstone style homes around us, and the East River was nearby. In Times Square, Midtown, and Downtown, there were the most unbelievably tall buildings I had ever seen. Mom would often take Betty and me on walks around the neighborhood and the city to explore, to eat, and to visit friends and some relatives who had also emigrated from Haiti. One of my favorite things about my new city was all the new food I got to taste for the first time, like pizza and hotdogs served by street vendors. Like many Caribbean islands, the staple diet in Haiti had consisted primarily of rice and beans; rice and beans with chicken, rice and beans with beef, rice and beans with goat meat etc, all of which I still loved, but it was nice to have some new options.
Mom sometimes took us to the Burger King where she worked and bought Whoppers, or to McDonald’s for Big Macs. I was very familiar with both places having seen their commercials many times from my hours spent watching television. While we walked to McDonald’s, I would sing the jingles I had learned, which also helped me remember the menu: “Big Mac, fillet o’ fish, quarter pounder, french fries, icy coke, thick shakes, sundaes and apple pies, you deserve a break today, at McDonald’s!”. As I said, I watched a LOT of television).
The first time I ate spaghetti and meatballs, I couldn’t believe how much fun food could be. I loved the way the spaghetti twirled around my fork, and I slurped it, getting the sauce all over my clothes. Tasting and eating all these new foods was a way for me to adjust to my new surroundings. Looking back on it now, I think that my ease with and willingness to try all kinds of new food was me not only adjusting to my new city but, also to the idea that I would be traveling all over the world one day, tasting and eating different kinds of food. I have always found it funny when people travel to strange new places only to seek out food that they can find at home. I guess I have an adventurous stomach. To this day, I enjoy being a “gastronomic tourist” wherever I may roam, which over the years has led to me eat some rather interesting things, from cow’s tongue in Paris to mutton brains in India.
The sheer size of the city (along with the astounding number of people, cars, trucks, and buses) was mind-blowing. It made Port-au-Prince seem like a quaint little village. The city was vibrant, loud, and full of motion and activity. My first experiences on the subway were unforgettable. Having never gone underground before, the subway system was nothing short of a marvel. Dad left shortly after breakfast each morning to go drive the streets of the city in his taxi and would not return until late at night, which meant that it would usually be Mom, Betty, and I exploring the city together. I was astonished to find that there was a whole other city underground. How was this even possible, how did they build all this? I wondered.
As was the case above ground, the underground city offered a feast for my eyes and ears. I heard the metal subway car wheels screeching to a halt at the stations and musicians playing their instruments for spare change. I saw posters, advertisements, and graffiti on the walls. I heard the muffled voices of the conductors coming from the subway car speakers as we arrived at each station. It was endlessly fascinating. I wondered how Mom and everyone else knew where they were going down there. Studying the subway map inside the cars did little to answer that question, as it seemed there were too many subway lines to make sense of, yet somehow each time we left the underground city and ascended into the city above, we were exactly where we were supposed to be.
“Different” kinds of people
Children notice a lot more than we would ever imagine, even such things as the subtleties of social dynamics involving race, culture, and class. My indoctrination into the racial history and socio-economic issues present in my new country were a rude awakening to my young mind. Things were very different here than they had been in Haiti. The church we attended was a Kreol speaking church attended by Haitian immigrants and their children, some of whom, like Betty had been born in the States. Sunday provided the only time I was around a majority of Haitian people. Most Haitians are black people of African descent, with a multiracial minority and an even smaller minority of white Haitians, all of whom share the Kreol language. Haitian Kreol is a hodgepodge of French and the various native languages spoken by the indigenous Taino Indians who lived there prior to the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. It also has elements of the various African languages spoken by the imported slaves, along with a smattering of Spanish and English. While both Kreol and French are the official languages of Haiti, schooling is conducted mainly in French in the private schools, but more often in Kreol in government schools. Prior to leaving Haiti, I had been enrolled in one of those primarily Kreol-speaking government schools, so I did not learn French since my grandparents had only spoken Kreol in the home. In Haiti, French is generally considered as the language of the upper class, and many Haitians carry this idea with them even after they leave the country.
Unfortunately, Haiti has a high incidence of illiteracy, and although schooling is compulsory, many children never have the chance to attend due to dire poverty. As a result, many never learn to read any language, never mind French. This helps to perpetuate the idea of French being the language of the upper class, as normally, only educated people speak it. Having been a French slave colony, Haiti like the US, Brazil, and other European colonies in the new world with slaves, had many instances of slave owners having children with their slaves, which led to a small population of lighter-skinned, mixed race people. As happened in the other New World colonies, an unfortunate color-based class structure developed. The people with the most money, influence, power, and education often were the lighter-skinned ones. The closer to white someone was, the better his or her chances of moving up in society.
While growing up in Haiti, both sides of my family were relatively well-off compared to the unfortunate majority of the Haitian population: all the adults were educated and all the children went to school. Everyone had a maid (which is still very common in the Caribbean, Latin America, and many other parts of the world outside the US), and there was always plenty of food on the table. I lacked for nothing. My Uncle LaMartine, who was my mom’s older brother and who like most of her brothers was a Christian minister, was married to Aunt Patricia, a white American missionary. My Uncle Raoul (also my mom’s elder brother and a minister) was married to my Aunt Elsie, who was half-black and half-Japanese (her father was a black American soldier who had served in Japan during WWII where he had met his Japanese bride, Aunt Elsie’s mom). As far back as I could remember, there had always been people of different races in my family, so I had grown up thinking that people of different races living happily together was normal.
With all this as my background, I noticed differing depictions of the different races in my first few months living in the US, in favorite medium of television, be it in comedies, dramas, or the evening news. In watching shows like Good Times and What’s Happening, it seemed that black people were often shown as coming from broken families, living in the ghetto, or just struggling to get by from day to day. This was in stark contrast to the depictions of white families in television shows, the news, and in movies (including the pilots in the airline movies I loved to watch), where white families were usually depicted as living middle, or upper class lives. It was sometimes a subtle distinction, but even at that young age, I noticed that overall, movies and shows with majority white casts were not about the fact that they were white. Instead, they were about people living life and dealing with whatever dramas came up. This was in contrast to the shows and movies with majority black or Latino casts, where it seemed that their color or ethnic background was usually the primary issue. I wondered, even at that young age, why the black families couldn’t just be shown as living middle-class lives in the suburbs, without the fact that they were black being front and center.
In the years that followed, when The Cosby Show came out, I finally got my wish. I finally saw a happy, functional, successful, educated black family depicted as living life and dealing with family issues, without their skin color being the star of the show. As I grew older and learned more about American history with slavery, Jim Crowe laws, segregation, Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights era, I was sometimes saddened by how unfair it all seemed. I often wondered why people couldn’t just treat one another equally. All these things: the media depictions of blacks and minorities, the racial history of the US, as well as personal experiences I would have growing up, served as further motivation for me to become a pilot one day. Even at the tender age of seven, I realized that my captain’s uniform