This was my first Haitian home. Stranded at the airport I knew nothing of Port-au-Prince’s landscape. I had studied much more about the rural Artibonite Valley. One name I knew was Oloffson. I’m sure it was a mild curiosity about how this gingerbread looking place had found itself among the banana leaves with the name of a Swedish father. Not unlike me. A gingerbread child among the mangoes with the name of a Scottish man trailing me. The cab driver enjoyed our chat and then his exuberance melted in the rain as he handed me my suitcase and looked up the stairs of the magnificent hotel. It seemed to lean forward with its hands on its hips inspecting us. The lights shone down between me and the driver as he bid me farewell and wiped his brow.
A woman with a voice made of butter gave me a telephone to call my contact. The capital office of the hospital I’d be interviewing at was closed but they had an answering machine and they could get back to me in the morning. Evening in Port-au-Prince during rainy season with no obligations and the creak of the Oloffson’s wooden floors sheltering my every step is where I believe I truly met God for the first time. I enjoyed the cuteness of the room and bounced right back downstairs to sit in all the different chairs and show the great wrap-around porch with the ceiling fans whirring what a good eater I was. A happy child treating the hotel like my grandmother’s house or maybe even like my grandmother herself had set her soul down in the deep ornate crevices. And then a thought. I was not a child actually. I could sit at the bar and not have to fake it here.
I finished and moved. Not quite sunset but late enough for laughter to be the correct language, I joined a small conversation. A dazzling man in what I would have imagined was his fifties asked me if I had ever heard of him. Aubelin Jolicoeur. “What a beautiful name!” I remember saying. I can see his smile reaching from the gin to the tonic. “I am somewhat of a fixture here,” he said. A woman on the couches behind us shrieked “that was the biggest rat I have ever seen!” Mr. Jolicoeur asked if the Times might like her to focus on her story and not be concerned with something the Morses would take care of right away. She smiled, sucked on her cigarette and pulled out a notebook. We came back to our conversation. It turned out he knew all about where I was heading and my soon to be boss and my home city of Newark and why I felt that I had slipped directly into the time and space I was always destined to be in. He assured me that I was indeed home and that I’d be seeing more of him. In the next week he wrote a sweet article welcoming me to the country in Le Nouvelliste and I learned that he was arguably one of the greatest journalists of our time. I never saw him again.
I saw the hotel many more times and I can still see myself 19 in a million pieces reflected between the chandelier and mirror behind the bar. I think there is a mirror but my memory is always in the web of the great god spider. I see myself learning that not all bars were as safe as that one was for me. I see myself building a life over decades founded on that pivotal moment where a place, its character, its people, its rapturing music and its disregard for people who complained about rats but had no such fervor about the suffering of fellow people, taught me ancestral safety. I see all that and can’t help but mourn that place was burned this weekend. The inferno reported of the Hotel Oloffson has made me homesick in some way. I pray. I meditate. I hope the souls in the wood there found their ways to the sea with ease.