Editor's note: Dr. Nadine Pinede is a poet, writer, editor, and translator of Haitian descent. She is also a senior consulting editor at Scholastic Education. Her fiction has been published in Haiti Noir and her Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has been collected in numerous anthologies. Her debut coming-of-age novel, “When the Mapou Sings,” will be published in December. Opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinions at CNN.
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The Haitian proverb “tout moun se moun” means everyone is someone. Everyone has a story. Everyone should be treated with respect and dignity.
Sophie Kandaurov
Nadine Pinedo
Despite this wise adage, throughout history, our most fundamental freedoms — the right to bodily integrity and to think and speak the truth — have been denied to a large portion of humanity. These freedoms have been fought for, defended, and continue to be fought for. No one has lived that history more than black people in the United States and the broader African population.
Juneteenth celebrates the struggles that led to Black freedom and commemorates June 19, 1865, when slaves in Galveston, Texas, first learned of their freedom from Union soldiers. But it wasn't until more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that they received the news. Every June 19, many Black Americans gather family and friends for lavish picnics, enjoying red food and kola nuts that symbolize the resilience of those who survived the African slave trade. Surrendering to joy and community is a time-honored practice that helps people survive unrelenting trauma.
As a Haitian American, Juneteenth challenges me to see things in a bigger picture. 220 years ago, in 1804, Haiti was freed from slavery. But freedom can come at a high price. Juneteenth reminds me that when those who deny everyone the right to freedom feel threatened, especially when enslaved people boldly assert their freedom, backlash often follows.
That was certainly true for newly freed black people in Texas, who had endured prolonged unjust servitude.
And so it was with the black inhabitants of the newly born nation, named “Ayti” (Place of the Mountains) by the Taino people, who had been wiped out by the invaders.
After the Haitian people succeeded in wresting their freedom from French colonial slave masters, the fledgling Caribbean nation was forced to pay a huge indemnity to France in 1825, ostensibly as compensation for the “property” of plantation owners, in exchange for independence. Despite this humiliation, Haiti managed to pay off its unjust and onerous debts. But it wasn't enough: Haiti's treasury and assets were seized by the United States in a Wall Street-backed occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. This August marks 90 years since the end of that now-largely forgotten occupation.
The story of Juneteenth in the United States and black Americans' quest for freedom has much in common with Haiti's struggle for autonomy and its frustrated quest for some measure of prosperity.
Nadine Pinedo
The American story of Juneteenth and black Americans' quest for freedom has much in common with Haiti's struggle for autonomy and its frustrated quest for some measure of prosperity. The vortex of violence, poverty, and despair that plagues Haiti today must be traced in no small part to a history of systematic exploitation. Similarly, the poverty and deprivation that disproportionately afflicts some black communities can be traced back to the original sin of slavery and the repressive Jim Crow laws that followed.
One prominent figure who connects the struggles of black Americans and Haitians for freedom and dignity is Zora Neale Hurston, a daughter of the American South and an accomplished writer and anthropologist who lived in Haiti from 1936 to 1937.
Despite her difficult upbringing in Haiti, Hurston found fertile ground for her groundbreaking anthropological research as well as her soaring literary imagination. She is the muse and inspiration for my debut novel, set in Haiti during her time there, and the subject of my long-standing and passionate study. 133 years after her birth, Hurston still has much to teach us about transcendence in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the oldest black town in the United States, where her father served as mayor. Like my parents, who grew up in Haiti, she was used to seeing black people in positions of power.
Lynn Sladky/AP
In the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami, Florida (as well as throughout Haiti and the diaspora), May 18th is celebrated each year as Haitian Flag Day. The Haitian flag was created by “removing the white from the French flag and incorporating symbols of freedom and resistance, including a cannon, a royal palm wearing a liberty cap, and the saying, 'L'Union Fait La Force.'” United, we are stronger, writes Nadine Pinede.
After a difficult adolescence following the death of her mother, she grew ten years younger to attend public high school in Baltimore. By 1924, she had earned an associate's degree from Howard University in Washington. In 1925, Hurston won a scholarship to attend Barnard College in New York City, freeing her from the unjust rules that limited the education of black Americans.
While a student at Barnard College, she became one of the stars of the Harlem Renaissance and embarked on the adventure of her life, an adventure in which Haiti would play a key role.
One of the reasons Hurston attended Barnard was to join pioneers in the emerging field of anthropology. She traveled throughout the South, carrying a handgun for protection. Along the way, she collected folk tales rooted in the African-American experience, recorded songs, and filmed children playing. She also published literary works and briefly became friends with the master poet Langston Hughes.
Hurston unashamedly reinvented herself with a freedom and vigor that I have always envied. Like other black Americans living through the desperate times following the end of the Civil War, through ingenuity and necessity, Hurston found a way not only to survive but, in the process, to produce an enduring body of work that is an immeasurable contribution to the nation's creative, intellectual and cultural heritage.
A little less than a decade after her Barnard enrollment, Hurston's time in Haiti would change her life. In 1936, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, traveling first to Jamaica and then to Haiti, where she rented a house with a Haitian maid (an irony for Hurston, who had worked as a domestic worker in her youth and would later return to that role). Her previous patrons had supported her with conditions attached; not so with the Guggenheim. For the first time in her life, Zola was free from the worries of money that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images
A parade float passes by during a Juneteenth celebration marking the end of slavery in the United States, June 15, 2024, in Galveston, Texas.
In Haiti, Hurston's creativity had the time and freedom to flourish; she wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in less than two months there. As a budding anthropologist, she chose Haiti as the perfect testing ground to study the unbridled creativity emerging from African, European and indigenous cultures. As the author of Barracoon, a book based on interviews with one of the last enslaved black Americans, Hurston arguably understood the significance of Juneteenth.
Only a few letters remain from Hurston's time in Haiti, and, as far as I know, no field notes. The mystery seemed like an invitation. Above all, I wanted to know the backstory of Lucille, the Haitian maid whom Zola praises as one of her few friends in the introduction to her genre-bending book about Haiti and Jamaica, Tell My Horse. I wanted to move Lucille from a footnote into the spotlight.
This Haitian figure more than intrigued me. As a child, my parents home-taught Haitian history, with framed portraits of founding fathers like Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe hanging throughout the house. They were determined to tell the story of Haiti, no matter what. I knew that the Haitian flag, commemorated every year on May 18, had been stripped of the white of the French flag and incorporated symbols of freedom and resistance, including a cannon, a royal palm bearing a liberty hat, and the saying, “L'Union Fait La Force.” We are stronger together.
“My mother's captivating tales of Haiti and my grandmother, an ingenious market woman who survived under occupation, gave me a sense of belonging. Long before Haiti was known as the Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere, my mother's stories made me feel like I was the descendant of heroic people who claimed their freedom. It is this seizing of personal freedom against all odds that speaks to me about Hurston.”
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Years after Hurston's death in 1960, renowned author and activist Alice Walker discovered her forgotten grave. In an article for Ms. magazine (also published in her book, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens), she wrote about rededicating Hurston's grave, which had been overgrown with weeds. Walker erected a headstone that re-inscribed Hurston's place in history as “A Southern Genius: Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist.” To my ears, she sounded like she was referring to the Global South, including Haiti, where Hurston wrote masterpieces that would guide generations.
Now more than ever, we need these beacons – the stories of those who have been silenced, ignored or worse – but all over the world, the very act of writing and reading these stories is under threat.
This year, and every Juneteenth, is a precious reminder of the freedom that Zora Neale Hurston embodied. Tout moun se moun. Everyone has a story. She collected countless stories as an anthropologist, wrote guidepost stories, and rewrote the story of her own life by reinventing herself. Claiming a place to tell your story and living it is a freedom that can never be taken for granted.
