How One Woman Finds Connection to Her Caribbean Roots in New York and Beyond

When the place you come from is in turmoil, what's the best way to maintain cultural ties?

My first trip to Haiti was magical. It was October 2007, and I was falling in love with a Haitian man, Max, who was raised between Brooklyn and the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Friends and family whispered, “Be careful,” but during our six-day stay, my anxieties were erased.

I was mesmerized by the eclectic, bougainvillea-laced restaurants in Pétion-Ville, a cosmopolitan suburb of Port-au-Prince; the colonial charm of downtown Jacmel; Bassin Bleu’s four swimming pools in the lush mountains along the island’s southeastern coast.

I was so taken by Haiti’s charm that we went back seven months later. This time, we headed north to Cap-Haitien, where monuments to Haiti’s proud history as the world’s first Black republic still stand: the fortress Citadelle Laferrière, Sans-Souci Palace, and the statue honoring the Battle of Vertières, the final fight with Napoleon that won Haiti its independence from France in 1803.

When Max and I discovered we were pregnant, we’d often talk of taking our baby to Haiti, in hopes that she’d come to cherish her own memories of the country. Our daughter, Jillian, was born in January 2010. Within days, Haiti suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in its history. Nearly 220,000 people lost their lives and more than a million were displaced. Our commitment to deepen our new daughter’s roots grew even stronger.

In October 2012, I took her on her first trip to Haiti. She was not yet two, so I carried her in my lap. Her father had set up a construction company in the country and had been working there for weeks before we arrived. Max drove us to Wahoo Bay Beach Club, 70-minutes northwest of the city. We spent a blissful few days at this family-run boutique hotel on a cliff with views of the sea and Gonave Island.

When Jillian was eight years old, we took her back to Haiti, and this time stayed for a week in a great-aunt’s home near Kenscoff, a mountainous suburb, where our daughter picked bananas in the front yard. From there we drove to Les Arcadins, on the western coast of the country. We spent three straight days going back and forth between the sea and pool, stopping only to eat meals of stewed fish, diri djon djon (black rice), riz national (rice and kidney beans), lambi (conch stew), and griot (fried pork). At dinner, Jillian drank fresh limeade while her dad and I sipped Haitian Barbancourt rum and listened to the music of a local kompa band.

Both trips had to be planned surreptitiously. Max’s family left Haiti in 1967, during the 14-year dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and had not been back for decades. They held on to every negative news story they heard in their tight-knit Brooklyn community. As a Black American with no ties to a specific country within the African diaspora, I didn’t understand the resistance. I finally asked Max why his mother and aunts were so disdainful. He said, “They miss the Haiti they knew growing up.”

After the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Max and I began to share his family’s hesitancy. Max saw the political climate shift up close through his work in Haiti, and admitted that the country’s growing gang violence made it too precarious for us to visit. In the years since, things have become even more violent, with a state of emergency imposed in March.

And so, for the past six years, Max has been steadfastly helping our daughter to nourish her Haitian roots at home in Brooklyn. Up first: he’s insisted that she must learn to properly eat a mango. One day I came home with a Whole Foods container full of sliced mangoes. Our little one and I were eating them straight out of the box when her father exclaimed, “This is not how you eat a mango!” Okay mesye (sir or gentleman in Haitian Creole), how do you eat a mango? “She’s supposed to tear into the flesh at the top and suck out the juice. Then peel back the skin and eat the fruit around the seed.” Wow — or mézanmi, as the Haitians say.

But the most authentic way we keep our ties to Haiti strong is through cooking, from mayi moulen (Haitian-style cornmeal) and sos pwa nwa (black bean sauce) to Saturday dinners with family, where the aunts serve hearty servings of bouillon with goat. (Soup joumou is saved for Christmas morning and January 1, Haiti’s Independence Day.) As we cook, we play Spotify’s Haitian Heat playlist or our own selection of the Haitian Troubadours, Boukman Eksperyans, Alan Cavé, and Konpa Kreyol.

And when we’re looking for a fête, there are several restaurants that give us Haitian vibes within a five-mile radius of our home: Rebèl Restaurant & Bar, on the Lower East Side; Immaculee Bakery, on Nostrand Avenue in East Flatbush; and up the street from there, DjonDjon BK.

Instead of returning to Haiti, we’ve been making annual visits to Barbados, which is like a second home to Max. The minute we step on “Bim,” as the island is known, we focus on spending our time more like Bajans than tourists. We sign up our daughter for tennis and surf lessons and spend evenings “liming” with friends as they roast breadfruit in their front yard. On Fridays, we head to Oistins Fish Market for the weekly fête of soca, food, and drink. We had a front-row seat to Crop Over and watched those who played mas make their last lap on the Carnival route. We ate at rum shacks, ordering fish, macaroni pie, and Banks beer (and a fruit mocktail for our girl).

We knew our efforts were taking hold last August, when my daughter and I had lunch at the Limegrove Lifestyle Centre in Holetown, on Barbados’s western coast. To get there, we took one of the bright orange buses that stopped across the street from our hotel. Dancehall was blasting from the speakers. I was busy watching the directions on my phone, but Jillian had already rung the bell to alert the bus driver that we wanted the next stop. She walked confidently to the front of the bus — guiding me on our island adventure. When I relayed the moment to her father that evening, he smiled with pride. “She’s becoming a Caribbean girl.”

A version of this story first appeared in the December/January 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Home Away From Home."