Haiti, Blood and Revolution
A somber post, I'm afraid.
Haiti is on everyone's mind this week. I gave to the Red Cross and Yele, but wish I could do more. Unfortunately the stupid Red Cross variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease restrictions prohibit me from giving blood, since I spent more than 3 months cumulatively in the U.K. between 1980 and 1996. (Others may say I am a bit of a mad cow, but I assure you I'm sane and I have quite nice blood to offer.)
Speaking of which, it turns out I'm not entirely English; there's a bit of Scottish, French, German (and even possibly Cherokee) in the mix. As I've dug into the research for my family memoir, I've learned that we have a Haitian connection. The French blood comes via Rene Gregoire, who lived in Port au Prince.
Gregoire's life is a tale of two revolutions. According to family lore he first came to the states with Lafayette, fighting for the colonies in our Revolutionary War. Then he made his way to Haiti, where he owned a coffee plantation. He died on the eve of Haiti's revolution, which started as an uprising by slaves; his family believed that Gregoire was poisoned, perhaps by one of his own servants. (If Gregoire indeed had a plantation, which has not been proven, then he must have been a slave owner.) Most of Rene's offspring were presumed to have been killed in the violent insurrection that took the majority of white lives on the island. One son, Caspar Gregoire, survived; he was supposedly rowed to safety by a sympathetic slave. He was taken onboard a U.S. merchant vessel and landed in Philadelphia, where he changed the family name to Gregory.
Caspar became a boat captain and, in a strange twist, once took freed slaves from Charleston to Liberia. My great-great-great-grandfather, Caspar's son Henry Duval Gregory, was a very learned professor. One of his brothers moved to Leipzig, Germany and enlisted to fight for his adopted country in World War I. So the Gregoires were an interesting if misguided bunch, hurtling back and forth between quests for liberty and domination.
I'll end with a prayer for the living and the dead of Haiti: As blood flows once again in the streets of Port au Prince, and lives and hope are crushed, please God may the miracle of peace and stability spring forth this time from the ruins.
Haiti is on everyone's mind this week. I gave to the Red Cross and Yele, but wish I could do more. Unfortunately the stupid Red Cross variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease restrictions prohibit me from giving blood, since I spent more than 3 months cumulatively in the U.K. between 1980 and 1996. (Others may say I am a bit of a mad cow, but I assure you I'm sane and I have quite nice blood to offer.)
Speaking of which, it turns out I'm not entirely English; there's a bit of Scottish, French, German (and even possibly Cherokee) in the mix. As I've dug into the research for my family memoir, I've learned that we have a Haitian connection. The French blood comes via Rene Gregoire, who lived in Port au Prince.
Gregoire's life is a tale of two revolutions. According to family lore he first came to the states with Lafayette, fighting for the colonies in our Revolutionary War. Then he made his way to Haiti, where he owned a coffee plantation. He died on the eve of Haiti's revolution, which started as an uprising by slaves; his family believed that Gregoire was poisoned, perhaps by one of his own servants. (If Gregoire indeed had a plantation, which has not been proven, then he must have been a slave owner.) Most of Rene's offspring were presumed to have been killed in the violent insurrection that took the majority of white lives on the island. One son, Caspar Gregoire, survived; he was supposedly rowed to safety by a sympathetic slave. He was taken onboard a U.S. merchant vessel and landed in Philadelphia, where he changed the family name to Gregory.
Caspar became a boat captain and, in a strange twist, once took freed slaves from Charleston to Liberia. My great-great-great-grandfather, Caspar's son Henry Duval Gregory, was a very learned professor. One of his brothers moved to Leipzig, Germany and enlisted to fight for his adopted country in World War I. So the Gregoires were an interesting if misguided bunch, hurtling back and forth between quests for liberty and domination.
I'll end with a prayer for the living and the dead of Haiti: As blood flows once again in the streets of Port au Prince, and lives and hope are crushed, please God may the miracle of peace and stability spring forth this time from the ruins.
posted by The Tailored Woman at Saturday, January 16, 2010
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