In October 2016, Haiti found itself in the crosshairs of Hurricane Matthew. A Category 4 storm with 145-mile-per-hour winds, Matthew made landfall in the southwest region of the country, decimating large portions of it. Towns were nearly annihilated, with most houses either roofless or flattened. Farmlands and roads were flooded, and rivers raged, demolishing bridges. Five hundred and forty-six people were reported dead. Cell phones were down for days, making contacting friends and family in the south impossible. It was just as difficult to reach family members after the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake killed an estimated two hundred thousand on January 12, 2010. Thoughts of the earthquake brought to mind the dilemma of living in seismic and hurricane-prone areas: concrete might protect you from hurricanes but can become deadly during an earthquake.

  Before Matthew made landfall, the last contact I had with my friends in Gros Marin was the day before the hurricane struck, when I asked where they would take shelter. Most of them did not seem worried.

  “There will always be storms,” one friend said, stressing that the previous one, Hermine, had recently bypassed them altogether.

  The night Hurricane Matthew came ashore, I stayed up with my mother-in-law, who was visiting us in Miami. We listened to live Haitian radio reports online. People were calling in from coastal areas to say that the sea was coming into the towns, farms, and churches where they had sought shelter. Some eventually had to leave those shelters in the dark to seek higher ground. The calls to the radio stations were brief and urgent. Before he was abruptly cut off, one man said he heard a group screaming inside a house as the sea lapped at its doors.

  My mother-in-law eventually learned, through a text sent by one of her neighbors, that her home had been severely damaged. Like hers, most of her neighbors’ houses were either mangled or smashed by winds and floods. We learned that twenty people were sleeping in one room in the large concrete building near my mother-in-law’s home. As it traveled over southern Haiti, Hurricane Matthew killed livestock and destroyed crops. There were reports of people having no food, water, or shelter and living in caves while eating potentially toxic plants on the outskirts of Jérémie. The Haitian government estimated the hurricane caused up to $2.9 billion in damages. Also looming was the increased menace of waterborne illnesses, including cholera. The day after the storm, our friend Phillipe sent us a picture of the sky above what was left of my mother-in-law’s house. Behind the clouds was a rainbow, and it looked like a sphere, a massive circle.

  A few months later, I was standing on the back of a pickup truck to address a hundred or so protesters gathered in front of the Miami field office of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. We were asking the Department of Homeland Security to prolong temporary protected status, or TPS, for Haitians, who first gained the designation after the January 2010 earthquake, and needed it even more as a result of the hurricane. Temporary protected status—which DHS grants to individuals who cannot return to their home countries because of wars, epidemics, or grave natural disasters—typically lasts eighteen months. However, some countries that have benefited, including Honduras and Nicaragua, have had the status for over twenty years.

  I was expressing my support for the extension of TPS for over sixty thousand Haitians when a loud cheer broke out, and everyone started pointing upward at the sky. Out of nowhere, a rainbow ring emerged in the cloudless midmorning sky. It inspired such jubilation that I had to step aside.

  I handed the microphone to Farah Juste, a well-known Haitian singer and community activist. She began singing “Alelouya pou Ayiti” (Hallelujah for Haiti), one of her most famous compositions. Juste’s robust voice and upbeat lyrics reminded me of Mahalia Jackson singing her heart out in one of my gospel favorites, “God Put a Rainbow in the Sky”:

  God put a rainbow in the sky …

  It looked like the sun wasn’t gon’ shine no more

  Oh, God put a rainbow in the sky

  Juste was followed by a preacher who reaffirmed what I assumed everyone was thinking: the rainbow was a clear and positive sign that temporary protected status would be extended for the next eighteen months. After that, all would be well until the next renewal date.

  I used to think that a circular rainbow was a rare optical illusion until someone told me that most rainbows are circular; we just can’t always see both sides. I had never seen a complete circular rainbow in person before that moment. Rainbows, I was taught, as the daughter of a Pentecostal deacon and the niece of a Baptist minister, are meant to remind us of biblical floods, like the one Noah survived in his ark. Rainbows are also seen, in many cultures, as bridges between our world and the next. Iris, the Greek rainbow goddess, is a messenger between gods, mortals, clouds, and the sea. The Haitian rainbow lwa or spirit, Ayida Wèdo, is also the goddess of water, wind, fire, and serpents. She is sometimes referred to as the Rainbow Serpent and is believed by the Fon people of Benin to hold up the sky. In A Rainbow for the Christian West, René Depestre has Simbi, the lwa or spirit of rivers, demand the blood of a poet in exchange for a rainbow, even a rainbow that is beneath the ocean, un arc-en-coeur, “a heartbow of the sea,” in Colin Dayan’s beautiful translation. A friend at the TPS demonstration told me that in parts of Latin America, some mothers hide their children from rainbows or instruct them not to look or point at them because they’re manifestations of the devil’s anger.

  Our circular rainbow lasted nearly thirty minutes before fading as the demonstration ended. Nine days later, President Donald J. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that temporary protected status for Haitians would be extended for only six more months before more than a hundred thousand people could potentially be deported. Subsequent extensions were granted through 2020 by court order after a group of lawyers and activists sued the Trump administration. Then later, the Biden administration extended TPS in May 2021. The rainbow seemed to have been a bearer of good news, even if it was delivered in a prolonged and chaotic fashion.

  On Labor Day weekend 2019, Dorian, a Category 5 hurricane, pummeled the Bahamas and pulverized homes on Abaco and Grand Bahama Islands with wind gusts of over two hundred miles an hour. The hurricane hovered for forty-eight hours, crawling between one and three miles per hour. Dorian inundated the islands with three feet of rain, and a storm surge of over twenty feet, leading to dozens of deaths, including that of a still unknown number of Haitians and Bahamians of Haitian descent living on the islands. During the storm, Denis Phillips, a meteorologist from Tampa, Florida, tweeted an image showing a circular rainbow wrapped around Hurricane Dorian’s expansive eye. The image was said to be from NASA, but it did not look like the white-and-gray ones usually used by NASA on weather forecasts.

  Hurricane Dorian’s TV rainbow eye was a kind of coding, a series of radar screen colors designed to identify the intensity levels inside the storm. Blue meant light, green moderate, yellow heavy, red and orange severe, and violet or purple, extreme. The rainbow around Hurricane Dorian’s eye went from a light to a darker blue at the immediate center, then green and yellow as it spread out, then bright red and violet on the farther edges.

  I once made a rainbow. In a science class in high school, I performed an experiment in which I filled a glass jar with water and put a mirror next to it at a forty-five-degree angle. I aimed the mirror at a dark part of the school lab’s wall. And sure enough, there emerged a rainbow. Not a perfectly arced or circular one, but a fat uneven one with pale and unsteady variations of blue, yellow, orange, and green. After seeing the rainbow at the demonstration, I tried to make that same kind of rainbow again at my writing desk and failed. Only the water-filled glass was reflected in the mirror back at me.

  Soon after Hurricane Dorian ravaged several islands in the Bahamas, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reminded us that by 2050 oceans will rise high enough to wipe out low-lying cities like Miami. Hurricanes, extreme heat, droughts, floods, and wildfires will displace over a quarter of a billion people. These are enough people to create what could be the fifth-largest country in the world, a migrating nation with no landmass, borders, railways, roadways, seaports, airports, schools, hospitals, communications, financial institutions, or disaster management systems, all of which they’ll need to acquire from the other nations that have somehow managed to escape their fate. The unwanted citizens of this pariah state will soon be arriving in even more significant numbers at every remaining border. They will be trafficked, smuggled, crammed by the millions into refugee camps, whipped by immigration officers, shot at by armies, abandoned to freeze in tundra, and die of thirst in deserts. They will continue to drown by the thousands at sea, even as their deaths are recorded and viewed over and over by millions. Few countries will want to embrace or absorb this populace, yet no fences, walls, or armies will hold them back. They will be migrating not to chase dreams or procure luxuries but for food and water. They will be escaping the land, water, and food wars being fought over the little that’s left. They will still be called invaders, infiltrators, animals, an ongoing crisis, a national security threat, specters some will say they did not see coming but, like the other half of the rainbow, the heartbow, have been there all along.

  “I have become a river,” they might each proclaim, just as the Haitian poet and novelist René Depestre has before them, in his poem “La rivière” (The River), as translated by Colin Dayan.

  There now, it is done, I have become a river.

  It will be a great adventure all the way to the sea.

  What name will they give me on the maps?

  From where does this stream of unknown water come?

  What sky does it reflect with its waves?

  What calm, what hunger, what sorrow?

  They Are Waiting in the Hills

  Traveling with Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison

  Hansberry

  I slept through my first big New York City blizzard at sixteen. I woke up to the sound of a shovel grating the sidewalk as our neighbor, Mrs. Clark, cleared a path to her car. Snow was a striking transition from one culture to another, more abrupt than leaves turning in the fall. No one on our block in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, owned a large snowblower and the sanitation trucks took at least a day to arrive, so the snow would stay put for a while, like a thick white blanket over a lumpy bed. Flurries were still streaming past the streetlamp in front of our house when I woke up for school. Daylight had been delayed by snowflakes dancing past the lamp’s foggy rays.

  Grail was the only thing that impressed me as much as the snow. Some summers, high in the mountains in the Haitian countryside, where I spent my childhood summers, it would suddenly start to rain in the middle of the day, and out of the rain would emerge perfectly round pellets, as solid as roadside pebbles but colder than anything I’d ever felt. Even my brother and cousin, who, at any sign of rain, liked to jump out of our countryside relatives’ houses naked for outdoor baths, would stay inside when there was grail because we had been told a fantastical cautionary tale: that each marble-sized orb could get larger and larger until it became a boulder and flattened everything. But as soon as the rain stopped, we’d head out for small piles of grail, stuff them in our mouths, and suck on them as though they were glacial treats from God’s refrigerator.

  I would always think of grail during New York blizzards, when the snow flew around wildly as though being guided by hurricane-strength winds. In high school, my best friend, Norma, and I would go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden after a fresh fall in search of the best snow. Mostly a haven for greenhouses, flower cultivation, and weddings, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was regularly opened for a few hours in the winter. The trees looked like ghosts, miles and miles of leaf-stripped phantoms neatly lined up on either side of both wide and narrow trails. Sometimes Norma and I would attack a whole field with our black rubber boots, leaving behind two lines of footprints while imagining that someone would come back later in the night to track them with search dogs and helicopters. We had just read Jack London’s Call of the Wild in Mr. Swizohn’s tenth-grade English class, and one of my favorite scenes was of the central subject and character, Buck, touching snow for the first time.

  Buck’s feet sank into a white mushy something very like mud.… It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him … It was his first snow.

  Norma had a crush on Mr. Swizohn, our bearded, redheaded English teacher, who once asked me to make a dinner reservation for him, en français, at the French restaurant where he was to propose to his girlfriend. Norma was devastated when I told her about his engagement. Still, she quickly blew it off by laughing at the fact that, being new to English, I was long past the first chapter of Call of the Wild before realizing that Buck was a dog and not a man. When Norma was done making fun of me, she swooned over how Mr. Swizohn could recite long passages from Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale, passages that we were made to memorize for his class.

  “Everyone should commit a little Shakespeare to memory,” Mr. Swizohn would say before making us perform scenes like actors at a table read. I hated to be chosen for any part because I had a heavy Haitian Creole accent, which made Shakespeare’s convoluted language sound even more incomprehensible to my classmates.

  Norma and I would test each other to see if we remembered our soliloquies as we walked in the Botanic Garden in the snow. We would stretch our imaginations to reach for even the most remote connection to our chalky surroundings, reciting to each other Autolycus’s boasts of his imported wares in The Winter’s Tale.

  Lawn as white as driven snow,

  Cyprus black as e’er was crow …

  The night before, on television, Norma had seen the film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, starring Sidney Poitier. We both loved Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, whom we thought of as “island men.”

  “Why can’t we read that play and memorize those lines?” she asked, stomping on a thawing circle of brown dirt near the trail’s end.

  Norma particularly liked one of the speeches made by the younger sister in the play, the rebellious Beneatha, and tried to recite some version of it for me with the same emotion that the actress who’d played Beneatha, the vibrant Diana Sands, had.

  When I was very small … we used to take our sleds out in the wintertime and the only hills we had were the ice-covered stone steps of some houses down the street.

  “Those things relate much more to our lives,” Norma said, then added breathlessly, as she had many times before, “I’d love to come here with Sidney and not you.”

  “That’s okay,” I’d say, “because Harry and I would be in a much warmer place. Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica, or Trinidad.”

  Even as we discussed our famous paramours, I kept thinking of Lorraine Hansberry because she was a writer, and I, too, wanted to become a writer. Lorraine Hansberry died at thirty-four, and I’d always feared, from the time that I was collecting grail on the top of Haitian mountains, that I might die young. So, as we talked about Lorraine Hansberry, Norma and I walked the rest of the trail in silence, in Lorraine Hansberry’s memory, dejectedly pondering the loss of the old woman she would never become.

  When I got home, my father, who’d been living with snow longer than we had, told my brothers and me to be careful the next few days. He said the snowflakes would no longer stick to the tall green ash tree growing out of the sidewalk in front of our house. Instead, in a few days, the temperature would spike and then drop, turning clusters of snowflakes into deadly icicles that might pierce our bodies, gliding dangerously from the top of our heads to the soles of our feet.

  By dusk, the path Mrs. Clark tried to clear to her car had already disappeared. We had not cleared our driveway, so an even thicker rug of snow lay there. A single moving car, a phone company van, plowed through on its way to salvage fallen lines. Even in the snow, these phone lines seemed to stretch between ourselves and some very distant place, perhaps to Buck, Sidney, Harry, and Lorraine Hansberry, sitting on an ice-covered hill somewhere, writing a few more words for us.

  Lorde

  I was heading to Grenada while the island was hosting the 2017 State of the Tourism Industry Conference, one of the region’s largest gatherings on the subject. Though the conference was planned before Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated many Caribbean islands whose economies rely heavily on tourism, the timing seemed prescient. Indeed, on the conference program I scrolled through on the plane were discussions focused on disaster preparedness, recovery, and rebuilding. I was not attending the conference, though, because I am not a tourism expert. The people sitting on the plane on either side of me were not tourism experts either. They were tourists, two young American couples on their honeymoons. After listening to them exchange wedding stories, I turned to the poet and essayist Audre Lorde’s “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report,” an essay she wrote a few weeks after the 1983 US invasion of her parents’ homeland.

  I had read Lorde’s essay many times before—it’s the last chapter of her seminal 1984 collection Sister Outsider—but I wanted to reread it before seeing Grenada for the first time. That we landed at Maurice Bishop International Airport, which is named after the former prime minister of Grenada, who was assassinated six days before the start of the US invasion, might have intrigued Lorde. I felt her begin this journey with me as I walked down the airplane steps, the sun that is only this sparkling bright in the Caribbean beaming down on my face.