STORE
Emily Hiestand

In Memory of Parnel “Joe” Bain
First published in The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine 1998; revised slightly 2024
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In December of the first year that Joe and Alice Bain owned Parnel's, the small mom and pop store just across the street from our house, an enormous wooden crate of hook-necked, green-and-yellow-striped squashes suddenly appeared in the little room. Dozens of squashes, each one as big as a spade, spilled from the crate, and in a few days began to colonize the room, migrating from the crate onto the newspaper rack, the bread shelf, the lottery ticket stand. The Haitian ladies who shop at Parnel's were buying these giants by threes and fours, and I surmised that squash in some form was a winter holiday food. One morning while buying The Boston Globe at the store, I hefted one of the squashes, admiring its sculptural body. A woman at the nearby canned food shelf noticed and said, helpfully, "That's calabaza. We call it joumou. It's for soup."  I think she was going to tell me how to cook squash but Joe Bain, had overheard our talk from his post at the counter and called out to me: "You should taste joumou before you cook him. You might not like him." 

The Christmas holidays came and went, and by the last day of December the large wooden squash crate was empty. New Year's Day that year was bitter cold, with the steely-gray, ruthless skies that can begin the year in coastal New England. About noon, as Peter and I sat about in the existential ruin of that first day, still seeking some organizing principle to put in a good root for the coming year, the doorbell rang. We opened the door, and there on our front porch stood Joe Bain, holding in his arms what looked like a large fancy headdress or a small ceremonial pagoda.

“This is joumou," Joe said, presenting the beautiful basket, wrapped in a fine linen cloth and perched on a woven tray. "This is for the New Year," he continued, "like turkey on Thanksgiving." Joe could not stay — a family dinner was waiting at home — and after pressing the assemblage into our hands, our neighbor was off with a wave.

We bore the pagoda upstairs, unwrapped the cloth, and removed the ceramic lid of the bowl inside the basket. So intense was the saffron yellow color inside that the soup fairly shimmered. The liquid was steaming hot, and it was lunchtime, and so we began that year in the traditional Haitian way, eating bowls of silky purée of squash soup studded with chunks of beef, carrots, onions, and beets. The tureen of soup lasted for a week, and by the end of that time our daily raves had convinced Alice Bain to entrust us with her recipe for soupe de joumou — which her husband declared to be unlike anyone else's. "Better," he said. "My wife's soup is the best,"  Joe said, definitively, with the propriety of the spousal bond.

There is a small poster taped on the front door of Parnel’s store about someone who will do your income taxes, and another about a lost cat named Cleopatra. Once, for three months, a six-foot cardboard parrot in a Hawaiian print shirt, pink sunglasses, and purple sandals stood out front offering entry forms for a vacation contest (long blue claws curling over the sandals). But the parrot faded and was taken away, and the store went back to looking like an ordinary mom and pop store occupying the ground floor of a house on the corner. After dark, the sign on the roof gives off a cool, diffuse light which, seen from our balcony, through a canopy of maple leaves, appears as winking fragments of light, like lightning-bug tails, and reads:

Par . .. .'s   . . .     en . . .     ent . . .     Sto . . .     ican & Tro . . .   ods. 

From street level, in daylight, the sign reads: Parnel's Convenient Store, American & Tropical Foods. A hunter-green canvas awning once shaded the store windows, but the cloth is now a faded fringe. There are plans for a new awning, but it’s expensive and meanwhile, to shield the interior from the sun, Joe has mounted sheets of pegboard inside his two large, south-facing, front windows. There are also several paper signs taped on the windows that read: "Ice Cold," "Mangoes 99¢," and "Concha Y Toro." 

For ninety years, the store was Cormier's, named for its Acadian founders.  Cormiers and their cousins, the Tetraults, tended the store through a depression and two world wars and into the 1980s, when it was sold to a plump man from Delhi named Sonny. Sonny brought chutneys and Basmati, king of rices, to our street and I liked him — "Veg or non-veg?" he once asked me — but he had some minor feud with my husband Peter over something neither of them could ever adequately explain, and one morning Peter found a half-dozen eggs cracked open on his pale blue pickup truck. After the egging, I spoke sternly to each of the men, feeling suddenly like a woman much older than myself, and they let the issue go. But Sonny ran into trouble selling beer to minors, abandoned the store, and returned to India. For nearly a year afterwards the store was vacant, but early one fall day, the "For Sale" sign came down. A few weeks later, the Bains were stocking the shelves with Caribbean spices and drinks, French perfumes, tropical vegetables and fruits, and the literature of their native Haiti. The Bains also tied a little brass bell to the door.

The bell begins tinkling as soon as the store is unlocked each morning: children come in on the way to school, men and women going to work duck in for a coffee for the commute. Elderly men come for a paper and some society after their long evenings alone. One man shuffles down our sidewalk in bedroom slippers, the soles of the slippers making a schhhlp schhhlp sound on the pavement.

"Morning, Joe," the elderly man says, selecting an unwrinkled Herald from the rack, rarely the one on top. "How's everything?" 

The man waits, fingering one of the beaded keychains in a box on the counter, and Joe says, "Everything's going to be all right."

The man nods. 

"He comes every day," Joe tells me, after I chance to observe the exchange one day. "Not to buy. And I tell him that every day."

The owner of Parnel's Convenient Store will laugh easily but there is always a flinty alloy available to his sweet nature, and he can calmly ignore, say, a city cop grousing about his big van on street-cleaning day. This morning three young girls in the plaid, pleated skirts of St. John the Evangelist's school have stopped in to buy three chocolate cupcakes on their way to class. The girls are shy fifty cents, but Joe gives them all three cupcakes. "You bring it next time you come. Don't forget." As the girls leave, he says to me with a shrug, "They will forget." 

A baked-goods supplier wiggles through the narrow aisle with a dolly of donuts and coffee cakes. Joe signs the bill of lading, and then in between customers offloads the boxes and stocks his baked goods shelf. By 8:30 or 9:00 A.M., Haitian women are arriving in their immaculate shopping outfits for a week's worth of rice and vegetables, and Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) is rising from the street. Joe speaks both French and Kreyòl, of course, as well as English, and is willing to let me try my limited French in conversations:

"Bonjour, Monsieur Joe, comment ça va?" 

"Ça va. Et vous, Madame?"

"Ça va bien."

"Il fait du vent aujourd'hui," I might say on a breezy day, and Joe will give me the daily lesson:

"Il y a de la brise," he says. "Pas du vent, la brise!  Tu comprends? 

When I do comprehend, or make whole sentences, or introduce a new word, Joe beams solicitously. Joe and his wife Alice also train my French accent, an accent that used to be the occasion for any of the Haitian men visiting with Joe to double over in merry peels, but more recently, after tutoring by the Bains, prompted a lady behind me in line to ask Joe, as I was leaving the store, "Française?" So I can die happy, Dieu merci!

The store is not a sure thing. It holds on, like a nearby sidewalk maple that is stressed by the new hydrocarbons in the air and by tall trucks crashing into its lower limbs. In the era of BJ's Discount food clubs and supermarkets, the little market on our street survives only because the Bains have designed their store to serve two tiers of customers. For proximate neighbors — loyal, but limited in number — Parnel's is stocked with candy bars, balls of string, very good Pain d’Avignon bread, batteries, milk and bacon, emergency candles, Chianti, and glitter crayons. 

Who buys the speckled enamel coffee pots like the ones 1940s movie cowpokes and hoboes used at their campfires I don't know, but to draw the larger Haitian community, which is dispersed throughout the metro area, Joe and Alice also stock their shelves with prayer candles, Coco Rico sodas, and bottled parfums (Nuit Blanche, Rose Folie, and Champs Elysées). For these customers yellow-green stalks of sugarcane lean against the wall and island root vegetables are piled high in cardboard boxes: the brown, potato-like yotitia from Santo Domingo; nagro yams from Brazil, each one wrapped in a creamy brown paper; and pumpkin-shaped squashes from Haiti. There are boxes of plantains and green bananas, shelves of tamarind and guava nectars, packets of senne pot, the island culture's herb for "improving children's appetites." There is a wall of beans — frijoles negros, habichuelas pintas, coloradas pequeñas — and there is another wall of grains — plantain flour from Ecuador, Mais Mouline and blé from Haiti, rice flour, yellow corn grits, and the yellow corn flour called acassan. There are bins of poisson fortement salée, choice boned salted cod, and burlap bags of jasmine-scented rice, each bag stamped with the picture of a regal green elephant.

None of the piped-in soft pop that bludgeons the supermarket customer with relentless cheerfulness is here. It is a quiet room save for the hours during a baseball game, when the air is filled with a buzzy jangle from a small television on a shelf near the baby pacifiers and dishwashing gloves. Often the small room is filled with conversations, some of them taking place on the phone situated in the window, the kind of pay telephone that looks like a regular phone on steroids. Next to the phone is the dark green rack that holds the city's newspapers and, in this store, on the bottom shelf, a handful of copies of a small white booklet: Pour Convertir Nos Revers En Victoires (For Converting Our Losses into Victories), Jean Baptiste Aristide's plan to foster a government of the people, by the people, for the people in the island nation of Haiti. The booklet is a how-to on what Aristide calls the "difficile institutionnalisation démocratique." There are passages on "Le face-a-face avec la bourgeoisie" and "Des fractions diverses du duvaliérisme."

Near the plan there is another booklet titled Sweet Phrases for Lovers — a handy English-Creole-French book of translations featuring a great range of the utterances helpful for a romance, from "May I kiss your hand?" (Mwen met embrose men ou ?/ Puis-je baiser la main?) to "First of all, you do not even have a donkey, you are lazy, you do not want to work and you think you’re in love with a young lady!" (Pou koumanse, ou pa menm genyen tou tibourik ale we pouoto! Jan ou parese, ou pa menm vle travay epi w bezwen renmen farnm!).

Near the literature of liberation and love there is always a box of fresh loaves of Le Foyer dough bread, and under a plastic dome, a stack of sticky, golden-brown coconut cakes. Really big temptations like candy and lottery tickets are kept behind the counter. The lottery tickets are doled out of a wooden drawer to adults who come in with two or forty dollars to buy a single cardboard ticket or long sheaves of foil tickets named Red Hot, High Roller, and Mystery Money. Candy is meted out from a behind the counter to small children, actual tykes, who come in with a quarter and begin to learn just how much of the sweet world their coin equals. Lately they want spun sugar shaped in green and white rings, and gelatinous squiggles called worms.

Mid-afternoon, when I cross the street again for a soda, a man who appears to be unsteady is putting a quart of beer down on the glass-top counter. He's on his way home from work, with maroon paint on his coveralls. Joe slips the bottle into a brown bag, twists the soft Kraft paper around the neck, takes the man's dollars.

"You could stop," he says, handing over the package, speaking softly, matter of factly, as if he's saying "The Bears are playing tonight."
The man hears the tone, doesn't get angry. 
"I know it," he says. Joe treads one more step, "There's a program at the hospital." 
"I'm going to do it someday," says the man. "You'll see, you'll be amazed at me."

He weaves out of the store and upends the packet in the sun. "He can't drink at all," Joe says. "He's a good man, but he just can't drink at all." Joe shrugged his shoulders the day he said, "I am going to have to do it," meaning he couldn't make the store profitable without the income from beer and wine. "Don't come back," he growls at underage kids who try to buy from his store, "and don't go somewhere else."

Alice Bain, who works at a hospital, tends Parnel’s Convenient Store on Sundays and sells the tower of Sunday papers. "Zhoe is terrible," Alice declared one afternoon in amused mock anger, upon learning that Joe had not passed on to her some tidbit of information from me. "Zhoe tell me nothing from the customer!" Though he must have told her about one customer's interest in a squash. But it is true that Joe's sense of formality makes him reluctant to carry social messages back and forth, and it is Alice who speaks of their daughter's drum and bugle corps competitions (first in the world last year!), the son who was asked to be an altar boy at Speaker O'Neill's funeral, the older boys in college, and how one has lost a little weight.

The idea of store that the Bains brought to our street is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a public living room. Here the disappearance — and the return! — of Cleopatra the cat were announced. Here neighbors sign the petition to keep a chain donut place from opening near Verna's Coffee Shop (famously loved by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill grew up a few streets over). Here, events in Haiti are debated, and here flyers are posted for meetings about the toxins in our local soil and water table. Here customers and the Bains offer each other pleasantries, and opinions about, for instance: Dennis Rodman's hair; cloned sheep; the Hubbell telescope photos; the growing gap between rich and poor; the folly, not to mention the inhumanity of no guaranteed national health insurance; odds of winning the lottery; and how terrific Halloween was this year (balmy, and oh, that Carmen Miranda with a fruit basket on her head, and that little tiger.) Over the years, Alice and Joe have seen the neighborhood soul as well as anyone save perhaps the local priests.

The Bains themselves would be uncommon in any era, but their kind of store was once a commonplace. Parnel's Convenient is the last survival of dozens of small markets that dotted our neighborhood from about 1870 until the 1950s.  Alice Harrington, who has lived two houses from the Convenient Store for seventy-one of her seventy-four years, remembers all of the former markets. I first met Alice Harrington one day in May when we were both out sweeping our walks. Annually, Alice sweeps enough of our neighborhood block to be on the payroll of the department of public works. "Hello," she called that day, waving with her broom. I walked across the street and down three houses to her station. "I don't know why people think street cleaning is all up to the city," Alice huffed. I said I didn't either, and felt myself being admitted to the society of the broom. We stood with our long wood-and-straw wands (Alice was using a Big Chief) and later that month she invited me over for tea.

"There was always a store on the corner where Joe is now," she says. "There was another store where the social club is now. It was tiny too, but it was called the First National, and the man in charge was Pat Haley. The next store was a meat market, and that man's name was Cohen. Next was a shoemaker, then the barber, and next there was Milio, who had all this nice Italian pasta.  He would have it in different bins and measure it out for you. Oh, that was good." Alice also recalls how she used to play in the street — hopscotch, jump rope, and hide 'n seek. "But that stopped," she says, "after the war, when the cars came." 

”When the cars came” is one woman's succinct history of the massive change from a city crisscrossed by horsecars and streetcars to the automobile city. With a car, supermarkets made sense, and the Milios and Pat Haleys closed up shop. "We can't have it all," Alex Marshall said recently in The Washington Post, writing that "The clerk at the Circuit City who sells you a washing machine … will not know your name. It is a tradeoff. For the most efficient distribution system in the modern world, for the elimination of all middlemen, we get a life almost devoid of intimate contact between the home and the market."

One afternoon I chanced to ask Joe where the food in his store comes from, meaning the place where Joe actually picks up his inventory. The more complex question, answerable only by tracing through granaries, warehouses, and freighters, and faraway fields, I was not asking, which Joe realized, for he said, "Chelsea," a town that is the site of the New England central produce market, located near the Mystic River. Joe is surprised when I want to tag along with him to the produce market, but agrees to take me. A few days later, in the dark of 4:30 A.M., I am sitting on my front porch. A lone bird has just begin to trill as Joe's white, Tradesman van pulls up — a huge box on wheels, so vast that in it, I feel like a single pea bouncing in a tin can. I'm too sleepy to talk much as we pass through the pale green marshes of Medford, and onto a street lined in scrap metal dealers and storage lots. 

The van then blends into a stream of trucks converging on the gate of the produce center. A guard waves Joe inside the compound and he heads toward four immense, creme-colored, single-story buildings. We will spend two hours in the vast complex, as Joe selects and bargains for papayas, lettuces, tomatoes, avocados, both of us threading steadily through schools of miniature forklifts, machines called palette jacks (or just jacks) that scoot through the market like swift squids, emitting a high, soft electronic call. It is a world of produce stevedores and big-rig drivers working deals with wholesalers, everyone dealing at a dead run, everyone wearing baseball caps, the stevedores also wearing weight-lifting belts with a flag, heart, or lightning bolt burned into the leather. Summing up the scene for me, one of the produce men says, "Okay, you've got the Mushroom People, the Tomato People, the Potato People, the Celery Hearts People, and the Onion People."          

I have to run to keep up with Joe as he ducks into the bays of companies named Boston Banana, Marco Tomato, Arthur Silk; the Brothers Forlizzi, Matarazzo, Dolci, Arrow Farms, Gold Bell, and Pro-Deuce. Each of the huge bays is refrigerated, and passing each one, the scent in the air will be a mingling of wet cardboard and pineapple, or cardboard and corn, or oranges, or mangoes, or the hard, heavy yams that come packed in a mass of their own damp, rust-colored roots. Posters on the walls of the bays picture not sports heroes, women, nor fast cars, but ravishing tropical fields, and mounds perfect kiwis and bananas.

The foods are the color of flame. They are nut-brown, tawny, ruddy, pea-green, grass-green, damson, and plum, and none is a single color, but is flecked, veined, or brindled. They are turning color before your eyes, perishable with life. I think that selling produce must be a very different experience than selling duct tape or flanges. But I discover that in market jargon the botanical kaleidoscope undergoes a metamorphosis. One of the Apple People, recalling a recent visit from a foreign trade delegation, says to us, "The Russian minister was going from bay to bay. And boy oh boy, he ate so much product!" A Celery Person tells me, "Most of our business is hearts, but we also sell product to Chinese restaurants." A Tomato Man says, "The main question is, How much product can we move?" Note that in this context the word "product," the transmodal integer that combines all the glorious fruit and vegetables into one word, takes no article, no "the," or "a," or "an."  "Product" is pure placeholder.

Leaving the last store, Joe wheels a laden trolley down a steep incline, bracing its weight with his body. A courtly man, he has been embarrassed by my offers to help him lift a few boxes from dock to van, and each time I hand him a box he says, "No, no, I can do this. No, no, that one he is too heavy." This is the sixth round of boxes he has loaded into the van, whose volume is now filled.  The morning shop is complete. On the two days each week that my neighbor goes to the produce market (and the third day a week that he goes to the meat market), this is his regime: Awake at four A.M.; at the market by five-fifteen; shop until about seven; head home to pick up the youngest children and get them to school by seven-thirty. Minutes later, Joe is pulling up in front of his store. He will spend several hours unloading his van in between tending to customers, and will keep the store until nine p.m., when we hear the steel grate rasp over the door. (Seventeen hours, if you are counting.)

"It's hard work, Joe," I say as we cross the Mystic River heading back toward our neighborhood. "It is hardest in the winter," he says, not disagreeing.  "Some days the roads are not plowed, and I never get used to the cold. But the produce workers are always there, every morning when it opens, no matter if it is snowing or ice. Always there," Joe says, describing his own work ethic too. Passing the marshes along the Mystic River, Joe says, "If it is for the profit, I can close the store tomorrow. But all the time, when people come to the store . . . well, this is what I will say: joy is a thing that you can create in your life. Because when you find some place you enjoy, and you find great people, that is a riches." 

We had known each other for five years before Joe could talk about Haiti. The few times that I broached the subject Joe grew uneasy, casting his eyes around protectively as we stood in the complete privacy of his own store. I stopped asking, and wondered whether it was the long reach of a military junta, or something closer to home, here within our borders, that could cause a rock-steady man to go jittery. And then one morning Joe's surprising reply to "Bonjour, Monsieur, ça va?" is "My father owned a big bakery in Haiti. When I was nineteen years old, he send me to Paris to study business, and when he get to be an old man he want me to take over and run the bakery. But I was young and I want to do something different."  

"Racontes-moi," I say, folding The Boston Globe and soon we have left the store with its wall display of dried herbs and we are in a countryside where a young Joe Bain is buying vetyver from farmers. I had always assumed that vetiver itself was something — flower, vegetable oil? — that emanated from Provence, or was perhaps distilled directly from the Parisian air. I got this idea because a company named Roget & Gallet wraps its vetyver-scented savons parfumés in pleated tissue, then seals each bar with gold foil and nests three of these jewels inside a box that looks as much like a Louis Seize inlaid table as a cardboard box can look. Now I learn from Joe that vetiver does not come from Paris, nor even from France, but from Haiti, from the root of the Khuskus grass, Vetiveria zizaniodes. "He is a big green bushy grass," Joe explains, "with a good root.  The root hold the oil." 

Joe named his company Spéculateur, and set up several depots in the provinces, stations where farmers could come to sell their stacks of the precious root. With a team of men and fleet of trucks, Joe transported the root stocks to a manufactory in Port au Prince. There the oil was extracted and then shipped to the great parfumeries of Paris and New York. Joe describes the technique of gathering the root: "The farmer must cut it when it is just ready," he says. "They must not pick him up too young. What does it look like? The root look just like the hair of grass in the ground. It goes deep deep in the ground, and he spread. After the farmers get the root out of the ground, they shake him off and put him in the sun. When he is dry, they tie him up, and make a big bunch, and then they bring him to me. This is a very good business," Joe says. "All the parfumeries get their vetyver oil from Haiti. Right now, I have a friend in Port au Prince who makes the oil and sends it to France. He has about five hundred people working for him. He started the same year as me, the same time. You know," Joe says evenly, "I didn't want to come to the United States when I was in the vetyver business. If I didn't have those people harassing me…"  He shakes away the thought.

Roaming his first homeland, Joe has been smiling, gone on one of memory's weightless journeys. Along the way, he remembers something else, and when he is finished talking about vetiver, he says with no transition, "People think there was no democracy in Haiti, but before Duvalier, there was democracy."  In Joe's accent, the word is "day-mo-cra-see" — a pronunciation that makes the old ideal sound new and fresh, the kind of refreshment democracy does, in fact, always need.

"I was born one year after the occupation." He's referring to the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1935. "In my time," Joe says, "Haiti was one hundred percent democracy. Democracy is respect each other; that's what it is about. We had that. When there were disagreements, people go to the courts, and they will find justice in them. I serve on the jury in two murder cases. In one case, a young man murdered an old woman. She was living alone and he think that maybe she have money. I was elected the president of the jury and I think that if I give the death penalty, I am a murderer too. I am no better. So, we give the man a life-in-jail sentence. And the same with the other case."

My neighbor would be in Haiti still, a prominent homme d'affaires and dispenser of justice, the kind of man the Haitians call un notable, had not a handful of the Tonton Macoutes, the thugs of “Papa Doc” Duvalier's U.S.-backed regime, paid a call. They came one day to invite Joe to join the government. Papa Doc, they said, could use an enterprising man, a natural leader. Joe declined and Duvalier's men came again to issue the invitation. Again Joe refused. And then the men came at night. "I was wearing no shoes, and only shorts, and they took me away to the police station. I keep asking, 'What have I done? I don't know anything I have done.'" What Joe had done, of course, was support someone other than Duvalier. In 1957, when Joe was twenty, he worked for Louis deJoe's election. "He is the one the people want to be President," Joe remembers. "But the army stole the election from deJoe, and give it to Duvalier. Now Duvalier was not popular, but he has the support of the bourgeoisie and the military. And," Joe continues in an understatement worthy of an ambassador, "I believe there was an order from the United States for Duvalier, and that is how the army stole the election from deJoe."

When the Tonton Macoutes let him go, Joe Bain sold his trucks, his house, and his stocks of vetiver. He married Alice on Friday, came to America on Saturday. Many lives were lost in those years, but it was not fear, Joe says, that prompted him to leave. "It was a humiliation,” he says. “It was a humiliation for a government to do that to a citizen who was working hard for a living. I haven't done anything wrong, in fact I was helping the government because I have about twenty guys working for me. I'm helping the government! But it was not government," he says. "It was dictatorship. Even in a dictatorship, they cannot make all the people obey. Not everyone can see, but I see what it was in Haiti then, and I like to stand."

First he lived in Manhattan, then Alice came too, and the Bains moved to Boston. Joe's story continues as he remembers exactly how much — $1.85, $2.10, $3.50 — he earned per hour in a series of jobs during his first years in America. He recites the rates, the overtime work, the gradual advancement, how it helped that he had been to business school in Paris. It is a blur to my ears even in the moment, but each fifty cents from two decades ago is fresh and inscribed in Joe's inner calculation. Perhaps I would be getting more of it if I weren't still stopped in my tracks by that earlier phrase, that simple phrase said in the cadenced voice: "I like to stand."  

The paper I had been holding that morning was full of news from Haiti — one story about the military elite, who did not then believe that the U.S. would move to usurp their power, and another about the many Haitian-Americans who believe that the last thing the U.S. wants in their native land is a real democracy. "Why do some people in the United States want to ruin Haiti?" Joe asks the air one day, puzzled by the sheer illogic of it. Joe is a viscerally political man of a political people who enjoy the tradition of debate and individual opinion. He distinguishes expertly between the diverse strains of American policy and how they variously affect his first homeland. Recent Republican administrations he sums up with one word: "Diables! They were sending arms every day to the army. They kill the people! But most of the time," he reflects, "you should hold it in your chest. The truth will never be able to spell out. And a lot of people don't like to hear the truth. Maybe ten years from now we can see democracy again in Haiti. It is still very hard, but a few years ago people were being tortured. Compared with that, right now is a paradise in Haiti. It is slow, but many people are working on it seriously, and God is not sleeping."

Suddenly Joe adds, "Do you want to know what makes joumou our tradition for New Year's Day?"
"Mais oui!"

"When the Haitian people were slaves, only the French were allowed to eat squash and cow. So when Haiti become independent — this is on January first, 1804 — they kill a cow. All over the country, the former slaves make a feast of cow and squash. That is the reason we have the tradition of squash soup with beef in the New Year. You know that Haiti helped the United States fight for independence? Yes! We send men to fight with the American colonists for independence, and only twenty-nine years later, we have our own independence. You see how we have been participating in the fight for independence for a long time." 

At nine p.m., when the streets are dark, Joe cuts off the lights inside the Convenient Store, pulls the metal grill over the door and padlocks the grate.  At this hour in summer the red and lime-green Concha Y Toro sign filters through the leaves of our maple, and here and there a partial phrase — "merican & Tropi" — glows like one of the bioluminescent fishes in deep waters. The neighborhood sleeps. And then comes the rasp of the store’s grille being pulled aside in a fine rain, and Joe is unwrapping newspapers from their plastic jackets, shaking the plastic, sending a miniature shower of water beads onto his linoleum floor. Frank Dewey comes in lowering a black umbrella, and Joe, bending over the fresh news, hands the elderly man a dry paper from the middle of the heap.

Alice Bain's Soupe de Joumou

Ingredients

2 lbs. beef stew meat
1 large  joumou (if not available, a hubbard or acorn squash will do)

4 stalks celery
3 carrots
1 green pepper
parsley
watercress, cabbage, beets (or any vegetable desired)
4-6 cups of stock
Spices, especially garlic (3-5 large cloves)

Directions

 Cut a large joumou squash in half, take out the seeds, and bake the squash for about an hour or until the inside is tender. 

When it has cooled, scrape out the squash and purée it. 

Meanwhile, prepare the beef as if you were making stew: cut the beef into small chunks and brown them with green peppers, celery, and onions. 

When the meat is brown, add some tomato paste. 

Combine the squash purée and the meat and vegetable mixture with several cups of stock. 

Bring to a boil, then simmer for forty-five minutes, adding the parsley, carrots, any other vegetables, garlic (minced or pressed) to the soup, along with salt and pepper, and curry flavoring as desired. 

Serve on New Year's Day. 

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