New Meaning to the ‘Haitian’ in ‘Haitian-American’

By KAREEM FAHIM
SOURCE
Detective Claude Jean-Pierre has stumbled through the terrible hours and days after the earthquake in a daze every Haitian recognizes. He slept a few hours each night and could not concentrate on work. He called relatives and searched every corner of the Internet for information. He started a list of volunteers, of police officers in his Brooklyn precinct, to go to the nation and help.

Julie Glassberg/The New York Times/Since the Haitian earthquake,
Detective Claude Jean-Pierre has devoted himself to relief efforts and the search for information.

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But Mr. Jean-Pierre, 41, who was born in Brooklyn, has hardly any relatives in Haiti. He has visited only twice, a long time ago for his grandfather’s funeral and once for vacation. His parents and children were safe in New York, but this week, Detective Jean-Pierre was as anxious as his Haitian-born neighbors.

His bonds to the homeland are different, but still strong. They formed on Sunday mornings when he was a child, and listened with his father to Moment Creole, a Haitian radio show broadcast in the language young Claude learned from his mother.

And as a law enforcement officer, he had a special sense of responsibility in the aftermath of the disaster. Detective Jean-Pierre, who has worked for the New York Police Department for 12 years, said he could help process the remains of victims or help keep the peace; other Haitian-American officers have served in the military or worked in the construction industry, extra qualifications.

“The earthquake was like an octopus,” he said. “It affected everyone.”

On Friday, his day off, Detective Jean-Pierre nonetheless stopped in at work, in the station house of the 70th Precinct, which covers a swath of central Brooklyn where many Haitian immigrants live, and checked in with other Haitian police officers at a nearby precinct. As he drove through the neighborhoods, he reflected on his childhood and the blur of daily life since the earthquake.

It struck while the detective was in court, testifying in a child abuse case. When he returned to his desk, the other detectives in the cramped squad room told him the news. By the next evening, about 200 Haitians who work in law enforcement had gathered in the conference room of another station house to plan a response.

For Detective Jean-Pierre, who has two children and a busy life in the United States, the earthquake and the follow-up meeting were a revelation. He is American, he said, “but I’m made of Haitian parts.”

It all could have turned out differently. When Detective Jean-Pierre’s father, an engineer who is also named Claude, left Port-au-Prince in 1965, he had a five-year plan: get American or Canadian citizenship and then return home with his family.

But he found work in New York and stayed. Theirs was one of the first black families to move into an apartment building on Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn, near Kings County Hospital Center. The new Haitian immigrants all sent their children to Catholic school. Detective Jean-Pierre met his future wife — who was born in Haiti — in class.

At home, his parents kept Haiti close. His mother, who went to culinary school and then became a nurse’s aide, taught the children French and Creole and cooked riz djon-djon. The detective’s father, a “Haitian nationalist,” as his son put it, never let go of a dream to move back.

It seemed possible for a moment in 1986, when the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier fell. Some of the family’s friends returned to Haiti then, but Mr. Jean-Pierre stayed, unwilling to snatch opportunity from his children, who he hoped would become doctors or lawyers.

But his son, after attending the University of Pennsylvania, eventually chose the police department, a career that helped him re-establish links with Brooklyn’s Haitian community, but also set him apart.

He was part of a group of Haitian officers who started working in the 70th Precinct after its lowest moment, when Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was tortured and sodomized with a broomstick by officers in a bathroom of the station house.

In the neighborhoods they patrolled, the officers found “fear and mistrust” of the police, Detective Jean-Pierre said on Friday. They used their common language and culture to narrow the gaps.

Now, he hopes to use some of the same tactics to help Haiti. On Friday morning, he stopped in at Diaspora Community Services, a nonprofit organization run by his wife, Carine Jocelyn, that provides social services to low-income and immigrant families. She had heard nothing from the staff of the medical clinic the group operates in Haiti.

By week’s end, the earthquake had shattered any divide between those born in Haiti and those in Brooklyn. Detective Jean-Pierre and Ms. Jocelyn learned that her uncle, who had walked her down the aisle at their wedding, was among the dead.