Call Me 'Papa Doc'!

by Dennis Green

So I’m reading, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, about the history of Haiti, and America’s rather shameful role in that history. How we observed the sanctions imposed on the breakaway island nation by France, how we shipped, from 1824 to 1826, some 6,000 freed black African slaves to live there, how we invaded, occupied and subjugated Haiti from 1915 to 1934. How a U.S. Under-Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, signed the orders to impose a new constitution there in 1917. And years later, as President, how he finally signed the “Friendly Nations” treaty, giving Haiti its full independence.

I also read about how the U.S. re-imposed a form of slavery on Haitians in a massive road building program, creating 470 miles of new roads by 1918, using a system called corvée, forcing Haitians to donate their labor “in lieu of paying a road tax.”

And then I came across the name for the first time — Françoise Duvalier — as a young, idealistic humanitarian rescuing Haitians from the disease of yaws, which caused blindness. The man who, many years later, would morph into “Papa Doc,” a ruthless strongman and dictator backed by U.S. interests, who, with his Vodou-inspired Tonton Macoutes, killed an estimated 30,000 Haitians who attempted to oppose him. There is something else familiar about the name, but I just gloss over it.

And then, that night, I dream that I am Papa Doc. And I am being driven in a long black limousine across town, and I tell my people, the gathering throngs, “Call me ‘Papa Doc.’” It is one of those dreams so vivid it has to be real. And when I wake, at midnight, with a start, I say, “Of course! He was my cousin!”

My grandfather, Frederick Francis DuVall, traced his lineage back to aristocratic families living in the north of France, who came to America through Arcadia, became Cajuns and also settled, many of them, in Haiti. “Francis” is an Anglicization of “Françoise.” The lineage is undeniable. The land owners, and slave holders in Haiti were, at the time of the French Revolution, aristocrats from the north of France.

DuVall and Duvalier are one.

Now, in my lifetime, besides my Uncle Bob’s three children — Robin, Kermit and April — I have met two other distant cousins I could trace through the DuVall side of the family. One was my old pal Jim Ledbetter, whose mother informed us that, learning about my ancestry and the DuValls in Missouri, that we were distant cousins. And Jim and I thereafter called each other “Cuz.”

The other was a young man of French Algerian descent I met one night at a sushi bar in Alameda. Somehow, the DuVall name came up and he showed me his U.S. Coastguard I.D., which read his name as “Henri DuVall.” He told me even more about the small, exclusive line of the French family that had its roots in Normandy. And that his father had migrated to Algeria from there.

And now I’ve identified another, Françoise Duvalier. Strange fruit on the family tree of life. A humanitarian turned dictator. A strongman.

There’s hope for me yet. Call me Papa Doc! Papa’s in the HOUSE!

©2010 Dennis Green