Hungry for Justice

Henry Petithomme May Not Be a Guy You’d Expect to Starve Himself to Be Heard, but That Could Be the Key to His Protest.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Henry Petithomme, left, in the seventh day of a hunger strike, is consoled by supporter Marc Joseph Tuesday at the Episcopal Church of St. Paul in Miami. Photo by Mitchell Zachs/Magicalphotos.com

Henry Petithomme is an unlikely Haitian activist. He’s 32 years old, a real estate agent, a former Army man and speaks his Kreyol with an American accent. He’s too young and too assimilated to carry the baggage of the previous generation. For most of his life, he has been a prime example of an immigrant success story — educated, middle-class and not dwelling much on the past.

He does not, in short, strike one as the kind of person who would go on a hunger strike.

Then a rickety wooden boat carrying 101 Haitians ran aground in Hallandale Beach. As usual, the TV cameras were there faster than Homeland Security. Petithomme watched with the rest of us as the thin and dehydrated group, adrift for 22 days, scrambled to shore, only to be apprehended by law enforcement.

That’s when the knot in Petithomme’s stomach started. He knew, as we all do, that these people were most likely doomed.

Most of them would be detained for weeks or months, processed, then unceremoniously dumped back in the impoverished, violence-torn country they had fled. There would be the usual rallies in front of the immigration building at Biscayne Boulevard and 79th Street. There would be thoughtful letters to the editor and our congressfolk from social justice activists and concerned clergy.

None of it would much matter. As usual.

For days, Petithomme watched TV and read the newspapers, his fears playing out. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to eat. The whole business just made him sick. Then he thought, yes, that’s it. I won’t eat until there is justice for these Haitians.

His family thought he was a bit crazy, but they knew that once he’d made up his mind, there was no changing it. “He has a stubborn mind,” offers his older brother Pierre Loubau.

Petithomme looked for a church in Little Haiti that would let him hold his vigil in its sanctuary. He found St. Paul Episcopal Church and the Rev. Canon Jean Fritz Bazin. Bazin, a purposeful fellow who presides over a small congregation of about 90, agreed, once his bishop gave the OK. “I felt that the idea was a good one,” he told me.

On Wednesday, April 4, Petithomme stopped eating. 

I went to visit Petithomme on day seven. He sat in the church’s office in jeans and a striped shirt, a hat jammed over his eyes, sending out e-mails from his laptop. “I’m really not in a low spirit for going seven days without food,” he said. “I wake up with a focus that we need to bring people together.” 

Petithomme was drinking water and the occasional Gatorade. When he was tired, he would lay down on a church pew. Eventually, a coworker, Jetro Nelson, brought him an air mattress to sleep on at night. Nelson also distributed hundreds of fliers to local college campuses and helped organize a rally that began Wednesday. 

Petithomme explained that he’d visited Haiti twice last year (for the first time) and was really affected by the extremes of poverty and beauty he witnessed. He grew up in North Miami and spent several years after high school living in Colorado. Before last year, he hadn’t thought that much about Haiti, or about the U.S. immigration policy that allows Cubans who make it to dry land to stay, while the Kreyol-speaking black people of Haiti are almost always sent back. 

The boat that landed here in late March jarred him. “Since I’ve been back in Miami, I’ve seen this struggle with Haitians coming and being sent back, when others stay,” he said. “If you live someplace and they’re killing you and you’re poor and you have relatives who tell you how [good it] is in the United States, wouldn’t you take the chance? Then they get sent back and nobody fights. A couple of protests is not going to change the policy.”

Here’s where this gets interesting. The Haitian community here and elsewhere has long been divided by politics and fear (the bitter infighting in the last mayor’s race in North Miami is one example). Petithomme, who has never been an activist, believes that in order to really move the U.S. government, this little corner of the Third World has to come together. That’s why the fence in front of the church is strung with the national flags of most of Miami’s diverse denizens. “This is a wrong done against humanity,” he says. “We should all be together on this.”

Petithomme wants to attract not only the usual activists, but also a new group of younger, middle-class immigrants and children of immigrants who might be willing to organize beyond one issue at a time, and, in the words of a call to action he sent out, “breathe new life into a community divided and misguided.”

This is very presumptuous of Petithomme. He has received the support of some activists in the community (Marleine Bastien, executive director of Haitian Women of Miami, called his effort “very admirable” and wishes more young people would get involved) but thus far, it has been somewhat tepid. He is not a known quantity and his temerity garners mixed reactions, usually along class and age lines. “I know some Haitians look at me and wonder if I am a real Haitian,” he says.

“He speaks more English than Kreyol,” admits Bazin. “But he’s really determined.”

Bazin agrees with Petithomme’s contention that Haitians could learn much from Cubans about unity and political power. Managing crisis by crisis does not get the community far in the longer term. “The Cubans are structured so when a situation arises they are ready to give an answer,” Bazin opines. “There are some divisions within the community that we have not been able to put behind us for that cause.”

But Bazin is optimistic this will eventually happen. Not being a fatalist, so is Petithomme. “Everybody needs to see the Haitian community make it happen first,” he says. “I believe it will work and it will bring the communities together.”

In the church’s office, Loubau reaches over and grabs a hunk of his younger brother’s belly, checking to see that he’s still got some gut to work with.

“You OK?” he asks. “Still strong?”

Petithomme nods.

“I want to keep you, bro,” Loubau adds.

Petithomme says he will continue his hunger strike until he’s satisfied that masses of people support the cause of keeping the 101 Haitians in the United States, and of making federal policy more equitable for all immigrants.

He says there will be a rally, including musicians, artists and other creative people, at the church (6744 N. Miami Ave.) every day after 4 p.m. “until change comes.”

I left him and went, somewhat ashamed, to get some lunch.

Editor’s Note: Jetro Nelson has since joined Petithomme’s hunger strike, the Miami Herald reported.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.