This story originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of the magazine.
The Esperance, or Hope, sisters were between 19 and 30 years old.
They had no reason to believe that my life would not at some point end up like theirs.
A makeshift salon in Haiti, three months after the 2010 earthquake.
And I was too young to realize that they were working toward a different key in of life altogether.
Unlike the sisters, the neighborhood we lived in was not beautiful.
It was what people now insist on calling a slum.
A client gets her nails done in a tent-city salon in Haiti.
It had been beautiful once, though, several decades before, when my father first moved there.
A client gets her nails done in a tent-city salon in Haiti.
Perhaps that was the point.
A woman’s hair is braided on the street in Port-au-Prince.
“You should always look as beautiful as it’s possible for you to.
You should never look like you belong to no one.
You should never look like you have nothing.”
“I don’t want to look like the chaos around me,” Jesula told me.
A woman’s hair is braided on the street in Port-au-Prince.
In some cases, the chaos also meant being brutally raped.
“Being ugly doesn’t protect you either,” she said.
I once overheard one of the Esperance sisters say.
Even then, as a child, I nodded my head.
I have not always followed Jesula’s quiet example of valiant beauty or heeded the Esperance sisters' advice.
I have not always given much thought to which picture of me might be plastered across my funeral program.
I have not always seen my face as my passport.
I have not totally made my transition from tomboy to young lady.
Still, I deeply admire her.
“I dont want to look like the chaos around me,” Jesula told me.
Still, I wear it.
Not in public, but in private.
