HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Haiti has a way of calling to some of us Vineyarders the way the Shenandoah beams a hidden message every time it glides in or out of the harbor (actually the Shenandoah’s message doesn’t bear looking into, being the reproduction of a Confederate raider and all). But Haiti, the poorest nation in the western world, is something else, and I’ve been meaning for years to get involved with our own homegrown PeaceQuilts group.

Last month O.B. photographer Harvey Beth offered to take me to artist Jeanne Staples’s house to meet visiting quilters from Haiti: Nadege, overseer of the project on those far shores, and Sister Angela, nun, quilter and teacher.

My own fascination with Haiti started back in the 1970s when I read Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians, set in the Haiti of the 1960s. All I remember about the story was the lush tropical scenery, the characters who had run for the U.S. presidency on the Vegetarian Ticket, the elegant but decaying old hotel in the center of Port-au-Prince, and the sinister Tontons Macoute, Papa Doc’s secret police who tore around in jeeps, faces obscured by ultra-dark sunglasses. You didn’t want these guys pulling up in front of your house.

Then, a few years back, the biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, authored by Tracy Kidder, appeared: Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the young doctor’s obsessive interest in Haitian medical care, so much so that he spent his med school years on the Caribbean island, only returning to Harvard to take his final exams. His next act was to build a clinic in the rural mountains in the heart of the island, and he’s been giving his life’s blood ever since to help Haitians to a better life.

Next to catch my attention was when our own Betty Burton and her daughter, Grace, took a trip to Haiti, coming back to lecture and show slides about the Fish Farm project headed by Islander Margaret Penicaud, the St. Vincent’s Hospital for Handicapped Children where Grace spent hours cradling AIDS babies, the slums of Cité Soleil, the folkloric art, and the continuing hope of the people.

Finally, the earthquake of January 2010 grabbed the attention of all of us, and I started asking Harvey if, in a future nonprofit junket to Haiti, an empty airplane seat awaited a writer, I’d be happy to jump aboard. I promised not to eat much, easily done when there’s nothing much to eat in the first place.

So, Jeanne Staples, with a husband who works for CNN, two sons, and a house near the shores of Sengekontacket, eager to help Haiti a few years back, tried to think of a perfect craft to hone among Haitian women that would both pay a living wage and achieve a wider, even global marketability. She knew that quilts weren’t part of the native art scene, but that local ladies were full-bore into needlework. Soon she had a collective going of seven women making quilts, which has since expanded to one hundred women quilting like the dickens all over the country.

The quilts are colorful, of course, some of them abstract designs with stripes of, say, polka dots, basket weave patterns and tiny flowers, others profuse with everyday scenes of men in boats, fishes, suns, moons, stars and livestock. Even a quilt of the earthquake is strangely cheerful with a yellow background sprinkled with flying shacks in primary colors (Harvey has been photographing these quilts, and a first collection is captured in his book, Patience to Raise the Sun, with essays by Jamie Franklin and Nora Nevin; if Island bookstores have run out, ask them to order more.) Currently an exhibition of PeaceQuilts masterworks is making a tour of American museums, the first having taken place in Bennington Museum in Vermont. And, hey, can we get it to come here during the summer?

I asked Jeanne if you had to be a millionaire to buy a single quilt, which can take up to a year for a Haitian quilter to produce. “Oh no,” she said, “They’re surprisingly affordable relative to the time it takes to make one.” (Somewhere in the area of a few thousand dollars.) So you needn’t be a millionaire, only a thousandaire, if still out of reach for us hundredaires.

Anyone with scraps of fabric to contribute should get in touch with Jeanne or Harvey or log on topeacequilts.com. On second thought, forget Harvey for the moment; he’s off shooting pictures in Nepal. It’ll be a while before he’s back to lugging bags of material down to Haiti. But go online anyway and get active, bearing in mind that that empty airplane seat is spoken for.

Ready to change gears? The Martha’s Vineyard Center for Living will sponsor their third cultural luncheon on Saturday, March 12, noon to 2 p.m. at The Grill on Main in Edgartown. Tickets are $25 and may be purchased by calling director Leslie Clapp at 508-939-9440.