Louise will say no more. She takes a deep breath and stares one last time at the message written on the plaque that she just unveiled in honor of the 281 passengers who had boarded in Cherbourg, just like her family, the Laroches, eighty-four years ago. It reads: “RMS Titanic: During its maiden voyage, the liner Titanic made its only stopover in Cherbourg on April 10, 1912. It would go down in the night of April 14 to April 15 off the coast of Newfoundland. The Titanic Historical Society of Indian Orchard (Massachusetts, USA) and the city of Cherbourg commemorated this tragic event on April 19, 1996.”
Louise remembers her father. She keeps a picture of him in her purse. A purse that she is holding even closer to her body, realizing again how cruel fate was to this wonderful man who loved his wife and adored his children.
Joseph Laroche was going back to his country. He never had a chance to see his homeland again.
Joseph Laroche’s story began far away from Cherbourg, across the ocean—again—on a former French colony, a Caribbean island already much talked about at the time: Haiti.
He was born on May 26, 1886, in the city of Cap-Haïtien32, in the far north of the island.
For a long time, Cap-Haïtien was the country’s most important city. During colonial times and after Independence, it served as the capital of “Saint-Domingue,” bustling with activities. Port-au-Prince, its great rival in the west, would later prevail, relegating Cap-Haïtien to second place. In 1886, however, with its thirteen thousand inhabitants and its active commercial port, Le Cap was still playing an important role in exchanges with Europe and North America. Ships brought flour, soap, shoes, clothes, linen, hardware, and wine. They left loaded with coffee, cocoa, wood, cotton, sugar, tortoise shells, and roots of vetiver, a plant that produces an essence sought after by perfume-makers.
Trade was the specialty of Joseph Laroche’s mother, Euzélie Laroche33, who’d built a fortune. At twenty-four, the single mother had enough money to raise her son on her own. She gave Joseph her last name because the father refused to acknowledge him.
“From what we know of her, she was a dynamic and hard-working woman. She was a speculator in sugarcane, cotton, and, above all, coffee,34” jurist Christina Schutt35, a family descendant, explains with pride. “Euzélie is the sister of the great-grandfather of my ancestor,” she says.
In Haiti, a speculator is a merchant who practices general business. However, if one wants to acquire agricultural commodities, one must first buy a special government license. Euzélie Laroche had this valuable permit, the key to her success; it allowed her to purchase the planters’ harvest. From the coffee producers, for instance, she bought large bags.
Old map of the Antilles, created by Vuillemin and Erhard, published in Le Tour du Monde, Paris, 1860
When rocks, dirt, and rotten fava beans slipped through, Euzélie separated the good from the bad and then reconditioned the merchandise, which she sold at her Kay-Kafé on Rue 8. The store was patronized by a specialized client base.
“There was a huge scale inside the store to weigh the bags. She sold her coffee to big local enterprises and to exporters,” historian Georges Michel explains.
“She was also visited by European buyers, French and mostly German,” Christina Schutt adds.
Coffee was at the time Haiti’s main asset, and even its “only real currency,” according to the French consul general. In 1888, two years after Joseph Laroche’s birth, the country exported over seventy-five million pounds of coffee, shipped to Le Havre. Trading with Le Havre, New York, or Hamburg allowed the local economy to remain sustainable and benefited numerous families. While the big planters could easily grow rich from the business, it was not always the case for the small farmers, however. Most of the time, they had to go through multiple middlemen to move their product. They sold the coffee through a trading network of Haitian businesswomen, also called “acrobats,” “submarines,” or “Madan sara.”36 The latter resold the coffee to speculators, who finally brought it to their customers.
According to an official report, “the distribution network was far from linear, because the producers also had direct contact with speculators when they sold them their ground coffee.” Euzélie Laroche preferred procuring directly from the source. This way, she said, everybody wins.
This complex system, put in place by a government that also collected taxes, lasted until 1996. That year, there were two hundred thousand planters, ten thousand acrobats, submarines and madan-sarah, seven hundred speculators, and seven exporters in Haiti. That’s why a minister said: “Coffee is a gold mine for everyone, except its producers.”
▪ ▪ ▪
Euzélie Laroche was born 160 kilometers from Le Cap, in the municipality of Grande Rivière du Nord37. She later moved to Le Cap with her mother, who was in search of employment, and Euzélie rapidly adapted to the rhythm of this port city. In fact, Euzélie took the plunge almost immediately, creating her own business, as she wanted independence; she refused to be like the single mothers around her whose sole occupation in life was to raise their children, alone.
In the streets of Grande Rivière du Nord, Euzélie had more than once observed merchant women selling the cheap junk they procured from some local wholesaler. She felt she had it in her to do the same—only better. Buy and sell: it was even easier in a port city like Le Cap, where trade was a tradition.
Founded in 1670 by buccaneers, Cap Français, as it was called in old times, was the heart and soul of the sugar industry. Under the whip, enslaved men and women planted and harvested sugarcane, which the masters sold for their exclusive benefit.
In January 1802, however, the tide had turned. The slaves had eventually rebelled and chased the colonizers away. Then, everything had changed. Well, almost everything.
“The violent separation of the colony from the home country was immediately followed by an embargo that put a stop to all exchange between France and Haiti,” historian Benoît Joachim says. “This greatly benefited the British, who refused to side with the Napoleonic empire and its economic strangulation of the new state.”
The British were not the only ones to take advantage of the new regime. The Germans also continued business with this small, now independent, country. Many of their nationals had been established as traders or merchants since the eighteenth century. In 1841, one of their own, Peter Gottlieb38, disembarked in Le Cap. He was nineteen years old and dreaming of adventure.
Cap Français
Founded in 1670 by buccaneers, Cap Français, as it was called in old times, was the heart and soul of the sugar industry. Under the whip, enslaved men and women planted and harvested sugarcane, which the masters sold for their exclusive benefit. In this picture: The massacre of French colonists and burning of Cap Français in 1820
“The German sailor, Peter Gottlieb, was often seen in the Hamburg port, coming back with vivid stories of lands where anything could be undertaken. The Germans who settled in Haiti were welcome, and it seemed to him the