Eddy Chapoteau

Description

Eddy has lived in Brooklyn since 1979, though he lived there for a few years in the mid-1970s when he attended Brooklyn College. He was born and raised in Haiti. He speaks about attending Catholic school and rebelling against the Catholic religion and extreme order in school. He remembers seeing soldiers in the homes in his neighborhood fleeing, as a child, in relationship to the coup d’état and political turmoil between the Magloire and Duvalier presidencies. He remembers that the president’s son was kidnapped when he was a kid, and Eddy’s brother attended the same school as the president’s son. He recalls the retaliatory violence that occurred until the son was recovered. In Catholic school he remembers rebelling and not completing his school work, connecting it to his mother absence. When he was about 11, she moved to the United States and his grandmother raised him and his siblings. He repeated a grade and many of his siblings repeated grades, though he notes that this as not stigmatized in Haiti. The standards are high educationally so poor performing students do not advance to the next grade. He mentions that his mother really left for political reasons, as opposed to economic. They already lived in a nice neighborhood in Port au Prince. She would visit and bring them gifts. At age 17, he joined his mother (along with his siblings) in New York. They lived in the New York City suburbs, in Nyack and Spring Valley, New York. Now, Spring Valley...

From Collection

2016 Weeksville Heritage Center Oral History Series