Between Hope and Dread in Springfield, Ohio: a Visit on Columbus Day Weekend
Kaetlie Moise in front of her restaurant Keket BonGou
Between Hope and Dread in Springfield, Ohio: a Visit on Columbus Day Weekend
by Dan Grossman
On October 13, I visited Springfield, Ohio with the goal of talking to Haitian immigrants and long term residents. In September, baseless allegations that Haitians were eating Springfield residents’ pets started appearing on social media channels. These claims, amplified by vice presidential candidate JD Vance and others, gained national attention. Donald Trump repeated this accusation during the presidential debate on September 10.
In the Springfield Museum of Art, which was my first stop in the city, I found an installation titled “TIGRIS” that spoke to the deteriorating media environment that allowed this false claim to fester (albeit indirectly). The installation included a mock-up of the Tigris River and sculptures of boats made from deconstructed books and concrete, seemingly floating on its black surface. You walk into the exhibit lit from above, as if by moonlight, that represents a sad chapter of human history.
In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad and destroyed the greatest library in the Arab World, the House of Wisdom, on the banks of the Tigris River. In the immediate aftermath, thousands of books, the accumulated knowledge of centuries, were thrown into the Tigris. According to accounts at the time, “the Tigris River ran black with the ink of books.”
The artist Amanda Love, a former bookbinder, was on hand at the museum to talk about “TIGRIS.” When not talking to visitors, she was working on a collage from images cut from blown-up stills of the 1966 motion picture Fahrenheit 451, based on the book by Ray Bradbury. The movie, by French director François Truffaut, depicts a dystopian society where firemen are tasked with burning books rather than fighting fires.
With “TIGRIS,” Love drew a connection between the sacking of the House of Wisdom and contemporary book bans instigated by Moms for Liberty and other MAGA-supporting groups.
“I'm a book lover,” she told me. “I'm very much against suppression of authors that are sometimes not able to have their work represented.” She went on to say that the books that were banned often featured stories about minority ethnic groups and LGBTQ persons. “All of those people, they're not getting to read about themselves,” she said.
Love’s installation deliberately conflated the 1258 looting of the House of Wisdom with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, when Baghdad’s National Library was burnt to the ground. The audio component was designed by sound composer Christophe Preissing who was also at the museum interacting with visitors.
“The idea was to put the viewer in the water,” he told me.
The audio features sounds that simulate the crackling of burning paper hitting water and muted voices rising from the burned books like ghostly memories.
For many Americans, Haiti might seem like a ghostly memory from high school history class—if mentioned there at all. But Haitian history is also American history. Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492. After the Spanish ceded the northwestern part of the island to the French, much of the land that would become Haiti was taken over by sugarcane plantations. Enslaved Africans provided the labor. Unlike in the pre-Civil War US, the slaves revolted. A period of long and bloody revolution preceded the country’s founding in 1803.
Haiti’s full history is too long, complex, and bloody to summarize adequately here but it’s worth noting that Haiti became the first independent state in the Caribbean and the first state in the Americas to abolish slavery. It’s also worth noting the US occupied Haiti from 1915-1937 to protect its investments in the country, underlining its role in world commerce as an extractive economy. In 2010, an earthquake claimed more than 100,000 lives. Currently much of the country, including the capital, is controlled by gangs. Kidnapping is rampant, there is an ongoing shortage of doctors, and half the country faces chronic food insecurity. In the last half-century, more than a million Haitians immigrated to the US. In 2020, Haitian migrants started arriving in Springfield en masse. Somewhere around 15,000 Haitians reside in the city now.
In the museum, the only work on display having something to do with Haiti and its history is a painting by French-born Paul-Henri Bourguignon titled “Mountain Village.” In this painting, the simplified figures in the foreground of a Haitian village scene are painted in broad strokes, so broad that they lack much detail. These figures are clothed in white, seeming to melt into their environment, as if the artist has difficulty seeing them as individuals. The predominant color of the landscape and the houses behind them are various muted shades of brown. Most everything is muted, even the sky in the mountainous background.
I asked Jennifer Wenker, Curator of Collections & Exhibitions, who was sitting at the front desk, if she was planning to bring any more work by Haitian artists into the museum in light of recent events.
“Absolutely, yeah,” she said. “We have received offers from around the country to share collections of Haitian art. So we're very excited. We just want to do it well.”
My focus, as I talked to Wenker, was turning from art to food, as I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast and it was already 1:30 p.m. When I asked her about nearby restaurants, Wenker mentioned Station 1, a bar and grill right up the street, but it occurred to me that it might be good to try Haitian food considering my alleged reasons for coming to Springfield. Wenker suggested a place called Rose Goute. I looked it up using Google maps and saw it was 2.1 miles away, on the south side of town. Investigating further, I saw that the restaurant was the focus of intense media attention in mid-to late September, when the national media had parachuted into Springfield after Trump and Vance had painted targets on Haitian migrants’ backs, as it were.
My visit was not well-planned. It was a spur of the moment thing. I had been vacationing with my ex-wife Katya and my daughter near Cuyahoga Valley National Park the day before. It was a four-hour drive from our home in Indianapolis. Springfield just so happened to be the halfway point on our drive out on I-70. It occurred to me on the drive out that, by spending time in the city interviewing people, I might be able to find out more about the situation there. So I had Katya drop me off at the museum on the way back to Indy. I would come back home the following day, I explained to Katya, attempting to counter her skepticism. I would spend the night in a hotel, I told her. There was just one problem: I’d have to walk, or Uber, everywhere because the car rental companies were all closed on Sundays, but I didn’t tell her that. Thinking I could learn something about the city on foot, I decided to walk, rather than Uber. Fortunately, Springfield is a small city, at least in comparison to Indianapolis, which put my scheme within the realm of possibility.
I set out on the sidewalk along South Fountain Avenue, which passed through downtown Springfield, which was largely empty of traffic. I passed a Mexican restaurant and the main branch of the public library, both of which were open. I followed the avenue farther south as it crossed through a tranquil residential neighborhood. Walking down the avenue was like being in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting. Almost. That is, some of the homes I passed were in need of renovation. I could see anecdotal evidence as I walked, from observing the people walking down the street and sitting on their porches, that this was a racially mixed neighborhood.
Across the street, I saw a young girl, around 10-years-old, setting up a lemonade stand with the help of her father on their front lawn. He was a young guy, in his mid to late 20s, short blonde hair slicked back. I crossed the street and approached him.
“First customer of the day,” he said, meeting my eyes expressionlessly.
Two dollars bought me a large styrofoam cup filled with store-bought lemonade and a Chips Ahoy cookie.
“Is it normally this quiet?” I asked him.
“No different than usual.” He laughed out of the side of his mouth. It wasn’t a friendly laugh, and something told me that trying to have a conversation with him would be pointless. I wondered if the composition book I held tight in my left hand had clued him in on my agenda.
The girl looked up at me and smiled. “Thanks for coming,” she said.
I found the Rose Goute storefront located in a strip mall that had seen better days. There was a busy crowd in the restaurant. Two people were ahead of me in line at the counter. I looked at the menu and ordered the “rice and bean with goat” from the man behind the counter, who told me to sit down at table 17, which had that number card attached to a holder. As I walked away, he casually switched languages to Haitian Creole to address the next customer.
After the rumors of Haitians eating cats and dogs were amplified by Trump and Vance, many people from outside the Haitian community patronized the restaurant, to show their support. That support seemed ongoing. Seated customers, black and white, were munching away at plates piled high with brown rice, plantains, chicken, goat, and salad.
A young Haitian man with a beard was scrolling on his cellphone at the table beside me, his plate long finished. I asked him in English what was better at the restaurant, the goat or the chicken. He looked up at me uncomprehendingly.
I repeated the question in French, which is spoken in Haiti along with Haitian Creole.
He responded in French, saying the goat was better. I told him that was what I was getting. He told me, when I asked, that he had been in Springfield for three months. His name was Henri, 26 years old. He was working in the kitchen at Rose Goute. I had to lean forward to understand what he was saying since he spoke softly. I asked him if he had any family members living in Springfield with him and he told me no, that he was on his own. In addition to French and Haitian Creole, he also spoke some Spanish, he told me, because of the year he spent in Mexico before entering the US. He was surprised that I spoke French and asked me if I was French, which I took as a compliment on my language ability. I told him no, I was American. I told him it wasn’t common for Americans to speak French, and that I’d learned the language as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa where French is widely spoken (although I spoke Hausa most of the time). I also asked him if he had Temporary Protected Status(TPS), which provided work permits and relief from deportation, but he didn’t seem to know what that was. This conversation seemed to be going well, or I thought it was. But then Henri abruptly ended it, excusing himself and moving across the dining room to where two of his friends were sitting.
My food arrived, the centerpiece of which was a large dome of brown rice surrounded by fried plantains. There was a bowl of goat stew on the side and a small plate of Haitian potato salad, colored red by the addition of beets. All in all it was enough for two or three people, but I was hungry, having eaten little for breakfast.
As I started my meal, I noticed a black man in a blue two-piece suit and tie, his head shaved bald, sitting down at a table next to me.
The order, I saw, came quickly: rice, beans and vegetables.
I poured the goat onto the rice. I found the whole thing delicious. I had eaten a lot of goat in Niger and it was good to reacquaint my tongue with the pungent meat. As I ate, I wondered at the sharp-dressed guy who had just sat down. He finished his food pretty quickly, leaving about half a portion. After he was done, he asked for a container and the server brought one out for him.
He was loading it up when I said to him, “These meals are too big for one person, aren’t they?” He laughed and we bumped fists.
I told him I was a journalist and that I wanted to ask him some questions.
“Of course,” he said.
I sat down at his table.
Theova Milfort was his name. He said he was a tax and immigration specialist based in Hollywood, Florida, near Miami. He had arrived from Haiti to the US in 2004. He was in town, he said, to help Haitian migrants.
“I’m here to explain to them the immigration laws, and then to see how I could lead them to the proper strategy in order to stay here lawfully,” he said. To that end, Milfort was driving around the community, stopping at soccer matches and churches, to meet and greet the local Haitian population. He made trips to places in the US where he could be of service to the community.
“My vision is, I have to, let's say, to build up real economic power,” he said.
“Like here, this restaurant.”
“Like here,” he nodded.
I asked about the guy I had just talked to, Henri, and the fact that he didn’t seem to know whether he had the Temporary Protective Status (TPS) that Biden had granted to Haitian nationals due to the dangerous conditions in the country, that allowed Haitians to work legally through February 3, 2026.
“Most of the Haitians here have it,” he said.
I pulled up my Indy Correspondent website and showed him an article I’d written about my travels along the US-Mexican border.
Milfort told me he had been in South Texas around two years ago, at the invitation of local officials, to urge Haitian migrants who had just illegally crossed the border to leave the underpass where they had been sheltering, under the bridge connecting Eagle Pass to Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico.
“I was at that crossing about a year ago, and it’s all built up with barbed wire and heavily patrolled,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It is like a military zone. I was able to convince the Haitians there to seek shelter somewhere else, where they could get food, water, and medical care,” he said.
Many of these Haitians under the bridge were granted TPS by Biden, which presidential candidate (now Vice President Elect JD Vance) has called “a magical amnesty wand.”
“I think now, the situation is even worse,” I said. “The state of Texas is basically throwing migrants back in the Rio Grande.”
“Yes,” it is a bad situation,” he agreed. He looked at his watch. He told me he needed to go to a soccer game but he gave me his phone number if I had any more questions for him.
Later, at the Motel 6 where I was staying for the night. I looked up Mifort’s name online, and found a lot of information. In 2016, when President Obama was in office, he went on a hunger strike in front of the White House, partly as an effort to convince Obama to visit the country. He runs the organization Fondation Theova Milfort pour le Development, and occasionally returns to Haiti to raise awareness and to be in “solidarity —a word he used during our conversation— with his people.
I also read an article online, in the Springfield News-Sun dated July 13, 2024 about the problems the city was having adjusting to the influx of immigrants. As a result, according to the mayor, Rob Rue, there was a housing crisis. The article mentioned strains on other city services leading city officials to request help from the state and federal government. I read in another article that local leaders had also tried to attract Haitians to Springfield to fill vacant jobs available in Springfield, particularly at warehouses run by the likes of Amazon, McGregor Metalworks, and Topre America.
So it was no accident that many Haitians had decided to settle in the city. This article also made mention of a local nonprofit, the Haitian Community and Support Center, which seemed like a place I needed to visit.
I drifted off to sleep, falling into a dream. I found myself walking through the village square of Mai Guero, Niger where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years, 30 years previous. Mati Mai-Gona, a local butcher, was seated on a mat on the ground, selling grilled goat meat from a greasy tray. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his mouth as he cut the meat with a curved knife. A Tuareg in his blue robe was leading his camels through the square to the rhythm of mortar hitting pestle in a nearby compound. I looked around, knowing that I would likely never, or never again, be able to return to visit my friends who lived here, because of the unsafe security situation.
The next day, after I rented a car at AVIS, the Support Center was my first destination. I arrived at the vacant building, which looked like it might have been a former bar, at 10 in the morning. Since it was Columbus Day, I was fearful that the center would be closed due to the holiday (ironic, considering the history of Haiti.) I parked in the lot and waited. I didn’t have to wait long before a couple drove up in a Ford Bronco.
A Haitian woman got out of her car, saw that the door was locked and came to me and asked if the Center was open. I said it wasn’t as far as I knew. She didn’t seem to understand what I said but when I repeated what I had just said in French, she nodded. Then I said I was a journalist and asked if I could interview her. She said I had to ask her husband. But when I got out of my car and went up to talk to him through the car window, his answer was a hard no, his eyes flashing wide.
They drove off.
Just as I started to beat up on myself for coming on too strong as a journalist, or not coming on strong enough, another car entered the lot.
The car backed up in the lot parallel to the entrance of the support center and the driver didn’t exit his vehicle. I figured I had nothing to lose so I went up to talk to him.
The man behind the wheel was Viles Dorsainvil, 38 years old, born in Haiti. He was the executive director of the Haitian Community and Support Center. He told me that the Center would not be open today as it was Columbus Day. He told me he was waiting for volunteers to arrive and they would shortly be going all together to work on a food drive. I asked him if I could tag along and he said yes. When I asked if he had a moment for a conversation, he asked who I was affiliated with and I pulled up an article I had written about my experiences on the US-Mexico border on my Indy Correspondent website.
“I’m happy to talk to the media but we just have to be careful,” he said.
Dorsainivil has been interviewed with many news organizations in the past month, in the aftermath of the anti-Haitian slurs Trump dropped during the debate. He had been interviewed by National Public Radio, CNN, Politifact, The New Yorker and a local Fox affiliate. To Politifact, he said he became concerned and afraid, for himself and his community, after JD Vance’s post on X about dogs and cats being eaten. To the New Yorker, he talked about the reaction of people in Springfield to the influx of Haitians into the community, mentioning the attacks, both physical and verbal, that Haitian migrants had endured in Springfield. But he also mentioned that there were well-intentioned Springfield residents. They were concerned about the Haitian migrants in the area. They just wanted to make sure the Haitians were doing well, he told the magazine.
I asked Dorsainivil why the center was founded and told me it was initially in reaction to the blowback on the Haitian community after a fatal accident involving an unlicensed driver named Hermanio Joseph. On Aug. 22 2023, this Haitian migrant caused a Springfield school bus to overturn with 52 students on board. One of those students, Aiden Clark, was killed in the accident and 20 other students were injured.
“There were so many bad comments and that created so much anxiety and fear,” he said. “Some of the Haitians were afraid to even drive. And they were afraid as well, because the tension was so high and they were afraid for their lives, and believed that people would have caused them some harm.”
In the aftermath, local pastors and other community leaders in Springfield came together to plan a way forward.
“We created this structure, the Haitian Community Help & Support center. as a place where the Haitians can come for services and also for orientation, as they are new to the environment in the community,” he explained. “If they want to do anything, they know that they can come here and we can help them out, or we can direct them in a proper way.”
“What are some of the services offered here?” I asked.
“If they want to normally go for driving lessons, we walk them through the process,” he said. “Anything that they want. If they want to apply for legal papers, for job applications and housing applications and everything, we make sure that we accommodate them and give them those services.”
I asked Dorsainvil what drove him to establish the center.
“I used to be a pastor in Jamaica,” he said. “I went to seminary and I used to work with the Haitian Association for the United Nations. And I used to work with church organization back home in Jamaica. When I came here in 2020 I was just being around helping people get involved in church activities or community activities. It was a good thing for me just to embark in this organization as a director, because I believe that my voice matters for the community and I am a community-oriented person. I like to help.”
In addition to his nonprofit activity, Dorsainvil works as a bilingual specialist for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
I asked what the current needs of Haitians needed to be addressed.
“We need to make sure that we address the real needs of the people,” he said. “This is our concern; learn about them more and serve them with respect and dignity and value them. These are some of the concerns that we have and we want them to feel free to come for help. And we are also concerned about their safety and their mental health.”
I asked him about his concerns for the future.
“We need to be optimistic,” he said, “because the concerns for the future might have to do with the outcome of the election. I think that so many Haitians are so anxious about that as well. It's because they're not very aware of how things work here by the fact that some of them are on the TPS status.”
Trump has vowed to revoke TPS for Springfied’s Haitians as president.
A car entered the parking lot. The driver got out and came up to Dorsainvil who excused himself and they went into the center together even though it wasn’t officially open.
When they were still inside, two SUVs pulled up with a bunch of people inside. A Haitian woman stepped out of one of them. I walked up to her and she looked up at me with wide eyes as if to say, “What do you want?”
“I was told I could help with the food drive.”
“We’re just getting organized today,” she said. “That’s all we’re doing.”
When Dorsainivil came back out he was headed briskly to his vehicle. I asked him again if I could tag along but he was on his cell phone engaged in a conversation. He nodded to me briskly and I assumed that was a yes.
The volunteers drove out of the parking lot in two vehicles and Dorsainvil followed in his and I followed. The caravan traveled about two miles to a local storage facility which required storage renters to enter a code to open a gate. The caravan entered and I followed.
The volunteers got out of their vehicles and so did I but Dornsainvil didn’t get out. I stood there as the volunteers, including the woman I talked to, rolled up the garage-style rollup door of their storage unit and entered. There were various boxes containing foodstuffs inside the unit and the volunteers were talking amongst one another. I just stood outside, hoping that Dorsainvil might come out to introduce me to everyone. Instead, one of the volunteers, a man in his late 20s, closed the storage unit door in my face.
The message was clear. My presence was not wanted. So I got back into my rental car and waited for the next vehicle to exit, causing the gate to open, and I drove through behind that vehicle. By putting myself in the volunteers’ shoes, I could see how I aroused their suspicion. Like, a lot. In search of a story, I had pushed too hard.
I drove to Rose Goute, where I had left my cell phone fuel rod the previous day. The place, at 11:30 in the morning, was even more crowded than it had been during my previous visit. The woman at the counter returned it to me when I asked.
As I walked out of the restaurant, a man handed me a flier from the Progressive Labor Party. It was titled SMASH RACIST TERROR - FROM TOLEDO TO PALESTINE.
The opening passage read:
The gutter-racist attack by Trump and JD Vance against thousands of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is a new low in the building of a mass fascist movement… Meanwhile, Harris and Biden, while giving lip service to debunking Trump’s Big Lie that immigrants are responsible for all of our problems, are deporting and turning away millions of immigrants, surpassing what Trump did as President, while sending billions of dollars in weapons to the racist Israeli government to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
The man handing out the flier was Robert Peterson, in his late 40s, an African American resident of Toledo. I asked him about his activism.
“It’s about oppressed people trying to live a normal life, attacked by the establishment,” he said. And here, particularly, you know, Trump's racist lies, you know, people pick that up and and, and they take it out on the quote unquote “others.” So this is our way of showing support and fighting back against. Small support can be significant.”
I asked him how he got involved in politics.
“Just growing up in the civil rights era, and seeing how racism affects minorities,” he said. Here we are almost 50 years past the civil rights era, and we are still going through a lot of the same stuff.”
I wished him luck and headed back to my rental. It was time to get some food.
Rose Goute wasn’t the only Haitian Restaurant in town. My lunchtime destination was another restaurant called Keket BonGou, on the west side of Springfield. I found the storefront in another dilapidated strip mall. The place was decorated with balloons and streamers colored yellow and black, left over from their grand opening, and had several electronic slot machines. They had had some kind of small grease fire in the back and the restaurant was smokey inside.
The owner, a woman in her forties with tightly cropped hair, seemed embarrassed about the smell as she stood in the dining room, looking up at a light fixture.
“We’re fixing it,” she said, glancing towards me as I walked in.
When I walked up to the counter, the young woman behind the counter showed me the menu. When I pointed to one of the smaller appetizer plates, she said, “No, we don’t have this.”
She pointed to a dish on the menu that they did have, which was the same kind of bean, rice and vegetable dish I had seen Theova Milfort devour the previous day.
I wasn’t prepared for one of their main course selections that I figured would probably be 2-3 times what I could eat, so I settled on coffee and a Caesar salad.
A woman sitting in a booth across from me was checking out her cellphone. Getting in conversation with her, I learned her name was YuRose. She told me she was 35 years old and that she came from Goave, in the south of Haiti, and that she worked in a solar panel manufacturing plant.
My coffee arrived, which was black and very sweet (and very good), along with my Ceasar salad. After a while, the owner came out and talked to me. Kaetlie Moise was her name.
Sitting across from me in a booth, she told me that she had been in Springfield six years; she had lived in Plaisance, in the north of Haiti. She had a restaurant there by the same name until a gang came for her and her family.
“My husband was a politician,” she said. “They killed my mom, burned my business. I lost everything.” She also said the gang tried to kill her husband, but didn’t elaborate.
Like Viles Dorsainvil—who she knew and worked with at the Haitian Help & Support Center— she was under TPS status. She told me that since the false rumors of dogs and cats being eaten, many people had fled Springfield, and gone to Columbus, to Florida.
“We had our grand opening and many people came and then this happened,” she said.
I asked her if I could take a photo of her in front of her restaurant and she agreed. As we walked out, she said, smiling, “You didn’t eat any of my food.”
“But the coffee was good, and I had the salad too,” I sidestepped, feeling a little guilty, defensive. But I also told her, “Next time I come I’ll have one of the entrees.”
“Oh, OK.,” she said.
Moise wasn’t the only member of her family in Springfield. Her 31-year old brother Claudie wandered in for a moment, kissed YuRose on the head and sat down beside her. A short while later we started to have a conversation. But that was interrupted by a call on his cell phone.
He excused himself and left. It was getting late in the afternoon, so I figured it was time for me to leave as well.
My last stop in Springfield was Dee & Dan’s Cedar Pub, because I was hoping a dive bar was a good place to ask long-term residents what they felt about what was going on in the city.
I sat down at the bar and ordered a Corona from their short list of available beers and got in a conversation with a retirement-age truck driver about hair bands after he put a quarter in the jukebox and played something by Great White. “I stopped listening to new music around 1994,” he told me. He hated grunge. We also talked about air braking: he had been a trucker but currently worked construction laying cement foundations. But when I brought up the question, “What do you think of Springfield becoming the center of national attention lately?” he clammed up.
“I don’t discuss religion or politics,” he said.
By now I was getting used to this wariness, which sat somewhere between distrust and dread, among those I encountered in Springfield.
There was a reason for the wariness, of course. Weeks previous, the media of the world had descended on the city with their tripods, vans, video cameras, and reporters. With my cell phone turned to record and my notebook attached to my claw, I was a dead giveaway to anyone paying attention.
I figured this was a sign I wasn’t going to make much headway, so I left the bar. It was time to head home anyway. I started my drive west, back towards Indianapolis.
On the way to I-70 I stopped at George Rogers Clark Park. This park commemorated the Battle of Piqua, where the general defeated an alliance of local Indian tribes on August 8, 1780. It was the largest battle fought west of the Allegheny Mountains in the Revolutionary War.
Near the park gate was a statue commemorating both General Clark and Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader. On the side facing north, you see a full scale sculpture of George Rogers Clark standing proud with his musket. On the other side you see a depiction of Tecumseh, the legendary Shawnee leader, being taught how to use a bow and arrow by an older warrior. But this latter depiction is merely sketched out in bas-relief, as if the Shawnee leader was an afterthought and didn’t deserve a fully realized statue of his own. It seemed almost tossed off, in fact. An impressionism in stone. An equivalent, say, of Paul-Henri Bourguignon’s “Mountain Village” in the Springfield Art Museum.
I thought back to the Haitians I had met in Springfield, the latest group to seek refuge, and opportunity, on American shores. I hoped to return soon to Springfield to check in on these people, whose fates depend so much on the result of the 2024 presidential election.
Postscript: On Nov.6, the day after the election that will bring Donald Trump back to the White House, Theova Milfort posted the following to Twitter:
