Marta Aponte Alsina and Rossana Duchesne Winter
That fertile darkness: Mayagüez, the mother and the poet
Tinta regada
1 de octubre de 2024
First of all thanks to the William Carlos Williams Society for its loyalty to a strong and sensitive poetic universe. If ever in time there has been a need for ecstatic beauty it is the present, it has always been the present, because wars between peoples and nations are always sadly present. In Henry James’ short novel, The Aspern Papers, the solitary worship of a poet becomes a malignant obsession, but when readers gather to share their findings, always, somehow, new although acknowledging readers from times past, they generate an enriching aura. So thank you, and welcome to one of the homes of the poet’s imagination: his mother’s birth place.
In the year before William Carlos’s birth, one of the great Latin American writers of the 19th century, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, died in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I am not suggesting a fast forward reincarnation of one poet into the soul of a future poet, but rather a locational timeline, a comparative bridge between intellectual spaces to be crossed by means of Williams’s favorite human virtue: the imagination. In 1882, Virginia Woolf was born in London, that creature never quite understood by our poet. In 1883 Franz Kafka was born in Prague. When such events are viewed as interwoven histories without closing accesses, or establishing hierarchies, their connections are revealing. And Williams’s is, above all, a poetics of connections, trapping the qualities of a place at a given moment.
Williams’s ancestors were trans-Atlantic and trans-Caribbean migrants, but here in Mayagüez his maternal grandparents stayed long enough to raise a family of modest means and exceptionally gifted children, in the fields of science and the arts that the poet would blend in his own trades. At the time of William Carlos’s birth Rutherford was a new town, emerging from a land planning project, with the functions of a suburban satellite community. In contrast, Mayagüez, founded in 1760, was, by 1847, the year of his mother’s birth, a bustling commercial hub surviving a great fire, the first of several catastrophic events, by means of unending economic and social activities that sponsored new urban forms and designs. In its initial stages it was the small urban center and port of a plantation economy based on intensive slave labor. By mid-century its buildings, handsome houses, and warehouses had been built and rebuilt several times, thanks to the work of enslaved persons, poor persons classified as white and free people of color, merchants and artisans.
I wrote the first paragraphs of this conference in a luminous and cool Monday morning in December. As I glanced out of the window at the mountains in the background and the wild trees I felt close to Williams method of writing.
The following quote is from Kora in Hell:
That which is past is past forever and no power of the imagination can bring it back again. Yet inasmuch as there are many lives being lived in the world, by virtue of sadness and regret we are enabled to partake to some small degree of those pleasures we have missed or lost.
And elsewhere, as the quality of a place in a poetic moment, brings forth an aesthetic: “embracing everything involved, climate, geographic position, relative size, history, other cultures – as well as the character of its sands, flowers, minerals, and the condition of knowledge within its borders.”
In a present of wars, universal panic, barbaric accumulation of wealth by the few, and environmental destruction, one is tempted to think that the fabric of life is beyond repair. But when Williams published his The Great American novel in 1923, and when Virginia Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, and Joyce his Ulysses in 1922, and Luis Palés Matos his first Afro-Caribbean poems, I think they were writing as spirited survivors of the first mad, global apocalypse of modern times.
Family legacies are acknowledged throughout Williams’s work, in his poetry, essays, novels and plays. The most outstanding statement of those legacies is Yes, Mrs. Williams, forty years in the making, and published in 1959 to the astonishment and incomprehension of critics, although he, perhaps ironically, considered it one of his finest works; the words of a mother collected by a son who was, in a sense, a stranger. Many analogies can be made to Williams’s method: archaeological explorations, the search for erased traditions in the writings of diasporic intellectuals, the final memory of a land and a people in a body that gave birth to a poet. A joyful temperament clouded by sudden melancholic moods may have been the lesson of the mother. And the anxiety of disconnection provoked by her strangeness and her trances.
The mother was not quite human. She was a place of wonder, desire and caution. The first line of the second paragraph of Williams’s autobiography reads: “Terror dominated my youth, not fear.” A cryptic play of words, granting terror the stature of a master. Terrorized by the exotic trances of the mother, without being aware of the fact that the modern spiritualist movement was an American invention, with chapters around the world. Spiritualism, for the most part associated with progressive causes such as women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, came into being not very far away from the Williams Hoheb household in Rutherford.
Mayagüez was also a regional and island-wide center of the spiritualist movement since the 1870s, and also of Freemasonry, with the establishment of the Logia Yagüez in 1815. In 1903, the Federación de Espiritistas de Puerto Rico was founded in Mayagüez. Previously Iris de la Paz, a periodical managed by women, was launched here, in Mayagüez, to spread the word of a movement of spiritualist free thinkers. However, there were explicit limits. Another sort of spiritualism was associated with trances and tremors. It had old popular roots, and was rejected as indomitable and irrational and dangerous. And Williams mother as remembered by her son was an unpredictable, undisciplined, lonely medium overruled by her trances, a chaotic force to be both respected and dreaded. It seems that her only interlocutor was the often absent husband, and his long absences deepened her sense of loneliness even in the realm of spirits.
Her ordeal may have been the force invoked by Williams in “Sub Terra”, the macabre first poem of his third book: the spirits of the underground. Be it as it may, I have read that the Americanization of the Williams Hoheb family, a proof of the will to become a normal American family led them to convert from house-bound spiritualist seances to the Unitarian church. I don’t know what a normal American family is, but according to testimonies, the spirit world of Raquel accompanied her to church.
In our first visit to Rutherford some years ago Paco, my husband, and I had a memorable experience. We parked at the opposite side of the street, facing the Williams-Hoheb house, on West Passaic Avenue. A young man approached us and said yes that’s it. We told him we were Puerto Ricans. He went to ask his mother, the then owner of the house and came back saying that she would receive us. She showed us the living room of the house (uncannily identical to the one pictured in old photographs) and the backyard with a very old, twisted grape plant. On the ceiling partition between the living room and the dining room there was a painting of a building resembling a Caribbean plantation house. As we left, we saw the stairs to the second floor. That was off limits but still the owner was kind enough to let us know that the spirits of previous generations, including the Williams, Hohebs, and Dickensons, I guess, were satisfied with the living bodies of the present owners. “I know because my husband is sensitive and he has seen them,” she said.
This brings us to Williams as biographer Yes, Mrs. Williams. In a sense it was an attempt to understand and honor the scattered memories of the mother; the poet as his mother’s medium. Beyond that, and, in a post-colonial studies fashion, the book may be read as a haunting: the return of a colonial territory to haunt the metropolitan space.
In 1941, months before U.S. involvement in the second world war, Williams was invited by the University of Puerto Rico to a Panamerican writers of Spanish history of Pan Americanism and the role assigned to Puerto Rico. The meeting’s coordinator was the poet Muna Lee, the poet, feminist, and according to her biographer, Jonathan Cohen, the most important Spanish to English translator in the first half of the twentieth century. She was also the first wife of the man who was to be the Island’s first Puerto Rican Governor, appointed by the American president in 1948. During the first half of the 20th century, all governors had been white Americans appointed by the American Presidents. After the war, Lee, while working at the State Department, would continue her role as a promoter of pan-americanism, a foreign affairs strategy long since filed and forgotten.
One purpose of the intercultural meeting of writers was to establish a climate of mutual understanding between intellectuals and artists across the hemisphere. In preparation for these visits of luminaries Muna Lee delivered several lectures, one for each North American writer. Later Nilita Vientós Gastón a leading Puerto Rican intellectual, wrote about the visitors, In her estimation, the outstanding star of the lot was Archibald MacLeish.
During this visit in 1941, reporters described Williams as a poet, novelist, doctor and embryonic biographer, alluding to his plans to write a biography of his mother. A note was published in the official publication of the University: La Torre, a bilingual review. It stated that Williams had accepted the invitation provided he was granted time to visit Mayagüez, his mother’s birthplace, to complete an almost finished biography he was writing. Also, that he had contacts with several of his relatives on his mother’s side, and, most importantly, that his mother would be accompanying him to the conference, on her first trip to her birthplace since leaving it in 1878. She never did, and another fact stands out: at the time, Williams told reporters that the book was almost completed.
It has been acknowledged that the eccentric presence of his mother, whom he both adored and misunderstood to the point of exasperation and cruelty, was one of the driving forces of William’s instinct as a poet devoted to recording the aura in things, from the humblest object to the dialects of the street and to his insistence in expressing their values, and that with remarkable speed and constant openness, without distraction, eyes and words synchronized. Sight seems to be the dominant sense; the gift of a visual artist. So Raquel Hélène Hoheb Hurrard, her poetic gifts as a painter, and as a sensitive medium could be conceived as the “mother source” of a considerable stream of U.S. American poetry.
I think that Yes, Mrs. Williams deserves an annotated edition so that it is no longer branded as a minor work or a trivial “capricho.” The names Paradis, De Castro, Krug. Pardo, Keratryz, come back to haunt us and claim our attention. Searching in local archives I found that Raquel Elena was an appreciated amateur opera singer in her twenties. A charity concert is reviewed in La Razón, (July 15, 1873) a local newspaper: “Miss Elena Hoheb, sweet Elena, sang for us Nabuco’s soprano aria, receiving enthusiastic applause… . (then) Astol and the sweet Elena gave us the tasty harmonies of I due Foscari, in a soprano and tenor duet.” It should be noted that Astol, sweet Helena’s companion was considered a leading actor and singer in the theatrical scenarios of the Spanish Antilles and Latin America. It should also be noted that a close friend of Elena’s, Ernestine de Keratry also sang at this benefit concert. Ernestine and Pauline de Keratry are important characters in the last part of Yes, Mrs. Williams, as is their grandmother, the comtesse de Keratry. Their father, Ernest de Keratry was indeed an extraordinary character, a nobleman who supported the French republic and led an adventurous life in Venezuela and Mexico.
Back to the theater. Religious plays were staged in Mayagüez in the 1820s, in more than one language, including afro – Caribbean creole. The city’s first modest, provisional theater was built in 1834 and by then amateur musicians played Mozartian airs and Rossini overtures. Operas and concerts were staged in Mayagüez since at least the early 1840s. By mid-century there was a level of accumulated wealth and generalized musical sensibility that sponsored international operatic and theatrical companies and visiting luminaries, such as the composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the soprano Adelina Patti, both mentioned by Williams.
Dr. Carlos Hoheb Hurrard, Elena’s brother, returned to Mayaguez in 1871, with his diploma from the University of Paris, and opened his doctor’s office at his home in calle de Mirasol 57, where he offered free consultations for the poor. He is mentioned in a published letter written by a grateful mother, explaining how his dedication and knowledge helped save a small girl afflicted by pneumonia.
Another clue about the family’s dwellings. 1873 was the year of the emancipation of enslaved persons in Puerto Rico. The genealogist Rossana Duchesne, found that Elena’s mother was still alive in 1872, and the owner of a slave whose name was Agustín. They lived in a quarter of the city known as Cárcel, close to the Catholic Church and the public square. In Yes, Mrs. Williams, Raquel Elena is quoted as saying that her parent’s house was located at Méndez Vigo Street and that it bordered with a large estate owned by the Cristis, a family headed by Juan Bautista Cristi Lange, a French migrant.
Such details are but the indicators of larger potential subjects like the social status of the creolized Jews, French, Germans and other nationalities. Another thread may be found in Raquel Helena’s birth certificate (December 20, 1847). Her godparents were Manuel Pardo and Cecilia Prieto. They were most probably related to, or the same person mentioned as Mrs. Pardo in whose house Elena’s mother stayed when visiting St. Thomas, indicating that the relations of the Hoheb-Hurards with the father’s birth place, and his religious community of converted or coerced Sephardic Jews were extended and enduring. Hence the presence, in her memories and in those of her mother in law, of families of Jewish origin, like the Monsantos, and the Wellcomes. Those were the dynamics of migrations, and cross cultural and extended relations between families. When Elena told her son that she did not wish to return to Puerto Rico because there was nothing there, perhaps she was referring to the Mayagüez of her childhood or her remaining close relatives who no longer were always there. However that was not entirely true, as we shall see.
An enigma connected with the Hoheb side of the family, and Elena’s only brother by both of her parents is the identity of the girl depicted in “Portrait of a Niece in Mayagüez.” According to Eric Williams, the painting was exhibited in the living room of the house at 9 Ridge Road, “a handsome portrait in oil of a golden-haired young woman.” Hours of trance like communications via emails with Rossana Duchesne suggested that if indeed it was painted in Mayagüez, the model must have been one of the three daughters sired by Carlos Hoheb in his first marriage to Elvire Chevalot. It is a charming painting, by a woman who had left Mayagüez rarely, as her mother’s companion, and had yet to study with masters like Carolus Duran and Henner in France. And it suggests the existence of competent art teachers in the city which, after all was a market for itinerant photographers and itinerant painters, as notable as the American Eliah Metcalf, born in Massachusetts, who is known to have painted nine portraits in Mayagüez in the late 1820s.
And indeed, the history of an educated woman painter born in a family of West Indian migrants established in Puerto Rico leads necessarily to the city where we are meeting today. It bears repeating that Mayaguez society was formed in part by an influx of exiles fleeing from the revolutionary Caribbean and Latin American wars of independence. It was a seaport, with its own customs house, and, by mid-century, with connections to South America and Europe. In short, an outward looking, heterogeneous and stratified society of planters, merchants and laborers, whose early inhabitants included indigenous persons, creoles and blacks. And also, it was in Mayagüez, closer to Santo Domingo and Haiti, that descendants from migrants and older families conceived an independence movement and a Confederation Of the Antilles, preceded, as early as the 1820s, by conspiracies to establish here the capital of the República Boricua.
Most of the city’s social strata and activities are represented in Yes, Mrs. Williams. An outstanding character is Meline Hurard, Williams’s maternal grandmother of Martinique descent, a poor widowed woman could hardly support, her son, Carlos, a medical student in France by competing with more powerful merchants. She had the business sense of a small segment of independent women vendors who were active in Puerto Rico until recently.
In 1872, around the time of Elena’s concert, a member of the Paradís family, José Paradís, perhaps the Pepe, mentioned by her, established and export company in Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo, with local partners. He was one of the founders of the Puerto Rico abolitionist society in 1858. In spite of the fact that he himself was a slave owner with a questionable background in the treatment of slaves in the turbulent years after the Puerto Rican Independence insurrection of 1868.
Back to Elena’s memories and the characters mentioned by her: indeed Pedro Gicomaggi’s, school for boys existed, and had more than seventy students. Andrés Guenard was a wealthy land owner with a plantation of 150 cuerdas. In Yes, Mrs. Williams are fragments of a social history of Mayagüez, and Paris in the late 1870s, after the recovering bourgeoisie had crushed the Paris Commune one of the first modern experiments in political organization by anarchists, socialists and working class people. The briefest moment and the tiniest life are connected to a wider scale of history and myth. It remained for such an innovator as Williams to write about his fertile cultural background. And the life and gifts of his mother should be read as threads of that universe of ideas and micro cosmic scales to be complete.
More than now, when borders are controlled, and to use a metaphor by B.V.I. poet Richard George, the Caribbean was a sea surrounded by islands. No limits seem to have impeded the regular travels and long stays of families such as the Monsantos, the Anduzes, the Wellcomes, the Hohebs and the Hurrards.
In spite or maybe because of constant displacements, memories endured and came to us almost a hundred years after their impressions on a young girl, and by the agency of her son. A sense of place is condensed in images of Elena’s childhood that can be found throughout her sons work; landscapes plants, fruits. Wiliams stay at home school of American poetry was complemented by his family of wanderers on both sides.
There is no question of William’s attachment to his mother, nor of her constant sense of isolation. Her words were not fully translatable. They were rooted in close knit modes of thriving or survival, secured by constant visitors. Carlos Emilio Hoheb, her oldest nephew, son of Carlos Hoheb and Elvire Chevalot, was born in France, and as a young man settled in Ecuador. He visited Rutherford with members of his family, as recorded in well-known photographs. Another nephew, Albert, stayed close to Raquel Elena. He became a doctor, settled in Rutherford, and covered for Williams during the poet’s travels in Europe.
Mrs. Williams’s brother Carlos married twice. In his second marriage, to Rita Ayala, she gave birth to seven children. Two of them, Carlito and Raquel Carmen, are mentioned by Williams in his autobiography as having stayed at his parents’ house when they were adolescents. More detailed portraits of two daughters of Carlos’s marriage to his first wife are included in Williams’s memories of the time he spent in Paris with his mother and brother.
We know about Raquel Carmen that she never married and that she lived for some years in New York. Her sisters María and Paulina grew up in Puerto Rico. Both married Danish engineers, founding new branches of the Hoheb lineage in Denmark.
Thus, in Williams’s childhood, the writing impulse was formed among the murmurs of hybrid languages. A Babel of languages and dialects connected, to quote him, the “waters of the world.” In some of Williams’s works, the oceanic sadness of history, to quote the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, involved Spanish conquerors, American revolutionary heroes and the Jamaican sorceress Tituba into a poetics of connections, somehow related to the threads of family history. From his father, his English origin, his childhood in St. Thomas and his South American excursions; from both father and mother the ghosts of a place like the Caribbean region, formed by in and out migrations and multiple cultural ways of thinking, speaking, transforming, being transformed and leaving a mark on the culture of empires; a power to be acknowledged. Williams himself wrote: “All the races of the earth mingled in the West Indies…It was not only a fact, it was at its best, a revolution…of sentiment…and intelligence.”
The poet’s Spanish American roots and conflicts are the subject of Dr. Julio Marzán’s groundbreaking book. We know that for Williams, the first immersion in poetic sensibility was experienced at home, where a Spanish that perhaps is rarely spoken today was the first language he heard, most probably interlaced with English vernaculars and French and English idioms; the oral creole from the Antilles, linked to his genealogy: Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Martinique, Santo Domingo.
Not all of the Hoheb threads lead to happy results or picturesque adventures. Julio A. Hoheb, a son of Carlos Hoheb’s second marriage to Rita Ayala, was enrolled as a student in the infamous Carlisle Indian School. Carlile’s shocking view of pedagogy as forced assimilation has been studied by Pablo Navarro Rivera. Julio entered at a fourth grade level and reached a fifth grade level. He arrived at Carlisle on May 2, 1901 and departed on April 16, 1905.
As regards to Williams’s paternal genealogy, it is documented that his aunt Rosita Wellcome was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and baptized in St. Thomas by the Henna family, from Ponce. Her parents had met and married in New York. He was an itinerant photographer and his name was not George, as reported by Williams’s biographer. He traveled throughout the lesser Antilles offering his services and selling his collection of images. His life and work is the subject of an ongoing research project by Rossana Duchesne.
On a previous visit to Mayagüez I was impressed by the ongoing loss of patrimonial architecture. Fires and earthquakes gave way in recent times to not always adequate urban development designs. I can imagine Williams’s disorientation when trying to locate his mother’s house.
Diasporic families carry an almost portable, self-centered biosphere, but they leave a trail of connections. Indeed what I have been trying to communicate is that such connections are relevant in the life of a poet who struggled with identities. As Marzán has written, that struggle was one of the strong qualities of his temperament. The poet chose to stay at home in a small town of New Jersey. He did not follow the expatriates who were his friends and mentors, but maintained a connection with them, nurtured, in part, by his cosmopolitan cultural heritage.
We have looked at some contacts with his mother’s heritage, but she deserves further research for her own merits as, perhaps, one of the notable women painters of the Caribbean. Let us advocate for a formal, curated, exhibition of Raquel Hélène Hoheb Hurrard’s paintings and drawings that are still owned by Williams’s heirs.
In concluding, thanks to Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera for hosting this congress and, again, to Rossana Duchesne Winter, who shared with me the forking paths of Williams’s maternal genealogy.
