How the (Trade) Winds Blow: My Life With Christopher Columbus

The earliest sound I can remember is the sound of the wind stirring through my grandmother’s house in St. Marc, Haiti. It would wend its way over the mango tree just outside her bedroom window, up and around the tin roof--making a strangely comforting rustle as it went--before landing gently on my nose bearing the smell of sea salt and endless fields of sugar cane.

In Haiti, the wind takes on almost human form: Often, it comes ashore as a soothing, cooling breeze just off the Caribbean Sea. But sometimes, it morphs into a loa and bears down on the island with the wrath of the gods--forcing humans, animals and spirits alike to take cover.


When I was a child, I believed I controlled the wind. It came and went at my call, just like any well-trained pet. It loved and soothed me when I needed it, and it served as intermediary to the unseen elements that were a natural part of my life. I heard and felt it everywhere I went.

On the morning of the day I left Haiti, the wind was nearly silent. I stood on the tarmac feeling the heat rise up to push me away, and I was just as desperate to go. The journey before us promised so much more than my six year old mind could imagine, but even I knew something exciting was about to happen: We were moving to New York.

“You’re going to be a good girl for your mother and father, you understand?” My grandmother said. “You’re going to show them I raised you well while they were gone.”

I nodded politely, just as I always did when my grandmother told me to do something. But my attention was not on her words. I was awestruck by the giant white beast in front of me: Its engines roared with power as they sucked in air and spat out the wind with a wheezing, metal-infused groan that both frightened and thrilled me. I imagined myself being pulled by the wind slowly, inexorably, into the big spinning blades.

“S’il vous plait!” a flight attendant shouted as she attempted to marshal passengers up the ramp into the dark, gaping mouth of the waiting airplane. “It is time for people with tickets to come take their seats. Everyone else must go.”

No one listened. It seemed all of St. Marc had come to the airport to see us off, and each person would have his turn. Our friends and family chatted and laughed and recounted when-you-were-young stories that always ended badly for me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my brother running around and around the crowd with his friends generally making a pest of himself. My two oldest sisters were getting words of advice from an elderly neighbor, while the three younger ones looked on with boredom.

We were ready for the journey to begin.

Finally, my grandmother straightened the ribbons in my hair one last time and tugged unnecessarily at my navy-blue pleated skirt. Then, she let me go. I practically skipped across the tarmac buoyed by the weight of the wind at my back as it pushed, teased and prodded me forward. I looked back at my grandmother just once and saw her tears. In a culture heavily dependent on its young to care for its old, she was being left all alone. First her daughter and son-in-law were lured away just four years earlier. Then her son. Now, her grandchildren had heard the call of the wind and followed.

It is a cycle that has repeated perhaps millions of times in the last few hundred years. Since early sailors learned to harness the sun, stars and wind to power their journey across the sea, the world has never been the same. As a child in Brooklyn, I remember chanting a short little song on the playground to that effect:

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the oceans blue ..."

And he changed the course of global economic history (and the trajectory of my life) while he was at it. None of it would have been possible without the wind. Forging a watery path from Spain to the Caribbean and back again took an incredible amount of wind power expertly harnessed. I have long been fascinated by that journey. Did you know, for example, that shortly after arriving in his first port of call in the Canary Islands, Columbus was delayed for over four weeks because the winds were too calm? What did those winds know even then? What would have happened if . . . ?

What does it matter the possibilities? Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492--just days before my birthday five centuries later--and promptly Christened the people he met there "Indians" (I will forever be known as a West Indian to cover up one man's error). More importantly, a bruised and battered but alive Columbus returned home several months later to be met with a hero's welcome. By October 13, 1493, (now just six days and five centuries short of my birthday--do you begin to see a pattern?) he was back on his ship sailing the oceans while trailing global economic catastrophe in his wake. Well, as to that, it was only a catastrophe for some of us.

Columbus' second journey was a spectacular affair. Seventeen ships and over one thousand men set sail for the New World. On board was a cacophony of sounds: Men shouted orders and scurried across the deck as they loaded up for the journey; sheep made sharp, braying noises as they were being herded into position while cattle shuffled restlessly, and horses uttered soft, frightened whinnies at the unfamiliar feel of a ship beneath their hooves. In the echoing distance, not yet discernable to human ears, was the faint moans of the millions of women and men who would follow Columbus' path into a life of perpetual bondage.

What was remarkable about Columbus' journey was not its refutation of a belief that the world was flat (an idea Thomas Friedman would resurrect to great effect in 2005). What Christopher Columbus discovered was the wind. The lyrically named trade winds of the Caribbean--"regular, dependable, steady winds that blow east to west at the 20 degree latitude"--allowed Columbus to complete his second journey to the New World in only twenty-one days. That fact would herald in a new era of colonial expansion and economic development the likes of which the world had never known. It was a period of globalization pure and simple. Not the first. And certainly not the last.

I like to imagine the wind that played at my back in Haiti that day in March 1975 is the same wind that powered Columbus' journey. It is the same wind that carried my Béninois ancestors from the African coast into a life of slavery and bondage in the now-conquered lands of the Taíno Indians. It is the same wind that whispered words of freedom in the listening ears of the great guerilla warrior Toussaint L'Ouverture. And it is the same wind that forged a path from my grandmother's mango tree to the display cart at the Safeway on Alhambra Boulevard in Sacramento (3 mango francis for $1? You can't beat that!)

It has been with us a long time.

So, how is that someone like me ended up an international trade lawyer of all things, you might ask? That, I am afraid, is a story for another day.