Claire Gaetjens was born in Léogâne, Haiti — the southern-peninsula port town from which Toussaint Louverture had once organized the Haitian Revolution, a hundred years before her birth — to a Haitian mother and a German father. The German father is the founder of the Léogâne Gaetjens line, the European graft that gives the Haitian Gaetjens its mixed-elite-and-colonial profile to this day. Claire married Georges Marcel Lebrun; their son Serge is Alex’s maternal grandfather.
A famous Gaetjens in the next generation: her nephew Joseph “Joe” Gaetjens — the striker who scored Haiti’s 1–0 upset of England in the 1950 World Cup and was later disappeared and killed by the Duvalier regime in 1964 — was Serge’s first cousin, the kinship traveling through Claire’s side of the family.
