In seconds, the path had joined a wider path, a trail, actually, that soon broadened and swept beneath a head-high, earthen trestle overgrown with ferns and tall grasses. As I passed beneath the bridgelike structure, I glanced up and saw the high palisade above it and realized that in my search for an entrance to the village I had simply walked across the top of it and had missed the gate entirely. I followed my lissome guide under the bridge and entered the village of Fuama.
It was a large, circular compound of ten or twelve daub-and-wattle, whitewashed, windowless huts, each with a single, low doorway facing a packed dirt yard the size of a basketball court. A crowd of people, which I recognized as the same crowd that had greeted us when we first stepped from the car, was loosely gathered around a fire pit. Two large, skinned, piglike carcasses, headless and without hoofs, were slung across the red coals alongside a fifty-gallon drum whose steaming contents I could not see but assumed was a soup or stew, made no doubt from the heads, hoofs, and innards of the beasts roasting on the fire. While the children mostly held hands and watched in silence from the edge of the crowd, men and women of all ages drank from gourds and soda pop bottles, laughing and talking excitedly with one another and every few seconds breaking into scraps of song. It was a party, a drunken celebration. Off to one side were the drummers — four sweating, muscular, young men — eyes closed, heads thrown back, as if each were chained to a private, throbbing world of sound. And there, behind the drummers, rising above the crowd on a dais at the entrance to a hut significantly larger than the others, stood a very tall, elderly man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and trousers, four older women in colorful wraps, and Woodrow.
Standing next to Woodrow and slightly behind him, yet making herself visible to the crowd, was a young woman with a thick, pouty upper lip. A naked baby was perched on her wide, outslung hip. The woman was very dark, almost plum colored, with glistening hair that was braided and coiled like a nest of black snakes and wore a bright yellow-and-white sash across her bare breasts. She stared at me unblinking. Everyone else seemed not even to notice my presence.
Woodrow, too, ignored me. Or perhaps he just hasn’t noticed my arrival yet, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t notice my absence in the first place.
I flipped a small, discreet wave in his direction. Over here, Woodrow! He saw me. I know he saw the tall white woman standing at the edge of the crowd. How could he have missed me, for heaven’s sake? But he seemed to look right through my body, as if it were transparent, a pane of glass between him and his people.
I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my guide, the boy who had brought me here, and said, “What should I do?”
He smiled sweetly and shrugged.
“Do you speak English?”
He nodded yes and said, as if reciting from a textbook, “I learn it at missionary school. I go to missionary school.”
“Like Woodrow. Mr. Sundiata.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Albert,” he said. “I am Sundiata, too. Same like Woodrow. My father and Woodrow’s brother the same-same.”
“Should I go over there?” I asked. When I pointed towards Woodrow and the others on the dais, they were stepping down from the low platform and entering the hut, one by one.
Albert shrugged again. Smoke from the fire bit at my eyes, and my nostrils filled with the smell of roasting meat. The women in the crowd had resumed their high-pitched singing, and the drumming rose in volume with them. A wizened, toothless old man shoved a gourd in front of my face, and the vinegary smell of palm wine momentarily displaced the smoke and the aroma of the meat. I grabbed the gourd and took a sip from it and shivered from the sudden effect, felt my heart race, and found the courage to make my way quickly through the lively crowd towards the hut.
I passed through the low doorway and stood inside. It was dark, and I thought I was alone in the room. Tricked. A prisoner. The hut was stifling hot, the air heavy with the sour smell of human sweat. I stepped away from the entrance, let in a band of sunlight, and saw Woodrow seated on a low stool against the far wall. On either side of him, also on low stools, sat the tall, elderly man and the eldest of the four women. The others, including the young woman with the baby, lay on mats on the floor nearby, watching me.
“Woodrow, I hope — ”
“Please sit down,” he said, cutting me off. “Welcome.”
I looked around in the dimly lit space and followed the example of the other women and lay my long body down on a mat by the door. There was silence for a moment, an embarrassing, almost threatening silence, until finally Woodrow said, “This is my father, and this is my mother. They don’t speak English, Hannah,” he added.
The old man and woman seemed to be examining me, but they said nothing, and their somber, inward expressions did not change. It was as if I were being tested, as if everyone knew what was expected of me and were merely waiting to see if I could figure it out on my own. If my ignorance or lack of imagination forced them to tell or show me what was expected, I’d have failed the test. They were an imposing, almost imperious group, but at the same time they were utterly ordinary-looking people. Commoners. Working people. It was the context, the social situation, not their appearance, that gave them their power over me.
Woodrow’s father’s skin was charcoal gray, his face crackled and broken horizontally and vertically with deep lines and crevices. His neck and arms had the diminished look of a man who’d once been unusually muscular and in old age had seen everything inside his skin, even the bones, shrink. His hair was speckled with gray and, except for a few thin tufts on his cheeks and chin, he was beardless. The old woman, Woodrow’s mother, was very dark, like Woodrow, and small and round faced, with a receding chin, also like Woodrow. I could see him in her clearly. In twenty years, the son would look exactly like the mother.
I hadn’t noticed, but Albert, my guide, had followed me inside the hut and was now squatting by the door. Woodrow rattled several quick sentences at him, and the boy leapt to his feet and went back outside, as if dismissed. We continued to sit in silence. I dared not break it. What would I say? Whatever words came from me, I was sure they and my voice would sound like my mother’s — that insecure, coy, jaunty banter she always fell back on when addressing black or working-class people, as exotic to her as the people of Fuama were to me. I waited for one of the Africans to speak, any of them, in any language, it didn’t matter. I longed for the sound of human speech, regardless of whether I could understand it, as long as it wasn’t me doing the talking.
Then suddenly Albert was back, lugging a basket filled with steaming chunks of what looked like roast pork and a handful of palm leaves, which he distributed to everyone, starting with Woodrow and his father. He placed the basket on the ground before Woodrow and disappeared again, returning at once with a large open gourd filled with a thick, gray stew. Woodrow gave him another order, and the boy left again, this time returning carrying a batch of pale Coke bottles filled with what I assumed was palm wine.
At the sight of the food and drink, Woodrow’s father’s expression had changed from unreadable impassivity to obvious delight, and he reached across Woodrow and with one hand grabbed a Coke bottle and with the other picked up his leaf and snatched a piece of the meat from the basket. He took a mouthful of the wine, mumbled what I took to be a quick prayer, and spat a bit of it onto the ground before him, then swallowed, smacking his lips with pleasure. He tore off a large piece of the meat with his teeth and, almost without chewing, swallowed it — his eyes closed in bliss — and then a second large mouthful, and a third, by which time the others had joined him, and the hut filled with the sounds of chewing, slurping, swallowing.
The young woman on the mat opposite me lay back and ate in a leisurely, luxurious way, as if at a Roman banquet, nursing her baby at the same time. She glanced over at me, smiled to herself through half closed eyes, casually passed a Coke bottle to me, then returned to eating. Woodrow’s sister? His father’s youngest wife? Or Woodrow’s village wife and baby? I didn’t know how to ask and was afraid of the answer. Flies buzzed in the darkness, cutting against the thick, muffled noise of the drums and singing outside. I took a small sip of the wine and as the others had done spat half into the dirt before swallowing. With leaf in hand I plucked a small piece of the pork from the basket. I glanced around and realized that everyone had ceased chewing and was watching me with friendly but inexplicable eagerness. And then, of course, it came to me. This was bush meat. The skinned beasts roasting on the fire were adult chimpanzees, their heads and hands and feet removed and boiled with their innards for stew, their cooked haunches, shoulders, ribs, and thickly muscled upper arms and legs cut into steaks and chops. It was bush meat — a profoundly satisfying, probably intoxicating, delicacy to be savored in celebration of the return of Fuama’s favorite son and the foreign woman who had agreed to become his wife.
I slowly returned the chunk of meat to the basket, wiped my hand on my dress, and stood up. “Woodrow, I … I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t.” His face froze. The others simply stared at me, uncomprehending, confused, as if they and not I had made the terrible mistake. I knew that it was an insult to them, an unforgivable breach of decorum, and Woodrow was being humiliated before his people. But I could no more eat the flesh of that animal than if it had been human flesh. I’m not in the slightest fastidious about what I eat, and have devoured the bodies of animals all my life without a tinge of guilt or revulsion. I’ve eaten snakes and insects, badgers, woodchucks, bison, and ostrich. I could have eaten dog or cat or rat, even, if that were traditional and were expected of me as a way of honoring the hospitality of family and tribe. But not chimpanzee. Not an animal so close to human as to expect from it mother-love and grief, pride and shame, fear of abandonment and betrayal, even speech and song.
I turned and left the hut and made my way back through the crowd to the gate, where I retraced the path back to the palisade, where Albert had first found me. No one tried to stop me from leaving the village, and no one followed me. I was alone again, and familiar to myself again. My thoughts were mine again — safe, known, fixed.
From the palisade I slowly, carefully, walked back along the path through the jungle to the riverbank, where down by the river Satterthwaite leaned against the hood of the Mercedes, smoking a cigarette and chatting with a teenaged boy, one of the crew that had pulled the car across on the raft. The raft, I saw, was halfway across the river, empty, on its way back or over, I couldn’t tell. Satterthwaite looked up and smiled pleasantly, as if he’d known I’d arrive like this, a woman alone and angry and frightened and glad to be back at the car, and he knew exactly how to make me feel better.
“You finish, Miz Hannah?” he said.
“Give me a hand,” I said and started down the steep embankment towards him. He came forward and, just as I was about to slip and fall, grabbed my arm, righting and easing me to level ground, reeling me in like a kite. “Thanks.”
“No trouble,” he said and flipped his cigarette into the brown river water and swung open the rear door of the car. As I passed him, he placed one hand over his crotch, looked down at it, then at me. I stopped, halfway into the car, halfway out, and returned his look. He said, “Anyt’ing I can do to make you a little more comf ‘table? Gonna take a while before Mr. Sundiata turn up. Be dark soon, y’ know.” His smooth, dry, hairless face was close to mine, and his breath smelled strongly of palm wine. I’d never been this close to him before and saw for the first time that he was a very young man, much younger than I’d thought, probably not yet twenty, and reckless and naive and dangerously curious. Dangerous to me, possibly, but definitely dangerous to himself. I slipped past him and sat down in the welcoming shade of the leather-upholstered interior. I reached out and touched his wrist with my fingertips and said, “Can you find me something to drink? Beer would be nice. Or some of that palm wine you’ve been drinking. And some fruit to eat?”
He smiled broadly — beautiful teeth, I noticed, also for the first time. “Not a problem,” he said and went to the boy, spoke quietly to him, and handed him some coins. The boy ran along a riverside path I’d not known was there, in seconds disappearing from sight and taking the path with him. Satterthwaite strolled back to the car and said, “Want the air-conditioner? Can turn it on if you like. We got plenty of gasoline still.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” I said and closed the car door. He slid into the front, turned on the engine and the air-conditioner, then slung his arm over the seat back and looked at me with — oh my, yes — a handsome, elegantly formed, young man’s look of lust. The dark, leathery interior of the car smelled like ripe peaches. I leaned back in the seat and let the cooled air flow over me. It pleased the skin of my face and neck, my bare arms, a breath from the arctic blowing across my legs, and I drew my mud-spattered dress up a few inches to my knees and closed my eyes.
“When the boy come back wit’ the wine and fruits, I can make him go ‘way.” He spoke in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, as if reluctant to wake me from my reverie.
“Fine,” I said. And after a few seconds, “When do you think Mr. Sundiata will come back?”
“Oh … not till long time. If him not come before dark, then not till mornin’.”
We both spoke very slowly, as if under water. “He won’t come looking for me?”
“Naw. He gots him a heap of fam’ly bus’ness to settle first.”
“All right, then. I can wait.”
“Me, too. Us two can wait together.” He extended his pack of cigarettes, I took one, and he lighted it with a flip of his heavy, chromium Zippo.
I cleansed my mouth with smoke, and thought, So this is how it’s going to be, married to Woodrow.
Before long, we passed beyond the villages and small farms into a region that was even less populated. Here the isolated roadside settlements, small clusters of daub-and-wattle huts with thatched roofs, looking more like family encampments than communities, were separated from one another by dark green jungle too thick with trees, vines, head-high ferns, and flowering bushes for any earthbound animal to penetrate. Snakes, lizards, and insects might make their way unimpeded along the ground, but otherwise it was strictly parrots and arboreal animals like monkeys and tree sloths that ruled. When suddenly a human being appeared — a man with a machete or a woman and her baby — it was as if he or she were emerging from a wall of green water, stepping gracefully from the jungle onto the road ahead, usually carrying a large bundle of cut sticks or a gunny sack stuffed with groundnuts.
The sky, floating overhead, was a creamy ribbon. Here below, the road was its shadow, growing rougher as it narrowed, with deep pits, potholes, and corrugated ruts carved in the red dirt by the morning and evening daily downpours — not by motor vehicles, surely, for there were no tire tracks anymore, save ours. To avoid the holes and ruts, Satterthwaite drove more slowly and elaborately now, cutting from one side of the road to the other as if on an obstacle course. Every few hundred yards we passed people walking towards us and away, always walking, never just standing, never idly waiting, men, women, and children and sometimes elderly people, all of them walking with bundles on their heads and in their arms — sugarcane stalks, firewood, baskets and swollen burlap bags and large and small babies strapped to their mothers’ backs or clinging to their hips — everyone, regardless of the burden, moving along with a lovely, easeful, straight-backed carriage. They wore loose clothing, brightly colored, traditional, topless and over-the-shoulder wraps on the women, the men usually shirtless in baggy shorts or trousers, battered straw hats or sometimes baseball caps on their heads, most of them barefoot or in broken-backed sneakers worn as slippers.
We slowly drew abreast of them and passed by. The people turned and looked at us. A Mercedes sedan carrying a white woman accompanied by two black Africans in Western city clothes way out here in the bush had to be an unusual sight, extraterrestrial, almost; yet the expressions on the native people’s faces remained unchanged, placid and incurious — as impenetrable as the jungle itself. At least to me they were. I could not know how, or even if, Woodrow and Satterthwaite read them.
By this time, after nearly six months in Africa, I had learned the names of some of the trees and flowers, although it was difficult way out here to separate and identify individuals from the tangled, green throng. As we passed strangler figs and huge cotton trees with gray, winglike extensions at the ground, I named them to myself. For miles we drove alongside a closed palisade of thick bamboo, then a grove of ferns high as a house, and everywhere liana vines, blooming epiphytes, wild coffee plants, aloes. Swatches of frangipani and oleander blossoms tumbled to the roadside. Among the fan-shaped traveler’s-trees and papaws and in thickets of the malagueta pepper plants that so excited the early English traders that for a century they called this place the Pepper Coast, I saw black hornbills pecking for seeds with their ax-like beaks, and dusky plovers and parrots. And wherever there was standing water, usually a pool covered with water lilies or a shining green swamp, I saw kingfishers in flocks, egrets, and herons.
This inland territory, the bush, was ancient. Primeval. From before the Fall, it seemed. Here the needs of nature and humanity were collaborative and far more peacefully meshed than back along the coastal region, where Monrovia, the capital, and the other, smaller cities of Liberia — with their modern industrial spoilage and smoke-spewing cars and diesel trucks and buses — waged warfare against the jungle that surrounded them. Down there, from the border with Côte d’Ivoire in the east to the border with Sierra Leone in the west, human beings and their machines were chewing their way inland, greedily devouring the land and everything on it.
It was like that all over equatorial Africa then, especially on the coast, and is even worse now; but in the mid-1970s, when this journey took place, the upland region of Liberia still remained essentially untouched by industry and technology, by modernity; and as we moved farther and farther away from the coast and the plantations on the lower plateau, I felt myself steadily slipping backwards in time. The twentieth century disappeared behind us, then the nineteenth was gone, the eighteenth, and the seventeenth. Lost to my mind were the crowded, rapidly swelling coastal cities, the rubber plantations, the railroad lines, even the roads that had spread inland from the seaside trading stations built first by Europeans and then Americans. The iron mines hadn’t yet been established, the gigantic mahogany and cotton trees still loomed overhead, blocking out the sun, and diamonds hadn’t been uncovered and sold for guns. Chimpanzees hadn’t been captured, caged, and bred for the development of multibillion-dollar drugs. They and all the other now-decimated species were still out there in the jungle, abundant, invisible, silent, watching us pass. This, I thought, is as close as I will ever get to West Africa as it was when the first Europeans arrived.
The road, barely a grassy trail now and no wider than the car, led to the edge of a slow-moving, brown river. A large raft made of cut poles lashed together with vines was waiting at the bank and the half-dozen men beside it, barefoot and wearing loose shorts, watched us approach as if expecting our arrival. The river was not wide — a boy could toss a ball to a boy on the other side — and a thick vine tied to a tree on both banks crossed the river just above the sluggish surface of the water.
“Beyond this river is my village,” Woodrow said. “Fuama.”
These were the first words he had spoken to me since I’d stepped from the car nearly two hours earlier and had been overcome by … what? A vision? A seizure. If I don’t know what to call it now, I certainly didn’t at the time. It had been a sudden, thoroughgoing confusion of needs and desires, I knew that much, even when it was happening, and little else. But looking back these many years later, I see it more clearly now, and if it was a vision, then it must have been the felt aftereffect of a collision between two conflicted desires that had been germinating in my subconscious for months. One desire had been generated by the woman named Hannah Musgrave, who wanted to become wholly herself again, free to go back to her parents and homeland; the other by the woman named Dawn Carrington, who also wanted to become wholly herself, but hoped in the process to disappear from her pursuers safely into Africa. My decision to marry Woodrow was turning both women — the lost but still loving daughter and the fugitive revolutionary — into a bourgeois African man’s loving American wife. It had set Hannah’s and Dawn’s opposing desires on a collision course. If I married Woodrow, Hannah would never go home again, and Dawn would not disappear into Africa. It would be as if neither woman had ever existed, as if both had been from the beginning nothing more than fictions. In deciding to marry Woodrow, I was deciding to abandon my dream of assuming the identity I had been given in childhood and youth, as well as the identity I had replaced it with.
I glimpsed that fact that day, and it terrified me, and when I fled from the safety and comfort of the ministry car and embraced that poor, pathetic, female goat, it was not to comfort her, but somehow to induce her to comfort me. To help me believe that what I saw coming towards me would not arrive.
The car coasted from the road onto the raft and stopped. To the man in charge Satterthwaite spoke a few words in the man’s language and dropped a coin into his hand. Satterthwaite closed the window and let the motor and air-conditioner continue to purr, as the crew of muscular men, like a team in a tug-of-war, somberly, rhythmically pulled on the thick vine and drew us slowly across the river, where I saw gathered on the farther bank a large, rapidly growing crowd of naked and near-naked men, women, and children. They were a somber group, like a photo from an old National Geographic, the women with large, pendulous breasts, the men with tightly muscled arms and chests, the children with round bellies and protruding navels — a passive, yet withheld and slightly suspicious-looking crowd, as if waiting for us to make our intentions clear, not exactly welcoming, and not in the slightest ceremonial.
I suppose I expected feathers and masks and drums, elaborate headdresses, leopard-skin capes, and woven breastplates, not, as they seemed, a loose collection of poverty-stricken hunters-gatherers. Woodrow’s people. His family. Soon to be mine.
Satterthwaite drove the Mercedes slowly from the raft and onto the mudded clearing, parting the crowd, and shut off the motor.
“End of the road,” Woodrow said and chuckled. He put his pith helmet on and, checking himself in the rear-view mirror, squared it. “End of the road,” Satterthwaite repeated, and he, too, chuckled. He stepped from the car and opened my door for me to exit, then jumped to Woodrow’s door.
Immediately, as soon as we were out of the car, the people surrounded us, all of them talking at once in loud voices pitched at the same high, flattened tone, their rapid-fire cries, calls, and speeches directed entirely at Woodrow, who shook hands with the men like a visiting plenipotentiary, smiled and nodded politely to the women and children, but said nothing in response to anyone and did nothing to present or even to acknowledge me. Satterthwaite, leaning against the hood, arms folded across his chest, waited by the car and with a sly smile on his face watched Woodrow and me in our city shoes and clothes make our awkward way up the slippery embankment.
Woodrow reached the top of the bank before the rest of us and without a pause plunged into the forest there. The crowd, focused entirely on Woodrow — their village champion returned from a far country in triumph — followed him, and I followed them, more or less ignored, except for the smallest children, the babies, who stared at me with wonderment and a shadow of worry on their brown faces, until their mothers caught them looking and turned them around, shifting them to where they couldn’t see me anymore or else covered their faces with a flattened hand or a large leaf torn from a nearby tree.
It was very hot, and the ground was wet and muddy, and the path was narrow and half-covered with wet, overhanging ferns and bushes. I had difficulty keeping pace with the others and at one point, hurrying to catch up, slipped and fell, smearing my dress, hands, and lower legs with red mud. I blurted, “Shit!” but no one looked back. No one paid me the slightest attention. To everyone, it seemed, except for the babies, who’d been all but blindfolded by their mothers, I was practically invisible. Which, before I arrived there, may well have been what I wanted. I wanted to see them but didn’t want them to see me. It was not, however, what I’d expected. And now that it was happening, it made no sense to me. Some welcoming party, I thought.
Soon the others had gotten so far ahead that I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I couldn’t hear their chatter and ululating calls to one another. I was alone and damned near lost in the middle of the jungle, and I was growing angry. Furious.
I felt like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and almost laughed out loud at the thought. Woodrow in his pith helmet and eyeglasses as Bogie? But I slipped and skidded and stumbled on, and after a while, a half-hour or so, the path brought me face to face with a palisade nearly eight feet high, made of thick poles roughly cut and peeled and lashed together with vines. The path split right and left alongside the wall, with no indication of which way led to the entrance to the village. I could see on the farther side of the wall thatched roofs like conical hats and the green leafy tops of fruit trees and caught the aroma of wood smoke and roasting meat.
I chose to go left and, like a princess locked out of her castle, made my way along the wall, looking for the drawbridge or gate, a doorway, a hole in the wall, a tunnel — any way in. I heard drumming, high, thin, rapid-fire patters at first, then a heavy bass drum joined in, and the click of sticks on a log, and singing — those high-pitched female ululations orchestrated cleanly into a chorus now. The sun shone aslant in the sky, behind the trees, but it was still very hot and humid, and I was sweating and muddy. The mud had a cold, metallic stink to it. I took off my shoes, and carrying them like pathetic gifts, one in each hand, walked along the path barefoot, whimpering with frustration and anger and confusion. Where was the damned gate? Where had everyone gone? What was going on in there? Why hadn’t Woodrow or someone, anyone, stayed back to lead me into the village? It was turning into one of those awful dreams of rejection and repressed rage that you think will never end. When, after walking for what seemed like hours but could not have been more than twenty minutes, I realized that I had actually walked full circle around the village without having come to a door or a gate and had arrived back where I had started, and I was suddenly afraid.
There must have been something important said or done back at the car that I utterly missed, I thought. I’d been distracted, confused, when we came to the river, not paying attention. Back there, when we crossed the river, a gesture, some sort of instruction or lead, must have been given to me by Woodrow or Satterthwaite or by one of the people who greeted us, something that would have told me what to say and do when we arrived and thus, as a result of my not having said or done it, would explain what was happening to me now. I must have unintentionally insulted Woodrow or his people. Perhaps I offended one of their ancestors or broke one of their taboos. Good Lord, I thought, this is Alice’s Wonderland — the rules are different here, and I haven’t a clue as to what they are, and everything I do is wrong!
Barefoot and muddy, sweating and scared, my shoes in my hands, my hair damp and in stringy tangles, I grimaced and began half to laugh over my plight and half to cry. I felt like a traveler from another planet whose compatriots had left for home too soon. A shadow crossed mine, and when I turned there was a slender boy of fourteen or fifteen standing beside me. He was silent and motionless, as if he’d been transported there by magic. Shirtless and barefoot, wearing little more than a loincloth, he was a pretty, almost girlish-looking boy who smiled slightly and gestured for me to follow him. Turning, he walked gracefully downhill a short ways, looked back once to be sure that I was coming along behind, then stepped into the bushes and disappeared into the bright greenery, and when I arrived at the place where he’d become invisible, I saw a narrow footpath and took it.
Coming Wednesday: Two large, skinned, piglike carcasses, headless and without hoofs, were slung across the red coals alongside a fifty-gallon drum whose steaming contents I could not see.
The road, up to now a shaded tunnel through the crowding green jungle, had opened on both sides to the geometrically laid out orchards of a rubber plantation — row after row of tall, high-branched rubber trees protected against wandering cattle and human beings by barbed wire fencing. At each tree a man in tattered shirt and loose pants stood tapping latex into a white plastic tub, as if collecting his winnings from a casino slot machine.
“Firestone,” Woodrow said. He sucked his lips for a moment and stared out the window. “Everybody from here and people from far away works for them now. Good money, best they can get.” He paused and examined his carefully manicured fingernails.” But the people, they got to buy food now, instead of growing it. Even rice. A big problem,” he said, his brow furrowed with worry. “Big-big problem.”
Woodrow’s politics, like those of most educated Liberians, were conflicted. He was all in favor of President Tolbert’s so-called Open Door policy of making it cheap and easy for foreign, especially U.S., companies to acquire monopolistic, long-term leases to vast tracts of land and ownership of everything on and under it, avoiding taxes and tariffs, unions, and regulations on wages and working conditions. But he was aware of the price being paid by the natives.
“It’s the fastest way to civilize the tribal people,” he went on, switching back to town talk. “And this country is mostly tribal people, you know. The foreign companies build schools for the children of the workers and make bush hospitals and company stores for them, so the workers will leave their villages and live close to the plantation.” He paused. “And they help our balance of payments. Something the Peace Corps does not do,” he said, smiling. “And it brings hard currency into the economy.”
Right, mainly in the form of bribes, I thought, but did not say — payoffs and misdirected foreign-aid funds siphoned into the pockets and secret bank accounts of President Tolbert and his inner circle of ministers and bureaucrats. Nothing trickling down to Woodrow Sundiata, however, whose Ministry of Public Health had little to offer the representatives of foreign corporations and governments and no power to restrict their field operations. Once the necessary under-the-counter payments were distributed in Monrovia, the companies were free to loot whatever they wanted from the land — rubber, citrus, rice, cocoa, and in recent years a small but growing quantity of diamonds. With Liberian government collusion and assistance, they rounded up and, on contract, hired tribal people and made them into indentured workers, paying them a dollar a day to help extract the raw materials, and then processed what they’d taken and sold it abroad at a colossal profit. Sometimes they shipped and sold it right next door — rice to Guinea, flour to Sierra Leone, powdered milk to Ctte d’Ivoire. They even peddled Liberia-grown crops back to the Liberians themselves, dumping foodstuffs at inflated prices for credit or cash on the Lebanese and Indian traders in Monrovia, who in turn marked up and distributed the goods to every small shop and market in the land.
This troubled Woodrow and depressed him. He explained that his father, Duma, who owned many farms, on instructions from the village headman had leased the land under his control to a Norwegian company that insisted he plant nothing but rice on it. In the evenings, Duma’s four wives cooked rice that had been grown and harvested on Duma’s land, carried in bulk by truck to Monrovia, shipped to Nigeria for bagging, and sent straight back to Monrovia, where it was purchased for cash at the village shop in Fuama by Duma’s wives at a triply inflated price.
“The people eat poorly now, much worse than in the past. It’s a bad system,” he pronounced. “But we got nothing else available. Except communism, socialism, whatever you want to call it. And we’re not stupid, we see what happens when you try that. We see what happens to African countries when they get big socialistic ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. And America we know. England and so on, them we know, too. China and Russia, them we don’t know. So we live with the system we’ve got. Besides, communism, socialism, no matter how I might like some of their ideas, in the end they’re no good for anybody. At least capitalism is good for some of us. Right?”
“Right,” I said, and nothing more.
We rumbled along the rutted dirt road through scattered crossroads towns and small villages and after a while wound slowly up to a more populous highland district. Now I saw large numbers of ordinary Liberians everywhere — the tribal people, poor people, men, women, and children bent over hand-tilled rows in their small burned-over fields. Also great numbers of people who seemed to have no work — knots of idle boys and men sitting in the shade of a tree as if waiting for a boss in a truck who would never come and crowds streaming alongside the road aimlessly, it seemed, as if having just departed from a sporting event.
We passed an old man and woman holding hands, both blind, tapping their way with sticks, abruptly stopped in their path by a sleeping black pig. They stood and poked at the pig with their sticks, trying to determine what was blocking them. A plaintive-faced boy, machete in hand, watched over a row of fresh coconuts for sale on the ground. Leaning against the front of a bamboo roadhouse — above the open door, a scrawled tin sign, Champion Sam’s — a pair of teenaged girls in unbuttoned jean jackets, miniskirts, and plastic spike-heeled shoes flashed us with their long black legs and tobacco-colored cleavage. In the middle of a field adjacent to the roadhouse, a tall, thin, shirtless man stood, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, lay his hoe on his bony shoulder, and watched his toddler sons, little more than babies, lug a burlap sack of seed across the field towards him.
I gazed on the Liberians as we drove swiftly past them, poor people eking out their day-to-day livings and enduring terrible hardships and humiliation in the process, and all of a sudden, with no warning or buildup, I felt a powerful urge to ask Satterthwaite to stop the car. Let me out of this air-conditioned chariot, let me be one of them, not one of you! Let me walk unnoticed with them along this dusty road to the market and not ride smoothly over it. Let me mingle out there with the men, women, and children whose backbreaking labor and suffering are used to pay for this German car and its driver, to pay for the power and privilege of the man beside me, my future husband, also to pay entirely for me, for my safe, secure, undeserved life!
My eyes filled, and I was breathing hard. And even though it caught me by surprise, it was an old impulse, one all too sadly familiar to me, this desire to separate myself in the dance of life from the people who had brought me and become one instead with the people excluded from the dance, the people who set up the chairs, served the food and drinks, provided the entertainment, and cleaned up afterwards. I knew the desire was illicit. It wasn’t rooted in compassion or altruism; it wasn’t even political.
In a voice louder and bolder than I intended, I called to Satterthwaite, “Stop the car! Please!”
“What’s the matter?” Woodrow asked. “Are you ill?”
Satterthwaite brought the car to a halt in the middle of the road. In the tangled brush next to the car, a goat looked at me through the window glass. It was an ordinary red-haired goat with large, fly-clustered yellow eyes, a scrawny female with a swollen udder and a thin piece of rope trailing from her neck into the dense, thorny bushes behind it.
“No! I just … I need to get out of the car,” I said and opened the door and stepped outside, face to face with the goat. A bulky wave of cooked air broke over me, nearly knocking me down. I shut the door and took several unsteady steps away from the car and toward the goat, which seemed suddenly afraid, backing away, wide eyed.
A gang of naked and half-naked children appeared out of nowhere, round-bellied babies and boys and girls, some on the edge of adolescence, the girls with rosebud breasts, the boys with man-sized hands and narrow shoulders and spindly arms, all of them barefoot, their legs covered with road dust, sores, old scars, their noses and eyes running. They extended the pale palms of their hands to me and murmured, “Gimme dash, miss, gimme dash, miss, gimme dash.” I heard Woodrow behind me shout at them through the open window of the car in a language I didn’t understand, Kpelle, I supposed, and the children backed off a ways and gazed at me in silence.
Except for the buzzing of the flies, all the noise of the world seemed to have been banished, and after a few seconds even the flies went silent. There was only the heat, the impossible heat. And the face of the goat staring wide eyed through the heat at me as if I had no other wish than to kill it and had all the power to do so. And me staring back. Somehow that broken-down, used-up animal’s pathetically scared gaze had turned for one brief moment into the central reality of my world, erasing everything that surrounded it, shutting out everything that had preceded it, memories even, blotting out Woodrow’s presence and Satterthwaite’s, and erasing my reasons for being there today. It wasn’t a symbol of the world that surrounded me; it was the world itself, as if I’d suddenly been made incapable of perceiving anything else. I’m describing this moment from memory, obviously, many years afterwards, but while inside that moment I had no memories to associate with it and thus had no correct understanding of it and no context for it. I’m not sure I understand today what happened alongside the road to Fuama that day, except that afterwards I was a subtly changed person, and Africa no longer frightened me.
I approached the goat, put my arms around her neck, and drew her to me and held her tightly against my breast. Strangely, the animal didn’t resist or pull away; she gave herself over to my embrace.
Sounds began to penetrate the silence, first the buzzing of the flies, then the children, murmuring again, “Gimme dash, gimme dash,” and Woodrow saying, “Come now, Hannah, come back inside the car.” I felt his hands on my shoulders. Slowly, I let go of the goat and stood away from her and allowed Woodrow to help me back into the car. Before he joined me there, Woodrow tossed a handful of coins into the air in the direction of the children, sending them scrambling after the money. The goat had disappeared, swallowed by the bush. People, most of them adults standing on both sides of the road, watched us impassively, as if we had merely slowed in our passage through their village but had not stopped.
“All right, Satterthwaite, drive on now,” Woodrow said and closed the window on the universe. “We have a long ways to go yet.” Without turning, he said to me, “From now on, my dear, when dealing with the tribal people, you’ll have to stay close to me and follow my example and my instructions. Understood?”
“Yes, I understand. I’ll do that,” I said. “It’s a promise.”
Woodrow wasn’t exactly sure, but he thought that altogether he had forty-two brothers and sisters. Maybe more.
My mouth dropped. Woodrow smiled. An old joke. But that was counting all his father’s children by his four wives, he said, still smiling. From his father’s first wife, he farther explained, there were only five children, of which he, Woodrow, was the youngest, which is why he had been allowed to attend missionary school and from there enroll in a preparatory school here in town, in Monrovia, and then, on a church-sponsored scholarship, travel to the United States, where he had studied business at Gordon College, a Baptist school in Beverly, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Emerson, the town where I had grown up. Woodrow’s older brother, Jonathan, and his three sisters had stayed in the village, because of their responsibilities to the family. Woodrow had met his responsibilities to the family by finding jobs for about twenty of his half-siblings and cousins so far, in the government of President William Tolbert and in the True Whig party, of which he was a national officer, as were all cabinet ministers and sub-ministers. He was able to do this, he said proudly, because his mother and grandmother were Americos, descended directly from the African-American founders of the Republic of Liberia, and not full-blooded Kpelle like his father and grandfather, who were headmen descended from headmen.
Woodrow’s family pride was much greater than mine. It colored his every reference to them, and I envied him that pride. I admired it. I wanted it for myself. “Woodrow,” I said, as he reached across me to open the car door, “would you like to stay with me tonight?”
I had startled him. He blinked, frozen in mid-reach. I’d startled myself as well. Where had that come from? I hadn’t once, all evening long, thought of sleeping with him. I’d enjoyed attracting him and was aware that the attention I’d received from the big men at the head table had aroused Woodrow, but making love with him? Now? It had not crossed my mind. This was not usually the case — for no other reason than because he was an African, I actually thought Woodrow sexually unusual, let’s say, and wondered almost constantly what he would be like in bed. Tender or rough? Gentle and generous, or harshly demanding? Knowledgeable of a woman’s body or, like almost every man I had slept with so far, woefully ignorant of it?
He was a small man, small hands and feet, small ears. I liked small men.
“Well, yes, of course,” he said. “Of course. Yes, I would like to stay with you tonight. But, no. No.” Then, regaining his balance, “It’s not the right time, Hannah darling. Not yet. I don’t mean to seem a prude, you understand. Or to suggest that you’re not desirable to me. Quite the opposite. No, it’s just — ”
“I am really embarrassed,” I said, interrupting. “I guess … well, I thought that was what was on your mind.”
He laughed, affecting the big African man’s deep, dark laugh. “Always! Always! But first things first. As you Americans say. Hannah, I want you to meet my people. Then … then we will be free to follow our desires.” He chuckled the Englishman’s chuckle.
“Is that customary?” I asked him. “Do you usually have your family meet a woman before you sleep with her? Am I being too frank, Woodrow?”
“No, not at all, not at all. Not too frank at all. It’s only the American way of speaking, isn’t it? I like the American way of speaking, even in a woman. But in answer to your question, you are the first woman I have invited to meet my people. Remember, I’m inviting you to meet them, not inviting them to meet you. I’m my own man, Hannah, not theirs. This meeting is for you. For you and for me. Not them.”
He pressed the door handle, and Satterthwaite opened it wide for me to exit. Woodrow kissed my hand, as had become his custom by then, and smiled sweetly, and I stepped from the car. “When you have met my people, then we can sit down and decide what we will do next. Together. Goodnight, Hannah,” he said.
“Goodnight,” I said. “I’m sorry, Woodrow, if I misunderstood.” I felt almost bawdy, what my mother used to call “cheap.” I turned away before he could respond, and made for my cabin. The car pulled out onto the road. Halfway across the compound I stopped and watched its taillights fade and disappear and then stood for a long, lingering moment in thick darkness, letting a flurry of images of slow, comforting sex with Woodrow and marriage to him and bearing his children and settling into a permanent life in Africa flutter randomly down, obliterating neat, orderly thoughts of tomorrow and the next day and the next, the mundane details of my daily routine. I was bored by the thoughts of tomorrow and my ongoing days, one by one by one — but, oh, the images of a permanent life in Africa, though they frightened me, they were exciting and made my skin prickle. They signified a future! I hadn’t had a vision of an actual, believable future in a long time, not for years.
A wedge of shadow darted past my ear. A bat. In the distance a dog barked once and went silent, as if kicked. There was a rustling noise coming from the Quonset hut at the rear of the compound, and I started quickly for my cabin. Before I reached the porch steps, a single chimp had begun to pant and hoot, and in seconds another had joined in, then more, and by the time I opened the door of the cabin, the chimps, all of them, were howling and banging against the bars of their cages.
Woodrow arrived at the compound early the following Saturday, chauffeured in the ministry car by the faithful and ever watchful Satterthwaite. He hadn’t answered my question the night before about what to wear, and I was shy about asking him again, but figured I’d better dress like a proper white lady — a pale yellow cotton sundress, a floppy, broad-brimmed hat, and sensible, low-heeled shoes, purchased in town the day before. Which turned out to be correct. My usual daytime uniform of jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers would not have cut it. It troubled me slightly that, bit by bit, week by week, my African wardrobe was coming to resemble my mother’s collection of resort wear.
Woodrow’s outfit that day resembled nothing from my father’s closet, however. He wore a starched, white guayabera shirt, pale blue Bermuda shorts, brown British shoes and knee socks, and a new pair of round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Beside him on the seat an old-fashioned pith helmet lay at the ready. Evidently, when a government sub-minister goes to his village, he does not want to be mistaken for a villager. I got in back and kissed him on the cheek. “You look like a missionary, Woodrow,” I said and smiled: Just teasing, honey. He frowned. I kissed him again.
“You don’t approve?” he said. His frown became a scowl.
“No, I like the look. Especially the eyeglasses. I mean, you seem very … official. For a family visit, that is.”
“Yes, well, in a sense I suppose this visit is somewhat official.”
The car sped along the road, splashing through steaming puddles of water. It had rained earlier, and sunlight flashed like strobes off the overhanging, bright green foliage and fronds. We were headed north from the compound, which was located east of the harbor on the inland edge of Monrovia. I hadn’t been out this way before. My travels in Liberia so far had been strictly limited to the immediate neighborhood of the plasma lab and to the commercial area downtown and west of the city out to the beaches and hotels beyond, where I’d gone solely in Woodrow’s company. Due to the attention I attracted, especially from other white people, and my residual underground paranoia — which I clung to in spite of Woodrow’s assurance that there was no possibility of my being arrested by the Americans or anyone else — I was still wary of traveling about the country on my own.
Pavement turned to gravel, and the brightly painted, air-conditioned homes of the affluent Monrovians, with their close-cropped lawns and iron-spike fences and the occasional security guard on patrol, gave way to one-room roadside shops and small, rectangular, daub-and-wattle cabins, many with zinc or thatched roofs. Manicured lawns and flower gardens were replaced by vegetable patches and burned-over fields ready for planting and long stretches of dense brush, then solid, continuous jungle. Soon the road was red dirt, and there were fewer and fewer vehicles: Chinese bicycles wobbling under two and three riders, handcarts pushed by shirtless boys, and now and then a crowded rattle-trap of a van or mud-spattered pickup headed for the city.
A crippled yellow dog — Satterthwaite refused to slow for it or adjust speed or direction an iota — heroically dragged its hindquarters across the road just in time to avoid being hit. People walked alongside the road, mostly women and girls with babies strapped on their backs and heavy loads of garden crops balanced on their heads. They watched us blow past and, expressionless, as if the Mercedes were weather, turned away from the wake of dusty wind that followed and resumed trudging towards Monrovia and the weekend market there.
“My father’s name is Duma,” Woodrow said. “Duma Sundiata. He’s the headman of his quarter in the village. Not head of the village its ownself, which has a chief, a paramount chief, above the headmen. So some people like to say my father Duma a small-small man.” His voice had dropped a register, and he had slipped into rapid-fire Liberian English, usually with me a sign of easy intimacy. But today he sounded anxious. “But he’s abi-namu,” he said. “That means he’s a direct descendant of the Kpelle ancestors, and he has many farms and many children, so even the paramount chief of the village thinks very well of him and invites him to the most important palavers.”
“Palavers?”
“For settling disputes and such amongst the peoples. The village name is Fuama. Fuama is very small, very isolated. Small-small. Only a village. Fuama is about fifty miles from here, three and a half, maybe four hours.”
I couldn’t tell if he was worried more about the impression I would make on his people or the impression his people would make on me, so I said nothing. Reassuring Woodrow was not my strong suit then. He was still too much a mystery to me.
“My father, Duma, he comin’ to receive us,” he continued. “But him want to present us to the chief and to the other headmen, prob’ly. Same for my mother, Adina, and the other headmen wives. Alla them know why we comin’ out,” he added.
“Oh. They do? Why exactly are we coming, Woodrow?”
He turned to me, eyebrows raised above his glasses, surprised by my question. “Well, it’s to tell them of our plans, Hannah darling,” he said, his low-voiced Liberian-English turning subtly British again, almost a patrician drawl.
“Plans?”
“Our plans to marry. So they won’t be surprised and have hurt feelings when they find out about it later. Since we won’t be able to do it in Fuama, and certainly not in the traditional way,” he said.
“I don’t know why not. I can handle that. I might even prefer a traditional wedding,” I said. “But, look, Woodrow, you haven’t actually proposed marriage to me. Not formally, I mean.” I tacked on a small laugh. Keep it light.
“Ah!” he said, as if suddenly remembering. He smiled gently, but his nose and forehead and upper lip were shiny with sweat, as if the conversation were becoming a wee bit uncomfortable. “Yes, well. Yes, I assumed, after our talk the other night — ”
“No, no, that’s okay, I assumed it, too,” I said, interrupting. “I didn’t expect you to get down on one knee and ask for my hand, and you can’t very well go to my father and ask his permission. No, it’s okay. I knew what you were saying. And I agree. I mean, I accept your proposal. Consider it accepted.” I didn’t want to make him say what he seemed reluctant or maybe unable to say, but at the same time I wondered what else had I missed all these weeks we’d been together? What other exchanges had I agreed to, other offers accepted?
“Tell me what you mean,” I said. “That we won’t be able to do it in Fuama in the traditional way.”
“Well, you … you’re a foreigner. And there are certain important conditions that a Kpelle girl, that any native girl, has to meet.”
“Conditions?”
“A certain type of education and experience. And it’s … it’s rather too late for you. It would be too late even if you weren’t a foreigner, because a woman learns it as a child, as a young girl. She learns it from her family and her people. She learns it from the older women, and in a special way that’s not known to men. We males, we learn other things.” He was silent for a moment, and his face was shut, as if he were trying to remember the words of an old song. “We … the people, they have societies for this,” he said with slight embarrassment. The societies for the girls and women were called Sande, he explained, and Poro for the men, secret, highly ritualistic associations, a bit like American college sororities and fraternities, I gathered, except that the Sande and the Poro were ancient and engaged the entire community in their rites and governance. They had strict rules and harsh punishments for violators of the rules; they had officers and emblems of office, secret signs and words, and elaborate regalia and ceremonies that the ancestors had established long before the Europeans arrived. Sande and Poro connected the living to the dead, the physical world to the spiritual world, girls to women and boys to men and men and women to each other, and through rite, secret knowledge, and shared belief they organized and facilitated a person’s transition from one state of being to another.
“But that’s not a problem,” Woodrow assured me. “Your being a foreigner and all. Not for me, certainly, because, as you know, I’m a modern man. One of the twi, as the people call us. No, no, we’ll get married in town, in Monrovia, in a proper church way,” he declared. “We’ll have a Christian marriage. It will be fine and good, you’ll see. The president may even come and celebrate with us. He sometimes does that, President Tolbert.”
“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”
Coming Thursday: “The people eat poorly now, much worse than in the past. It’s a bad system,” Woodrow pronounced. “But we got nothing else available. Except communism, socialism, whatever you want to call it. And we’re not stupid, we see what happens when you try that. We see what happens to African countries when they get big socialistic ideas. At least capitalism is good for some of us. Right?”
