Authors: Russell Banks
And besides, I had no better alternative life to propose. No meaningful future for me alone or me with anyone else. So it was jail time, and public confession and shame, or get the hell out of Dodge, lady. Disappear. I was like a late-stage drug addict, unable to admit her addiction because of the damage it has done. She goes off the map altogether and no longer associates even with other addicts. I grabbed my duffel bag and my phony passport and followed Zack to Ghana. That way I could keep my mask, and no one could see it for what it was. Except Zack.
WITHIN A WEEK
of our arrival in Accra, we had rented from an ex–Peace Corps friend of Zack’s a small, two-bedroom, second-storey furnished apartment in a pink stuccoed building downtown, with a balcony overlooking the bustling street below and a view of the vast, open-air Makola market. Another week, and I had a job. Zack seemed to have friends everywhere in this city, at all levels of society—expatriate Englishmen, Ghanaian nationals, African-Americans in search of their roots, American businessmen, and ex–Peace Corps volunteers gone native—and he managed through a pal at the U.S. embassy to get me hired as a medical technician for a New York University blood lab that was using monkeys and bonobos for research on hepatitis.
My job was essentially a clerical one. I worked with the blood, not the monkeys, cataloguing and shipping plasma back to the States. I barely saw our simian donors and never handled them. Two years of Harvard Medical School under the name of Hannah Musgrave and my job, later, in the plasma lab at Peter Bent Brigham as Dawn Carrington had qualified me nicely for a similar, difficult-to-fill position here. In the days before computer checks, nobody checked. You could take off, put on, and mix and match identities like sportswear. You got caught only if you couldn’t do what you said you could. Or if someone informed on you.
Once I had my job and living quarters settled, it wasn’t long before Zack and I began to fall away from each other. Mostly, it was my doing. Back in the States—starting at Brandeis and finally in New Bedford—I’d been willing to dismiss his egoism and grandiosity as the typically elaborate feathers and coxcomb worn by just about every man I’d ever known in the Movement, without lowering my estimation of his political commitment and integrity. But that wasn’t possible here in Ghana. For ten long years, in the vain attempt to create a revolution, I and hundreds of women like me—and, yes, men like Zack—had literally risked our lives and sacrificed our families and friends and given up on the comfortable futures we’d been promised. It was who we were back then and now and who we’d be for the rest of our lives. We believed it. We insisted on it. We needed it. But for Zack, once we’d landed in Accra, all that turned into merely a stage in his life, a phase he claimed to have passed beyond.
I wouldn’t have been offended by his having designated those years a phase instead of a life, implying that it had been merely a phase for me, too, and I might even have been grateful for it. It might have provided the start of a way out for me. But in Africa, Zack quickly set himself up as a “businessman” of a particularly embarrassing and loathsome type. At least to me it was, especially then. And that, in turn, flipped him into a defensive posture, which only made things between us worse. For a long time, I said nothing to him about it. But he knew. My presence silhouetted his new life sharply against the brightly lit background of the old, and it made him angry at me, as if I were in charge of lighting.
He’d become a middleman. The bottom-feeder of capitalism. The enemy, as far as I was concerned. The Ghanaian economy had collapsed in the middle 1970s, and the inflation rate of the cedi, the local currency, was doubling by the month against the U.S. dollar. Small farmers and merchants were slipping so deeply into debt it would take generations for them to climb out again. These were Zack’s suppliers. He spoke Fanti and a little Twi from his Peace Corps days, and as soon as his shoulder had healed well enough for him to drive, he bought with the dregs of his trust fund a little red Suzuki motorcycle and roared off to back-country cocoa-farming villages and along dusty country lanes from one small market town and city to another and prowled up and down the back streets and alleys of Accra, buying up from desperately frightened debtors their last hedge against financial ruin—ancient Ghanaian artworks and religious artifacts, principally Ashanti gold. He bought the precious objects with American dollars at flea-market prices, then sold them the next day at a colossal markup to the agents and dealers for rich American and European collectors and galleries, who waited for him in the air-conditioned lobby of the Golden Tulip Hotel out by the airport. It was, as he said, “sweet.”
He was thriving, and within a month he had bought himself a Mazda van to carry his goods. I remember sitting with him one afternoon at a beach bar called Last Stop that he liked and had made his informal headquarters. It was a Sunday and very hot, and he had talked me into meeting him there “For the breeze,” he said, “if nothing else. Who knows, you might actually enjoy yourself for a change and meet somebody you’d like and maybe even fall for.” For some reason, Zack was eager to see me involved with a man. “Or a woman,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to me, so long as you get your own pad if you decide to shack up with him. Or her. Two’s company, three’s a drag.”
We sat out on the terrace and drank the local Gulder beer and watched a gang of small boys and girls chase the surf while their tall, slender mothers stood knee-deep in the water with their skirts pulled up and talked. The breeze off the sea was aromatic and cooling. I kicked off my sandals and showed my face to the sun and admitted to Zack that I was glad I’d come out there.
“Yeah. Too bad there’s nobody interesting here today. Probably still too early.” He’d completed a successful sale that morning of a half-dozen rare, elaborately carved chieftain’s stools to a midtown Manhattan gallery and was more pleased with himself than usual. “Actually, this gig’s going so good I’m thinking of setting up a gallery of my own here, with maybe a branch in the States in a year or two. Cut out the middleman, you know?”
“You’re the middleman,” I said. “Jesus, Zack, do you have any idea how you sound?”
“Look, there’s no more trust fund, babe,” he said, spreading his empty hands. “Same with you, y’know. No more checks from Mommy and Daddy waiting at the American Express office. This is
Africa
, babe, not Ameri-ka. So lighten up, will you?”
“I never took money from my parents, you know that. And don’t call me ‘babe.’”
He scowled. “You put me down all the time, but look at
you
, for Christ’s sake. Taking U.S. dollars from a university lab that’s financed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company that’s trying to patent and sell a drug that cures a disease that’s been inflicted on the liver of some poor African-American woman who’s addicted to another drug that’s imported by the CIA from Southeast Asia. Terrific. I suppose that’s better than being an upscale African street peddler like me? Because that’s all I am, you know. A street peddler. I mean, c’mon, Hannah, which of us is really working for the enemy?”
“Dawn.”
“Hannah. We’re not underground anymore.”
“Dawn Carrington is who I am here. So I’m still underground.”
“Yeah. Whatever,” he said and flagged the waitress impatiently.
“I used to think I was attracted to dangerous men,” I said. “Dangerous to
me
, I mean. And I don’t necessarily mean sexually attracted.”
“Fuck you. Find yourself a dangerous man then.” He waved his hand around the bar like an impresario or a pimp. “A little while and the place’ll be full of ’em. The whole fucking city’s full of ’em.” And it was. In the mid-1970s, Accra, and this bar in particular, along with several others like the Wato and Afrikiko’s, were catch basins for First-World drop-ins: anti–Vietnam War draft dodgers, black U.S. military personnel gone AWOL, and ex–Peace Corps volunteers, and probably more than a few of them were CIA agents collecting information on the rest of us and sending it back to Washington. They were Zack’s and my tribesmen and -women, although only a few were women. West Africa was peppered with Americans like us in those years.
“You used to think I was dangerous,” Zack said. “And now you don’t. Is that what you’re saying?” He grinned in a manic way, showing me his perfect teeth. With his gingery hair worn in a ponytail he looked more like a Colorado ski bum than a fugitive would-be terrorist. I didn’t know what I looked like anymore. Actually, I’ve never known. I used to tell people that on the FBI wanted poster I looked like a Mexican hooker, but I wasn’t really sure and in fact was only asking for an opinion.
“I never thought you were dangerous, Zack.”
“Man, you are cold. Just like with Carol, man.” He shivered and abruptly stood. “I’m outa here. I’ll see you back at the apartment later, maybe,” he said and strode off.
I’d hurt his feelings and didn’t care, and he knew it. And he was right: from his point of view, Africa hadn’t warmed me up. Though we shared the apartment, we kept to our separate bedrooms and were rarely there at the same time anyhow, never ate together, and didn’t socialize with the same people. Actually, I socialized with no one, and he hung out with everyone. I liked the city of Accra, though. The huge, bustling city sprawled inland from the sea for miles and was such a glorious and inviting contrast to the gray, old mill towns I’d left behind—those recently abandoned, rust-belt cities like New Bedford and before that Cleveland, which had borne me down almost without my knowing it—that I found Accra irresistible. It was hot, equatorially hot, but thanks to the steady breeze off the Atlantic not uncomfortably humid, and as long as you kept out of the direct sun, it felt ideal—the climate to which human anatomy, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, was perfectly adapted. And I liked the Ghanaian people. They were excitable, loud, confident, and in your face, but in an engaging and good-humored way, waving hands, gesticulating, bending, bowing, and spinning as they talked, haggled, hassled, gossiped, and sang. Like the people, the city itself competed tirelessly for your attention and ear with its unbroken din of car horns and buses and trucks without mufflers, radios blasting from windows and open storefronts and hawkers hawking, babies crying, jackhammers pounding. Everywhere you looked Accra worked to catch and hold your eye with bright, busy color—the tie-dyed and beautifully woven wraps on the women and their elaborately coiled, braided, and beaded hairstyles, glossy black, hatlike structures as precarious as wedding cakes; the Chinese bicycles repainted in gaudy colors; the jammed minivans called
tro-tros
, the dazzling heaps of fruits and vegetables in the Makola market; and the barbershop signs with crude, hand-painted portraits of black men wearing spiffy Detroit-style haircuts called “747 Wave” and “Barracuda Zip” and “Concord Up.” I liked the street food, especially
keli-weli
—savory little chunks of plantain fried in palm oil and flavored with ginger and hot peppers and served on a banana leaf—and even grew fond of the culinary leftovers from colonial days, a cup of hot Milo in the morning and for lunch at the office a thick sandwich of Laughing Cow cheese and the spongy white bread that Zack, just to get on my nerves, liked to call bimbo bread.
Never much of a cook, evenings I dined alone and mostly in little hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the neighborhood, where I favored the chopped-spinach dish called
kontumbre
and fish and rice
jollof
and the thick, darkly spiced stews. And I liked smoking the very strong Ghanaian marijuana. It was called
bingo
and sometimes
wee
, sold by a dealer named Bush Doctor, who hung out by the pool at the Golden Tulip. Zack bought it by the pound and, whenever he motored off to the backcountry on one of his art-buying jaunts, he carried enough with him to fill a tobacco pouch, leaving the rest carelessly behind at the apartment in a quart jam jar. Those nights when he was away, I’d dip into his jar, roll myself a pencil-size joint with tissue paper stripped off the foil liner of a cigarette pack, get sky high in a single swoop, and sit out on the balcony, hidden in darkness, and watch the thronged street below as if ensconced in a private box at Shakespeare’s Globe in seventeenth-century London.
But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models—those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality—and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.
Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely
he
wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.