Authors: Russell Banks
Dear Hannah, how I would love to be able to hug you and sit face to face with you and talk the night through. I wonder if it’s possible for us to visit you there. I understand, of course, that you can’t visit us here, but maybe we could fly over to Africa and be with you for a few days. It would mean so much to us if we could all be together again, however briefly. I would love to see where you work, meet your friends (especially this mysterious new man-friend you mentioned), and travel about the countryside some and “see the sights.” Neither your father nor I have been to Africa before, you know, although your father keeps saying he wants to go to South Africa and support the anti-apartheid movement in some fashion that’s appropriate to his profession and his public standing here in the U.S., probably by forming an international organization of physicians opposed to apartheid. It’s possible that we could come first to Liberia for a few days or a week and then fly on to South Africa. What would you think of that? Naturally, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way and would stay in a nearby hotel, rent a car, and so on, and would amuse ourselves quite capably while you were at work. We could hire a local guide and go sightseeing, then meet up with you afterwards. The very idea of it is exciting to me, and when I suggested it to your father, he was thrilled.
It amazed and disappointed me to see the ease with which my parents, simply by presenting themselves to me, could turn me into that cold child again. I read their letters and was transformed into Scout. Here I was, a woman in her middle-thirties who had accumulated a lifetime’s experiences that her parents would never even know about, let alone experience for themselves; yet, in their presence, even in as disembodied a form as an exchange of letters, my world shrank to the size and shape of theirs, as if I’d never left it.
I’ve gone on and on, especially for a letter that I’m not one hundred percent sure will even get to you, and so I really should close now. I love you, darling, and miss you terribly. Please write back soon.
All my love
,
Mother
I didn’t take the time to refold her letter and put it back into the envelope, before I was writing my answer. My hand trembled as the words scrawled across the page, and when I had finished, I did not bother to reread what I had written. I immediately sealed it, slapped on an airmail stamp—one of those famous Liberian chimpanzee stamps printed in small editions for foreign collectors—and headed straight for the little neighborhood post office, where, after a ten-minute wait for the postmistress to return from lunch, I handed it to her.
Dear Mother
,
The last thing I need is for you and Daddy to show up at my door! How can you even think of doing such a thing! I’m not a post-deb taking her Grand Tour in Africa and I’m not in the Peace Corps, thank you very much, Daddy. Please understand that my situation vis-à-vis the government of Liberia and the U.S. State Department is extremely delicate, and I’m more or less free to stay here solely by their leave. And I mean that, more or less free. And by their leave. The American authorities pretty much run the show in Liberia and they know who I am. I’m no longer underground, but as you surely must remember, Mother, there is still a federal warrant for my arrest that could be acted on any time they wish, for any reason they wish. Relations between the two countries are conducted not as between equals but rather on the basis of what’s in the best interests of the U.S. At the moment, because of an acute shortage here of medically trained personnel, it’s in the interests of the U.S. State Department and probably a few congressmen from New York and New Jersey to allow me, even with my low-level skills, to be employed basically as a lab assistant for an academic front financed by some huge, politically connected pharmaceutical company. The university is doing research that requires blood from chimpanzees, an animal that happens to be abundant in this region, research that, if successful, will some day produce the patent for an anti-hepatitis drug that will generate enormous profits for the pharmaceutical company sponsoring the research and in the end will make the shareholders of the company obscenely rich. Thus the complicity of the U.S. government and thus their interest in having me employed here. (I can’t believe I have to explain this to you!)
Mother viewed people as either lucky or unlucky, Daddy saw them as overprivileged and underprivileged. He failed to note, however, that the underprivileged among us could not be eliminated without first doing away with the overprivileged. Nonetheless, in my parents’ dreamy, meandering, hand-holding march towards universal justice—where the downtrodden would be uplifted and the sick and the starving healed and fed—Daddy was a step ahead of Mother. He was a logical man, a decent and kind man, but a liberal. He believed that no one’s property need be confiscated and redistributed on the long march towards universal justice and that none of the overprivileged would have to be lined up against a wall and shot and none of the underprivileged would have to be deliberately sacrificed along the way. Thus he saw no reason why, for the duration of the Revolution and for as long as desired thereafter by him and his descendants, his own pocket could not stay filled.
Besides, I know that the American embassy has someone watching me just to be sure that I’m not engaged in any anti-American political activity. The Liberians probably watch me, too. In spite of Liberia’s willingness to do the U.S.’s bidding in Africa by turning itself into a CIA listening post and its one airport into a B-
52
base, this is not an especially stable country. There are many groups and individuals who would love to see the present pro-American government overthrown and replaced by one allied with the Soviet Union or China or God forbid with the non-aligned nations of the Third World. As a result people like me (who are not tourists or Peace Corps volunteers) are viewed with suspicion by all sides. It’s as if I’m under house arrest, Mother, and if you and Daddy or anyone else from my past suddenly shows up here calling attention to yourselves by hiring guides and poking around the country “sightseeing” (and you know what Daddy’s like when he travels), I’ll very likely be extradited to the U.S. and sent to prison for a long, long time.
I’m no longer the same person I was when this exchange between me and my parents took place. But I can see how, just in telling you about the exchange, I revert, not quite to my childhood state of mind, but to adolescence, or even to pre-adolescence. Both my parents are long dead now. In the intervening years I’ve been married, widowed, and borne three children; I’ve perpetrated a hundred large and small betrayals and abandonments; perfect lovers have been replaced by other perfect lovers, men have replaced women and boys have replaced men, and Africans have replaced Americans, who have been replaced by Americans again; chimpanzees in cages have replaced a childhood pet, and Border collies, free-roaming farm dogs, have replaced the chimpanzees; and I’ve gone on alone, untouched, undeterred, unbetrothed, a woman whose essence is a white shadow, a spirit of the river, one of those mammi wattas. Yet despite all that, today, in telling of a brief correspondence back in 1977 between me and my parents, and in the process bringing my father and mother wholly back to my mind, the person I was so long ago returns to me, invades and inhabits me.
In writing to you and Daddy I took a small chance that I’d be compromising my position here slightly. All I wanted was an intimate exchange of family and personal news so that we might not feel so estranged from one another. But after reading Daddy’s letter and now yours, believe me I feel more estranged than ever. I know you mean well, and no doubt Daddy does, too, but please, please, please, try to respect the difficulty of my position here and my feeble attempt in spite of it to reach out to you. In very different ways the two of you seem unable to know me as a person. Daddy’s still addressing me as if I were one of his young, awestruck interns, and you act like I’m a troubled teenager emerging from her rebellious years. I think it would be better—since we now know that all three of us are still alive and well—if we didn’t try to communicate any farther, at least for the time being. I’m sorry to have to write that to you, but I see no useful or safe alternative.
Love
,
Hannah
But there came a time several months later, after my marriage to Woodrow, when I first learned that I was pregnant, and I felt a powerful need to break my silence once again. I wanted my father to know, of course. Not of the marriage, necessarily—though I had no reason to keep it a secret. I wanted him to know of my pregnancy. I wanted both my parents to know that they were going to be grandparents. I was also motivated by a desire to shock my father, perhaps to frighten and hurt him. That was Scout operating.
Daddy
,
I’m writing to tell you that I am married and ten weeks pregnant with my husband’s child. You may inscribe in the big old Musgrave family Bible that my husband’s name is Woodrow Sundiata. He is
43
years old and is the Deputy Minister of Public Health for the Republic of Liberia. We were married in Monrovia by a Methodist minister on September
12
th
1977
. Witnesses were Hon. William Tolbert, the President of Liberia, and my husband’s close friend and colleague, Hon. Charles Taylor, who is the Minister of Public Services. Rest assured that I’m healthy and receiving the best possible medical care here. I will let you know when there is anything more to tell you about my ongoing life. Mother keeps me well informed as to your ongoing life, so you need not answer this.
Love
,
Hannah
My father did not write back. Nor did my mother.
YOU THINK IT’S
never going to end. First the fucking. Then the pregnancy. The delivery. The infancy. And then it actually ends.
It’s not that any one of them goes on forever—some, like the fucking and the actual birthing part, last only minutes or hours. But all of them, while they last, seem without beginning or end, and whatever stage of the two-year-long process you’re enduring, from fucking to the end of infancy, it seems to be all there is. And I went through it twice, overlapping—first with Dillon; then, just as I finished nursing him, with the twins, Paul and William.
First you think,
This is what my life is now. This is who I am
. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it’s shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I’m the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature’s sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.
Over and over, the same cycle, month after month.
This is what my life is now
, you think.
This is who I am
. And everyone, especially if she’s a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.
THIS IS THE END
of my history
, I thought.
My life has become a series of endless moments. There’s no more story to it
. I got pregnant right away, probably the first time Woodrow and I fucked. Sorry about the language, but I can’t call it “made love.” I don’t think Woodrow and I ever actually
made love
, although, Lord knows, we fucked constantly, at least in the early years we did. At his urging always, never mine. From the very beginning, Woodrow’s way of making love to me, and consequently my way of making love to him, was chilled, methodical, obligatory, and, even when slow and drawn out, brutal. It was the same for years as it was on our “honeymoon” at the posh beach house south, along the coast, loaned to Woodrow by Liberia’s friendly World Bank representative.
That first night, still half-drunk from the reception champagne—ten iced cases of Dom Perignon delivered to the reception by the president himself—and exhausted and confused by the crowd of people I barely knew, and weirdly, unexpectedly desolated by loneliness, I went straight to the bedroom that looked out on the moonlit beach and crashing surf beyond, doused the lights, undressed, and literally tossed myself onto the enormous, king-size bed and stared up at the slow-moving, overhead fan, and said to myself,
Thank God
that’s
over!
And then thought,
But, Lord, Lord, what have I done?
I could hear Woodrow where I had just left him, prowling proudly through the house, patting the leather-upholstered furniture imported from Miami and checking out the brand-new, stainless-steel kitchen appliances from Sweden, opening liquor cabinets and linen closets with undisguised glee and rising dreams of gluttony. He was delirious with happiness. And because I knew the reason he was happy, I hated him. And because I was the reason, the agent for his happiness, I hated myself, too. He had a Christian wife at last, and better yet, a white Christian wife, and better still, a white Christian American wife!