Authors: Russell Banks
We named them William and Paul—William after Woodrow’s elder brother; Paul after Woodrow’s uncle, his father’s elder brother—and gave them both the same middle name, Musgrave, to indicate their mother’s lineage, with the last name Sundiata, to claim their father’s. It was William Musgrave Sundiata and Paul Musgrave Sundiata who became, years later, the boy-soldiers known as Fly and Demonology.
BUT I WASN’T
going to get into that. Not now, anyhow. Not until I can first bring you to a sympathetic understanding of my sons and what happened to them and can keep you from being frightened of them. Just as there are certain things about me that I won’t reveal to you until your understanding of what happened to me early on and later is such that you won’t be afraid of me, either, and won’t judge me as you would a stranger. Like my sons, I, too, was once upon a time an infant, a child, and adolescent, all in a particular time and place with most particular parents; and like Fly, Demonology, and Worse-than-Death, I, too, was shaped, formed, and deformed by time, place, and parents—although, in the case of my sons, time and place were more influential in the creation of their fates than were parents. For me, probably, it was the opposite.
Even so, my hope and my intention is that you know us and not be afraid of us.
GIVING BIRTH
, like being pregnant, like fucking, did remake me, just as everyone who had been through it themselves said it would. But it didn’t make me
more of a woman
, as promised. It made me more of a stranger to myself. I went from being a whale with a porpoise in her gut to an emptied snakeskin, a wrapper. Until slowly, with the baby and one year later the twins finally out of me, I filled again, swollen now with blood and milk that spilled, dripped, trickled, and sometimes squirted from my body, and I realized that I had become a leaking food source, a supply ship. Depersonalized. Objectified. My body a vessel no longer connected to my past self.
I was not a natural mother. Was not born programmed like most women with a mother’s instincts and abilities. Had to be taught nearly everything by Jeannine, sweet-natured Jeannine with the round, brown face and puffy cheeks, whose kindness and endless patience in those first years of my marriage astonished me. It’s almost as if I was, and still am, missing the gene. There are things that I am naturally good at, skills that seem to have been part of my DNA—math, mechanics, linear thinking, classification, etc.—right-brain stuff that we usually associate with males and that early on got me my father’s favor, my teachers’ and later my professors’ wary admiration and, from boyfriends who needed help with their calculus homework and tuning their cars, mistrust and envy. Women, including my mother, and other girls worried about me or merely felt superior. But thanks to my father’s constant delight and his proud endorsement of these tendencies and skills, I never minded my mother’s worry or my girlfriends’ superior airs or the wariness of the males. I courted it.
As a girl I was a full-blown tomboy. Wouldn’t wear a bathing suit top to cover my flat chest until I was almost thirteen and no longer flat. Took Scout for my nickname when I was ten, and from fourth grade until eighth insisted on being called by it and would not answer to Hannah, except when it was used in anger by my mother or father. Otherwise, it was, “Hannah? Who’s Hannah? I’m Scout.” Entered science fairs in grade school, always the only girl to win a prize. A fact that in the 1950s was worth an article in the
Boston Globe
, which Daddy clipped, framed, and hung in his office like one of his degrees. Built a tree house in our backyard with leftover scrap lumber the summer Mother had her garden house put up. Won a Westinghouse scholarship to study engineering at Brandeis (another article in the
Globe
), then switched to pre-med in order to impress a biology professor I’d developed a sophomore crush on. In the Movement ran and kept patched together with tape, spit, and baling wire the old Multilith presses we used then, when everyone else, especially the men, were or pretended to be hopelessly inept, and later in Weather was one of the half-dozen members nationwide who could be trusted not to blow themselves up while making bombs from dynamite and blasting caps stolen from construction sites. Though was never trusted to place and set the bomb itself, a job reserved for only the more charismatic comrades, so had to read about it in the papers afterwards if it went off successfully. And still had the gene-firing proteins in Africa whenever I needed them—building cages for the chimps, devising and installing a cistern for the house, replacing the busted radiator on the Mercedes with a radiator from a wrecked jeep when Satterthwaite couldn’t find anyone in Monrovia clever enough to do it. And years later still had it, the right brain clicking away, when I took over the farm here in Keene Valley, impressing Anthea and the girls and the local men with my ability to tune and maintain the vehicles, build stockades and fences, fix the furnace, and build a windmill from scratch. Talked trucks, tractors, guns, and plumbing with the guys down at the Ausable Inn, packing back brewskies with the boys while a football game raged from the TV at the end of the bar. And whenever one of them, drunk and reckless, put the moves on me in the parking lot, I’d punch him lightly on the shoulder and say, “Frank, for Christ’s sake, keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t you know I’m one of the guys?” And Frank or Pat or Chuck would laugh and shuffle his feet on the packed snow and say, “Sorry, Hannah, guess I forgot, heh-heh-heh,” and hoped like hell it never gets out that he got so drunk one night down at the Ausable Inn that he tried to fuck Hannah Musgrave, who is white haired and must be sixty and is probably a lesbian anyhow. But it does me no harm to have them think that I’m different from other women, that I’m not like their wives and daughters, that I’m Scout, a tomboy grown old. Safe.
IN AFRICA
, especially early on, when the boys were babies and for many years afterwards, I had no such ruse to protect me. Especially around home, where my natural abilities were inappropriate or at best useless—except, perhaps, to the chimps, although even there Woodrow wanted me to delegate the physical work, give it to the native men and women who worked at the lab. My proper job, other than to function as Woodrow’s consort, was to supervise the household staff and to mother and raise his sons as little Americo-Liberian gentlemen. Consort and chief of staff were mindless tasks that I could handle in my sleep, practically. Turning myself into mommy was something else, however.
It was, as I said, Jeannine who taught me what I needed to know to get by. She showed me how to fake it as a mother, and when I couldn’t fake it, substituted for me altogether. She was little more than a child herself, barely eighteen years old and freshly arrived from the village of Fuama, not quite literate and, under her uncle the deputy minister’s tutelage and protection, eager to become a Christian. She had been part of the family dance troupe that performed at our wedding, and afterwards, at Woodrow’s request, although he didn’t tell me at the time, had remained in town and moved into his house, now my house, to cook and clean for us.
The house itself, up to now strictly a bachelor’s quarters, was owned by the government, one of a dozen or so that had originally been private residences built or bought by foreigners who’d afterwards moved up the housing scale or gotten themselves assigned to some other African capital. The houses had been acquired over the years by the government to dispense as favors or small rewards to ministers and VIPs and came with a staff, a car, and a driver, all paid for out of the national treasury. The residence assigned to Woodrow was a sprawling, white, single-story structure with a wide front porch and floor-to-ceiling windows, high ceilings, and large airy rooms—an American-style residence probably built in the 1940s, the sort of house a small-town southern lawyer would have built for himself. Except, that is, for the eight-foot-high, cinder-block wall that surrounded it and the heavy iron gate and Woodrow’s pair of huge, black, drooling Rottweilers roaming the grounds.
There was a small patio at the side of the house, where we often ate dinner, and a master bedroom fit for a Jamaican plantation owner, with a four-poster bed and private bath and French doors that opened onto a flower garden and a second patio, where Woodrow and I sometimes took our breakfast. There was a small bedroom that would soon become the nursery, a bathroom, and two additional bedrooms, and behind the house a servants’ quarters and a laundry and utility room. There was even a gardener’s shack for Kuyo, the part-time yardman—another of Woodrow’s close relations come in from the country for the support and protection of his cousin, uncle, nephew, or half-brother—the deputy minister. I was discovering the age-old Liberian system of exchange between the powerful and the powerless, a form of indentured servitude that more closely resembled slavery than nepotism.
The house had been outfitted with modern plumbing back when the city water system still worked, but the municipal pumping station and delivery pipes and valves had long since fallen into disrepair. Consequently, faucets ran only in a trickle and for a few hours a day, while outside on the street water poured from broken mains day and night. We had electricity and all the usual appliances, a TV, too, but even in those days, when the country was still relatively stable, we rarely had power for longer than three or fours hours a day, usually in the mornings, and relied on kerosene lamps and candles at night, and more often than not we were obliged to cook with charcoal on a backyard tin stove.
To me, it was a luxurious setting, however, almost embarrassingly so, compared with how most Liberians lived. A comparison, incidentally, that I rarely had the opportunity to make—because of Woodrow’s insistence that I account for every minute of my day when he wasn’t in attendance and his use of Satterthwaite as a keeper and spy as much as a driver and bodyguard and his refusal to allow me to go anywhere in the city alone. “You must not forget who you are,” he insisted. “Please, Hannah darling. The wife of a high government official must not be confused with a Peace Corps volunteer.”
The truth is, I
had
forgotten who I was. That’s what marriage and motherhood had given me: the upshot of the fucking, the pregnancy, the birthing of my sons and their infancy was that I wasn’t more of a woman or less; I was a different woman. You probably think of me as strong and independent, and I believe that I am—now. I was strong and independent when I was young, too, back before I came to Africa. But in the years between? No. Emphatically no. I was different then.
My weakness and dependence on Woodrow and other men—and in time I’ll tell you about them, too—caused terrible pain and harm to many people. To my sons, especially. Who was that terrible woman, and how do I deal with her now? And the chimpanzees, my dreamers—I need to know who betrayed and abandoned them, too. Was it Hannah darling? Was it Dawn Carrington? Was it Scout? Whom must I hate? And what will be the sentence for her sins and crimes?
IT WAS JEANNINE
who taught me how to buy groceries at the Saturday market at Congo Square, and how to cook Liberian style with palm oil, peanut, or groundnut oil, with coconut milk and plenty of hot peppers. There wasn’t much meat available that wasn’t tinned—plenty of fresh fish, however, and chicken, and occasionally pork and goat and stringy chunks of beef. I knew all too well, of course, the local habit of eating chimps and monkeys, bush meat—an atavistic throwback to cannibalism, as far as I was concerned. But it wasn’t merely the country people in the distant villages who relished it and offered it up as a special tribute to distinguished guests. The townspeople loved bush meat, too, and considered roasted ape a luxury item, a delicacy. By then Woodrow had come to accept my abhorrence of bush meat—crediting it to my affection for the chimps at the lab and later the sanctuary and perhaps a white American fastidiousness—and ate it himself only when he dined out without me. “It’s actually very sweet,” he said. “Cooked correctly, it’s better than any pork, and no kind of mutton compares. In fact, in Sierra Leone that’s what they call it, ‘spring mutton.’ ”
No, at home we ate
jollof
rice, rice
fufu
, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls. With Jeannine at my elbow, I learned to cook them all. We ate plantains, breadfruit, yams, gari, or cassava mixed with fish or chicken, one-dish meals mostly. Desserts were fruit salads, banana fritters, tapioca pudding, and shredded coconut balls. The gorgeously colored vegetables and plump fruits were always fresh, firm, a pleasure to cut, chop, mix, fry, roast, steam, and chill.
This was a whole new enterprise for me, who’d never paid much attention to cooking or even to shopping for food. Food had always been fuel, already there on the table before me, or if not, then prepared as quickly and easily as possible, and eaten the same way. Nourishment, that’s all. Now, however, it had become an intricately linked sequence of deeply satisfying, sensual, spiritual, and social rituals. In the past, I’d never really cooked, not even when keeping house back in Cleveland, where the preparation and consumption of food and cleanup afterwards were rigorously communal, or in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina—Carol had done all the cooking, actually. I did the cleanup, like a good husband. In the months when I was living alone at the lab compound I’d depended on expensive, Western-style groceries and imported canned goods purchased at what passed for a supermarket, Dot-Dot’s, on Ashmun Street. But after Woodrow and I were married, the marketing became a Wednesday- and Saturday-morning ritual for me and Jeannine that continued for years, long after I was capable of handling it alone. It was one of the few occasions when Jeannine and I stood on more or less equal footing, when I was less than the mistress of the house and she more than my servant. For a long time I didn’t know how much more, and back then, especially when we shopped for food, I thought we were friends.
I remember walking with her to the square, enjoying the beauty of the crowd, the thronged streets, and then, looking for a particular herb or spice, taking side trips down the alleys and side streets to the shops of the poor. I remember putting my face and hands forward in gestures learned from watching Jeannine haggle and gossip with the shopkeepers in the market, who were all women, many of them from outlying villages, at first feeling foolish for it, awkward, inauthentic, somehow condescending, until it became natural and almost intimate.