Authors: Russell Banks
Up to that point, my most radical act had been to attend Brandeis instead of Smith, and I had done that solely to please my father and to avoid granting my mother’s unspoken wish that I follow her example. I’d never been out of New England, except for a high-school civics class trip to Washington, D.C., and a flight to Philadelphia for an admissions interview at Swarthmore, my second choice for college after Brandeis and my father’s first choice. But I had gazed overlong into those Southern novels and stories, and for many weeks that first summer in the South they provided the reflecting pool in which I saw where I was and the black and white people who lived there. Eventually, of course, literature got displaced by reality, as it invariably does, but for a while my everyday life had the clarity, intensity, and certitude of fiction.
A FEW MILES WEST
of the town of Ganta, the road bends perilously close to the Guinea border, where, as I knew from the newspapers at home, there had been sporadic fighting in the last year between small bands of regular and irregular soldiers from the two neighboring countries—the usual jockeying for control of the Nimba diamond traffic. Even the
New York Times
seemed to know about that, which had surprised me. It was here, in the middle of a long stretch between rural villages, that Mamoud abruptly pulled over and parked the truck by the side of the road.
He told me to get out and bring my backpack, and I thought,
Damn him! Damn the man. He knows who I am, or he’s just figured it out and he’s got evil on his mind
. Back at the border, just as we crossed, he had insisted on learning my last name. When I said it, Sundiata, Woodrow’s well-known last name, he didn’t react. But I knew at once that I should have said only what it read on my passport, Musgrave, my father’s last name. Mamoud had merely smiled and then said nothing for the entire two hours after.
The old, all-too-familiar, Liberian paranoia came rushing over me. It’s in the air you breathe here. It’s like a virus. You can’t escape or defeat it. It hits you suddenly, like when you’ve had a close call. At first you feel foolish for not having been more frightened and warily suspicious, and you promise yourself that it won’t happen again, it had better not, because next time you may not be so lucky. From then on, you assume that everyone is lying, everyone wants to hurt you, to steal from you, and may even want to kill you.
I got slowly down from the truck, slung my pack onto my back, and made ready to bolt. On the near side the jungle came up tight to the road, but on the far side of the road I saw a field of high sawtooth grass and knew that if I got there before him, he’d have trouble catching me in the dark. I had no idea what I’d do after he gave up the chase and drove on.
If
he gave up and drove on. I was three hundred kilometers from the city of Monrovia, a white American woman afoot and alone. Never mind that there was probably a standing warrant for my arrest and the U.S. embassy would do nothing to protect me. All my chits with the Americans had been spent a decade ago. And never mind that there would probably be rumors of a reward offered by Charles Taylor personally, making me a target of opportunity for any Liberian with a knife or machete to slice my throat or take off my head. Liberia is a small country, and in any village, even out here in Nimba, my corpse could be exchanged for a boom box or maybe a motorbike and passed along in a farther exchange and then another, the price going up with each transaction, until finally what was left of my body, maybe just my head with its telltale hair, got dropped at the gate of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia.
Beyond all that, even if I was just being paranoid in that Liberian way, and none of it were true, and there was no warrant, no reward, and in the passage of time and the blur of alcohol and drugs and the intoxication of having ruled his tiny country with absolute power for so many years, Charles had forgotten me altogether, I was nonetheless a white woman alone, a sexual curiosity, spoilage, perhaps, at my advanced age, but with a little use still left to the madmen and crazed boys here in the madhouse.
For the first time since leaving my farm in the Adirondacks, I wondered if somewhere along the way—going back to those early days in Mississippi and Louisiana and coming forward to the afternoon at the farm when I suddenly announced to Anthea that I was returning to Liberia to learn what had happened to my sons—I wondered if I had lost my mind. Not figuratively, but literally. I thought,
I could be a madwoman
. And I wondered if I was standing there in the dark by the side of a narrow, unpaved road in the eastern hills of Liberia because somewhere back there, without knowing it, I’d lost touch with reality. Lost it in small bits, a single molecule of sanity at a time in a slow, invisible, irreversible process of erosion, and couldn’t notice it while it was happening, couldn’t take its measure, until now, when it was too late.
On the driver’s side of the truck, Mamoud was hurriedly unfolding a stiff, old tarpaulin and spreading it over the lumber and tying it down at the corners. He worked his way around to my side, and I darted four or five steps away from him, ready to make my escape. I looked toward the front of the truck, searching for a rock, a brick, something to injure him with.
Mamoud said, “Checkpoints be comin’ up now, missy. Dem won’t bother me none, but mebbe best f’ you t’ hide back here.” He held up the corner of the tarp and indicated with a nod a hollowed-out area the size of a coffin in the middle of the cargo.
“Oh! You want to hide me,” I said, relieved. “You don’t think that’s the first place they’ll look, under the tarp?”
They wouldn’t look there, he explained, because they knew that that was where he carried the stuff he didn’t want them to see. Perfect Liberian logic. Surprised at the turnaround and a little shaky, for I had gone into fight or flight and my adrenalin was running high, I climbed onto the stacked lumber. When I had lain myself down in the hiding place, Mamoud drew the tarp over me and finished tying it at the corners, leaving a flap loose so I could peek out and breathe fresh air. A moment later, the truck was chugging along the rutted road and then trundling steadily downhill from the highlands towards the towns of the savannah and the cities of the coast.
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
I rode back there, stretched out between the boards, sweltering from the heat, jostled, pitched, and bumped, and every now and then I peered out from under the tarpaulin, and when I did I felt more borne down by the wet air than by the stiff canvas. A decade in the hills and valleys of upstate New York and I’d almost forgotten the moist weight, even at night, of the tropical air against my body, its nearly tangible density, as if, between the tarpaulin and the freshly planed planks that I lay upon, a large animal were holding me down. And the odor of the bleeding green lumber and of the canvas that hid me, old, patched, and smelling of rotten fruit and urine and wood smoke, made me nauseated and dizzy.
My discomfort disappointed the puritan in me. I wondered if in those few years away I’d turned delicate and, traveling again in Africa, would have to hold a scented hanky to my nose. For that’s all this was, the same old smell of Africa and its sense-surrounding, watery heat and its sounds—the blat of a battered, out-of-tune diesel truck and, whenever the truck passed through a village or town or came to a crossing and slowed and the clatter of the engine eased, the yips of a small dog, the clack of dominoes against a masonite lapboard, or a transistor radio playing its lonely juju song to no one at a village crossroads cookshop. Once, I heard the call of a desperate boy from the side of the road as the truck rumbled past him,
Take me wit’ you, take me to Monrovia, to the city, an’ from there, m’am, carry me to the Great World beyond, where is plenty of
jollof
rice an’ tinned meats an’ good water, where no one sick, no one hungry, no one ’fraid!
All of it, his whole, long, hapless plea compressed into one repeated, fading cry, “Hoy, hoy, hoy!” as the truck picked up speed and roared down the red-dirt road into the African night.
Several times the truck was stopped at checkpoints—gates, we used to call them—at Ganta and where the road crosses the St. John River. Without looking, I could tell where we were, because the map of Liberia and its few roads were still clear in my mind’s eye, and I knew people in these towns, or once had known them, and was even related to some of them by marriage, for we were not far now from Fuama, my husband’s tribal village. But surely most of those people, all Liberians, were gone by now, dead or swept away like dry leaves by the fierce wind that had blown across the country in the civil war and burned by the fires of chaos that had followed. Even if they had somehow survived and still lived in their old homes and villages, they would have been of little help to me anyhow. Not now. Not back then either, when we were all running for our individual lives.
The truck wheezed and slowed and downshifted, then crept along for a few moments at a walking pace, and I knew that we were approaching another checkpoint. Then the truck stopped, and I heard men’s low voices, speaking first in a Krahn dialect, then switching quickly to Liberian English for Mamoud, the Monrovian Lebanese, with light, conspiratorial, male-bonding laughter interjected—he was a regular on this route, obviously, and he paid the soldiers on time and gave them good dash.
Yeah, Mamoud, him a
good
Arab guy
. A loud hand slap on the front fender of the truck, like a slap on a horse’s flank, granting permission to leave, and the truck moved ahead again, soon picking up speed.
I was wrapped in my thoughts in the darkness like an animal hiding in its burrow. I had a plan. I wasn’t so out of touch with reality, I wasn’t so far gone that I had come out here without some sort of blueprint. Lord knows it wasn’t much of a plan. It couldn’t be; there was so little here that I could predict or control. I had in my mind merely a vaguely worded, partially completed outline whose blanks I would fill in as I passed from moment to moment: I would get into the country somehow; I would make my way to Monrovia; I would ask after my sons in a way that would not put me or them in danger, although I had no idea yet whom I would be able to ask; and I would either go to my sons, wherever they were, and try to bring them home with me or, if no one could tell me where they were, I would leave the country and return to my farm. That was it. That was as far in advance of my actions as I was able to think.
I was carrying enough U.S. currency around my waist and in my backpack to buy my way through these few steps and probably enough to let me take advantage of any exigencies or opportunities that arose. Unless, of course, I were attacked, stripped, robbed, or worse. Mostly, though, I counted on buying my safety. The comforting and most useful thing about total corruption is that it’s total. It’s systemic, top to bottom, and therefore predictable and more or less rational. So I wasn’t being especially brave or even reckless.
I don’t travel in fear anyhow; I never have. When I am afraid, I don’t travel at all; I stay put. Years ago, when I was in my early thirties and living underground in the States, moving from safe house to safe house, I was taught by comrades more experienced at flight than I that if a person, especially a woman, travels in fear, she is never safe. So if you’re afraid, don’t move. Freeze. Disappear into the scenery. You’ll only attract attention to yourself by running.
Despite my plan, however—which was like a long-faded path through the jungle, nearly overgrown now, with only a few landmarks still recognizable—and despite there being an ostensible goal, a consciously chosen destination that I’d imagined lying at the end of the path, it felt as if I were being mysteriously drawn towards that goal by a magnet, and that the pull was generated out there, in Liberia. Not here, inside me. I was being reeled in. I could say, and had, that I was going out to Liberia to learn what happened to my sons after I left the country those many long years ago and, if possible, to bring them back with me to the States; I could say, and had, that I was going out there to honor my husband’s memory somehow, a private, solitary thing I had to do. I could say that I was going to try to learn what happened to my friends and my husband’s family. I had said these things any number of times—to Anthea, to the other girls at the farm, to the few good citizens of Keene Valley whom I counted as friends. And to myself. I said them especially to myself. All the way across the Atlantic to Abidjan, then in the bush taxi to the border between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, and down to the coast from Nimba in the back of the truck, I kept naming my reasons for coming there.
And I will tell you something that at the time made me ashamed, although now it makes a kind of sense. Not moral sense, but psychological, emotional sense. From the beginning, from the day that I decided to leave my farm and return there, I did not once picture my husband Woodrow’s dark, perpetually somber face in my mind; nor did I see the faces of the boys, little Dillon, my crackling smart, hyperactive one, or angelic Paul, my peacemaker, or William, as somber as his father. They were my family—the only husband I have ever had and probably ever will, and my missing sons, my only children, for I know that I will never bear another. I am too old. Old and dried up, a husk of a woman. So they are not just the family of my past; they are the family of my future as well. But it was as if they had become names only. I have their photographs in frames on the sideboard in my living room at the farm, all four faces gazing at me, and another set is on my bedroom dresser. Yet once I had actually departed from the farm and driven in my Honda along the lane to the road and headed down the Northway from the Adirondacks to New York City, once I was on my way to Africa again, I did not, I could not, I
would
not see their faces. No, the truth is I saw only the faces of my chimpanzees.
On a deep—perhaps the most basic—level, my chimpanzees were drawing me back. Not my husband’s memory, not my sons. My chimpanzees. And during that long night coming down the half-destroyed road from Nimba to Monrovia, enduring the pronged heat under the canvas tarp as if I were inside a covered, black, cast-iron pot baking in an oven, I lay there and remembered the creatures that I had abandoned, my chimpanzees. I did not remember my husband or my sons or our life together. I remembered only those poor, confused creatures whom I had nurtured and protected for so long, the innocents for whom I had been willing to give my life—or so I had believed.