Authors: Russell Banks
“Yes,” I said. “But everything’s pretty much true, what’s in there.”
“Pretty much?”
“Except … well, except that I never knew what was happening anywhere other than where I myself happened to be, and I wasn’t responsible for anything that I didn’t do personally. Which wasn’t much, believe me. We weren’t that stupid or naive. We were in these small cells, what we called
foco
groups, and mine was in New Bedford, Massachusetts. So when that townhouse blew up and killed those three people, I was as shocked as everyone else. I hadn’t heard from any of those people in years, didn’t even know if they were still part of Weather or not. Same with the Pentagon bombing and most of the others. The New York police stations. All of them, actually. That was the idea, to keep the cells separate. Only the three or four people at the top—the Weather Bureau, we called them—knew what all the cells were
supposed
to be doing, and they knew only in a general way. We were instructed to invent and implement our own individual attacks on the government cell by cell. Some of the cells were really creative and bold. But others, like mine, were incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy. You have to understand, Woodrow, most of us were like actors in a play that on a barely conscious level was mainly about disappearing. About breaking with your past. You know?”
“Your past. I don’t understand.”
“Well, that was
me
, husband. I was mainly trying to break from my past. Of course, what I
thought
I was doing…”
“What was wrong with your past?” Woodrow interrupted. “I mean, that you wanted to break from it?”
He was never going to get it. No matter what I said or how far back in my life I went with him, my pain and sorrow and my anger and shame were too weirdly American for Woodrow to grasp what had transformed me from a college coed worried about keeping her real name on the dean’s list to a hard-as-nails terrorist on the run under a false name. Or what had transformed the terrorist into the two-named wife—three names, actually—of the Liberian minister of public health, the mother of his sons. How could he be expected to get those changes when I barely understood them myself? If I told him everything that had been left out of that thin folder, if I made the story of my life
real
to him, like I’m trying to do for you, he’d be afraid, rightly, that I could be transformed yet again into something equally strange. Or even changed back into what I had been before. The coed. The political activist. The fantasist. The maker of bombs.
I wasn’t going to put that fear onto him, I decided, not after all he’d done for me so far and showed every sign of continuing to do. Despite all, Woodrow was a good and generous man, there was no denying it, and I loved those qualities in him and benefited from them and fully expected to benefit from them for the rest of my life. I was not altogether sure, even early in our marriage, that I loved
him
, however. The essential Woodrow. Whoever, whatever, that was.
I understood, perhaps better than he, that I could no more make sense of his past than he could mine. We were a husband and wife who could not imagine the texture and content of each other’s consciousness as they had existed prior to the day we first met. Woodrow, too, had been transformed many times. A boy from a West African village had turned into an American college student, a black-skinned foreigner with an exotic accent, a young man who, in time, had become a Liberian cabinet minister married to a white American woman. If I knew his story, the whole of it, I, too, might be frightened by the possibility of still farther transformations to come. What if he became again the boy from a West African village? He seemed on the verge of it whenever we visited Fuama. What if he still secretly was that boy, now become a man, with a second and third wife and still maintained sexual control over his female cousins and nieces? Not just Jeannine. Or became again the black African college boy imitating the white American college boys, drinking too much, playing with drugs, screwing the coeds whether they liked it or not? I’d known some African students like that at Brandeis, although most of them had been enrolled elsewhere, the technical and business schools in Cambridge and Boston proper, out looking for hot, guilt-ridden, liberal white girls turned on by negritude but scared of American blacks.
Consequently, neither I nor Woodrow had sought to learn the other’s story. The rough outline, a few typed pages in a file folder, was enough. No details necessary. No late-night connubial reminiscing for Mr. and Mrs. Sundiata. No lengthy descriptions of anyone other than the husband and wife sitting across from each other at the table right this moment, the man and the woman lingering over the last of the evening’s wine, with the dinner dishes and serving bowls cluttering the space between them, palm trees flipping their fronds in the breezy dark, tree frogs advertising their wares, the giggles and splashes of the boys in their bath, and Jeannine’s low, monitoring scold as she hurries them to dry and into their American pajamas, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pluto.
WHEN IS IT TIME
to flee your country? “When they shoot your dogs,” is what people say. There was no warning—there seldom is—not even the sound of a car or truck pulling up at the high, chain-locked gate. The dogs barked once, more in surprise than fear or anger, a yelp of astonishment, then a rapid set of gunshots, six or seven, and the two Rottweilers were dead. Andy and Beemus—Woodrow’s pride, his beautiful black thugs imported from Zimbabwe, goofy, meat-eating playmates for his children and fierce protectors of his household—lay in the driveway between the rear of the Mercedes and the iron gate, large mounds of bleeding black dirt, as four helmeted soldiers carrying automatic rifles opened the gate as if they had the key—wait, they did have the key: in the dark we saw that one of the soldiers … no, it was a civilian with them, a man wearing a navy-blue suit and tie, looking as if he’d just come from a board meeting, a man whom both Woodrow and I recognized at once, in spite of the soft gloom that surrounded him, when he looked across the yard at us and dropped the key in a showy way into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, at which point Woodrow and I heard a truck rumble to a stop on the street beyond the gate and wall, and a second later the yard was filled with soldiers.
As many as twenty, I would later recall, but to do so I had to concentrate on where in the driveway and yard, patio and house the soldiers had positioned themselves, which was difficult for me afterwards, because mainly I remembered first the dogs’ being shot dead in a single burst of gunfire, Woodrow leaping from his chair and knocking the wine bottle onto the tile floor, where it smashed into tiny green slivers, and my realization that the boys were barefoot.
“Stay inside!” I shouted to them. “Don’t come out here!” I wasn’t as frightened yet of the stone-faced young soldiers as of the broken glass that could cut my babies’ tender, pink-bottomed feet. “Don’t come out here till I sweep!” I yelled, when Woodrow and I were suddenly surrounded by these men, Samuel Doe’s own personal security force. I noticed that much, but since they were with, possibly led by, our friend and Woodrow’s colleague, Charles Taylor, then the soldiers had no imaginable reason to be here.
I remember feeling oddly distant from them and unafraid, in spite of what I knew about these men, their cold-blooded brutality and sadism, their fearful capacity for murder, rape, torture, and worse. The stories I’d heard—rumors is all they were—of drug-fueled ritual dismemberments, amputations, cannibalism, were of a savagery beyond anything I’d ever read or heard of before and still I had not yet decided whether to believe them. One
couldn’t
believe those stories; human beings just don’t act that way. Anyhow, this wasn’t happening to me. It was as if I were watching a movie, an amateur movie staged as some sort of training exercise made for new recruits from the countryside. This is how you bring in an important man for questioning by the leader. You kill his dogs first. Then with a key obtained earlier from the man’s caretaker—who may well be his nephew or brother-in-law, but not to worry, the man will know the consequences if he refuses to turn over the key—you simply open the gate and quickly seal off all means of escape from the compound. You place the important man and his white American wife under guard with four of your men, the same four who shot the dogs and were the first to enter the compound, while the others round up the three terrified little boys in their pajamas, their useless, hysterical nanny, the sleeping maid—the children and the servants to be kept under guard in a room of the house well out of sight of the mother and the father, preferably a room without windows, the utility room at the back. All this is to take place in thirty to forty-five seconds, during which time you slap handcuffs on the important man. Treat him roughly, as if he were a goat going to slaughter. And keep between him and his wife. Push her against the outer wall of the house. Don’t look at her eyes, her strange, pale blue eyes. Everyone, even including the civilian in charge of the operation, Charles Taylor, who will be known personally to the woman and the important man, will speak only in Liberian, so she won’t understand what is happening or else she’s likely to interfere and complicate matters. Her husband, the important man, will understand all too well.
I remember that their eyes locked, Woodrow’s and Charles’s, and I realized that one of the two had betrayed the other, or perhaps not yet; but both knew that, if it hadn’t happened yet, the betrayal was coming. It was a strange, fierce exchange of gazes between the two men, the minister and the man who had been sent to fetch him by the leader, that illiterate ex-sergeant, Samuel Doe, the master of the coup that had executed the previous president and his cabinet three years earlier. I knew him; we all did. Liberia is a small country, and we all knew what kind of man he was. His paranoia and secrecy and penchant for torture had kept the country loyal out of fear of him, starting with his ministers and judges in particular, but the small men in government as well, all the way down to the non-commissioned officers in his personal security force, the enlisted soldiers in the army, customs officers, cops in the street, the private guards at the banks, even the caretakers and watchmen. The leader’s cruelty and greed and his limitless lust for power in his petty kingdom had corrupted his subjects from top to bottom, including the two men facing each other here on the patio, my husband and his friend, two minor ministers in the cabinet, one evidently sent to arrest the other by the leader himself, who, in his enormous, white, limestone house on Mamba Point was at that moment probably swilling fifty-year-old Napoleon brandy and crowing with delight, because, as I soon learned, he was convinced that the two of them, Charles Taylor, the Gio, and Woodrow Sundiata, the Kpelle, both of them clever village boys, American-educated college boys, had been stealing from the president’s personal cache of millions of dollars originally sent to Liberia as American foreign aid. The leader knew this was true. The Americans had shown him the proof. The leader was a shrewd judge of character and circumstance and no doubt believed that Sundiata was the weaker of the two ministers, weak because he was married and had children, and therefore would betray his friend Taylor very quickly, very easily, probably by midnight, especially if Taylor were the one sent to arrest him. And then the leader would have both thieves in his grasp, instead of only one, as would have been the case if he’d chosen to arrest Taylor first. That man, Taylor, was too angry and too strong inside to confess or incriminate anyone else. Taylor would have let the leader’s men torture him to death—not to protect Woodrow, whom he felt superior to, like all the Gio, but to infuriate the leader, whom he loathed and whose power and wealth he coveted.
Charles and Woodrow spoke in Liberian pidgin, and I could barely understand them. Even so, right away it was clear that something much more complicated and dangerous than a mistaken or false arrest was taking place, for Woodrow seemed to understand very well why the Minister of Public Services, his good friend and longtime colleague, had invaded his house, shot his dogs, terrorized his family, and clapped him in irons. And Charles—I knew him well enough now to call him Charles, I’d danced with him and shared fond reminiscences with him of Massachusetts, where he’d attended Bentley College—seemed disgusted with himself, as if he’d fallen for an old trick, as if he knew that somehow Woodrow was not the prisoner here, he was. Woodrow spoke too quickly for me to translate, but I knew that he was making a plea. Yet he was not exactly pleading. He was asking Charles to be sensible.
Charles told him to shut his fucking mouth. I understood that. Then in English, Charles said to me, “It’s all right, he’ll probably be home by morning. But you stay here, stay with your children and your people. Don’t let anyone leave the house until Woodrow returns. You understand me, woman?”
I nodded, and Charles walked quickly away, followed by Woodrow and the four soldiers who held their guns on him as if they expected him to make a run for it. Then all the soldiers left, but one, who took up a position at the gate. When the truck was gone and Charles’s black ministry car had rolled into the darkness behind it, the lone soldier strolled into the house and returned with a bottle of Woodrow’s whiskey. He lighted a cigarette from a fresh pack of Woodrow’s Dunhills, squatted down by the gate, and took a long pull from the bottle. The soldier saw me watching him from the patio and extended the bottle, offering me a drink. I shook my head no, no, no, and hurried inside to my children.
It all happened so fast that it hadn’t fully registered with me, until, halfway across the living room, my legs suddenly turned to water. The room spun, and I tipped and nearly fell to my knees. I reached out to break my fall with one hand on the cold tile floor, when from the tiny, dark laundry room at the rear of the house, Jeannine, trembling, gray faced, her eyes darting around the room, led the boys out.
They saw me and let go of Jeannine’s hands and tumbled towards me like baby birds falling from a nest. I caught them in my arms and pulled them close and stroked their heads, the four of us on the cold floor, tossed together in a tangled heap the same way we sometimes played mamma lion and her cubs in the cave, except this time, for the first time, the boys were terrified and crying, all three of them, and I was struggling not to cry myself, saying in a low, crooning voice, as if all four of us and also Jeannine had been wakened by the same nightmare, “They’re gone now, the soldiers have gone away, they’re gone and won’t be back, my darlings.”