Authors: Russell Banks
The twins were quickly comforted and settled themselves peacefully against me, the nightmare over, but Dillon pulled away and, looking over my shoulder and around the room, said, “What about Papa? Where’s Papa?”
“He’ll be fine, Dillon. Don’t worry about Papa.”
“Why did the soldiers take him away?”
“He’ll be back soon. The leader wanted to speak with him, that’s all. Your papa is such an important man that the leader wanted to see him and couldn’t wait for tomorrow, that’s all, so he sent some of his own special soldiers to fetch him.”
Dillon looked at me with his steady, skeptical gaze. He knew I was lying, but accepted it, so as not to further frighten his younger brothers. I knew that, had we been alone, though barely seven years old, Dillon would have pushed me for the truth, or else a more complex and believable lie. That was his way. And possibly mine. Children are usually more concerned with justice than truth. And a strong lie sometimes gives as much strength to the one being lied to as to the liar.
The twins merely wanted comfort, not the truth. That was their way. Jeannine, too, wanted comfort, and accepted my reassurances with evident relief, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, although she surely knew that Woodrow, her uncle, her employer, her sometime lover, the man whose power had brought her out of the tribal village into this magically softened life in the city, the person on whom she depended utterly for safety, physical comfort, nourishment, even health, was in danger of losing all his power, possibly his life, and that therefore she, too, was in grave danger.
I disentangled myself from the boys and stood and helped them to their feet, tugged and straightened their pajamas, and kissed them each and in as normal a voice as I could manage told them to hurry along to bed now, it’s very late. “When they’re in bed, Jeannine,” I told her, “there’s broken glass on the patio.”
“Yes, m’am,” she said, and drew the boys to her and led them down the hall towards their bedroom. Then I remembered the dogs. Good Lord, the poor dogs! I walked to the door and looked out at their black bodies between the car and the gate, where the soldier squatted and drank Woodrow’s whiskey and smoked his Dunhills. If I left the house, I’d have to negotiate the space with him somehow. As long as I stayed inside, he’d stay outside. Better to send Jeannine for Kuyo tonight and ask him to come over to the compound right away and remove the bodies of the dogs and hose the blood away before the boys got up in the morning and, when they asked where are the dogs, Mammi? I’d have to lie again and say that Mr. Doe had admired them and wanted them to guard the presidential palace, and Papa had decided that it would be a nice thing to give the dogs to him. Wasn’t that nice of Papa?
All at once I seemed to be living a wholly different life from the one I’d been living barely an hour ago, with different rules, different intentions, and utterly different strategies for survival. I flopped down on the sofa, exhausted. What should I do? What
could
I do? I glanced at the telephone squatting on the table beside me and instantly decided to call Charles Taylor. It wasn’t exactly the next logical step, but I had no idea what was. Maybe Charles would say something that indirectly indicated where I should turn next; or maybe he would even tell me outright what I should do to save my husband. He surely was still Woodrow’s friend. My friend, too. Whatever he was doing tonight, it was against his will. He was acting on the leader’s orders, that’s all.
A quick search of Woodrow’s rolltop desk in the cubicle off the living room, and I had Charles’s home number. After a dozen rings, a woman picked up.
“Mist’ Taylor, him na home,” the woman whined, as if wakened from a deep sleep. One of Charles’s harem girls, I supposed.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ask him to call Mrs. Sundiata as soon as he returns. No matter how late,” I added, although I knew at once Charles would likely not get the message and, even if he did, would not call, not yet. I shouldn’t have called him. A mysterious and scary business was unfolding, and Charles was no mere messenger boy for the leader. There was more to come, surely. He owed me nothing anyhow. He was possibly in danger himself, and my call might have made things worse for him. At that time, I rather liked Charles Taylor. Of all Woodrow’s friends and colleagues, he was the most worldly and congenial, and in his relations with me he was downright charming. A ladies’ man, I’d decided, even before I learned of his harem, a claque of teenage girls and very young women, most of them from the backcountry, beautiful, interchangeable parts in Charles’s domestic life and rarely appearing with him outside his compound and never at a government function. I’d seen them mainly at his home, when visiting with Woodrow for drinks and dinner. They were gorgeously plumed birds kept in cages, nameless, for Charles never bothered to introduce them to me. One doesn’t introduce one’s servants to one’s dinner guests. Actually, they were more like groupies than servants. Charles had a rock star’s charisma and presence and generated a sexual force field that made him glow and allowed him to treat those who warmed themselves at his fire with benign neglect.
I’m not sure how benign it really was, though. Each time Woodrow and I visited Charles’s compound out on Caret Street, the girls I’d seen there previously had been replaced by new, younger girls, and I wondered what happened to the caged birds they’d replaced. Set free, flown back to the country? Not likely. More likely they’d become prostitutes, and were possibly now among those who entertained Woodrow and Charles and their friends and colleagues on those increasingly frequent nights when Woodrow didn’t come home from the ministry until dawn. I knew, of course, what went on. A wife always knows, and besides, this was Liberia, not Westchester County. After a while, when new birds appeared and boredom with the old ones set in, Charles probably just recycled the girls by passing them down the chain of command—first to the Assistant Minister of General Services, then to the Administrative Officer for the Ministry of General Services, on to the Director of the Office of Temporary Employment of General Services, all the way to the lowest clerk in the ministry, who could not afford to house or feed anyone but himself and family, and so the girl would turn to the soldiers or hit the streets, which amounted to the same thing.
All night long, I waited to hear from my husband—a phone call or, more likely, as I persisted in thinking, his actual return, angry and humiliated by his treatment at the hands of the leader and his one-time friend, Charles Taylor. You may prefer not to know this about me, but secretly, deep in the dark chambers of my many-chambered heart, Woodrow’s arrest pleased me. It wasn’t very wifely of me, I know, and it certainly was not in my best interests or my sons’, for we were as dependent on Woodrow as his niece Jeannine was. The entire household, even the chimps, were dependent on the man. He had insisted on it. It was, especially for Woodrow, the only way to live together, it was the African way, and all of us, Jeannine and Kuyo and I, had happily complied.
I sat there on the couch and considered my situation and how helpless I had suddenly become. I remembered my vows as a teenage girl and later as a grown woman never, never to become dependent on a man’s fate. I’d seen early on how it had paralyzed my mother, and from that vantage point, still a girl’s, I had looked ahead at what the world would offer me when I became a woman, and had pledged that I would take it only on my own terms. I would gladly accept from a man responsibility, commitment, recompense, and reward, but only if they were reciprocal and I were free to walk away from the man when and if he broke the contract or became a danger to me. The years in the Movement from college on had only reinforced this pledge, educating me as to its inextricable link to my personal freedom. I fought with my male classmates at Brandeis, who called me a bitch, a dyke, a cock-teasing, ball-busting feminist; and I argued with and sternly critiqued my male comrades in SDS and Weather, the boys who called themselves men and the women girls and said they really appreciated my contribution to the discussion,
but let’s go back to my room and fuck and then you can make breakfast for me in the morning
. Later, underground, I demanded of my cellmates total upfront clarity and agreement on splitting equally all financial, household, and childcare responsibilities and labor, even when the child was not mine and neither of the parents my lover.
Lord, all those vows, all those promises and contracts—broken, abandoned, nearly forgotten! Throughout the night, I lay in bed waiting for Woodrow’s return, for, all evidence to the contrary, I still believed that this was, at worst, another of the leader’s ways of intimidating and keeping loyal one of the most loyal members of his government. The other members of his government, more dangerous than Woodrow, had long since been disposed of. It was a move typical of Samuel Doe. He was famous for it. Arrest the man for a night, and send his best friend and fellow minister to do the job. It’ll keep the both of them in line.
While I waited, tossing restlessly beneath the gauzy mosquito netting, I let myself play out little scenarios, dimly lit fantasies that up to now I’d kept pretty much hidden from myself, like a secret stash of pornography tucked in the dark back corner of a closet. I saw myself settled in a small house, like the old Firestone cottage I’d lived in when I first arrived in Liberia, only with an extra bedroom for the boys to share, and located a few miles inland from Monrovia. The four of us would take care of the chimps, my dreamers. That’s all, a simple life. I’d school the boys at home, and I’d read to them at night, and they’d play with the children of the village, while I socialized with the other mothers, went to market with them, and cooked native food the native way on my own. A very simple life. Just me and the boys and the dreamers and the villagers and the jungle.
And when I grew tired of that fantasy, or it grew too complicated and was no longer sustainable, I envisioned a life here in town, a continuation of my present life, except that now Woodrow was no longer a part of my life, and I was free to be the white American woman with three brown sons living in the big white house on Duport Road with the view of the bay, the woman who ran the sanctuary for the chimpanzees, the woman with the mysterious past who could never return to her native land, who was occasionally seen at one of the better restaurants in town on the arm of an official from one of the European embassies, was sometimes mentioned in the society column of the
Post
as one of the guests at an embassy party. Or even, why not, seen dancing at a Masonic ball with Minister Charles Taylor. Which would indeed complicate things, no?
Fantasies of escape really are like pornography. They have to remain simple and untainted by reality, or they cause anxiety. I imagined myself and my sons, all three wearing small backpacks, Americans in Africa, as they board a plane at Robertsfield, leaving Liberia. Then here we are departing from the plane after it has landed at Logan Airport, in Boston. My mother and father, unchanged after all these years, greet us at the gate. Embraces and tears of joy and mutual forgiveness all around. No one else is there, except for other arriving passengers and the people waiting to greet them. No reporters covering the return of a one-time fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the last of the Weather Underground come in from the cold. No U.S. Marshals or FBI agents to arrest me. No customs officer asking to see our passports and confiscating mine.
It would be simple, oh so simple, if Woodrow stayed arrested—stopped, frozen in time at this moment, and not jailed or tortured or beaten or killed, not shot dead by one of those iron-headed men with the AK-47s, big, cold-eyed men from the country. I didn’t want
that
. As I lay there in my bed and dawn light slid through the shuttered windows, as pepperbirds started their pre-morning ruckus, my tumbling fantasies gradually slowed and then, top-heavy with growing complexity, ceased to move. They buckled under the weight of reality and collapsed. Leaving me to contemplate the undeniable fact. My husband had been arrested by the most powerful man in the country, a man who, with impunity and without reason, was more than capable of killing him. And where would that leave me, me and my children?
BY DAWN THE SOLDIER
guarding us had disappeared from the yard. And Jeannine and Kuyo, I discovered, had fled during the night—not until after Kuyo had removed the bodies of the dogs, I noticed, and Jeannine had swept up the broken glass. They’d gone back to Fuama, where, by noon, news of the arrest of Woodrow Sundiata, the village’s one big man in Monrovia, would have sent every member of Woodrow’s immediate family into hiding, where they’d stay for as long as it appeared that Woodrow was an enemy of the leader, even if it meant hiding in the bush for years or until the leader was overthrown and replaced.
I didn’t care, I was glad they were gone from the compound. Their presence, no matter how useful their service, oppressed me. Their role in my life, even after all these years, had never clarified itself. They weren’t servants or employees, nor were they family members, the kind you can count on in a crisis to provide aid and comfort. I didn’t know what they were, or who. They weren’t even hangers-on, the sort of people you can shoo away when they’ve become a burden or a bore.
So they were gone, and the house, for the first time since I moved into it, was empty. Fine, then; that settled it. I made a plan. It was more a piece of theater than a plan, however. In my life here, I had been acting in a play not of my making for so long that it was all I had. A role.
As soon as I have fed the boys their breakfast, I’ll dress them the way Woodrow likes to see them, in blazers and ties, like little brown gentlemen enrolling at Choate, and I’ll dress myself accordingly in my long, white, chiffon dress and carry the silly, saffron-colored parasol and wear a soft, wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and with my sons in tow I’ll march into the leader’s office like a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara and demand the immediate release of my husband. After that, I’ll make up another little piece of theater and play it out. And then another, and if necessary, another
.