Authors: Russell Banks
With his back to me, Dillon asked “Will you come back someday?”
“Someday? Of course! And it won’t be someday. It’ll be soon, as soon as possible.”
“Okay, then. Go ahead,” he said. He slipped out of his bed and in tee shirt and shorts, barefoot, headed for the door, and was gone. The twins watched him leave and began to get out of their beds to follow.
I said, “What about you two? Is it all right with you, that I have to go away for a while?”
They stopped by the door and turned back and smiled sweetly, both of them, as if they’d already discussed the subject and had reached an easy agreement. Paul said, “Yes, Mammi. It’s all right. You can go.” Both twins waved goodbye to me, and ran to catch up to their brother.
When you part with someone you love, there’s usually an aura of grief attached. But saying goodbye has never been difficult for me. I do it quickly and with little felt emotion, until afterwards, when I’m by myself and it’s done and it’s too late for any feelings that might slow or clog my departure. I sat at the foot of my eldest son’s rumpled, empty bed alongside the two empty beds of his brothers and saw that for the first time in nearly eight years I was alone again. And for the first time since the day I went underground, I felt strong and free.
The room slowly filled with hazy gray morning light, gradually bringing into sharp focus the clutter of the boys’ toys and clothing, all the defining props and evidence of their ongoing existence. Though I had been the one to clip and tape the pictures, maps, and drawings to the walls, the boys had chosen them. And though I had purchased most of their possessions, it was with money given me by their father. To my eyes, there was nothing of mine in that room, no evidence that I existed.
MY LEAVE-TAKING
from Liberia in 1983 went nearly as unremarked as my arrival had back in 1975. I packed my old duffel and said my goodbyes quickly and easily, as if flying to Freetown or Dakar for a holiday weekend with friends. The boys, naturally, were afraid they were being abandoned by their mother, but they could not admit it, even to one another.
The night before I left, Sam Clement dropped by the house on his way home from the embassy, to wish me bon voyage, he said, and to reassure me that he’d keep an eye on my boys, including Woodrow (wink wink), until I got back, when in fact he was merely making sure that I knew that my departure from the country was under the protection and in the interests of official U.S. policy towards Liberia and the administration of President Doe.
Later, the president himself telephoned to say that he hoped I had a “superb” holiday in America and used the word
superb
, his new word of the week, I guessed, twice more, in reference to my sons and to characterize my company, which he said would be very much missed during the upcoming national holiday. As an expression of his personal affection for me, he was providing Woodrow with a bit of a cash bonus to help pay my travel expenses and would send it to me via Woodrow’s trusty assistant, Satterthwaite.
Woodrow, who left early for the ministry the next morning and did not see me off later, was clearly relieved to have me gone from his household—it was saving his life, after all—but had to say that he would miss me terribly. Then Satterthwaite arrived with the car around three that afternoon and handed me the packet given to him at the office by Woodrow. It contained my one-way ticket to JFK and an envelope with fifty crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills inside. Satterthwaite looked at the ground and said to me, “I hope you come back soon-soon, Miz Sundiata,” but I knew he was thinking,
Damn good t’ing dis bitch finally outa here, ’cause someday her gonna
get mad at de ol’ man an’ tell ’im what we done once way back den an’ mek de ol’ man fire me or wuss
.
Jeannine stood woefully at the front gate as Satterthwaite drove me from the yard, tears running down her round, brown face, her fingers crossed in a behind-the-back hex designed to keep me from ever coming back, making the house hers, my children hers, my husband and his wealth and power hers.
No one else took account of my departure from Liberia that day. It happened so quickly, of course, that there was little occasion for a farewell party or visits with the half-dozen or so people in Monrovia whom I counted as friends. And they weren’t really friends, anyhow—merely acquaintances, the wives of Woodrow’s colleagues and business associates. Elizabeth and Benji, who had been running the lab on their own for the last seven years, were not my friends, though I knew them well and had seen them nearly every day on my visits with my dreamers. The university had not bothered to replace me after I left my post as clerk of the works and had withdrawn all but minimal support for the project, providing only enough funding to keep the chimps caged and alive. This was before AIDS research had gotten under way in earnest, when a new reason would arise to infect the animals with disease and monitor their reactions. If they’d been allowed to do it, the university officials would have had the animals put down, cheaper than releasing them to the wild and easier on the animals, most of whom had been traumatized by capture and confinement and had gone through a simian version of the Stockholm syndrome and had so thoroughly substituted their captors’ desires for their own that they were incapable of living naturally in the wild.
Early the morning of the day I left Monrovia, even before packing my bag, I went out to the lab, ostensibly to say goodbye to Elizabeth and Benji, but actually it was for a final visit with the chimps, for, without my ongoing vigilance, I did not think they would live long under their keepers’ care. The machinery that paid Elizabeth and Benji their monthly salaries was permanently in place, it seemed, and did not depend on there being any chimpanzees in those cages. Corruption thrives on process, not product, so it didn’t matter to them or anyone else if the chimps starved or sickened and died, if the cages one by one were emptied out, because Elizabeth and Benji would still be paid by the American university for maintaining its research facility and animal subjects in Liberia, and the university would still be paid by the multinational pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, and the pharmaceutical company, through tax write-offs and federal grants, would still be paid by the American citizenry. Though I had come dangerously close to loving the product, the dreamers caged in a Quonset hut out at the edge of the city, I was merely a witness to the process, helpless to change it at any level.
I rode out on my bicycle, as had long been my habit, and as usual no one was at the lab. Elizabeth’s and Benji’s routines had long since been reduced to showing up twice a day for only as long as it took to feed the chimps and hose down the floor of the Quonset hut and conduct whatever little side business the two ran out of the all-but-defunct lab. They had sold off piecemeal most of the office furniture and the household goods and furnishings from the three cottages—after taking as much of it as they wanted for their own use—and were renting out the cottages on an hourly basis, I suspected, for I had on several occasions seen strangers, men with women, arriving and leaving at odd and unlikely hours. I never entered the cottages to see for myself who was living or working there—prostitutes, I assumed—and never confronted or quizzed Elizabeth or Benji about the use they were making of the compound.
They could strip it bare, for all I cared, or trash it or turn a profit from it any way they wanted. I had no loyalty to the university that financed the project and did not believe in the purposes for which the facility had been established in the first place. To me, it was a prison whose inmates had been deranged first by the circumstances of their capture and then by their lifelong confinement, inmates rendered incapable of functioning outside their cells, kept there now solely for their own safety. I made sure that they were properly fed and watered twice a day—either by Elizabeth and Benji or, if they didn’t show up, by me—and that their cages were washed down, and when on occasion one of the chimps injured itself or fell ill, I nursed it back to health, and, as happened several times over the years, if one of them died from an undiagnosed illness or simply from sadness, I buried the poor creature out behind the Quonset hut and erected a wooden marker with the dreamer’s name painted on it,
Hooter
and
Livingston
and
Marcie
. And grieved.
The dreamers had come to trust me, to welcome my twice-daily arrival with a joyful chorus of pant-hoots and hand-claps. We communed together, usually for an hour, sometimes more, in the mornings after my sons had been washed and fed at home and dressed for the day and placed in Jeannine’s care, and again in the late afternoon, when it had begun to cool and I did not mind riding my bike out to the compound and back, a thirty-minute ride each way that took me to the edge of the city and the beginning of the jungle. My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me, and I had quickly become dependent on the visits for what little peace of mind I had then. Without it, I feared I would come undone, for, despite the leisurely pace and apparent stability of my daily life as wife and mother, that life felt fragile, as if it were someone else’s and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.
In those years, there were, as there is now, a large number of baby chimps being bought and sold illegally on the streets of Monrovia and in the marketplaces all over West Africa and many more babies being captured and smuggled out to labs in Europe and North America. I knew about this terrible trade, knew that to capture a single baby in the wild it was first necessary to shoot its mother and as many as three or four of the other adults who always tried to protect the baby from the human beings. Over the years, whenever I came upon one of the little wide-eyed, terrified creatures locked in a tiny cage or at the end of a chain in the market or alleyway, I purchased it myself, and after nursing it back to health, for the babies I bought were almost always malnourished and swarming with parasites, carried it out to the compound, where, with a terrible sadness, I imprisoned it with the others.
A baby chimp cannot survive alone in the forest, and I had no way of returning it to its lost and probably scattered and decimated family. The best I could do for it was provide a less cruel form of imprisonment and deprivation than the one that would lead inevitably to an early death. Baby chimps are like young humans, playful and clever and eager to please, and they respond to kindness with delight and gratitude. But after a few years they become troublesome, hormone-fueled adolescents and then adults, very powerful, willful, and highly intelligent creatures for whom the human order of things is perceived as a challenge, a regime to be overthrown. An adult male chimpanzee can weigh as much as an adult male human and is five times as strong and capable of extreme violence against objects and other animals, including human animals and its fellow chimps. When a pet baby or even a laboratory chimp becomes an adult, unless it is caged, it is almost always executed, killed simply for being itself.
In purchasing the babies I came across in the marketplace and locking them into a prison, I was saving their lives. But for what? Every time I walked along the rows of cages and pushed melons, bananas, cucumbers, and armloads of greens through the bars or passed the food directly into the hand reaching through the bars towards me, every time I returned the direct, deep-water gaze of the dreamers in my charge, and every time we spoke together, they in their language, and I in mine, I asked myself, why can’t I set them free? Lord knows, I wanted to do it, and hundreds of times I imagined doing it, simply unlocking the cages and taking them by the hand—for all of them now let me hold hands with them, and we even groomed one another—I would lead them under cover of darkness to the edge of the forest and there let go of their hands and turn and walk alone back into the city.
But it was too late for that. They were like ruined children, incapable of surviving on their own. Humans and chimpanzees have to be taught by their kith and kin how to be a human or a chimpanzee, how to find proper food and shelter, how to relate to others of its species in ways that are mutually useful and satisfying, how to reproduce, how to care for the young and the old and infirm—or else we perish as a species. Every chimp in my care had been captured as a baby and had been confined for its entire life so far, and did not know, therefore, how to be itself. And I had made myself the warden of their prison, and by default had become their caretaker and had made them dependent on me for their food and shelter and protection from the humans who would as soon neglect them and let them starve and die in their own filth as sell the babies for pets and kill the adults and sell their bodies for meat, their hands and heads for souvenirs. And now I was about to abandon them.
They greeted me that morning with their usual clamor and applause and loud declarations of hunger and thirst, which I quickly satisfied. Neither Elizabeth nor Benji had shown up yet and possibly wouldn’t arrive till evening, if at all, but I had arranged with Woodrow to have our yardman, Kuyo, who had developed an affection for the chimps, replace me as caretaker. Woodrow promised me that he would see to this, but I carried his promise to Kuyo myself, to impress upon him the seriousness of the job. Starting this very evening, I told him, his job as yardman would include purchasing the chimps’ food in the marketplace once a week and feeding them and washing down the floor of the Quonset hut twice daily. Woodrow’s office paid for the food from the general fund supplied by the grant from NYU, the same fund that paid Elizabeth’s and Benji’s salaries every month. Kuyo said he’d like that. “The monkeys-dem, we come to be friends now for a long-long time.” I felt, therefore, replaceable in the lives of my dreamers. But were they replaceable in mine? I wasn’t sure. Everyone else in my life, even my children, saw me as replaceable. Somehow I felt that in my sons’ eyes, just as in Woodrow’s, I had become extraneous to their lives, merely a witness, a sympathetic bystander. To Jeannine I was a pretender to the throne. To everyone in Liberia who knew me I was Woodrow Sundiata’s white American wife. I was a woman whose absence would barely be noticed.