Authors: Russell Banks
“Well, m’love, I ought to be getting back to the office,” Sam said. Out the window I saw his Land Rover with the U.S. seal on the side. His driver was chatting with several of the men I had hired to help me move my dreamers to their new home. “You heard about Taylor, didn’t you?” Sam said.
“Heard about him? No. What?”
“He escaped from prison. In the States.”
“He was in prison?”
Sam smiled, that warm, Virginia, white man’s smile reserved especially for silly women. “Yes, Hannah. He was in prison. A federal prison in Massachusetts. Not too far from where you grew up, Hannah.”
“And he escaped?”
“It wasn’t but minimum security, so he didn’t need a hacksaw blade in a cake. I guess he just sort of walked off the place.”
“Where … where is he now?”
He opened the door and stepped into the glare of the yard. “Who knows?”
IN THOSE DAYS,
rumors passed through Liberia like weather systems, one following hard upon the other. To me it seemed unlikely if not impossible, but Charles was supposed to have fled the United States for Mexico, not Libya. And from there to Cuba, where Fidel Castro was providing him with military training and sanctuary. Then we heard he was in jail in Ghana for plotting to overthrow the government of President Rawley. Or he’d recently been seen in Abidjan trying to raise money to finance an invasion of Liberia from Côte d’Ivoire. Or he was up in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, making arrangements to invade Liberia by sea. The next week he was in a training camp outside Tripoli, building an alliance between Samuel Doe’s old Americo enemies in exile, a cadre of ex–Black Panthers, and a battalion of young pan-African communist revolutionaries. It went on like that, month after month, year after year. He was said to have gotten married. He was getting divorced. He was said to have become a Baptist. For a month we heard he was in the pay of the CIA. A month later the CIA was trying to assassinate him. And so on, until the only way for me to process the rumors was to discount them altogether, to go about my daily rounds at home and at Toby, and wait.
Meanwhile, as the boys approached puberty—and they were close enough in age to arrive there more or less together—Woodrow started taking them to Fuama with increasing frequency and for longer and longer stays. They made these trips without me, as I was unwilling to leave my dreamers in the care of others for longer than a day. At least that’s what I told Woodrow and the boys, until they stopped inviting me to join them—happily, it seemed, almost with relief, as if my presence out there embarrassed them. The bamboo wall that separated me from Woodrow’s family and village was cultural and linguistic, not racial or even economic, and I should have been able to scale it and join them on the other side, but I was unwilling, perhaps unable, to do fieldwork on my own family. Woodrow’s people and their world, especially as the boys became increasingly comfortable and knowledgeable there, frightened and threatened me. Consequently, I coped with my ignorance and feelings of exclusion by backing away from that wall, instead of learning how to climb over it, and only increased the distance between me and Woodrow’s people, between me and Woodrow himself, and between me and my sons.
This allowed us to keep deep and wide secrets from one another. Of Woodrow’s village life, whether he had one wife in Fuama or many wives or none, whether he had fathered children there with other women or, except for my three sons, was childless, I knew nothing and did not ask. And of my sons’ tribal initiation, of the secret Poro rites that moved them out of childhood and taught them the ancient ways of becoming men among their father’s people, I knew only that these rites had taken place in the bush and at night and that women were not permitted to inquire about them, a restriction I complied with easily. And though during those years I was no one’s lover or mistress and certainly no one’s wife but Woodrow’s and underwent no ritual initiation or life-changing religious experience, public or private, I had secrets, too. Mine were the secrets of my past: deviancies, as Woodrow surely would have viewed my relationship with Carol and earlier with other women; and brief and furtive sexual dalliances, as with Satterthwaite; and a certain long-held dream of violence against people and institutions and governments that exploited the poor and the weak—a dream that over the years had faded and nearly been forgotten, but that had been called back vividly into service by Charles Taylor. It was my biggest secret. Once again I was caught up in that old fantasy of the imminent arrival of justice. Though I appeared to be a dutiful mother and spouse and the successful manager of a locally famous primate sanctuary, I was underground, again.
FOR A LONG TIME,
we heard no more rumors concerning Charles, and I began to fear that something bad had happened to him, that he had indeed been jailed or possibly even assassinated. But then one morning in early December 1989, news came of a formal armed assault against the government of Samuel Doe. It had been launched along the border in Nimba County by a small force calling itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia and led by Charles Taylor. The second in command was a “strange man” named Prince Johnson, but there was little else known about the group. No one seemed to take the incursion seriously, since it had occurred in the jungle far to the east, some two hundred miles from Monrovia, and this National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the so-called NPFL, was said to number no more than a few dozen poorly armed men.
On December 26, we got word of a second raid in Nimba, this one conducted by a much larger force augmented by men and boys recruited from Butua and Karnplay, the Gio villages out there, Charles Taylor’s mother’s tribespeople. In the papers and on the radio the men and boys of the NPFL were being referred to now as rebels. But the fighting was still taking place in remote villages, and with no reliable firsthand reports available, no one, except for me, took the incursions seriously. Finally, in late February, Doe sent a battalion of his soldiers to Nimba County with orders to drive the NPFL back into Côte d’Ivoire and claimed a few days later to have gone to the front himself to assess the seriousness of the situation. Upon his return, he assured the nation by radio and TV that there was no cause for alarm, for the Armed Forces of Liberia had everything under control, and the rebels were in disarray, fleeing for the border. Within a few days rumors came that Doe had never made it to the front, that halfway there he’d abruptly turned back, trailed by persistent claims that Taylor’s men were protected by special powers, juju charms and magic waters, that the fighters were “gun proof,” and that often in the midst of battle they became invisible.
By April, the rebels had captured Ganta. Around this time, the AFL, Doe’s frightened and disorganized army—in a vain attempt to terrorize the villagers and keep them from providing recruits, food, and shelter to Charles’s rapidly growing force—had started committing atrocities in the distant villages. The rebels advanced with an ease and speed that surprised everyone. Everyone except me. Things were unfolding just as I’d expected. Just as I’d dreamed. By May the rebels had reached Buchanan, and by June they were in the Bong Mines region. Doe kept showing up on television to assure us that his army had suffered no casualties, that Charles Taylor had lost three hundred fifty men in Kakata, his second-in-command Prince Johnson had lost a hundred fifty fighters in Careysburg, and both were in retreat. Which to us meant only that Charles Taylor had advanced as far as Kakata, barely thirty miles from Monrovia, and Prince Johnson was in Careysburg, eighteen miles from the capital.
I did not know what Charles Taylor would become and what he and the thousands of men and boys who followed him would do to the people of Liberia and to my family and to my dreamers. I could not have imagined it. I believed not so much in him as in his rhetoric, which I had welded to the remnants of my youthful ideology and disappointed idealism. And when I ask myself now what I should have done, once I had made it possible for Charles to escape the cage he’d been put in and I had been granted permission by Samuel Doe to return to my husband and sons, to my home, and to the dreamers, I have no answer other than what in fact I did: I came, like John the Baptist, I thought, to prepare the way; or like Mary Magdalen, to welcome him at the gate, and until he came, to do good works: keeping house.
I wasn’t alone in this. As the season wore on, it began to look as though the rebels might actually succeed in overthrowing Samuel Doe. Support for Charles Taylor quietly spread across the country. It didn’t hurt that in July he broke with Prince Johnson, supposedly over depredations and atrocities committed by Johnson and his followers in villages around the Bong Mines near Kakata. Members of Doe’s government, his press secretary, the minister of transport, and some members of the legislature fled the country. There were demonstrations in Monrovia and Buchanan, led by prominent churchmen, calling for Doe’s resignation. All the while, from a portable radio station somewhere in the jungle, Charles was telling us of his progress and intentions, explaining his principled break with Prince Johnson, condemning Johnson and Doe as if the two were in cahoots together, and we all, Woodrow, too, secretly listened and silently cheered him on.
Doe fought back, of course. Many of his more outspoken critics—journalists, academics, churchmen, and even a few government officials—were brutally murdered by death squads, non-uniformed thugs who came out from under rocks at night and left the mutilated bodies of Doe’s enemies on the streets and door stoops to be found in the morning. Violence begat more violence. Single incidents of murder, disfigurement, and torture quickly justified massacres, villagewide amputations of limbs, gang rape, and the forced recruitment of children. Tribal war erupted. Doe’s Krahn soldiers started imprisoning and executing Gios and Manos, and in the countryside Charles Taylor’s and Prince Johnson’s men started killing Krahns, Doe’s tribe, and Mandingos, a tribe that in legal and extralegal commercial matters had long been favored by him. One of Doe’s death squads massacred hundreds of civilians huddled for safety in a Lutheran Church. Another raided a hospital and singled out Gio and Mano tribespeople and slew them in their beds.
Now the whole of West Africa was threatened by the conflict. Entire villages, towns, and cities from Senegal in the north to Nigeria in the south and inland east of Guinea were made up of Mandingos, Krahns, Gios, and Manos. Consequently, in mid-August, a fourth army, one made up mostly of Ghanaians and Nigerians, entered the war. Ill equipped and barely trained, they were sent into Liberia by the Economic Community of West African States. The new army was called ECOMOG, or the Economic Community Monitoring Group, and it was supposed to keep the warring parties apart and somehow broker a peace settlement. It did nothing of the sort. The Ghanaians and Nigerians simply joined the fray, and soon they, too, were brutally murdering civilians and being murdered back. Unbelievable tales of massacres committed by all four armies, bizarre accounts of ritual killings, random executions, rape, cannibalism, and pillage accumulated and became believable, and people who could leave Liberia for safe havens in the U.S. or other West African countries packed up and fled. Those who could not or would not leave—among them Woodrow for his reasons and I for mine—kept inside their houses and prayed that the war would soon be over and the horror would stop.
ONE AFTERNOON
late in August, the rain was falling like drapery, and Sam strolled into my office, only the second time he had come there, which meant he had a purpose. Even under a big black umbrella in a heavy downpour, he never seemed to hurry or stride along: he sauntered like a boulevardier, as if he had no place special to go and all the time in the world to get there. Which in those months was unusual, especially for a white man, when everyone in Liberia, even the locals, either hurried from one place to another or else slunk from door to door and, if you looked away and back again, was gone from sight. Sam folded his umbrella and perched on a corner of my desk and glanced at the logbook open before me.
I put down my pen and closed the book and said hello.
“Secrets?”
“You interested in the ovulation cycles of female chimpanzees?”
“Not really.” He whistled a tuneless tune through his teeth for half a minute while I waited in silence. We’d reached that point in our relationship where we could be both present and absent and not take it personally. Not exactly intimacy, but on its way there.
The rain drummed against the tin roof. Finally, Sam sighed and, without looking at me, said, “Things are going badly for Doe, you know. Very badly.”
“Yes. I know.”
“We’ve started advising American citizens to get the hell out of here while they still can. The country’s a house of cards, Hannah. Doe’s going to fall any day, and when he does, things will get savage for a spell. Between Johnson and Taylor and ECOMOG, there won’t be much wiggle room. It’s time for you and your boys to leave, Hannah.”
“I can’t leave. I’ve got the chimps. And the boys, they’re not Americans anyhow. They’re Liberians. Where would we go?”
“Please. Don’t play dumb with me. I’ve got exit visas for them and for you and Woodrow, too, in case Doe’s people give you shit at the airport. I’ve also got you entry visas for the U.S. All non-essential embassy personnel are flying out tomorrow. After that, getting out will be dicey at best. C’mon, Hannah, go home and pack.”
“Woodrow won’t leave. Not as long as Samuel Doe is president. He’s still a faithful member of the cabinet. And if he can’t go, neither can I or the boys. We’ll be all right. Besides, like I said, who’ll take care of the chimps?” I smiled up at him.
There was a break in the rain, and suddenly the room was very quiet. Sam walked to the window and peered out. “Doe’s a sinking ship, and all the rats who can are jumping off. Including Woodrow. And Doe knows it. He’s going nuts over there. Jesus, I hate this time of year,” he said suddenly and laughed. “I feel like Noah, collecting Americans for the ark, two by two.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’ve got five seats on the eleven o’clock to JFK tomorrow. If you’re not at Robertsfield by ten to claim them, there’s a whole bunch of gringos who will have been waiting all night, and they’ll happily take your place. It’s not the last flight out, but damned near it.”