Authors: Russell Banks
It’s a life eleven years on, and the first ten passed very quickly, like a dreamless sleep, until the end of August morning when Anthea and I finished butchering the chickens, and I saw that I could not live out the remainder of my days here on the farm unless I returned to Liberia and learned what had happened to my dreamers and my three sons and over his grave made a private peace with my husband. But I no more knew what I would find there than I did on the day I first arrived from Ghana a quarter-century ago. Liberia is a permanently haunted land filled with vengeful ghosts, and I had committed many sins there.
I made my way first to Boniface Island, where I had abandoned my dreamers. When the fisherman who carried me across the bay in his pirogue left me alone among the buried bones of my dreamers, I thought that I, too, had been abandoned on an island. Terrified and sick from hunger and thirst and the brain-boiling heat of the equatorial sun, I fell down before the ghosts of my dreamers and accepted their bewildered rage. I was ready, almost eager, for them to devour me. Their curses rained down on me, and my long remorse and secret shame were replaced that day by the permanent mournfulness that has given rise to the telling of this story.
I told none of this to Anthea or the other girls later, or else, once started, I would have had to tell them everything, as I have you. They asked, of course, but not until I’d been home again at Shadowbrook for weeks. There was so much else to preoccupy and frighten us then, with the world seeming suddenly to have turned murderous for everyone and anyone, even for four young women and an old lady ensconced on a farm in upstate New York, that my quick trip to a place in West Africa that they could not have located on a map did not count for much. It could wait, and has, until now. And when finally one evening in early October Anthea shyly asked me if my trip back to Liberia had been “successful,” for that was how she put it, I said only that I had learned what I needed to know and that someday I would tell her everything.
I won’t, of course. I can’t. Eventually, however, as winter came on, because I like and trust Anthea more than the others and because she is a few years older than they, I told her some of it. She genuinely wanted to know what had happened and to give me sympathy and comfort if I needed them. Nan and Frieda merely thought it was cool that I had gone to Africa alone, but weren’t at all curious as to why I’d gone or what I had learned there, and with them I was glad to let it go. Cat asked only if I’d seen a lot of people dying of AIDS, and I said no, which was the truth.
At Boniface Island I was rescued by the fisherman returning to the island with a jug of water. He paddled me back to the mainland and put me ashore below Mamba Point, where I made my way on foot up the hill and over the peninsula and through the town towards Duport Road. The city of Monrovia was a burnt-out shell of what it once had been. The long civil war and pandemic corruption and the abandonment of Liberia by the Americans had nearly killed it. The walls and houses along the way were splashed with bizarre graffiti, the names, claims, and mottos of madmen, and people on the street stared at me when I walked by, as if I were from a distant planet and my odd resemblance to them were more striking than my difference.
I crossed Tubman Boulevard, and when I passed the old Western Union office, I glanced through the broken window into the dim room and saw in the shadows a man I had once known. His name was Reuben Kanomae, whom I remembered as a spectacled, pipe-smoking fellow proud of his small skill and use to the foreigners and expats in town. A gregarious man in his late sixties, he cultivated warm relations with anyone he thought might need to wire money abroad, including me, although I myself had never required his services. Still, I enjoyed his easy banter and his habit of giving the boys candy when they were with me and had made his shop a regular stop whenever I went downtown. He sat in a corner of his dingy, unlit office slumped on a broken-backed chair beside a huge, no-longer-functioning air-conditioner, poking through an old, torn copy of
Sports Illustrated
. His iron-rimmed spectacles were gone, his eyes were dead, his gaze flat and without expression. I wondered what, if anything, he saw on the pages of the magazine.
I took a small step into the shop. He heard me and looked up slowly, then recognized me. “Miz Sundiata? You back? When you come back?”
“A day ago.”
He put the magazine on the floor. “Why?”
“To look for my sons,” I said.
He shook his head slowly as if he didn’t quite understand.
I said, “You remember them, don’t you? My three boys?”
He nodded slowly, as if calling them back to mind one by one.
“I saw you still had your shop, and because you send messages for people, I thought you might have heard or seen…”
“I don’t got no more shop. All them boys gone now!” he blurted. “Gone!”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. Can’t say.”
I asked him when was the last time he saw them.
His gaze came back into focus. “Long-long time ago,” he said. It was after President Doe got killed by Prince Johnson and before Charles Taylor drove Prince Johnson out of the capital. “Them boys, your sons, they got famous for a while. They had famous names, too,” he added. “Peoples all over was very-very scared of them. Scared of all them crazy boys with the guns and the bad names. Still are.”
I asked him to tell me their names, and he did. He said that because their father had been a minister in the government of Samuel Doe and their mother was an American white woman, everyone remembered those three. “The big one, the oldest, he call himself Worse-than-Death. The twin boys named Fly and Demonology. Last time I seen ’em, I was hidin’ from the soldiers,” he said. He wasn’t sure whose soldiers they were, but they had smashed up his shop, and he had fled to the roof of the building, where he had a clear view of the body-strewn street below. “There was dead peoples everywhere for a long-long time. That’s when I seen ’em.” He told me that the two younger boys wore women’s nightgowns over their trousers, and the older boy had on orange coveralls and no shirt. All three were carrying guns, all three were wild eyed and grinning, filthy, running from store to store and screaming bloody murder. Until they stopped over the crumpled body of a man. Reuben said they kicked it a few times to be sure the body was dead, then rummaged through the pockets. When they came up empty, the older boy, Worse-than-Death, stripped a watch off the man’s wrist and tried in vain to pry off his wedding ring. One of the twins, Fly or Demonology, he wasn’t able to tell, reached under his nightgown and pulled a bayonet from his belt and sliced off the ring finger, jammed the bloody end into his mouth and sucked the ring from the finger. Then the boy stuck out his tongue and showed the ring to the others, and when the older brother reached for it, the twin swallowed it and laughed and started running again. The other two followed, and the brothers darted across the deserted street and disappeared from sight.
Slowly I backed from the shop to the street, my sneakers crunching against broken window glass. “After that,” Reuben said, his voice rising, “they was just gone! No one saw them boys again, Miz Sundiata!” he called after me. “No one!”
When I got to Duport Road, the gate to our house was open, and there were four young children at play in the yard, white children, three little girls and a boy of about eight, and they were speaking American English with a southern accent. I told them that I was Hannah Sundiata and that I had lived in this house a long time ago. The children led me to their parents inside, a serious, blond couple in their mid-thirties named Janice and Keith Crown, Evangelical Christians from Ashville, North Carolina. Janice and Keith were intensely polite and eager to talk with an American visitor. When I told them who I was, they said that they knew of me and had heard of my chimpanzee sanctuary at Toby and that it had been destroyed in the war. The Crowns had been in Liberia and living in the house, which their church had leased from the government, for nearly two years. Previously they had worked in Haiti, they said. After the war ended and Charles Taylor was elected president, their church had established, with President Taylor’s permission and help, a series of small missionary outposts in the backcountry. Keith, who had a pilot’s license and a single-engine plane, kept the missions supplied with medical equipment, medicines, schoolbooks, hymnals, mail from America for the missionaries and Bibles for the natives. Keith and Janice and their children liked the house on Duport Road very much, they said, and on Sundays Keith conducted religious services for the local people right here in the living room, although Keith confessed that it was easier to bring God’s word to the natives in the backcountry than here in Monrovia. In the city, he explained, people had been severely traumatized by the horrors of the war, and many of them had reverted to Islam and ancient forms of animism. “But people in the bush are very open to Christ’s healing spirit,” he said, and Janice agreed.
They asked me if I was a Christian, had I been saved, and I said no, which seemed not so much to disappoint as to surprise them. This part of the story I told to Anthea, who like me is not a Christian and has not been saved but, unlike me, probably doesn’t need it. It was the end of October, and I was at my desk paying the monthly bills. Anthea came into my office off the kitchen for her pay and, apropos of nothing, attempting perhaps to fill in a blank that I had placed in an earlier version of my story, asked me what became of my house in Africa. I thought that she would find the presence of the Crowns in my old home and their Christian missionary zeal ironic and faintly amusing, which she did. But when she asked if the Crowns knew anything about my sons, since I had already mentioned that the couple knew who I was and had heard about my sanctuary, I lied and said no and wrote out her check and gave it to her.
The Crowns hadn’t been in the country long, but they had friends in high places, as Sam Clement used to say, among them President Taylor himself, whom they claimed to have personally introduced to Jesus Christ, causing the president to be born again, they told me, adding that I should not believe the ugly rumors of barbarism, corruption, and decadence sown by his enemies here and abroad. Charles Taylor had many enemies, they explained, especially among tribal leaders who did not want him bringing Jesus to this benighted land.
When I asked them if the president considered me one of his enemies, they looked away, for it was difficult for them to lie. Keith said that the president knew that in the war my sons had supported Prince Johnson, who was his enemy and was hiding in Guinea and still plotting to overthrow him. Janice added that the president also knew about my husband and that he had supported Samuel Doe, and he knew, of course, that in the war, when the fighting reached Monrovia, I had left for America alone.
“What are you telling me?”
Keith walked to the door and told the children to go back outside and play. Janice was silent for a moment. “We’re not apologizing for Charles Taylor,” she said. “It was a brutal war, people on all sides did terrible things. Both during the war and afterwards. And we’re not judging you, Missus Sundiata. Only God can do that.”
Keith took his wife’s hand in his and in a soothing tone said to me, “In this house we often pray for you. And we pray for the souls of your sons and your husband. Surely, Jesus has forgiven them. Just as He will forgive you, if only you ask. Seek, and you shall find salvation, Missus Sundiata.”
I tried to explain that my husband had been murdered by Samuel Doe’s men, one of whom was known to us, and that my sons and I had witnessed it, and that my sons had joined Prince Johnson solely to avenge their father’s murder, not to oppose Charles Taylor. But that was my story, my truth, not Charles Taylor’s, and although they did not contradict me or call me a liar, the Crowns would have none of it. They nodded and looked at me with pity and a craven hunger to save me from myself.
It was a hunger that I would not let them satisfy. Without warning I told them that my husband’s body was buried in their flower garden, which surprised and confused them. “And I would like to be alone there for a few moments,” I said. I told them that my husband was a Christian, and they could put a little cross over his grave there and continue praying for his soul, if they wished. “I’d also like to see my boys’ bedroom, if that’s all right. And then I’ll leave.”
There is not much more to tell. It was September 10, 2001, and one dark era was about to end and another, darker era to begin, one in which my story could never have happened, my life not possibly been lived. I stood at the edge of the garden at the side of the house where Sam claimed to have buried Woodrow’s body and waited for my husband’s ghost to rise from the flowers and punish me, as the ghosts of my dreamers had done. But he was no longer there. I was alone in the garden. In spite of the Crowns’ prayers for the salvation of his soul, Woodrow had gone to be with his ancestors in Fuama.
And when I went back inside the house and stood in my boys’ bedroom, I was alone there, too. Their spirits had long since disappeared from the room, replaced by the bright spirits of the four children who slept there now. My sons were with their father and their African ancestors. And it made me glad. They were with their people, the people who, living and dead, were loving them in death as I had never been able to love them in life.
I came back to the living room and prepared to leave. The Crowns asked me to stay the night with them, for it was dark by then and dangerous on the streets of Monrovia. I accepted their offer, and later, during dinner, Keith mentioned in passing that the next morning he had to fly supplies from the small in-town airport to their mission outpost in Ganta, close to the border of Côte d’Ivoire. I asked if he would take me there with him, so that I could cross out of the country and return to the States from Abidjan, the way I had come in. This was perfectly agreeable to him, he said, but why not fly out from Robertsfield? I explained that I had entered Liberia illegally without a visa and did not want to alert the authorities, especially the president, to my presence in the country. I said that I was, indeed, Charles Taylor’s enemy. And that is how I got to Abidjan, where I boarded a Ghana Airways flight to New York and made my way home to a nation terrorized and grieving on a scale that no American had imagined before, a nation whose entire history was being rapidly rewritten. In the months that followed, I saw that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world. In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.