Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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My journals, years of meticulous records and data, were still at the sanctuary, scattered across the sandy, blood-spattered yard where Kuyo had dropped them, wet from rain and driven into the dirt by the fighters’ jeep and feet as if they were old newspapers. For hours, Estelle and I gathered up the soaked books and loose sheets of paper, until finally we had them all collected in the plastic milk carton.
I held the carton and looked at the contents for a long moment. Then, halfway through that moment, something inside me cracked and split, and there the dark entered in. Weeping, I dumped the contents of the carton onto the ground at my feet. Without thinking, mindless, as if merely following orders, I doused the pile with kerosene from a lamp, lit a match, and tossed it onto the papers. An auto-da-fé it was. The heap burst into yellow flames and sour-smelling smoke and began to burn. I felt the light inside me, what little of it still shone, dwindle and die, smothered by the dark.
Grabbing my arm, Estelle yelled at me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz’ Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!”
I shook my head and said slowly, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t.” It was the simple, perplexing truth. I told her that I was sorry not to know, and instructed her then to run home to her village and stay with her family and not to come back to the sanctuary ever again. “There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. Like the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too.”
As if before her eyes I had turned into a ghost, the girl simply turned and ran, and I never saw her again. Estelle is probably dead now, if she was lucky. Or a ghost herself. She was a pretty little young woman, from Samuel Doe’s mother’s tribe, the Gio. During the months and years that followed, until the people elected Charles Taylor president to stop him from killing them, most of those women, especially the younger ones and the girls, were lucky to have been killed.
TEN YEARS AND A LIFETIME later, I walked in painfully bright sunlight along the narrow beach outside Monrovia towards the harbor and the town, passing the spot on the beach where, nearly twenty years and two lifetimes ago, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his men erected thirteen telephone poles in the sand. I knew the story. I was there. Everyone in Liberia knew the story. Drunk and high on drugs, bloodlust ramping through their veins, Samuel Doe’s men had eviscerated their president, William Tolbert, in his office and carried his ministers, fifteen baggy old men stripped naked, to the beach, where they lashed them to the poles and shot them dead in front of television and home-movie cameras and a crowd of wildly jeering citizens and left their bodies tied to the poles to feed the vultures and the dogs. The poles lie buried in the sand now, and the bones of the corrupt old men have long ago washed out to sea.
At the far end of the beach, where the land elbows into the harbor, I saw the same man in nylon shorts who had fled from me at the gully after the Lebanese truck driver, Mamoud, had let me off. The man stood beside a beached, dark red pirogue, with both hands on the bow in a proprietary way, as if he were about to launch the boat, and watched me approach. So he was a fisherman, then, not a mad scavenger, as I’d first thought, and I must have interrupted him at his morning toilet. He had merely been embarrassed by me, but not frightened. With West Africans, the two sometimes look the same.
A pair of osprey swooped past, dipped close to the glittering surface of the sea, and methodically cruised the length of the beach a hundred yards from shore, searching for breakfast. Now that the man and I could see each other’s faces clearly, I covered my teeth with my lips and smiled, and he smiled back. How strange, I thought, and how nice—a relief, in fact, that a Liberian man and I were greeting each other with friendly curiosity. I hadn’t thought that possible anymore.
I wished the man good morning, and he said the same, and soon we were talking about how bad the fishing had been in the last few months, since the end of the rains, he said. He was named Curtis. He was a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, with a wife, he said, “An’ five pick’nies. But wit’ no fish to catch me can’t feed them, an’ so the wife gone on the streets now, sellin’ pens an’ Bic lighters an’ other suchlike t’ings but ain’t nobody can buy t’ings in dis country no more, so what a man t’ do?” He spoke rapidly, anxiously, as if afraid I’d cut him off. “Can you help me out wit’ a little somethin’, Miz?” He held out his hand. “Can you gimme dash?”
“Do you know Boniface Island?” I asked him. He did, though he’d never been there. I asked if I could hire him to take me there in his boat. “I’ll pay you twenty American dollars,” I said. “To go out and back. And to wait for me for an hour or so. I won’t need to stay long.”
He wondered why I needed to go to Boniface. “Nothin’ t’ see on those little bitty river islands but birds an’ crocodiles an’ mangroves. Turtles sometimes though,” he added.
“I was there long ago,” I said. “During the war. Some of my friends were killed there. And I need to pray for them.”
He nodded, understanding. From Cape Mount to Maryland County, all over this land, “people’s friends an’ family needs prayin’ for,” he pronounced. “The war not over yet, mebbe never will be over,” he said and held out his hand again for money. I placed a folded twenty-dollar bill into it.
AT BONIFACE ISLAND, the long pirogue, shaped like a plantain, slid onto the dark landing. It was a short, sloped, brown beach with a small clearing surrounded by low bushes a short ways beyond and, on both sides, a mass of tangled, head-high mangroves half in the water and half out. Though it was the largest of the river islands in the broad estuary of the St. John River, it was barely the size of a schoolyard. Standing barefoot in the bow, my sneakers stashed in my backpack, I stepped from the boat and went ashore.
Behind me, squatting in the stern, Curtis held the boat tight to the beach with his single long paddle. He was looking in my direction, but his face was expressionless, as if I weren’t there. Then, without warning, he moved his oar up to the bow, placed the end of it into the mud, and shoved the boat away from shore. It floated past the mangroves, where it caught the river current and slowly spun stern to bow towards the wide, gray waters of the estuary. Standing, he took his long oar in hand and like a Venetian gondolier worked the handle back and forth, driving the boat still farther from the island and into the river.
“Wait a minute! What are you doing?” I cried. “Curtis! Where are you going?”
He was a hundred yards or more from the island now, and he said nothing, did not look back, kept rowing.
I screamed, “Don’t leave me here! Please, Curtis! Don’t leave me here!”
Then he was gone to the far side of the island, heading rapidly on a line towards the city of Monrovia, in the distance downstream. In moments, he was out of my sight altogether, twenty American dollars richer than this morning, when he found me, but with no more money coming to him again for a long, long time—unless he was willing to hit me with a rock and leave me on the island for dead. He must have been too timid a man to do that, I thought, and turned away from the disappearing boat. Afraid that if he’d killed me he’d end up sleepless at night with my spirit haunting his hut, he had done the next Liberian thing, he’d merely taken the twenty dollars and abandoned me.
I looked around at the drooping mangroves, their roots like limp snakes dangling their heads into the water, and stepped away from the shore in search of shade against the glare of the sun. But there was none, unless I were willing to crawl on hands and knees into the tepid water and huddle beneath the mangroves leaves. But the water looked filthy enough to make me sick on contact, and I remembered the crocodiles that Curtis had mentioned and was afraid to leave the clearing in spite of the sun’s beating on my head.
Though I was alone on the tiny island, from the instant I stepped ashore I knew that I was alone with the ghosts of my dreamers. I could almost see them shuffling side to side in the heat-crinkled air
. I sensed their presence all around me. There was a rustling from the bushes as if a cool breeze had blown over, but everything was dead and heavy. Then I heard a familiar huffing sound, the low woofs of a pair of adult male chimpanzees, as different from one another as two human voices, and as recognizable, and I knew at once that it was Ginko and Mano. And then came the distinctive pant hoot of the leader of the clan, Doc, the first of the apes that I had dared to name, followed by the chuckling close by of mothers Deena and Wassail and Ellie, nursing their babies and scolding their older children, and the squawks and high-pitched screeches from the adolescents vying for rank and dominance—they were all over this tiny, brush-covered islet! I looked for them in the low, leafless, prickly bushes at the edge of the clearing, tramped from one side of the island to the other, and peered under the mangroves, but could not see them.
But they were here, I knew, still waiting after all these years for me to come back and save them. Or, no, they were waiting for me to step forward, to bow my head, and receive their judgment. Yes, that was it. I suddenly realized that I’d come solely for this. It was the possibility and the necessity of receiving their strict, final judgment that had driven me from my farm and drawn me across the ocean to this tiny island. And I hadn’t known it until now. I hadn’t allowed myself to know it, until, like the dreamers, I myself was trapped on this island, and it was suddenly all too clear why, after years of safe retreat, I’d taken it upon myself to leave my quiet Adirondack valley one autumn afternoon and fly away to Africa.
The dreamers gradually went silent, as if they had seen me standing in the center of the small clearing and knew that I was alone. Emerging slowly from the dense scrub brush, one by one they came forward, all eleven of them, the entire clan, as if they had never been abandoned, slain, eaten. Bent over slightly, looking ready to spring, they hitched themselves cautiously towards me, closer and closer, until they had surrounded me. Their eyes were wide open, with heavy brows lifted in mild surmise, lips sucked tightly together, and when they stared up at me it was in sad puzzlement, not in accusation—which I expected and could have endured and may even have welcomed. After having first made them trust me to provide for their safekeeping, in spite of my weakness and fearful self-interest, and to know what was good for them, in spite of their own best knowledge, I had treated them shamefully. Unforgivably. And now, in consequence, though calm, almost placid, they had been transformed from my charges into furies. Their gaze showed me—as if I needed fresh reminding—that the themes of my life were betrayal and abandonment.
It came to me then that where I now stood in the clearing was the exact spot in which my dreamers had been slain, their corpses butchered and eaten. Their skulls and bones and the charred remains of the fires in which their flesh had been roasted lay like midden deep in the silt beneath my feet. It had been ten rainy seasons since Kuyo and I last stood here, and many flood tides had washed over the island, leaving behind each time a thick carpet of fresh mud floated down from the eastern highlands, sinking the remains of my dreamers deeper and deeper into the body of the island. They were buried far beneath me, and yet it seemed, nonetheless, that I had placed myself in the midst of those old bones as if at the center of a charnel house. The bones were piled up to my knees, a rough pyramid of leg and arm bones, of spines with hooped ribs still attached, skulls large and small, the bones of fingers and toes, yellowed teeth, and thatches of brown and black hair.
The large, yellow, equatorial sun lay pasted against the pale gray sky directly overhead. I knew that my blood and brain were dangerously overheated. I was dizzy and could not see clearly anymore. The faces and shapes of the ghosts of the dreamers had grown fuzzy and indistinct, and they resembled now a cluster of hooded medieval priests at prayer, kneeling in a circle around me. My legs were weak and began to tremble. Everything was spinning. I had not brought water from the mainland—there was no fresh water on the island, none at least that I could have located myself, and the river was brackish and filthy with sewage and rotted corpses—and I had not eaten since the previous night, when Mamoud had stopped briefly at the cook shop outside of Gbanga and the boy had run after us begging for a ride away.
I know now, of course, what was happening to me, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I had thought I was on a secret guilt trip, a return visit to the scene of my crime. One of my crimes. It was sunstroke and dehydration and hunger, but to me it was a vision. And here it came, a huge wave rising in front of me and then breaking and falling over me, shoving me to my knees, bending my body into an A, a wave replaced by a second, still bigger wave, and a third and a fourth, rolling me over, their enormous weight and force pummeling my body to the ground.
I lay on my back and looked up at the silhouette of a black, featureless head blocking out the sun. It was the large, gray-splotched face of Doc—who had been both the fiercest and the gentlest of the dreamers and the most intelligent—staring down at me in rage, a monstrous Caliban. He opened his mouth wide and bared his large canine teeth. The others, male and female alike, adults and offspring, all the dreamers, gathered beside and behind Doc and watched him intently, as if waiting for him to give the signal that would free them. Free them to do what? To rend and disembowel me and devour my raw flesh? It’s what I expected. It’s what I thought I deserved.
I crouched against the muddy ground and extended my hands in a pathetic gesture, as if to fend them off. They had come forward from the spirit world with no other purpose than to avenge themselves on my stringy, old lady’s body, to tear my hair from my scalp and toss bloody handfuls of it like gobbets into the air, to scream bloody murder and spit into my face. These were my imaginings. It’s what I must have desired. For years, since my youth, hadn’t I been seeking exactly this? The freeing of the slave, the resurrection of the slain, the revenge of the betrayed and abandoned human and not-human. I’d not been able to become any one of them, and had grown angry and then had slain them, the not-us. Now the not-us had come back to claim blood kinship by returning blow for blow, curse for curse.
And Doc spoke. I heard him speak to me! His voice was low and dark, his accent and intonation West African. He called me by name, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, he moaned, as if making a mysterious, final, despairing benediction for humankind, for my kind in particular, and he said that I had once made much of him and his clan, and I had fed them and had taught them the names and uses of things that they had never seen before. And when I had let them believe that I and they were kin, I had imprisoned them on this island and had delivered them into the hands of the soldiers, who saw them only as food and viewed the babies of their clan as toys to be sold on the streets.
His large, powerful hand descended towards my face as if he meant to tear my pale mask from the bone beneath. Blackness interceded. And that is the last of my memories of the vision.
UNTIL I FOUND MYSELF with my head lying against the brown thigh of a man who was trickling fresh cool water into my mouth. He must have seen that I was now aware of him, for he tipped my head forward slightly and smiled and brought the plastic jug closer to my lips so that I could drink more easily. There were broad, green mangrove leaves overhead, shading us from the sun. The man was the boatman, Curtis, who had carried me to the island and left me there—permanently, I had thought. But no, there he was, pushing my wet hair away from my face, helping me drink, and speaking softly to me, “You gonna be fine now, Miz, don’ you worry none, you gonna be jus’ fine. Good t’ing I come back f’ you an’ bring water, or by now you in the belly of the crocodiles for certain, Miz.”
He helped me sit up and let me hold the jug myself and drink from it. Then he held his hand out to me. “Gimme more dash now, Miz. The water not come free, y’ know. Nothin’ come free in this country anymore. Not for me, an’ not for you neither,” he said.
WHEN A YEAR AGO I went back to Liberia, I thought it was in search of my lost sons, and found something very different instead. Twenty-seven years ago, however, the first time I went to
Africa, it was to Ghana, to avoid arrest and imprisonment or possibly simple assassination in the United States. It was 1975, and I was living with Carol—poor, large-hearted Carol—in New Bedford, as part of a tiny Weather Underground cell made up, as far as I knew, of just me and a man named Zachary Procter.
Zack was actually a mainline Cincinnati aristocrat whom I’d known in the Movement back at Brandeis. He was tall—six-and-a-half feet at least—and slim, with ginger-colored hair, freckles, pale blue eyes with crinkly, premature laugh lines at the corners, and teeth like Chiclets. Zack and I had marched arm in arm at various peace protests at the university, but otherwise we had avoided each other. Perhaps because we sensed that we were too much alike. We could see behind each other’s mask of idealism and ideology the face of the privileged, angry kid who, in the name of peace, justice, and racial harmony, had declared war against the state, the university, and, before long, his parents’ entire generation. The face behind the mask was not a pretty sight. Later, the mask absorbed the face and became it, and for a while at least we weren’t ashamed of what we were looking at. Then, eventually, I guess the mask got peeled away, and we saw our true faces again.
Zack’s major was anthropology; I was pre-med. It was the mid-1960s. In our dorm rooms we listened to folk music, Negro blues, and jazz; smoked dope; drank cheap red wine from basket-wrapped bottles; and wore black turtlenecks, jeans, and peasant sandals to class, even in winter. We were conventionally ambitious students, however, and worried about our grades and calibrated our final class standing two and three years before graduation. But on our own, outside of class, we read Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre in Anchor paperbacks, loved Godard and Bergman movies and called them “films,” and cultivated what we regarded as morally meaningful alienation from bourgeois society and values. Our forms of rebellion had been handed down to us from the fifties, after all, by the Beat Generation and famous European-café existentialists.