Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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“Dawn Carrington is who I am here. So I’m still underground.”
“Yeah. Whatever,” he said and flagged the waitress impatiently.
“I used to think I was attracted to dangerous men,” I said. “Dangerous to me, I mean. And I don’t necessarily mean sexually attracted.”
“Fuck you. Find yourself a dangerous man then.” He waved his hand around the bar like an impresario or a pimp. “A little while and the place’ll be full of ’em. The whole fucking city’s full of ’em.” And it was. In the mid-1970s, Accra, and this bar in particular, along with several others like the Wato and Afrikiko’s, were catch basins for First-World drop-ins: anti–Vietnam War draft dodgers, black U.S. military personnel gone AWOL, and ex–Peace Corps volunteers, and probably more than a few of them were CIA agents collecting information on the rest of us and sending it back to Washington. They were Zack’s and my tribesmen and -women, although only a few were women. West Africa was peppered with Americans like us in those years.
“You used to think I was dangerous,” Zack said. “And now you don’t. Is that what you’re saying?” He grinned in a manic way, showing me his perfect teeth. With his gingery hair worn in a ponytail he looked more like a Colorado ski bum than a fugitive would-be terrorist. I didn’t know what I looked like anymore. Actually, I’ve never known. I used to tell people that on the FBI wanted poster I looked like a Mexican hooker, but I wasn’t really sure and in fact was only asking for an opinion.
“I never thought you were dangerous, Zack.”
“Man, you are cold. Just like with Carol, man.” He shivered and abruptly stood. “I’m outa here. I’ll see you back at the apartment later, maybe,” he said and strode off.
I’d hurt his feelings and didn’t care, and he knew it. And he was right: from his point of view, Africa hadn’t warmed me up. Though we shared the apartment, we kept to our separate bedrooms and were rarely there at the same time anyhow, never ate together, and didn’t socialize with the same people. Actually, I socialized with no one, and he hung out with everyone. I liked the city of Accra, though. The huge, bustling city sprawled inland from the sea for miles and was such a glorious and inviting contrast to the gray, old mill towns I’d left behind—those recently abandoned, rust-belt cities like New Bedford and before that Cleveland, which had borne me down almost without my knowing it—that I found Accra irresistible. It was hot, equatorially hot, but thanks to the steady breeze off the Atlantic not uncomfortably humid, and as long as you kept out of the direct sun, it felt ideal—the climate to which human anatomy, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, was perfectly adapted. And I liked the Ghanaian people. They were excitable, loud, confident, and in your face, but in an engaging and good-humored way, waving hands, gesticulating, bending, bowing, and spinning as they talked, haggled, hassled, gossiped, and sang. Like the people, the city itself competed tirelessly for your attention and ear with its unbroken din of car horns and buses and trucks without mufflers, radios blasting from windows and open storefronts and hawkers hawking, babies crying, jackhammers pounding. Everywhere you looked Accra worked to catch and hold your eye with bright, busy color—the tie-dyed and beautifully woven wraps on the women and their elaborately coiled, braided, and beaded hairstyles, glossy black, hatlike structures as precarious as wedding cakes; the Chinese bicycles repainted in gaudy colors; the jammed minivans called tro-tros, the dazzling heaps of fruits and vegetables in the Makola market; and the barbershop signs with crude, hand-painted portraits of black men wearing spiffy Detroit-style haircuts called “747 Wave” and “Barracuda Zip” and “Concord Up.” I liked the street food, especially keli-weli—savory little chunks of plantain fried in palm oil and flavored with ginger and hot peppers and served on a banana leaf—and even grew fond of the culinary leftovers from colonial days, a cup of hot Milo in the morning and for lunch at the office a thick sandwich of Laughing Cow cheese and the spongy white bread that Zack, just to get on my nerves, liked to call bimbo bread.
Never much of a cook, evenings I dined alone and mostly in little hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the neighborhood, where I favored the chopped-spinach dish called kontumbre and fish and rice jollof and the thick, darkly spiced stews. And I liked smoking the very strong Ghanaian marijuana. It was called bingo and sometimes wee, sold by a dealer named Bush Doctor, who hung out by the pool at the Golden Tulip. Zack bought it by the pound and, whenever he motored off to the backcountry on one of his art-buying jaunts, he carried enough with him to fill a tobacco pouch, leaving the rest carelessly behind at the apartment in a quart jam jar. Those nights when he was away, I’d dip into his jar, roll myself a pencil-size joint with tissue paper stripped off the foil liner of a cigarette pack, get sky high in a single swoop, and sit out on the balcony, hidden in darkness, and watch the thronged street below as if ensconced in a private box at Shakespeare’s Globe in seventeenth-century London.
But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models—those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality—and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.
Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely he wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.
It seemed to me, however, that at bottom nothing had changed. Despite the beauty and energy of Accra, when I looked beyond its exoticism to the day-to-day reality of people’s lives, I saw that they were made poor and weak so that I could be rich and powerful; they watched their babies shrivel in their arms so that my children, should I ever want to bear them, could be inoculated against the plagues and run in the sun and someday go to Harvard. I could no more alter my relationship with the Africans who surrounded me in Ghana than I’d been able in the United States to alter my relationship with the Americans whose African ancestors had been enslaved and shipped to the New World. In the United States I’d been stuck with being white; in Africa I was stuck with being American.
And while this was not a problem for Zack, for me there was no morally acceptable response to it, other than guilt. Which, to be honest, was not a problem for me, even though it alienated me even farther from Zack. Over the years, I had learned to live with guilt and had even come to embrace it, for I was the strictly engineered product of an old New England puritan line, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with my parents. With my father in particular, who believed in his bones that one’s consciousness of guilt led straight to good works and awareness of God. One’s awareness of guilt was a barometer of one’s virtue. Absence of that awareness led straight to
sinful self-indulgence and damnation. And unlike feelings of mere regret or remorse, which mainly work to separate people from one another, feelings of guilt, thanks to my father’s teachings, had always felt warmly humanizing to me. Even when I was a child, it was guilt that had let me join the species. And there in Africa, for the first time in years, those feelings emerged in a pure, de-racialized stream. It was all about class, I decided, not race, and I dove into the stream and swam as if born to it.
I knew I seemed cold to Zack. I couldn’t help it. His presence numbed me, as if by anesthesia. Whenever he bragged about how much money he made buying and selling Ghanaian art, I merely sniffed and turned away, and when in response he swarmed all over me with explanations and rationalizations, I could not bother to answer. I was a bitch.
Finally, there came the night that we both had been secretly waiting for. He’d shown up unexpectedly at the apartment where, having thought he was off to buy art, I’d gotten stoned and was sitting out on the balcony, blissfully watching the show below. I had seen him drive up in his van, but felt too heavy and thick bodied to move or put out the joint. He went straight to his bedroom, and changed his shirt for a fresh one. As he started back out he caught a whiff of the sticky sweet smoke from the balcony and followed his nose.
“Where’d you get the wee? Any good?” he asked, laughing and ruffling my hair affectionately. He plucked the joint from my fingers and took a hard hit. “You been copping my shit?”
“Once in a while.”
He laughed and handed back the joint. “Just don’t leave me an empty jar, that’s all. You oughta get outa this pad more. You’re gonna dry up and turn into one of those gray, sour-faced old ladies sitting on their verandas. Maybe you oughta get laid, for chrissakes,” he said. “C’mon, I’m heading over to Afrikiko’s. Let’s get juiced, do some dancing, and I’ll introduce you to some people.”
Afrikiko’s was a small, dim bar on Liberation Avenue where American expats sometimes hung out and traded job and housing information and bought and sold drugs, so I knew what kind of people he meant. His friends. Deadbeat dads on the lam, Black Panthers under indictment in the States, dope-smoking white Rastafarians who’d spent too much time in Jamaica. But he was right, I needed to get laid.
The place was crowded with men, most of whom were non-Africans, and a small number of women, most of whom were Africans. We grabbed a table in a corner, and Zack ordered us each a Gulder. When the waitress brought the beers and we’d taken a sip and had visually cruised the bar and hadn’t seen anyone Zack recognized or anyone I was in the slightest curious about or eager to meet, I suddenly, without forethought, blurted out, “I’m splitting, Zack.”
“We just got here. You are weird.”
“No, I mean splitting from Accra. From Ghana.”
He studied me for a moment. “Yeah, well, I kind of figured that’s what was up. You’re ready to cop a plea and go home to Mommy and Daddy. You’ve had that look for weeks, man. I can read it.” He lighted a cigarette, held up his empty Gulder bottle, and waved again for another. “Yeah, no shit. You and Mark Rudd and all the other wunderkinds. You guys bob up at press conferences with famous liberal lawyers at your side after making secret deals with federal prosecutors because you’re worried about turning thirty.”
“I don’t mean that, going aboveground. Besides, I’m already thirty-four. No, Zack, I’m just splitting. Splitting off from you. Going it alone from here on.”
“That’s not your style. There are followers and there are leaders,” he pronounced. “You, you’re a follower, believe me. Bernardine, Kathy, Tom, Bill Ayers, even Mark—I mean, they’re leaders, man. But you, you are not,” he said. “Me neither, if you want to know the truth,” he added and shrugged, as if he didn’t much care.
“Maybe I don’t have to be a follower or a leader. Maybe I can be something else.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I don’t know. A loner. Myself.”
“A loner!” He snickered. “Yourself. Yeah, well, good luck. It’s a little late for that, I think.” The waitress finally brought him his Gulder, and he unfolded his long legs and stood as if to say goodbye. He paid her, picked up his drink, and crossed the room to another table, where a pair of white kids with matted brown dreadlocks were playing dominoes. Turning his back to me, he drank and smoked and from his great height watched them play.
I started to get up from the table, when suddenly Zack turned and strode over to me, his face red and fisted. “Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Fine.”
I sat, and he looked evenly past my mask and into my eyes, as if about to confess that all these years he’d been in love with me. Or all these years he’d hated me. Instead, he said, “You’re here on false premises, Hannah, you know that?”
“No shit.”
“No, I mean it. I’m gonna tell you something you won’t like hearing, but if you’re set on leaving you probably oughta know it.”
“So tell.”
“You think you had to get out of New Bedford and leave the country, that you had no choice. You think it’s because you got caught in a stupid crossfire between me and some very heavy black dudes, et cetera, and it was the only way for you to protect Carol and her kid.”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not true.”
“It’s not true? What’s not?”
“No. The truth is, I shot myself.”
“You what?”
“I shot myself. By accident. Did it with my own fucking gun, too, trying to stash it under the seat of my cab.”
I looked away and pretended I hadn’t heard him.
“There never was any black dudes or SLA. Or whatever, Black Liberation Army. I mean, there was, there is, but I never knew them, not personally. I only heard about them from some Weather guys in New York.”
“Why, Zack? Why’d you blame black men?”
“I don’t know. Shit, I guess I thought it would impress you if you believed I was tight with them. I bought the gun in New Hampshire, actually, at one of those roadside guns ’n’ ammo shops, and carried it around in the cab in case some jerk tried to rob me. Then I figured I better learn how to use it, so I drove out to some woods on the other side of Plymouth one night to practice with it. I shot off a bunch of bullets, then got worried about the noise and local cops, so I reloaded the damn thing and when I leaned down and tried to shove it back under the seat of my cab, I shot myself. I guess I forgot to put the safety on.” He shook his head at the memory. “Pathetic.”
“And you’re telling me this now? Jesus, why now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In case maybe you want to go home, I guess. You know, to Carol. To the States. And the truth is, the longer you’re here, the more guilty I feel about it. So in a way I’m glad you’re splitting. I mean, it pisses me off, but it gives me a chance to sort of clear my conscience.”
“But why did you come to me? When you shot yourself, I mean. Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?”
“I’d bought the gun with a phony ID,” he said and smiled wanly. “I was underground, babe. Remember? Like you.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. I wasn’t angry, that’s certain. After all, he’d given me exactly what I’d wanted and hadn’t dared to ask for. He’d provided me with an excuse to abandon Carol, her child, the New Bedford apartment, my crummy job at Peter Bent Brigham, my sordid and lowly role in the Weather Underground—everything that had become an intolerable burden to me. And along with the excuse, he’d handed me a plane ticket to Africa, a place located as far from my burden as I could have imagined. Here in Africa, I’d enjoyed his protection and advice, and he’d laid his old Africa hand onto my shoulder just heavily enough to make me capable in short order of shrugging it off. And now the dear foolish man was telling me that I was free to abandon him, too. Go on, babe, split. You want to be a loner now? Go ahead, do it. Do it without guilt, without embarrassmen
t, without regret. You’re free, babe, free as a fucking bird.
I should have said, Thank you, Zack, a thousand times I thank you. Instead, I said nothing. I simply got up from the table, turned towards the door, and left my old life and entered a new life, as if walking from one empty room into another.
Chapter II
OR ENTERING A DARKENING SKY. And I was following the sun into it, flying like a petrel out along the westering Atlantic coast of Ghana towards Liberia, a tiny country wedged between Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, a place I knew not at all, where I had not a single friend or acquaintance to turn to, no old Africa hand to aid and abet me in my flight. I had little more than a man’s name, Woodrow Sundiata. And all I knew of him was that he was an assistant minister of public health in the government of President William Tolbert and had studied business administration in the U.S. and was said to welcome the arrival in Liberia of English-speaking foreigners with medical training of any sort.
Some weeks earlier, as so often happened, I’d found myself alone one afternoon in the NYU lab office in Accra with no work to do. Bored and restless, I’d opened a file folder marked “Confidential” and had cruised casually through a lengthy correspondence on official stationery between a Mr. Sundiata and my Ghanaian employers, along with copies of letters exchanged between Mr. Sundiata and my employers’ American bosses at NYU, including memoranda and cables to and from both employers and bosses concerning the good use to which the directors of the NYU blood plasma lab might put this mid-level West African official who was evidently eager to provide exclusive access to Liberia’s large population of chimpanzees, both in the wild and captive, in exchange for American-trained medical personnel and supplies.
Such an arrangement could eventually present us with a unique opportunity to obtain at relatively low cost a significant number of animal subjects without violating ITTA regulations and without alerting our competitors to this abundant new source of animal plasma. As we understand the situation in Monrovia, we are to provide Mr. Sundiata’s ministry with a few nurses and/or laboratory assistants on renewable six-month contracts, with housing costs and salary to be covered by our New York office, and a single shipment of sterile syringes and miscellaneous antibiotics (quantities yet to be determined). In return, the subject animals are thereafter to be placed effectively under our control. Please explore the matter further at your first opportunity. And confirm the above assumptions re: our anticipated costs …