Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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The night I walked out on Zack at Afrikiko’s and abandoned the reality we’d more or less shared since college, I went straight back to the apartment, sat down, and, before I could change my mind, composed a letter to the Liberian assistant minister of public health, asking for a job interview, and the next morning posted it to him. Within a week, I had my answer.
ALL THESE MANY YEARS later, my first meeting with Woodrow still remains vividly clear to me. A ceiling fan turned slowly, stirring the humid air, but not cooling it. My body had been wet with sweat since the moment the plane from Accra landed at Robertsfield Airport. I entered the shabby, disordered office, self-conscious and anxious about my appearance. Compared with the heat and the nearly suffocating humidity here in Monrovia, the weather in Accra had been positively balmy. My hair was frizzled, and my white cotton blouse was wrinkled, and I knew that I had huge, gray sweat circles under my arms. Rivulets trickled between my breasts and down my sides. I felt fat, fleshy.
Seated at his desk, he flattened his hands and splayed his long, slender fingers and slowly, deliberately lifted his face to meet mine. Woodrow Sundiata, Assistant Minister of Public Health of the Republic of Liberia. He was a small, tight-bodied man with a large, nearly bald head, his complexion as dark as a bassoon. He was not a conventionally handsome man, but to me then and there he was sexy. His eyes were light brown, the color of tea with milk. I guessed his age—accurately, it would later turn out—to be forty. He was wearing a pale blue, short-sleeved guayabera shirt, starched and pressed, a heavy gold Rolex on his left wrist, and on his right a bracelet of tiny, white cowrie shells strung on braided leather. No wedding band, I observed.
That first day I saw him as more like an old-time samurai than a modern, post-colonial, West African bureaucrat. It was a first impression that would hold up for several months. There was a visible tension between what I took to be his passionate nature and the means by which he kept it in check—he stood up in a single motion, as if caught by surprise, although Miss Dawn Carrington had been twice announced to him, by phone from his outer office and then by his personal assistant, a young, very tall, very black man named Mr. Satterthwaite, who had showed me in and quickly left us alone.
Woodrow Sundiata stepped back against the latticed window, clasped his hands together high on his chest, and made a little bow. He moved with the confidence of a man used to being in charge of situations and people, I thought, a familiar type to me. He looked directly into my eyes, nowhere else, as if everything he needed to know about me was revealed there. Then, abruptly, he looked away, gestured towards a chair next to his desk, and said, “Please sit down, Miss Musgrave.”
Musgrave! I was suddenly dizzy and sat down quickly, more to keep my bearings than to be polite. I stammered, “I’m sorry, but … but why… why do you say that name?” I was sweating even more heavily than before and had trouble breathing, as much from alarm as the heat and the wet weight of the air, which seemed to have been doubled by his words. Miss Musgrave! It had been more than five years since a stranger called me by my father’s last name. Even underground no one called me by that name, except for Zack, and then only when trying to antagonize me. Was I no longer underground then? Was my secret out? Just like that?
Relief and fear washed over me in successive waves, each nullifying the other. I felt neither emotion on its own, although I knew as a fact, as data, almost, that I was both immensely relieved and very frightened. No, what I felt was simple, mind-numbing shock. Shock at finding myself suddenly no longer underground, for that is what his calling me Miss Musgrave meant. It was now a fact. I said to myself simply, This is amazing!
“Yes, well, the American embassy in Monrovia, as you no doubt know, keeps track of American citizens residing in West Africa,” he said and slipped me a weary, knowing smile and a conspiratorial sigh. “We help them; they help us. Though we, of course, have somewhat different priorities and concerns than do they.” His accent was almost Caribbean, British with a musical, lower-register lilt. “Would you prefer that I call you Miss Carrington then?” he asked.
“No. No, that’s fine. I’m a little … confused, however. And surprised, I guess. That is, that you … that I was allowed to enter the country, I mean.”
“I imagine so. But all appearances to the contrary, Miss Carrington, and in spite of our ancient and mostly honorable, historical connections to the United States, we don’t work for them. And from the file we received, it didn’t seem that your Miss Hannah Musgrave was of any particular danger to the Republic of Liberia,” he said. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
He laughed. He had a pencil-thick gap in the middle of his upper front teeth which was strikingly attractive to me. “Oh, either one. Are you a danger to us? Are you Hannah Musgrave?”
“No,” I said. “To the first question. And yes to the second.” It was true, I posed no danger to anyone. Not anymore, not after today. Except possibly to myself. And in spite of Dawn Carrington’s name in my passport and on my Ghanaian exit visa and my Liberian entry visa, I was indeed Hannah Musgrave. And loved hearing this man say it. My name. And wanted him to say it again. Miss Musgrave. Hannah Musgrave.
We sat opposite each other in silence for a long moment, while I tried letting the name cover my body and my mind. But it wouldn’t fit over or around me. It pinched and pulled and seemed too small, as if cut for some other woman’s body and mind, a woman who was practically a stranger to me. I was no longer the Hannah Musgrave who’d gone underground in 1970, who’d disappeared from the world of parents, town, college, and university, where she once upon a time had played a central role, or at least a known and recognized role. And I could no more return now to being the old, abandoned Hannah than I could leap forward in time and become the new, nicely recovered Hannah, thank you very much, who tells this story these many years later. I might have been once again dressing myself in Hannah Musgrave’s name, but the woman who was born wearing it was gone, apparently forever, as if she were the unexpected victim of a rare, fast-acting, fatal disease. But if I wasn’t that woman anymore—and was no longer Dawn Carrington—then who was I? Desperately, that afternoon in Assistant Minister Sundiata’s office, I struggled to become the thirty-four-year-old Miss Musgrave freshly arrived in the city of Monrovia from Accra in search of a job, any kind of job, Mr. Sundiata, and housing, any sort of shelter will do, and intelligent company, for I am utterly alone, cut off from all the communities to which I previously belonged. Oh, and yes, thank you, I would be pleased to have dinner with you this evening, sir.
“My assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, will drive you to your quarters, so you can get settled. Perhaps you’d like to take a short nap and freshen up a bit? I’ll come ’round at seven o’clock, if that’s not too early.”
“No, that’s fine,” I said. “But… I’m a little confused. Look, I’m sorry to ask, but I have to. How can I be sure that you’re not…?” I paused. “All right, let me say it. How can I know that you won’t turn me over to the American embassy?”
He smiled. “To tell you the truth, you can’t. But really, Miss Musgrave—may I call you Hannah?”
“Yes! Please do.”
“It’s a lovely name,” he said and flashed his gap-toothed smile. “Yes, Hannah, you wouldn’t do us much good wasting away in an American jail, now would you?” He stood and took my hand in his and examined it, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss it. “You’re not married, are you.” It was more a statement than a question.
“No.”
“And you’ve come here alone. That’s quite something. What about your American companion in Accra?” He glanced back at an open file folder on his desk. “Zachary Procter, he calls himself. Not his real name, of course.”
“No, it’s his real name. He’s still in Accra. In fact, I don’t think Zack even knows where I am. I don’t think he knows I’ve left Ghana. I… I’m quite alone.”
“That’s good. Good for him, I mean. Because I don’t see how we coul
d be as … lenient with Mr. Procter as we are being with you. But let me assure you, Hannah,” he said, and now he did indeed kiss my hand, a gesture that was both comical and elegant, making me smile. “You are no longer alone.”
WOODROW’S OFFICE in the Ministry of Health was located off Tubman Boulevard at the southeastern edge of Monrovia in a freshly built, three-storey, cinder-block cube attached to the John F. Kennedy Medical Center. His assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, drove the ministry Mercedes, a ten-year-old, velvety, dark gray sedan in immaculate condition, and I sat in air-conditioned ease in the back and gazed at the city as we passed through it. Earlier, coming in from Robertsfield Airport some fifty-five kilometers south of the city—packed into an antique Plymouth sedan with six other passengers picked up along the way until I was finally dropped off at the ministry—I had been so distracted by the heat and so anxious and tentative about my reasons for being in this place, this city, this country, this continent, that I barely noticed where I was, and if the driver or one of my sweating, placid, half-asleep fellow passengers had told me that I’d been returned to Accra by mistake or had been magically transported to New Bedford, Massachusetts, I might have believed him. That’s how disoriented I’d become since leaving Accra. But as I saw clearly now, I certainly was not in New England. And Monrovia was not Accra, and Ghana was not Liberia.
In those days, Monrovia, the capital, was still lovely, if somewhat bizarre looking, at least to my innocent eyes. Innocent, that is, of Liberia’s odd history. The principal buildings of government—the copper-domed capitol; the bright, white palace of the president; the supreme court building; the treasury building; and so on; each pointed out with obvious pride by Satterthwaite as we drove into the city from the ministry offices on the outskirts—were miniaturized versions of the same structures in Washington, D.C., as if down-at-the-heels country cousins were putting on big-city airs. Bisecting the center of the city, its spine, was Broad Street, its two lanes divided by a grassy, parklike island and bordered on both sides by towering trees. Here, along the meandering ridge of Cape Mesurado—the rumpled, densely populated, yet still green peninsula where the Mesurado River meets the sea—white wood-frame houses with wide verandahs and floor-to-ceiling shuttered windows sprawled behind neatly hedged and trimmed front yards garnished with meticulously tended flower beds. Scarlet, yellow, and pink bougainvilleas sloshed against porch steps and over walkways, and lawn sprinklers carved glittery pale arcs in the sunlight. The wide main streets and sidewalks were free of trash and cleanly swept, and at nearly every crossing a steepled Protestant church kept the faith. Unpaved side streets and rutted alleys cut downhill from the ridge into brush-filled gullies, where, as we passed, I glimpsed clusters of one-room shanties, small shops, and narrow, single-storey shotgun houses hand built from cast-off lumber and recycled construction materials. The neighborhoods of the poor. But the poor did not look all that poor. As if the men had gone off early to steady jobs someplace else, almost all of the people I saw down there were babies, small children, and women neatly dressed in cotton skirts and blouses and brilliantly colored traditional wraps and headdresses, adults and children alike carrying something—water in plastic tubs, baskets of groceries and garden produce, firewood, bunches of bananas, a chicken.
West of Broad and strung along United Nations Drive towards the cliffs that overlooked the sea were the luxury hotels, the Ambassador and the Mamba Point, half hidden behind high walls and palms. Along Broad and for several blocks off it, public and commercial buildings preened, many of them fronted by tall, neo-classical columns—the Liberian national bank and branches of U.S. and British banks, the municipal police headquarters, the central post office, the Rivoli Cinema, a few small hotels, public utilities, and most imposing of all, the yellow-brick Masonic temple. Oddly, the streets and buildings of Monrovia and the overall ambience of the city, despite its size and sprawl and mix of architectural styles, didn’t so much suggest late-twentieth-century West Africa as it did a 1940s sleepy Southern county seat; and the city might have been a set for a sentimental movie about postwar Dixie, To Kill a Mockingbird maybe—except that all the actors in the movie, even the extras, were black.
In their dress and demeanor and comportment, and with their slightly diluted coloration, the citizens of Monrovia looked more African-American than African, which in a sense they were, although I knew nothing of that yet. And it was the bourgeois, small-town African-Americans of the 1940s and ’50s that they resembled, not of the 1970s, certainly not of today. In Monrovia, even as recently as twenty-five years ago, when the good citizens left their homes, they dressed up. The middle-class men wore seersucker or linen suits and neckties and sported homburgs or Panama hats, and the women wore respectable calf-length, flower-patterned dresses and white gloves, and even carried parasols. Their children walked hand in hand in simple, neatly pressed school uniforms. Occasionally, one saw a batch of Liberian soldiers bully through the traffic in a U.S. troop carrier or jeep, and one remembered the Cold War and Liberia’s special allegiance to the U.S. One remembered that the country was our man in Africa, as it were. One saw more heavily armed police officers directing traffic than there were vehicles on the streets; and one noticed cadres of uniformed cops with automatic weapons providing security at the banks and other public and corporate buildings; and one recalled the eagerness with which the three-term president, William Tolbert, and his predecessor, the seven-term president Tubman, both men much admired in Washington, had peddled their beautiful country to foreign investors like entertaining and gracious pimps.
But this was before the bloody coups and the civil war—when the population of the city was still made up almost entirely of civilians. The porticoed homes along the ridge were still owned by the descendants of nineteenth-century African-American settlers, and the people living in the gullies and on the side streets were the descendants of the native Africans the former had displaced, tribal villagers who’d run out of arable land and had come to the big city for work. Down by the harbor nestled the shops and warehouses and homes of the Indian and Middle-Eastern traders and merchants who for decades had been migrating there from Uganda and Rwanda. Everyone seemed to be getting by and getting along. And here and there, striding impatiently through the crowd as if looking for the exit, came the few foreigners, who were white and either in Liberia on business or else attached to one of the embassies—the main one being the American Embassy, pointed out to me by Satterthwaite where UN Drive bent north and east towards the Mesurado River and the bay.
“That the American headquarters,” he said, nodding in the direction of a palatial white estate surrounded by high, razor-wired, cinder-block walls. The Stars-and-Stripes drooped from a flagpole, and a spindly forest of antennas and several large satellite dishes scanned the skies from the flat, palisaded roof of the main building. “CIA, FBI, the Marines—all of ’em in there,” Satterthwaite said, as if to himself, and chuckled. “Busy, busy, busy.”
“Oh,” was all I said. And thought: My country, my enemy.
I knew almost nothing then of the history of Liberia and its deep and abiding connections to my country, my enemy. Piecemeal and from various sources I gradually discovered where I had landed. Liberia is a tiny nation, barely the size of Tennessee and shaped like a thick-bodied lizard, and for generations has given the appearance of being of no newsworthy importance to anyone not actually in residence there. There is fertile land for growing rice and other tropical crops; and rubber, of course, but not much; and beneath the jungle floor a few small caches of diamonds, but hardly enough to sell off or trade away, it was thought. And were it not for the end of the Cold War and, within a year or two, the discovery of a deep and wide vein of diamonds running the length and breadth of the land all the way into Sierra Leone and Guinea, the country might have remained—except to its residents and academic and U.S. State Department specialists—an all-but-forgotten backwater, a misplaced packet of towns and jungle villages and one small city squeezed between its
larger, richer, more socially elaborate and cantankerous neighbors on either side, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.
To get to the beginning of the modern history of Liberia and to understand its peculiarities, you have to return to the early nineteenth century, when religious, financial, and racial interests in the United States neatly converged over the idea of installing a man in West Africa. In the early 1820s, white Americans, having noticed the presence of a growing number of ex-slaves on the streets of northern cities, began to realize for the first time that they were facing not just a slavery problem, but a race problem as well. And while the first problem was political—merely the price a republic had to pay for the economic advantages of owning a self-perpetuating, constitutionally protected slave-labor force of nearly three million people—the second, the “race problem,” was moral, emotional, cultural, and, I suppose, sexual. Its dimensions were mythic and deeply threatening to most white Americans’ dearly held view of themselves as a morally and racially pure, not to say, superior, people. Besides, the presence of growing numbers of freed black Americans living more or less like white people in cities like Philadelphia and New York was having an unsettling effect on the slave population in the South. Before you knew it, the free blacks would want the vote. Before you knew it, they’d join with the radical abolitionists and in some states would come to outnumber the pro-slavers.