Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/russell-banks/page,10,61269-the_darling.html
Thoughtful white and some black Americans asked themselves, Why not send the freed slaves back to Africa? Why not create an alliance between northern white Christians and anti-slavery advocates and slaveholders from New York State to Georgia, and give the already free and manumitted blacks some seed money, an ax, and a Bible? And why not raise government and philanthropic funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved blacks—especially the more troublesome ones—give them a one-way ticket to Africa in exchange for their freedom, and let those people go?
Baptist and Methodist missionaries on reconnaissance had already spotted a corner of coastal West Africa overlooked by the British, French, and Portugese slave traders that perfectly suited these purposes. It was a large tract of impenetrable jungle, mangrove swamps, and malaria-infested estuaries, a plot of super-heated, saturated ground that no one else wanted—except, of course, for the fifteen or sixteen tribes of illiterate, black-skinned savages who happened to be living there unencumbered by legal deed or title. The word Liberia was not on any map, though surely the native people had a name for the region and for the Mandingo tribal village situated conveniently for coastal trade between the Europeans and the tribes from the hinterlands on a high peninsula at the seaside terminus of a large river. Why not ship forty or fifty thousand mostly literate, nominally Christian black-skinned Americans overseas to Africa, then? Why not send them from the fatherland to the motherland, from the home of their masters to the home of their ancestors, tell them this land is your land, and let them make the place safe for Christianity, civilization, and capitalism?
The place was perfect. The first American settlers—several hundred Christian freedmen and -women and recently manumitted slaves—came ashore in 1825. They named the Mandingo trading village on the peninsula Monrovia, after James Monroe, the fifth American president, who had been an early sponsor of the notion of return. And thus, in short order, was established the first U.S. colony. Soon to be known as the Republic of Liberia, it was organized from the start to operate not as a straightforward colony, but as a covert surrogate, clamped tight to the white-skinned leg of its North American founding fatherland. Consequently, as early as the 1840s, the Americans, unlike their European cousins, had installed in West Africa a homegrown, self-replacing class of overseers—a loyal ruling class made up of tens of thousands of freed and escaped ex-slaves who’d been making Philadelphia, New York, and Boston so scary, and nearly as many manumitted slaves, almost all of them from the South, who’d been offered and had accepted banishment in place of slavery. And for a long time, even to today, the arrangement paid the investors back handsomely.
After the Civil War, of course, it grew increasingly difficult to convince African-Americans to relocate to the soppy, equatorial jungles of West Africa, when they could homestead instead in Kansas or the Oklahoma Territory. Recruitment by the American Colonization Societies, as the founders were called, fell off. In Liberia, however, a diminished ability to recruit new settlers turned out not to be a major handicap. By the 1870s the black American settlers were running things—mainly from the coastal towns of Monrovia and Buchanan—efficiently and ruthlessly enough to generate a wide range of exports at little or no cost to the Stateside importers. Not only was this a feel-good program for white Christians in the United States, but also the resident tribes of savages in the nation were proving to be nearly as economically advantageous as the enslaved African-Americans had been back before the Civil War. The black Americans in Africa had duplicated nicely the old Southern and Caribbean plantation overseer system. It had worked there; it could work in Africa, too. No reason for the whip hand to be white.
By the end of the nineteenth century, just as in parts of the deep South and the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth, one percent of the population of Liberia for all intents and purposes owned the other ninety-nine percent, and a huge chunk of the profits generated by the back-breaking labor of that ninety-nine percent went straight to the board rooms of America. Where, after the usual executive skim, it got distributed to the white Christian shareholders whose parents and grandparents had put up the original investment. When you pay for the seeds, you get to keep most of the crop. That’s why they call it seed money.
Until the turn of the century, the main exports were rice, lumber, spices, bananas, cocoa, and from the hinterlands, ivory. In the twentieth century, with the development of the auto industry, the main crop became rubber. But things change. Not everything, of course; principles of exploitation and use remain the same. Where once there had been enough black-skinned savages and rubber to put treads on every motor vehicle in the West and enough banana trees to put a banana on every plate, by the late 1950s, cheaper, closer-to-home supply sources for both rubber and tropical fruit had been located. The Firestone, B. F. Goodrich, and United Fruit ships turned towards Central and South America and Hawaii, and our man in Africa got left behind.
After that, when it came to Liberia, the Americans seemed interested only in the Cold War. If you happened to be a member of the old boss class—if you were one of those Liberians who, since they couldn’t distinguish themselves from the savages by skin color, had turned to calling themselves Americo-Liberians—this wasn’t all bad. Having become the true inheritors of the post-bellum mentality of the grandchildren of the old southern slave holders, the Americos were mostly right-wing, conservative Protestants who believed in the moral and cultural superiority of their gene code, which they had inherited from their African-American ancestors. Consequently, to the delight of U.S. politicians and State Department officials, when the Cold War arrived, the Americos turned out to be as anti-Communist as Barry Goldwater, making the Cold War years, for the Americo ruling class, boom years. Foreign aid fluttered down from the skies like manna onto the wide verandahs and lawns along Broad Street from Mamba Point to Tubman Boulevard, missing altogether the rest of the country, where millions of increasingly disgruntled savages lived in near-starvation in mud-hut jungle villages. This, then, in the spring of 1976, was Liberia, the country to which I had fled.
SATTERTHWAITE AND I stepped from the hushed, air-conditioned interior of the Mercedes into dense, wet heat and a cloudburst of cacophonous sound. It came from a distance. It came from a place out of our sight, but loudly surrounding us, as if blasted from speakers hidden in the branches of the cotton tree spreading overhead—an arrhythmic, sustained slamming of thick flesh against steel, crossed by loud, high-pitched, rising screeches. Not human, not animal, something in between; and not in pain or anger, but something of both.
After a moment, the banging and screeches faded to a held silence. Then abruptly they returned, louder than before. Satterthwaite gestured vaguely in the direction of a large, rusting Quonset hut at the rear of the walled-in compound. “Seems like nobody here today, ’cept them chimps,” he mumbled.
Close by, facing the red-dirt yard, was a squat, four-square building of unpainted cinder-block that looked like a military interrogation center and that Satterthwaite said housed the administration office and lab. He told me to wait by the car and entered the building, returning at once with a ring of keys, which he handed to me. “S’posed to be some kind of caretaker guarding the place alla time,” he said crossly and led me around the main building to a wide, tree-shaded yard behind it, where three small wood-frame cottages with front porches were located side by side. Here the sounds of the chimpanzees were slightly muffled, and for the first time since stepping from the car, I could focus my attention and began to see and hear what was in front of me.
“Them was small-small Firestone houses built for the native foremen. We got ’em moved an’ set ’em up special for the Americans who run the blood lab,” Satterthwaite explained.
Inside, the units were identical—a single room cleanly swept and minimally furnished with a narrow, stripped bed, a table and two chairs, a kitchen counter with a hot plate, a few plastic buckets, enough dishes and utensils for two people, and a closet-sized bathroom. All three buildings were empty and ev
idently unclaimed. I chose the cottage farthest from the chimps.
“Can’t promise water or ’lectric full time,” Satterthwaite said, smiling. “But mostly it comes. I’ll check on that caretaker fellow,” he added, then dashed back to the air-conditioned comfort of the Mercedes and drove from the compound slowly, almost delicately, as if hoping to be seen by passersby.
I dropped my duffel in a corner. My worldly possessions, entire. Then lay down on the cot, exhausted from travel and the relentless heat and the several shocks of the day, and tried to sleep. But it was impossible. The screeches and banging of metal from the Quonset hut were like an ongoing accident, a slow-motion highway pileup. The racket frightened and confused me. I couldn’t stop hearing it, and couldn’t get used to it either. I wanted only to replay my meeting with Woodrow Sundiata and savor the details, ruminate on their implications. What was wrong with the chimps? Why were they so agitated? Weren’t there people to take care of them, to feed and quiet them down? I’d never seen chimpanzees in the flesh, only on television and in circuses wearing cute costumes—grinning, mischievous little creatures that made us laugh and shake our heads, amazed by their uncanny resemblance to humans and relieved by the difference. But these creatures sounded like huge and powerful beasts. They sounded violent and insane.
I tried covering my head with the thin pillow, but it did no good. Finally, I got up and went into the musty, windowless bathroom, closed the door, and stood in darkness inside the shower stall with the plastic curtain drawn shut on me—and at last could no longer hear them. After a few moments, not so oddly, my thoughts drifted back for the first time in a long time to a rainy night in 1967, standing in line for a movie in Durham, North Carolina, at a small art-house theater. The theater was located across the street from the county jail, a high, dark-brick building with bars in the third-storey windows facing the street and the line of moviegoers below. I’d been sent to North Carolina to help organize SDS chapters at Duke and Chapel Hill, and I remembered the movie—it was Easy Rider, of all things—because it was the only movie I saw that entire fall and I came away loathing it. While I waited in line for the theater to open, a few of the prisoners, men barely visible to the moviegoers on the sidewalk below, started shouting down at us, perhaps at first as a joke or to harass us, hollering obscenities and curses. Hey, you assholes! Motherfuckers! Hey, you cocksuckers, suck on this! And so on. Then other prisoners joined in. I imagined that all of them were black, although surely some were not. In seconds there were dozens of them calling down to us, and their hollers had turned into wild, uncontrolled, enraged screams, and they were banging metal objects against the bars, their tin cups, I supposed, or maybe just their fists—a clamorous, outpouring of anger that so shocked and frightened me that I wanted to break out of line and flee down the rain-soaked street and into the night.
When at last the door to the theater opened and we were able to get inside, the sudden silence of the lobby was even more terrible than the noise outside. It was as if we had become prisoners ourselves. We looked around the lobby at the posters, inhaled the familiar, friendly smell of fresh popcorn and candy, caught one another’s scared gazes, recognized them as our own, and quickly looked elsewhere.
Lost in the memory of that night, I slowly sank to the cool, dry floor of the shower stall—when suddenly something with claws darted across my ankle and calf. I half leapt, half fell from the stall onto the bathroom floor, pushed open the door to the outer room to let in light, and looked carefully back. A brown rat the size of a man’s shoe stared at me from a dark corner of the shower stall. I reached around for something to club it with, something to protect myself from it. Nothing. The bathroom was bare—just a toilet without a seat, an empty plastic pail for a sink. And then I saw the cockroaches. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, though surely they’d been there all along, watching me. Despite the sweltering heat, my body went cold, as shiny, dark-brown packs of brooch-sized cockroaches moved in undulating waves across the walls and over the crackled, lime-green linoleum floor. Scrambling to my feet, I heard again the undiminished screams of the chimps and the clang and bang of large, hard bodies being hurled relentlessly over and over against the steel bars of cages. It was the noise of bedlam, the cries from a madhouse or a torture chamber.
I ran from the bathroom, slammed the door shut behind me, and leaned against it, breathing hard. Though the room in the fading, evening light was half in darkness, I could now see cockroaches there, too—whole legions of them marching across the cot and pillow where minutes earlier I had lain my head. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Had I been that disoriented, that distracted by fatigue and the noise of the chimpanzees? The insects swarmed over my duffel, scattered from clusters on the kitchen counter, and regrouped on the hot plate. They raced across the dusty surface of the small dresser in the corner. They were everywhere, spreading over the formica-topped table as if spilled from a pail and shuddering over the floor and across the threadbare braided rug—hundreds of cockroaches, thousands, fleeing from my sight into pockets of darkness between walls, behind and beneath furniture, plates, and utensils, as if I had unexpectedly caught them doing a forbidden thing, a black mass or an obscene sexual act.
I held my breath and didn’t move. The cockroaches seemed to do the same, as if watching, waiting for me to attack them or run. I began to tremble, from my hands up my arms to my body and onto my face. I felt my lips purse involuntarily, and my right cheek started to twitch, as if with neuralgia. What is wrong with me? I wondered. Even though alone, I felt embarrassed. But this is the way things are in Africa, I reminded myself. It’s the tropics, for heaven’s sake! What did I expect in a house that’s been empty for weeks or months? I’d had to displace cockroaches and rats before, in my apartment in Accra and before that in dozens of rented rooms and filthy apartments and so-called safe houses in the States, and had disinfected my living quarters, set traps, put out poisons, washed floors with lye and scrubbed counters down with ammonia water. And though the chimps were louder and more raucous than I might have expected, I’d heard laboratory animals before—monkeys and bonobos yelling to be fed at this time of day—and had not been frightened by them, only worried that someone might not be there to feed them on time and clean their cages and change their water.
Slowly, carefully, as if walking on loose sheets of paper, I crossed the room and stepped onto the small open porch. The dirt yard needs sweeping, I noticed. I’ll buy some candles and mosquito coils at the little corner shop we passed coming in, and tonight when I sleep I’ll burn them near the bed. With relief, I saw a bundle of mosquito netting tied to a ceiling hook above the bed. Tomorrow I’ll scrub down the cottage and put out traps and poison. Tomorrow I’ll dispossess these tenants and take over the place, make it my own. I’ll meet the people who are supposed to care for the chimps, and I’ll learn their schedules and tasks, so that I can fill in for them when they’re late or for some reason can’t come in to work. And, in fact, right now I’ll see if I can figure out how to calm the chimps myself somehow. Perhaps all they need is fresh water, and maybe what and how to feed them will be obvious to me. As soon as I can, possibly this very evening, I’ll present myself to the woman who Mr. Sundiata said runs the lab and the man who feeds the chimps and cleans their cages, and they’ll tell me what sort of work I am to do here. I’ll work hard, very hard, and they will quickly find me irreplaceable. I’ll find good friends here, men and women. Liberians speak English, after all, and they’re said to like and admire Americans. It will be easy and enjoyable. I may call myself Dawn Carrington, or I may say I am Hannah Musgrave, and I’ll make a useful, satisfying, aboveground life for myself here in Liberia. And someday I’ll return to the United States, and at last I’ll see my mother and father again.
These were my thoughts as I crossed the compound and approached the door of the Quonset hut. I neared the windowless building, and the screams of the chimpanzees rose in volume and intensity, as if the animals could somehow see and hear me coming.
The door was padlocked, like the doors to the cottages. I took from my skirt pocket the ring of keys that Satterthwaite had given me and tried the keys at random until one of them snapped the lock open. Removing it, I swung back the heavy door and faced a black wall of impenetrable darkness.
A vegetative stench gushed from the interior and washed over me. It was oily, hot, and dense, like composted fruit mixed with fresh barnyard manure, but cut with an ingredient that I had never smelled before, something acidic and glandular and starkly repellent, like the brain chemicals of a psychopath. The howls and screeches of the chimpanzees and their compulsive, arrhythmic banging against their cages had merged and become a congealed and hardened quantity of sound, as if it were an object, a quarried thing, a room-size block of stone. My eyes grew slightly used to the darkness, enough to make out a light switch on the wall just inside the door. I reached in and flipped it, and the building filled with cold fluorescent light. Then I stepped across the iron threshold and entered.
The barred cages, racked in two layers from the front of the Quonset hut to the rear, were actually not as small as I’d pictured, not as small as the cages they’d used in the lab in Accra. These were the size and dimensions of a large kitchen appliance, a stove or dishwasher. At first I couldn’t see the creatures inside the cages, and for a second I wondered if the cages were empty and all the noise were just a tape-recording being played at high volume, some kind of special effect, as if a bizarre fraud were being carried off here. I looked around the large chamber, half expecting to see a wizard of Oz playing a diabolical noisemaker in the corner. Then I saw the chimpanzees—saw their wild eyes and pink lips and flared, flat nostrils, their almost human faces, their thickly knuckled hands wrapped around the bars, their hunched bodies—and I thought, Oh, my God, they’re much too large for their cages, they’re huge, much bigger than I’d ever imagined. They’re the size of human beings!