Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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There were some who were children, looking stunned and almost comatose, lying in the corners of their cages. Others, with barely enough room to pace a few short, angry steps, back and forth, back and forth, were evidently adolescents. A half-dozen more, full-grown adults—females, I could tell from their huge genitalia—were forced to stand bent over, nearly filling the cages with their bulk. Farther down, I saw four or five even larger adults shaking the bars with terrible force—clearly males, with surprisingly small penises, although I didn’t know why I was surprised and was embarrassed for having noticed at all. The big males spat at me and threw garbage and chunks of their feces in my direction, glowered, and showed me their cavernous, wide-open, nearly toothless mouths. I couldn’t understand. Why were they toothless? Their teeth, their powerful canine teeth, must have been removed, yanked out with pliers. The chimpanzees’ shoulders and chests were scabbed, and they had pulled out patches of hair all over, the young as well as the old. And, good Lord, what a stench of brutality filled that place! The animals were in more physical and emotional pain than I was capable of imagining. Why is this happening? Who has done this?
I could not absorb what I was seeing. It had no meaning. The scene bewildered me, as if it had been contrived by a species other than human, a species as clever as ours, as organized and rational, but demonic. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and stared at the dark faces of the chimpanzees, and I couldn’t stop myself, I suddenly began to weep. I cried for them, certainly, their pain and suffering, and then I wept for the humans who had imprisoned them. And then I felt my stomach knot and unknot, and in confusion I cried for myself. When, suddenly, I felt a touch on my shoulder. The dead weight of a hand. I glanced at my shoulder and saw a black hand with long, slender fingers lying there, and I leapt away from it.
“Ah, forgive me, Hannah. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
It was Woodrow—Mr. Sundiata to me then—facing me with a benign smile. It was the dark-brown face of the man whom in a few short months I would marry, the man whose three sons, in less than two years, I would bear. The husband whom I would deceive and abandon and to whom I would later return. The man who would betray and forsake me and who would later beg for my forgiveness and receive it. The man who would be chopped down and killed before my eyes. You may not believe me, but in those few brief seconds I saw what was coming. It was as if in the darkened room of my future an overhead light had been switched on and immediately, as soon as the room was illuminated, turned off again, dropping the room back into pitch darkness, and though I would remember what I had seen, the way one remembers a week-old dream, I would not glimpse it again until after it was long past and gone.
“I’m a bit early, I know,” Woodrow said, still smiling. “My apologies, dear Hannah. But I wanted to show you a little of our fair city before darkness descends.”
I fell into his arms, weeping freshly, out of control, ashamed of myself and feeling foolish, a silly, weak-kneed American girl falling into the arms of a big, strong African man. But I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t tell him what it was that had made me weep and practically ask him to hold me. I didn’t know if it was the sight of the mutilated, imprisoned chimpanzees that had made me weep or this awful, roach-ridden, rat-infested place. Or the fear of Africa, of being so alone this far from anything or anyone familiar to me. Zack, who had made Africa seem almost friendly and as already known to me as it was to him, was no longer there. I’d come so far away that everyone I had ever known was gone from my life now. Then I thought that perhaps it was the shock and relief from having suddenly found myself no longer living underground. Yes, that’s why I’m weeping, I decided. Replacing my false identity and the fears and comforts that accompanied it with my ill-fitting old identity and its fears and comforts had to be a sharp blow to the psyche. It had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I was reacting to it only now.
Or was it the quickly fading vision of my future?
Or all of these at once?
Woodrow eased me from the building to the yard outside, where it felt comparatively cool. For the first time since entering the building I inhaled deeply. Woodrow drew the heavy door shut behind us, clicked the lock onto the hasp, and walked me slowly towards the waiting car, all the while murmuring into my ear that I was surely exhausted, that I needn’t worry about the chimps. He had roused their attendant, Haddad, from a nap, and the man was on his way over now to feed and water the poor beasts. And a nice air-conditioned ride about the city would revive me, and then, over a leisurely dinner on the terrace of the Mamba Point Hotel overlooking the sea, we would get to know one another better and more personally.
“Hannah, I want you to know that I have decided to take an interest in your situation,” he said. “Does that please you?”
I didn’t answer him. But the truth is it did please me. It pleased me immensely.
FOR THE FIRST few months of our courtship, as in the old days with Zack, I felt that one of us, Woodrow or I, was wearing a mask. But I had no way of knowing which. With Zack, it had been as if both of us peered through eyeholes, so no problem: Zack and I were each two people, and knew it.
Maybe it was this courting business. Over the years I had been involved with many men—not many, actually, even though it’s the sixties and early seventies we’re talking about here, and my twenties. Numerous, let’s say. And I had believed at least twice that I was in love, once for as long as six months, both times wrongly and inconsequentially. They were crushes, infatuations, fixations, maybe, and there’s no point in my going into detail here. The truth is, I had never really been in love. And, perhaps more important, I had never been courted before. This was new and strange and exciting, and although the process confused me, I plunged ahead anyhow.
I wondered if this was how it had been for my mother and father. “When your father and I were courting…” my mother’s illustrations from her youth frequently began, but when it came to matters of the hearts and minds and men and women and the language used to portray them, I was a pure product of my generation and thus hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about.
Two or three times I’d stopped my mother’s story and asked directly, “What do you mean, ‘courting’?”
“You know, dear, when Daddy and I were first together. When he was in med school and I was still at Smith…”
“What do you mean, ‘together’?”
“Well, dating, I guess. And all that. Getting to know one another. The way one does,” she said, her voice rising. “Before one marries, I mean.” Her eyes darted nervously away from my gaze, as if I’d accused her of having done something disgraceful. “Why are you asking this, Hannah? I was only telling a little story.”
Why, indeed? I knew what my mother meant. I knew my mommy’s language, her silences and euphemisms, her code words and coy abbreviations, knew them better than I knew the language of my friends. My mother was right to feel defensive and angry. I was attacking her. But for what? For her timidity concerning the subject of sex, I suppose. For her placid reliance on words like courting and dating, as if they meant the same to every woman of every age and thus could be used politely under any and all circumstances to conceal as much as they revealed.
I wanted to say, Do you mean when you and Daddy were first fucking, Mother? Is that what you’re remembering at the start of your twenty-times-told tale of the day that he took you to meet his parents for the first time? And while you all sat in the parlor—it was a parlor, not a living room, right?—waiting for the maid to call you to lunch, the three of them, Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother Musgrave, silently read, Grandmother from her Bible, Grandfather from the Wall Street Journal, and Daddy from a medical textbook; and you, Mother, sat alone on the wide, hard sofa with your legs crossed primly at the ankles and stared at your lap, silenced by the silence of the others, as if the three of them were not reading but were lost in private prayer.
Courting. And now here I was myself dealing with a man in the same way,
meeting him for lunch and dinner three and four times a week, talking on the telephone almost daily, giving and receiving little gifts, meeting his friends, and soon, soon, he promised, his family, but plenty of time yet for that. I was dealing with Woodrow Sundiata in a way that I knew could only be called courting.
And we weren’t fucking. We were barely kissing. We held hands when walking along the moonlit beach, but rarely in public, and were held in each other’s arms when dancing at the Mamba Point Hotel or at the several government and Masonic balls that Woodrow invited me to. Mostly, though, we talked, talked to one another, talked in the way that is specific to courtship, speaking at first, as all lovers do, through a mask to a mask—long hours of talk that over time, weeks, months, slowly, atom by atom, transformed the mask of the other into an actual face and made one’s own mask as invisible to the wearer as to the viewer. It was how one lost track of the masks and how one came to know oneself anew. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being in love! I get it. You become a new person! A person unknown.
I told him the story of my life, most of it, a version of it, and he told me his, and in the telling both storytellers came to believe that their stories were true. I’m the person I’m describing, I thought, I really am! I knew that I was editing the story as I told it, but not to hide anything or to protect myself—I believed that I wanted Woodrow to know everything about me, no lies and no secrets that mattered. But I was telling my story to a man, not another woman, and therefore edited it accordingly. And I was revealing what I knew of myself to a black African, not a white American, to a Christian, not an atheist, to a conservative government official, a member of the True Whig party, and not to a neo-Marxist fugitive under indictment by her own government for acts of civil disobedience and suspicion of terrorism. I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.
And Woodrow was doing it, too, I was sure. He was the person he was describing—at least I believed he was, even though he, too, must have been editing his story in hundreds of large and small ways to protect me from my abysmal ignorance of lives like his and to assuage my fears of the vast differences between us. He was doing for me what I was doing for him and now for you. As my mother and father had surely done for each other long ago during those months when they were courting, before they were married, so that when finally they did agree to marry and started fucking, each knew whom she or he was fucking and was confident that the other person did too.
Which is almost how it happened for me and Woodrow. I remember a night in May: Woodrow and I were returning from a policeman’s ball at the huge, yellow-brick Masonic temple at the center of the city. There had been a considerable amount of drinking and hearty male laughter at our table, which was not the head table, of course, where President Tolbert and his half-dozen closest ministers and their large, tulip-shaped wives had sat, but close enough to it for me to gain a considerable amount of favorable attention from the important men. That night, Woodrow proposed marriage to me.
Not exactly proposed marriage, but I knew it’s what he meant, and I didn’t exactly accept, but he knew what I meant, too. We were in the back seat of the Mercedes, with Satterthwaite driving, as usual, watching us in the rear-view mirror, as always. Woodrow was uncharacteristically voluble. He was happy and a little drunk. All evening long, from the tone and tune of the greetings he’d exchanged with the big men—from President Tolbert himself to the American ambassador to the chief of police—and from the way the big men had so politely flirted with me, it was becoming clear that Woodrow was about to enter the next inner circle of power, where at the center the president stood alone. And far from hindering his progress towards that center, the young, white American woman—whose past was known among the Americo-Liberian community to have been “adventurous” and possibly even a little politically dangerous, especially for a woman, the woman named Hannah Musgrave, whose passport still had her name as Dawn Carrington—that woman was in fact an obvious help to him. In that circle I glamorized the otherwise dull and officious little assistant minister of public health, for I knew that’s how they viewed him, as one of the cadre of boring, competent, American-educated bureaucrats whom the president used to keep the government running and the Americans happy. Woodrow was one of a contingent of Liberians whose business would have been business had they been of Lebanese or Indian descent or Mandingo, but because they were black Africans of at least partial African-American descent, their business was government.
Satterthwaite pulled the car over at the gate to my compound and shut off the headlights, but kept the motor running. He stepped from the car and walked slowly around to my door, as he always did when Woodow returned me to my residence, and waited for his boss to say his goodnights, spread my shawl gently over my shoulders, and reach across me and open the door.
Woodrow, however, placed his left hand onto my knee. “Hannah,” he said in a descending voice, as if about to deliver unexceptional bad news. “It’s time that I introduced you to my mother and father and my grandmothers. My people.” He cleared his throat and continued. “We have reached a very important point in our relationship, you and I.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Good! I’m eager to meet them.” And I was. It had been nearly four months by then that we had been courting, and from the beginning Woodrow had spoken of his family members with a respect that bordered on awe, as if they, too, like the president and his cronies, made up an inner circle of power and prestige that he very much wished to enter.
“Also my father’s other wives,” he said. “And his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands, and my brothers and sisters, too, and their wives and husbands and children.”
I laughed abruptly, involuntarily, but he went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “It’s the time that we go to visit my people,” he said, placing heavy emphasis on people. I knew that his father was a farmer, an elder in the Kpelle tribe, and that the household was located in a tribal village in Bong County, about seventy miles inland from Monrovia. The family was Christian, Woodrow had told me in a reassuring way, although like most Liberians, especially country people, they practiced what he called “the old religion” as well.
I viewed myself as a firm atheist, so didn’t mind that at all. I reasoned that, since one superstition was pretty much like another, two or more practiced together were weaker than one alone. I was more threatened by a Baptist who believed only in the resurrection of Christ than I was by a Baptist who believed in both the resurrection of Christ and astrology. Thus I was more concerned about Woodrow’s own strict Christianity than about his Christian family’s reliance on “the old religion.” After joining the government, he himself had become a deacon in the United Methodist Church in Monrovia. He attended services every Sunday, and on several occasions had invited me to join him, until finally I was honest with him. “I’d feel like a hypocrite,” I said.
Woodrow seemed pleased. “Spoken, Hannah darling, like a true Christian.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Well, you view hypocrisy as a sin, a thing to be avoided at all costs.”
“Nearly all costs.”
“Yes, yes, nearly. Quite right. Don’t worry, my dear, the Lord has His ways and plenty of time. But never mind,” he said and smiled benevolently down upon me, as if having uttered a silent prayer for my conversion.
“I’m not worried,” I said. But I was. Look at me, I thought. I’m in love with a Christian, a black African man who believes more in the god of my parents than in the gods of his. How had this happened? I was in the midst of its happening, but still I had to ask. I was intelligent enough and sufficiently self-aware, even back then, to have tried viewing it as merely a reaction to my isolation and loneliness. During those first months in Liberia, I was utterly alone at the so-called plasma lab, except for the chimps and their caretaker, a man who fed them twice a day and who once a week made a half-hearted at
tempt to clean their cages, and the woman who took the blood samples from them. Everyone else I knew in this country, even the Americans posted at the embassy, I knew only through Woodrow. These people, all the foreigners, in fact, I deliberately avoided anyhow, regardless of Woodrow’s assurances that I was safe in Liberia under his protection, and that I never, he emphasized, would be extradited to the United States.
And you can be sure that I’d questioned the racial aspect of my love for Woodrow. I had dealt with that in the Movement long ago, after I’d gone through a rather lengthy period, eighteen months or so, of wanting to sleep only with black men. And did, with way too many of them, until finally, one night in Cleveland after a long, grueling, self-critical session with my Weather cohort, I saw myself as a racist commodifier of sex, acting out the age-old exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer. At least that’s what I confessed to. It wasn’t long afterwards that I began my first love affair with a woman, a white social worker named June.
But all that had faded, blown away like wisps of clouds after a storm. Now I can’t even remember June’s last name. Irish, I recall that much. June was Irish and had gone to Antioch. Of the too many black men I slept with, with the exception of the two or three I’d worked with in the Movement, I remember not even their first names. Calvin? Daryl? Walker? Why even call up the names of those poor men? It was long ago. And wrong.
So what was it about Woodrow Sundiata that brought me to believe that I had fallen in love with him and that made me, after a few short months, decide to marry him? My initial attraction had been mostly sexual, and within weeks, once I got used to his rigid, nearly expressionless face and constricted manners, had weakened somewhat. I no longer saw him as an African samurai. What, exactly, then, did I see in him, other than a benefactor and protector? If it wasn’t the color of his skin, perhaps it was the fact that he was African. That he was pointedly not American. In those years, I was bone weary of my war against everything American. The war against American racism, the war against the Vietnam War, the war against the System—all of it. It felt like I’d been at war my entire life, even as a child and adolescent waging the war against my parents. I hadn’t realized it until after I’d left Ghana and Zack, my last links to the Movement, but by the time I arrived in Monrovia, I was in a sense shell shocked.