Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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I’ve been out of the States for a while now and therefore haven’t heard anything about Daddy in the news, which in recent years is the main way I kept track of you two, you know, and as a result I’m left hoping but not knowing for sure that you’re both okay, in good health, etc. So I hope you’ll answer this letter with news of home and family. Maybe you should run it by your lawyer first, though, just in case I’m being legally reckless. If you wish, feel free to show it to Mitchell Stephens or Ron Briggs or whoever represents you nowadays, Daddy. I’ve been assured by a friend here—he’s sort of my boss, actually, a man positioned fairly high up in the government—that the Liberians won’t extradite me. I’m working for a blood plasma lab doing research on hepatitis with chimps. Not really doing the research, just supplying and shipping chimp blood to the U.S. It’s sort of a NYU, U.S.A., and Liberia jointly funded operation, and it is interesting work but has gotten stressful for me because of the chimps and what we have to do to them, so I’m not sure how much longer I can work at the lab. I have no intentions of leaving Liberia in the foreseeable future, however, and even if I wanted to, where could I go? Anywhere else and I’d risk being arrested and would have to go underground, which, believe me, I never want to do again as long as I live.
For years, Mother and Daddy and I relied on go-betweens, people in the Movement or Weatherman who, to the best of our knowledge, were not being followed or tracked by the FBI. From Mother’s point of view, no news from me was not necessarily bad news. It left her free to fantasize that, in spite of appearances, everything was actually hunky-dory, as if I were living on a hippie commune somewhere in Oregon and “going through a stage.” I never sent messages to the house or Daddy’s office at the clinic. From time to time, maybe once every three or four months, I did leave word with one or another of Daddy’s lawyers or his literary agent in New York, messages that I hoped would provide some small comfort to my parents without at the same time putting them or me at risk. I’d say to a receptionist or an answering machine, “Please tell Doctor and Mrs. Musgrave that their daughter is safe and in good health,” and then hang up.
Mother and Daddy, a lot has changed in me since I left the U.S. Not my underlying political beliefs, Daddy, I’m sorry to say, although you’ll be happy to know that I have pretty much separated myself from Weatherman and have no contacts with them anymore. That’s a whole other story, which I hope to be able to tell you someday in person. But something that’s possibly even deeper in me than politics has been changed. My mentality? My underlying temperament? I don’t know. But for the first time in my adult life I’m not part of a movement, I’m not a member of a group or organization dedicated to political and social change. I’m alone. Wholly alone. And it’s a little bit weird for me. A lot weird, actually, and I can see that it’s changing me in unpredictable ways. Who knows, Mother, I may turn up one of these days with a husband and a baby asking to swap recipes and gardening tips. No, not likely—just teasing. Actually, there is a man here with whom I’ve become seriously involved, but there’s nothing about the relationship that I need to burden you with, not just yet anyhow, if ever. Trust that he’s a good man, however, very kind and helpful to me.
In the months since I’d arrived in Africa, the literal physical distance between me and my parents had grown so great that for the first time in years I found myself unable to imagine their daily lives, and I think that’s what made me suddenly want so badly to communicate with them. Somehow, even though back in the States we’d been unable to speak or safely write to one another, as long as we were located close enough to get to one another in a matter of hours if need be, I’d been able to imagine Daddy and Mother going through their usual day-to-day activities and not feel especially worried about them. Once in a while I’d catch an item about Daddy in the news—his arrest at an antiwar protest with a dozen other distinguished citizens, people like William Sloan Coffin and Arthur Miller and the Berrigan brothers, an interview or essay under his byline in The Nation or The New Republic, his appearance on TV as a McGovern delegate at the ’72 Democratic Convention, and so on. Sometimes an item showed up on the book pages or in the culture section of the New York Times, usually having more to do with his liberal politics and exemplary personal life than his best-selling books. I could tell that, through it all, Mother was still playing her lifelong role as the loyal, selfless Wife of the Great Man. She was occasionally photographed at his side, although during those post–Civil Rights years when he was seen arm in arm with like-minded, earnest white men of a certain age and position, if a woman other than my mother was present, she was usually a famous folk singer.
Now, however, with no access here in Africa to those reassuring, though distant, glimpses of my parents, I had begun to worry about them. I fretted mainly about their health. They were in their sixties, and back then, in my mid-thirties, that seemed elderly to me. With no clear prohibitions against my contacting them by mail, I had on several occasions sat down to write them a letter. But I didn’t know who they were anymore; nor was I sure of who I was. So what on earth could I say to them?
What else can I tell you that won’t take pages and pages? It feels so strange writing to you like this. I wish I could tell you about the country and the people, about my life here and about how I came to be here in the first place, but I’m not sure how to say it yet. Just know that I love and miss you both very much, that I’m all right and in good health, mentally as well as physically, and that I feel safe here.
Better to say nothing, I decided, and again and again tore up the letter and put away my pen. Until that evening when I returned from my first visit to Fuama. I sat down at the table in my cottage, and by the light of a kerosene lamp—the electric power was off, and Woodrow still hadn’t been able to locate a working generator for the compound—began finally to write my letter.
Write me back, if this letter reaches you. If yours reach me I’ll let you know by return mail, and then we’ll once again be in touch, after so long, too long, all these months and years. I hope you know how grateful I am for the way you both have stood by me throughout those years, even though out of necessity we’ve had to remain at such a distance. I’m sure it’s been difficult for you, especially since our political beliefs, though they overlapped, never quite matched. But despite everything, they are not lost years. I know that my actions and their consequences have been hard on you, painful and frightening, and I often wish that it could have been different. I love you both and always have, and I think of you all the time, even way out here in deepest Africa.
Love,
Hannah
The impulse to write my parents satisfied, I mailed the letter and quickly forgot about it. Then, two weeks later, I was leafing through the day’s mail, the usual packet of lab reports from the NYU administrators of the project, who still seemed to think of me as their field agent, someone who could make sense of the charts, graphs, and statistics they’d derived from the blood samples I’d shipped them months earlier and who was therefore eager to read them, along with the odd jumble of official Liberian government pamphlets and studies financed by the UN and USAID and distributed to every agency in the Liberian government, regardless of its area of expertise and responsibility or lack thereof. From the day of my arrival at the lab, I had not read more than the opening paragraph of any of these reports and had simply dumped them unopened into the trash for burning later. But this time a stiff, white, business-size envelope fell out of a report on the practicalities of developing a fish-farming industry on the St. John River. It dropped into my hand as if seeking it out.
My dear Hannah,
How thrilling and, after so long, what a relief to receive news of you and to receive it from you directly! Your mother and I literally wept with joy when your letter arrived. I cannot begin to express the pleasure it gave us (and you may be pleased as well as surprised to know that it arrived unopened, with no evidence of its having been tampered with). I hasten, therefore, to answer it. I will be discreet a
nd discursive, as you were, so as not to compromise your situation in any way.
I’d known at once what it was—I’d seen that envelope a thousand times before, since childhood. It bore the return address of Daddy’s clinic, his familiar letterhead, and I recognized in my name and address the typeface of his equally familiar IBM Selectric, probably typed by Ingrid, Daddy’s doe-eyed Danish assistant, and I thought, Damn him, he can’t even write my name and address by himself and in his own handwriting, he has to dictate the letter on his little tape recorder, probably on a plane to Houston or someplace, and on his return have that poor, lovelorn sad-sack, Ingrid Andersen, type it out and leave it on his desk for his signature. She’ll even fold and seal the letter and lick the stamps for him. Suddenly I was sorry that I had written my letter and wanted to toss his into the trash. It was stupid of me to have contacted Daddy and Mother, stupid and self-indulgent and sentimental, and now I’d pay the price, and the price was having to open and read my father’s answer.
We were delighted to know that you are safe and in good health, although astonished to hear from you at such a vast distance. I looked up your country in the atlas and encyclopedia (I confess, I barely knew of its existence) and am learning quickly as much as I can about its rather intriguing history and culture and its perverse connection to the roots of our homegrown racial conflict. I feel almost as if you have joined the Peace Corps and have been stationed out there for two years, and I do wish it were so, for, sadly, I fear that your stay may run a bit longer, no? I do believe, however, that someday there will be a general amnesty declared for all of you who put yourselves on the line against the war and the men who ran, and continue to run, this country as if it were their own private fiefdom. I won’t go into specifics here (as I’m not confident, all indications to the contrary, that our letters are not being copied by the FBI for J. Edgar Hoover to peruse at his leisure), but there are signs, thanks to Jimmy Carter, that clemency is in the air, and not just for Agnew and Nixon this time. It may take several or perhaps five or more years for it to happen, unless, of course, someone like the idiot actor who’s currently cast as governor of California becomes president after Carter, which seems extremely unlikely to me, after what this country has been through. But who knows? I’ve guessed badly on presidential elections before. Remember Nixon vs. Humphrey?
By the time I entered the sixth grade I’d passed to the left of my father. It was either that or go to his right. His liberalism, cleansed of anger and tainted by melancholy, ill suited my temperament, and temperament always trumps ideology. He was like Adlai Stevenson. He even looked like Stevenson, a tall, angular version with the same high forehead, the same sad eyes and too-pretty mouth. He believed in non-violence because he himself was incapable of committing a violent act and, to work his will on others, frequently resorted, therefore, to manipulation. He was charming, articulate, witty, and of course intelligent and reasonable, and if you valued those qualities—and who among us did not?—then you bent your will to his. Which was all he wanted, the mere concession that he was right and that you, as a result, were wrong, implying, if you persisted in your belief and acted accordingly, that you were unintelligent, unreasonable, witless, inarticulate, and boorish. And who among us valued those qualities? He was a hard man for a wife and a female child, an only child, to resist.
Well, I did not mean to get into politics. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear from me. Despite everything, your mother and I are fine, one might even say happy, except of course for the continued absence of our beloved daughter from our daily lives. Even at our advanced age—not so old, really, still hale and hearty at 68 and 66—we’re as engaged and busy as ever, me with the clinic here in Emerson and over at the hospital, although I’ve cut back some on the latter, and with my books and a certain amount of political activism, and your mother with the house and her gardens and bonsai collections and with helping me. She continues to be, as always, my irreplaceable amanuensis. I’ve had to travel a great deal in the last year or so, more than I like, mostly lecturing in the U.S. and Western Europe, where they find my ideas on child-rearing a little more challenging than useful, perhaps, but worth listening to nonetheless.
After my father died, I hoped that I’d find among his papers the first letters I wrote to him and Mother, their only child’s letters home from Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp, a funky, pseudo-socialist, overpriced retreat for privileged kids from the suburbs. The camp was located in the Adirondacks, not many miles from my farm here in Keene Valley, as it happens. For five summers, my liberal parents shipped me off to the wilderness to be with other rich white kids with liberal parents, until I began to see through the hypocrisy and cynicism of the camp directors and was finally old enough to insist on staying home in Emerson doing volunteer work at the hospital. Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp is defunct now—not enough affluent parents in the 1980s and ’90s, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years, wanted their kids to experience the rigors of manual labor, which happened to save the camp considerably on staff, food, and maintenance costs, or learn the words to folk songs that helped us love and admire the oppressed, exploited workers of the world and ignore our own mild version of it. But I was innocent of all that then, at least at first, and for eight weeks every summer was free of my mother’s hovering, fearful shadow and my father’s constant, watchful evaluation of my behavior and development—I was always his Exhibit A, don’t forget, the visible proof of the wisdom of his theories on child-rearing. And every week for five summers, from that happy, unguarded center of consciousness, I wrote a letter home. After he died, I wanted to hold those letters in my hands and read them, to reconnect my adult self, inasmuch as I had a self, to the girl I was then. During those eight weeks at Saranac every summer, I was truly happy and as near to being my natural self as I have ever been, before or since. I never questioned then the simple fact of my own essential reality. It’s why, so many years later, when I went looking for a farm to buy, I came up here to the Adirondack Mountains and bought Shadowbrook Farm and why I have settled permanently here, hoping to find again that lost self, and finding it, cling to it. My father, as you might have guessed, did not save those long-ago letters from Saranac. Nor did my mother. Among his papers were the letters written to him over the years by the readers of his books, his colleagues, ex-students, ex-patients, state governors, cabinet officers, and presidents, and even the letters written to him by my mother from Smith when he was at Yale Medical School. But nothing from little me. I had even less hope of finding anything from me among my mother’s papers. Daddy, who’d always intended to write his memoirs, saved everything he might someday want to refer to; but there was nothing in Mother’s life, other than her relationship to Daddy, that she deemed sufficiently memorable to preserve for posterity. Predictably, when it came time for me to sift through her papers, I found every love letter and note, every Christmas and birthday card, that Daddy had written to her over the years, starting with his formal invitation to a mixer in New Haven in 1939 and ending, forty-five years later, with his final instructions to her on the dispersal of his personal library and manuscripts. But not a shred from their daughter. Before Mother died, I asked her why she and Daddy hadn’t saved my early letters from camp or any of the hundreds of letters I’d written from boarding school and college and later from the South during my Civil Rights stints and when I was organizing mothers on welfare in Cleveland, before going underground. “Well, after you were indicted and didn’t show up for the trial and disappeared,” she said, “Daddy thought it would be wise if we destroyed them. I think he showed them to Ron Briggs, his lawyer, and he advised it. To keep them from being used against you by the government or the press or whomever else might want to hurt or expose you. So we burned them. Besides, you know how protective he was of his private life. Don’t forget, Daddy was famous practically from before you were born.”
We miss you, my darling, and pray for your continued safety and well-being. Speaking of prayer, Bill Coffin wa
s here this past weekend, and we took the liberty of sharing with him the good news of your letter (the fact of it, not the letter itself, of course). He sends his love and prayers. We continue to be as circumspect as possible in all matters regarding you. Many, many people ask after you, of course, both your friends and ours and also numerous longtime supporters from the Movement, who come by from time to time or who call and/or write me at the clinic. In any event, inasmuch as it’s somewhat unclear to us how careful you want us to be regarding your current whereabouts and circumstances, we remain utterly discreet concerning both and shall continue to do so. There will come a day, I know, in the not-too-distant future, when we shall all be together again. In the meantime, please remember that we love you.
Fame is like a drug, and when one person in a family is famous, it affects everyone else in the family, shaping and deforming it in many of the same ways an alcoholic or drug addict does. You can’t ignore fame—it colors everything—but you’re not allowed to acknowledge it openly, either. It’s why you prefer to associate with other people who are famous or who have someone famous in their family. They understand. You can trust them the way an addict trusts his fellow addicts and enjoy their company the way an alcoholic enjoys the company of drunks. They make you feel normal.