Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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I’m no longer the same person I was when this exchange between me and my parents took place. But I can see how, just in telling you about the exchange, I revert, not quite to my childhood state of mind, but to adolescence, or even to pre-adolescence. Both my parents are long dead now. In the intervening years I’ve been married, widowed, and borne three children; I’ve perpetrated a hundred large and small betrayals and abandonments; perfect lovers have been replaced by other perfect lovers, men have replaced women and boys have replaced men, and Africans have replaced Americans, who have been replaced by Americans again; chimpanzees in cages have replaced a childhood pet, and Border collies, free-roaming farm dogs, have replaced the chimpanzees; and I’ve gone on alone, untouched, undeterred, unbetrothed, a woman whose essence is a white shadow, a spirit of the river, one of those mammi wattas. Yet despite all that, today, in telling of a brief correspondence back in 1977 between me and my parents, and in the process bringing my father and mother wholly back to my mind, the person I was so long ago returns to me, invades and inhabits me.
In writing to you and Daddy I took a small chance that I’d be compromising my position here slightly. All I wanted was an intimate exchange of family and personal news so that we might not feel so estranged from one another. But after reading Daddy’s letter and now yours, believe me I feel more estranged than ever. I know you mean well, and no doubt Daddy does, too, but please, please, please, try to respect the difficulty of my position here and my feeble attempt in spite of it to reach out to you. In very different ways the two of you seem unable to know me as a person. Daddy’s still addressing me as if I were one of his young, awestruck interns, and you act like I’m a troubled teenager emerging from her rebellious years. I think it would be better—since we now know that all three of us are still alive and well—if we didn’t try to communicate any farther, at least for the time being. I’m sorry to have to write that to you, but I see no useful or safe alternative.
Love,
Hannah
But there came a time several months later, after my marriage to Woodrow, when I first learned that I was pregnant, and I felt a powerful need to break my silence once again. I wanted my father to know, of course. Not of the marriage, necessarily—though I had no reason to keep it a secret. I wanted him to know of my pregnancy. I wanted both my parents to know that they were going to be grandparents. I was also motivated by a desire to shock my father, perhaps to frighten and hurt him. That was Scout operating.
Daddy,
I’m writing to tell you that I am married and ten weeks pregnant with my husband’s child. You may inscribe in the big old Musgrave family Bible that my husband’s name is Woodrow Sundiata. He is 43 years old and is the Deputy Minister of Public Health for the Republic of Liberia. We were married in Monrovia by a Methodist minister on September 12th 1977. Witnesses were Hon. William Tolbert, the President of Liberia, and my husband’s close friend and colleague, Hon. Charles Taylor, who is the Minister of Public Services. Rest assured that I’m healthy and receiving the best possible medical care here. I will let you know when there is anything more to tell you about my ongoing life. Mother keeps me well informed as to your ongoing life, so you need not answer this.
Love,
Hannah
My father did not write back. Nor did my mother.
YOU THINK IT’S never going to end. First the fucking. Then the pregnancy. The delivery. The infancy. And then it actually ends.
It’s not that any one of them goes on forever—some, like the fucking and the actual birthing part, last only minutes or hours. But all of them, while they last, seem without beginning or end, and whatever stage of the two-year-long process you’re enduring, from fucking to the end of infancy, it seems to be all there is. And I went through it twice, overlapping—first with Dillon; then, just as I finished nursing him, with the twins, Paul and William.
First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it’s shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I’m the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature’s sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.
Over and over, the same cycle, month after month. This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she’s a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.
THIS IS THE END of my history, I thought. My life has become a series of endless moments. There’s no more story to it. I got pregnant right away, probably the first time Woodrow and I fucked. Sorry about the language, but I can’t call it “made love.” I don’t think Woodrow and I ever actually made love, although, Lord knows, we fucked constantly, at least in the early years we did. At his urging always, never mine. From the very beginning, Woodrow’s way of making love to me, and consequently my way of making love to him, was chilled, methodical, obligatory, and, even when slow and drawn out, brutal. It was the same for years as it was on our “honeymoon” at the posh beach house south, along the coast, loaned to Woodrow by Liberia’s friendly World Bank representative.
That first night, still half-drunk from the reception champagne—ten iced cases of Dom Perignon delivered to the reception by the president himself—and exhausted and confused by the crowd of people I barely knew, and weirdly, unexpectedly desolated by loneliness, I went straight to the bedroom that looked out on the moonlit beach and crashing surf beyond, doused the lights, undressed, and literally tossed myself onto the enormous, king-size bed and stared up at the slow-moving, overhead fan, and said to myself, Thank God that’s over!
And then thought, But, Lord, Lord, what have I done?
I could hear Woodrow where I had just left him, prowling proudly through the house, patting the leather-upholstered furniture imported from Miami and checking out the brand-new, stainless-steel kitchen appliances from Sweden, opening liquor cabinets and linen closets with undisguised glee and rising dreams of gluttony. He was delirious with happiness. And because I knew the reason he was happy, I hated him. And because I was the reason, the agent for his happiness, I hated myself, too. He had a Christian wife at last, and better yet, a white Christian wife, and better still, a white Christian American wife!
His marriage ceremony, to be sure, had been a little unusual—his bride had invited to the wedding no family members or friends of her own to raise toasts and share in the hosting or to present her, and had offered him no dowry, not even a single cow or a meager plot of arable land; she had brought him and his family nothing. I had arrived like a captured bride, booty. Nonetheless, an ordained Christian minister had presided over the nuptials, and at the reception in the grand ballroom of the Mesurado Point Hotel, where the air conditioning and sound system broke down fifteen minutes into the party, Woodrow Sundiata had been visibly honored by all the elite members of government in attendance and by the chief representatives of business, foreign and domestic. Woodrow’s people had come in from Fuama village, nearly thirty of them in elaborately feathered and wooden tribal costumes, carried to Monrovia in the back of a flatbed truck, and had danced, drummed, and sung for him and his bride and their guests all the hot afternoon long, and his father and mother had declared publically (although they’d had to do it in their native language rather than in English, and no one seemed to hear them) their pleasure and pride in this marriage, or so I was told by Woodrow, and there had been many florid toasts and speeches from members of the government. Not from the president himself, of course, but several of the more lugubrious ministers spoke. And despite my shortcomings, because of what I was rather than who I was, there was now a certain glamor to Woodrow and an almos
t enviable modernity. Suddenly Woodrow Sundiata possessed visible evidence that he was a city man, a worthy member of the Liberian elite, clearly a man fit for the president’s inner circle. If he had married a Liberian woman instead, even a descendant of the old African-American ruling class, he would have remained the same little, slightly boring, American-educated bureaucrat, the clever, but not too clever, missionary-boy from the bush. (By now I saw how he looked to others and was beginning to look to me, as well.) With me as his wife, however, Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him access to power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite. Women flirted with Woodrow now, showed him their bare brown shoulders, large bosoms and butts, their big, bright teeth. Men sidled up to him and spoke confidentially to him of deals and possibilities and newly conceived alliances, then reported back to their brethren: Hey, my brother, you see? Even the Belgian representative of the World Bank has given the man the use of his private, very lovely, very expensive beach house for a honeymoon cottage. He’s now a man to keep track of. Woodrow Sundiata sleeps on fine Belgian cotton sheets tonight. The sub-minister sleeps with a white American woman tonight and every night. And she will connect him to the big American and European world out there beyond Liberia where, mysteriously, people get quickly rich and end up with power over other people’s lives and livelihoods. Woodrow Sundiata, my brothers, has become a man to deal with.
He strolled into the darkened bedroom, where I lay splayed on the bed in my underwear, lost in morbid thoughts of having somehow lost my history, of being trapped inside an endless moment. I couldn’t explain it to myself. I wondered if, when my politics disappeared, my only hope for an autobiographical narrative had disappeared, too. It had happened piecemeal, in small erasures, going back to New Bedford and barely noticed at the time, and now I seemed to be living outside of time, without cause or consequence.
Woodrow’s sudden presence in the bedroom hadn’t interrupted my thoughts. I was barely conscious of my brand-new husband’s silent body, even though I could smell him—alcohol, cigarettes, sweat—and in the half-light could see him. As if I were alone, I rolled off the bed, undid my bra and took off my panties, and slid under the covers.
“Ah, I see that you’re ready for me,” Woodrow said. He had already shed his jacket, shirt, and shoes and now slowly unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers and shorts, stepping from them with knees high as if from a tub. He was erect and surprisingly large sized. This was the first time I had seen him naked. He still wore his socks and garters, like a man in an old-fashioned pornographic film.
I remember asking him if he had a condom.
“A condom? You’re not serious,” he said and gave one of his British chuckles, a low, belching sound that came from his chest. He spotted a candle on the dresser and matches and sashayed over and lit it. The long shadows of the blades of the overhead fan passed slowly across his dark brown chest and shoulders. “Ah, that’s better!” he pronounced. In the flickering candlelight his erection gave me a good-natured, straight-armed salute.
“Of course I’m serious,” I said to him. “I don’t want to get pregnant. Not yet, anyhow. Not this week, or even this year, maybe. Woodrow, I’m still absorbing the idea of being married, for God’s sake.” I pulled the cool outer sheet to my neck and tried to make a winsome smile. “One thing at a time, Woodrow. Okay?”
He laughed. “Hannah darling, this is a matter in which you must do as I say.” His erection, I noticed, was starting to droop, as if fatigued.
“Oh, come on. Now you’re not serious.”
“Decidedly so,” he said. His face darkened. He reached forward and with one hand grabbed my wrist and with the other whipped the covers away, and, lo, his erection had returned and was again at full salute.
Oh, dear, oh, dear, I thought in my mother’s voice, and said in mine, “Wait, Woodrow, please! You don’t have a condom. You didn’t bring any condoms? Let me at least…” I began, with no idea how the sentence should end, thinking that maybe there was something I could do to myself that would protect me from being made pregnant. Why hadn’t I anticipated this, bought a box of condoms myself in Monrovia? Surely they sold them at the Mesurado Point for the American and European men who were afraid of disease as much as I was afraid at this moment of becoming pregnant. I had thought of it, actually, many times, in sober anticipation of this very night, my wedding night, when for the first time Woodrow and I would make love, but each time had realized that in Liberia the women who bought condoms were likely to be prostitutes, so had put the idea out of my mind, until now, when it was too late. Too late. Too late, as Woodrow forced my legs apart with one knee between them and, scowling, spit on his hand and glistened up his cock, and then, too late, he was on me and in me.
I remember the fact of it, but not much more, because after that first time it was always the same with Woodrow, who never seemed to lose his erection and rarely came. He merely grew weary or sleepy or bored or had to leave for an appointment elsewhere, and that’s what finally, after long hours of it, stopped him. He could not follow a natural arc of rising passion—the drive toward orgasm, and the post-climactic, floating lassitude afterwards. No beginning, middle, or end for him, and consequently, none for me, either. Not once in all those years. I don’t think he knew that such an arc was possible or even desirable. He thought this was good sex, good for him, good for me, and was proud of his ability to keep us grinding away for hours like a pair of millstones groaning on wobbly axes, the thump of the bedstead bumping against the wall like a drum beaten by a dumb, arrhythmic drummer, on and on, making me first sore and then numb, until before long I was outside my body, floating somewhere overhead, thinking penny thoughts and making lists and averting my gaze from the two of us humping below like a pair of mechanical dolls that never finished what they’d begun but only ran slowly down until they finally stopped, batteries drained, and were still and silent.
And so ended one endless moment, the fucking, and another took its place. In a matter of weeks, Woodrow had come back at least once, and I was definitely pregnant, and in June of 1978 I bore Woodrow his first son, whom he named Dillon, after his mother’s father, to affirm the lad’s Americo heritage, and Tambu, after his father’s father, to maintain his lineage connection to the Kpelle, and Sundiata, to declare to all the world his own proud paternity.
Dillon Tambu Sundiata. Later the boy-soldier known as Worse-than-Death.
A beautiful baby. Everyone said so. Even I could see it, although I couldn’t at the same time keep from seeing my baby as an alien, a member of a different, non-human species. Not sub-human, but different and possibly superior.
The truth is, I wasn’t as bad a mother as I probably sound now, looking back all these years later and judging my past self from this distance. I’m less confused and turbulent now than I was then. But with regard to myself, less forgiving. When my sons were babies and little boys, certainly when they were newborn infants, I was diligent and careful and nurturing in all the ways of a good mother. No one faulted me then and no one can now, not even I. But nonetheless I was detached from my babies, detached in an unusual way, and I know this, and knew it at the time, too, because, with regard to my chimps, I was not detached and could tell the difference. I could look into the round, brown eyes of the chimps, even the eyes of the large and often fierce adult males, and could see all the way to their souls, it seemed, deep into the mystery of their essential being. But never, not once, could I see that deeply into the blue eyes of my sons.
I tried. I would wake in the middle of the night ashamed and in distress and would slip from bed and make my way to the crib and gently wake and lift Dillon in my arms. Sitting by the window, while the moonlight washed over my baby’s face, I gazed unblinking into his eyes and tried to see him, truly see him, for what and who he was, a person separate from me and yet a part of me, seen, known, honored, and protected; and every time,
my gaze came bouncing back, as if reflected off a hard, shiny, opaque surface. I was like Narcissus staring into the pool.
It wasn’t his physical appearance that made Dillon seem alien to me—he was perfectly formed, straight boned and firmly muscled, even as an infant, and his skin was reddish, almost copper colored, and burnished, and his tiny face glowed in sunlight and shone in moonlight. His eyes were dark blue, almost black, though they later turned bright blue, like my father’s sapphire eyes. His head was large and round, like Woodrow’s, and symmetrical as a piece of fruit. His thin hair, the color of fresh-brewed coffee, was like a lace cap, and his tiny ears were perfect whorls, natural wonders, as if carved out of soft stone by trickling water, and I loved to touch them. He was a beautiful baby. I thrilled to his pomegranate smell and used to nuzzle him with my nose. And the quality of his attention—from the moment I first took him from the hospital nurse’s arms into mine and lifted his face to my breast and he began to suck—was refined and as selective and focused as a camera’s on the world that surrounded him: first the nipple of my breast, then my face, my eyes and mouth, and behind me Woodrow’s proudly smiling face, eyes, and mouth, the room, the light streaming through the open window, the noise of children playing outside, cars, buses, and trucks passing on the street.