Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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But he didn’t seem to belong to the same species as we did, Woodrow and I. How could this infant, this stranger have emerged from my body? I kept wondering. The nine months of pregnancy had seemed like nine years to me, interminable, and though for the better part of it I had felt him moving inside me, shifting positions down there in the watery darkness, despite that long familiarity with him, when he was finally born he seemed to have arrived from another planet. His physical appearance kept surprising me, as if some other woman had borne him. Because he was male, I suppose, and had a penis attached to his body, and because his skin color and the texture of his hair were so unlike mine. He must be another mother’s child, I kept thinking.
You were the cutest little pink thing when you were a baby, with silky straight blond hair that I couldn’t bear to have cut until you were nearly six and your father insisted on it, and then I cried and cried, although for some reason you seemed extremely pleased to have it cut short. When my boys were infants, my mother’s voice in my ears plagued me. It was as if she were always standing just behind me, watching and commenting constantly while I washed, fed, and clothed my babies, brought them into the living room to show the guests, took them out in the carriage, held them up for the praise of strangers and friends alike, for Liberians love to make a fuss over newborns, and their attentions made me feel less like an alien myself.
It was only when Dillon was a few months old, and I could place him in the daily and nightly care of Jeannine, Woodrow’s eighteen-year-old niece who had come in from Fuama to keep house for us during my pregnancy and got promoted to governess, that my mother’s voice began to fade and eventually go silent. I no longer saw myself through her eyes and instead began once again to see myself through my father’s, which, while not ideal psychologically or otherwise, was preferable. It was, at least, familiar.
Then in short order I was pregnant again, another nine endless months of it. Pregnant with twins this time—although I didn’t know that I was carrying two babies until they had already arrived on the planet—and, as there were two of them, a matched, identical pair, they turned out to be even more alien to me than Dillon had been. And here came my mother’s voice again: Twins! They’re so adorable, like peas in a pod. I always wanted twins, you know. Especially when you were a baby. You were so cute and loveable that I wanted two of you. But you have to be careful and not name them similarly, calling them Florence and Francis, for example, or Ronald and Donald; and don’t dress them alike, or else they’ll have trouble separating from each other when they get older. Your father, you know, wrote about that in his second book, which, by the way, you have never read, have you? I don’t know why, Hannah, you refuse to read your father’s books, especially now that you have children of your own …
We named them William and Paul—William after Woodrow’s elder brother; Paul after Woodrow’s uncle, his father’s elder brother—and gave them both the same middle name, Musgrave, to indicate their mother’s lineage, with the last name Sundiata, to claim their father’s. It was William Musgrave Sundiata and Paul Musgrave Sundiata who became, years later, the boy-soldiers known as Fly and Demonology.
BUT I WASN’T going to get into that. Not now, anyhow. Not until I can first bring you to a sympathetic understanding of my sons and what happened to them and can keep you from being frightened of them. Just as there are certain things about me that I won’t reveal to you until your understanding of what happened to me early on and later is such that you won’t be afraid of me, either, and won’t judge me as you would a stranger. Like my sons, I, too, was once upon a time an infant, a child, and adolescent, all in a particular time and place with most particular parents; and like Fly, Demonology, and Worse-than-Death, I, too, was shaped, formed, and deformed by time, place, and parents—although, in the case of my sons, time and place were more influential in the creation of their fates than were parents. For me, probably, it was the opposite.
Even so, my hope and my intention is that you know us and not be afraid of us.
GIVING BIRTH, like being pregnant, like fucking, did remake me, just as everyone who had been through it themselves said it would. But it didn’t make me more of a woman, as promised. It made me more of a stranger to myself. I went from being a whale with a porpoise in her gut to an emptied snakeskin, a wrapper. Until slowly, with the baby and one year later the twins finally out of me, I filled again, swollen now with blood and milk that spilled, dripped, trickled, and sometimes squirted from my body, and I realized that I had become a leaking food source, a supply ship. Depersonalized. Objectified. My body a vessel no longer connected to my past self.
I was not a natural mother. Was not born programmed like most women with a mother’s instincts and abilities. Had to be taught nearly everything by Jeannine, sweet-natured Jeannine with the round, brown face and puffy cheeks, whose kindness and endless patience in those first years of my marriage astonished me. It’s almost as if I was, and still am, missing the gene. There are things that I am naturally good at, skills that seem to have been part of my DNA—math, mechanics, linear thinking, classification, etc.—right-brain stuff that we usually associate with males and that early on got me my father’s favor, my teachers’ and later my professors’ wary admiration and, from boyfriends who needed help with their calculus homework and tuning their cars, mistrust and envy. Women, including my mother, and other girls worried about me or merely felt superior. But thanks to my father’s constant delight and his proud endorsement of these tendencies and skills, I never minded my mother’s worry or my girlfriends’ superior airs or the wariness of the males. I courted it.
As a girl I was a full-blown tomboy. Wouldn’t wear a bathing suit top to cover my flat chest until I was almost thirteen and no longer flat. Took Scout for my nickname when I was ten, and from fourth grade until eighth insisted on being called by it and would not answer to Hannah, except when it was used in anger by my mother or father. Otherwise, it was, “Hannah? Who’s Hannah? I’m Scout.” Entered science fairs in grade school, always the only girl to win a prize. A fact that in the 1950s was worth an article in the Boston Globe, which Daddy clipped, framed, and hung in his office like one of his degrees. Built a tree house in our backyard with leftover scrap lumber the summer Mother had her garden house put up. Won a Westinghouse scholarship to study engineering at Brandeis (another article in the Globe), then switched to pre-med in order to impress a biology professor I’d developed a sophomore crush on. In the Movement ran and kept patched together with tape, spit, and baling wire the old Multilith presses we used then, when everyone else, especially the men, were or pretended to be hopelessly inept, and later in Weather was one of the half-dozen members nationwide who could be trusted not to blow themselves up while making bombs from dynamite and blasting caps stolen from construction sites. Though was never trusted to place and set the bomb itself, a job reserved for only the more charismatic comrades, so had to read about it in the papers afterwards if it went off successfully. And still had the gene-firing proteins in Africa whenever I needed them—building cages for the chimps, devising and installing a cistern for the house, replacing the busted radiator on the Mercedes with a radiator from a wrecked jeep when Satterthwaite couldn’t find anyone in Monrovia clever enough to do it. And years later still had it, the right brain clicking away, when I took over the farm here in Keene Valley, impressing Anthea and the girls and the local men with my ability to tune and maintain the vehicles, build stockades and fences, fix the furnace, and build a windmill from scratch. Talked trucks, tractors, guns, and plumbing with the guys down at the Ausable Inn, packing back brewskies with the boys while a football game raged from the TV at the end of the bar. And whenever one of them, drunk and reckless, put the moves on me in the parking lot, I’d punch him lightly on the shoulder and say, “Frank, for Christ’s sake, keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t you know I’m one of the guys?” And Frank or Pat or Chuck would laugh and shuffle his feet on the packed snow and say, “Sorry, Hannah, guess I forgot,
heh-heh-heh,” and hoped like hell it never gets out that he got so drunk one night down at the Ausable Inn that he tried to fuck Hannah Musgrave, who is white haired and must be sixty and is probably a lesbian anyhow. But it does me no harm to have them think that I’m different from other women, that I’m not like their wives and daughters, that I’m Scout, a tomboy grown old. Safe.
IN AFRICA, especially early on, when the boys were babies and for many years afterwards, I had no such ruse to protect me. Especially around home, where my natural abilities were inappropriate or at best useless—except, perhaps, to the chimps, although even there Woodrow wanted me to delegate the physical work, give it to the native men and women who worked at the lab. My proper job, other than to function as Woodrow’s consort, was to supervise the household staff and to mother and raise his sons as little Americo-Liberian gentlemen. Consort and chief of staff were mindless tasks that I could handle in my sleep, practically. Turning myself into mommy was something else, however.
It was, as I said, Jeannine who taught me what I needed to know to get by. She showed me how to fake it as a mother, and when I couldn’t fake it, substituted for me altogether. She was little more than a child herself, barely eighteen years old and freshly arrived from the village of Fuama, not quite literate and, under her uncle the deputy minister’s tutelage and protection, eager to become a Christian. She had been part of the family dance troupe that performed at our wedding, and afterwards, at Woodrow’s request, although he didn’t tell me at the time, had remained in town and moved into his house, now my house, to cook and clean for us.
The house itself, up to now strictly a bachelor’s quarters, was owned by the government, one of a dozen or so that had originally been private residences built or bought by foreigners who’d afterwards moved up the housing scale or gotten themselves assigned to some other African capital. The houses had been acquired over the years by the government to dispense as favors or small rewards to ministers and VIPs and came with a staff, a car, and a driver, all paid for out of the national treasury. The residence assigned to Woodrow was a sprawling, white, single-story structure with a wide front porch and floor-to-ceiling windows, high ceilings, and large airy rooms—an American-style residence probably built in the 1940s, the sort of house a small-town southern lawyer would have built for himself. Except, that is, for the eight-foot-high, cinder-block wall that surrounded it and the heavy iron gate and Woodrow’s pair of huge, black, drooling Rottweilers roaming the grounds.
There was a small patio at the side of the house, where we often ate dinner, and a master bedroom fit for a Jamaican plantation owner, with a four-poster bed and private bath and French doors that opened onto a flower garden and a second patio, where Woodrow and I sometimes took our breakfast. There was a small bedroom that would soon become the nursery, a bathroom, and two additional bedrooms, and behind the house a servants’ quarters and a laundry and utility room. There was even a gardener’s shack for Kuyo, the part-time yardman—another of Woodrow’s close relations come in from the country for the support and protection of his cousin, uncle, nephew, or half-brother—the deputy minister. I was discovering the age-old Liberian system of exchange between the powerful and the powerless, a form of indentured servitude that more closely resembled slavery than nepotism.
The house had been outfitted with modern plumbing back when the city water system still worked, but the municipal pumping station and delivery pipes and valves had long since fallen into disrepair. Consequently, faucets ran only in a trickle and for a few hours a day, while outside on the street water poured from broken mains day and night. We had electricity and all the usual appliances, a TV, too, but even in those days, when the country was still relatively stable, we rarely had power for longer than three or fours hours a day, usually in the mornings, and relied on kerosene lamps and candles at night, and more often than not we were obliged to cook with charcoal on a backyard tin stove.
To me, it was a luxurious setting, however, almost embarrassingly so, compared with how most Liberians lived. A comparison, incidentally, that I rarely had the opportunity to make—because of Woodrow’s insistence that I account for every minute of my day when he wasn’t in attendance and his use of Satterthwaite as a keeper and spy as much as a driver and bodyguard and his refusal to allow me to go anywhere in the city alone. “You must not forget who you are,” he insisted. “Please, Hannah darling. The wife of a high government official must not be confused with a Peace Corps volunteer.”
The truth is, I had forgotten who I was. That’s what marriage and motherhood had given me: the upshot of the fucking, the pregnancy, the birthing of my sons and their infancy was that I wasn’t more of a woman or less; I was a different woman. You probably think of me as strong and independent, and I believe that I am—now. I was strong and independent when I was young, too, back before I came to Africa. But in the years between? No. Emphatically no. I was different then.
My weakness and dependence on Woodrow and other men—and in time I’ll tell you about them, too—caused terrible pain and harm to many people. To my sons, especially. Who was that terrible woman, and how do I deal with her now? And the chimpanzees, my dreamers—I need to know who betrayed and abandoned them, too. Was it Hannah darling? Was it Dawn Carrington? Was it Scout? Whom must I hate? And what will be the sentence for her sins and crimes?
IT WAS JEANNINE who taught me how to buy groceries at the Saturday market at Congo Square, and how to cook Liberian style with palm oil, peanut, or groundnut oil, with coconut milk and plenty of hot peppers. There wasn’t much meat available that wasn’t tinned—plenty of fresh fish, however, and chicken, and occasionally pork and goat and stringy chunks of beef. I knew all too well, of course, the local habit of eating chimps and monkeys, bush meat—an atavistic throwback to cannibalism, as far as I was concerned. But it wasn’t merely the country people in the distant villages who relished it and offered it up as a special tribute to distinguished guests. The townspeople loved bush meat, too, and considered roasted ape a luxury item, a delicacy. By then Woodrow had come to accept my abhorrence of bush meat—crediting it to my affection for the chimps at the lab and later the sanctuary and perhaps a white American fastidiousness—and ate it himself only when he dined out without me. “It’s actually very sweet,” he said. “Cooked correctly, it’s better than any pork, and no kind of mutton compares. In fact, in Sierra Leone that’s what they call it, ‘spring mutton.’ ”
No, at home we ate jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls. With Jeannine at my elbow, I learned to cook them all. We ate plantains, breadfruit, yams, gari, or cassava mixed with fish or chicken, one-dish meals mostly. Desserts were fruit salads, banana fritters, tapioca pudding, and shredded coconut balls. The gorgeously colored vegetables and plump fruits were always fresh, firm, a pleasure to cut, chop, mix, fry, roast, steam, and chill.
This was a whole new enterprise for me, who’d never paid much attention to cooking or even to shopping for food. Food had always been fuel, already there on the table before me, or if not, then prepared as quickly and easily as possible, and eaten the same way. Nourishment, that’s all. Now, however, it had become an intricately linked sequence of deeply satisfying, sensual, spiritual, and social rituals. In the past, I’d never really cooked, not even when keeping house back in Cleveland, where the preparation and consumption of food and cleanup afterwards were rigorously communal, or in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina—Carol had done all the cooking, actually. I did the cleanup, like a good husband. In the months when I was living alone at the lab compound I’d depended on expensive, Western-style groceries and imported canned goods purchased at what passed for a supermarket, Dot-Dot’s, on Ashmun Street. But after Woodrow and I were married, the marketing became a Wednesday- and Saturday-morning ritual for me and Jeannine that continued for years, long after I was capable of handling it alone. It was one of the few occasions when Jeannine and I stood on more or less equal footing,
when I was less than the mistress of the house and she more than my servant. For a long time I didn’t know how much more, and back then, especially when we shopped for food, I thought we were friends.
I remember walking with her to the square, enjoying the beauty of the crowd, the thronged streets, and then, looking for a particular herb or spice, taking side trips down the alleys and side streets to the shops of the poor. I remember putting my face and hands forward in gestures learned from watching Jeannine haggle and gossip with the shopkeepers in the market, who were all women, many of them from outlying villages, at first feeling foolish for it, awkward, inauthentic, somehow condescending, until it became natural and almost intimate.
But how I wished I were invisible. My white skin was a noise, loud and self-proclaiming. It declared my caste and status for all to hear. And I was both hated and envied for it. For a long while, whenever we went to market, hard looks and cold shoulders greeted me. Then, when it became known among the higglers and shopkeepers that I was Deputy Minister Sundiata’s wife, visibly pregnant by the minister, and was in Liberia to stay, coldness alternated with servile deference, as the shopkeepers bypassed the locals in line to serve me ahead of the others. One or the other, hatred or envy, rejection or servility, would have been endurable, on some occasions maybe even desirable, but coming together as they did, they were like a sty in the eye—a cause of pain, but one’s only means of seeing the world.
And it stayed painful, even after I had become a fixture in town, no longer exotic with my brown babies in tow or pushing a carriage. As soon as he could walk, Dillon went ahead hand in hand with Jeannine, while the twins, magical beings to Liberians, lay tucked into the carriage that I insisted on pushing, after the usual argument with Satterthwaite, who was still under strict orders to drive us in the car and wait while we did the shopping. I carried the money, and though Jeannine translated for me—for I understood almost no Liberian English then and even after years of hearing it daily got lost whenever native speakers wanted me lost—and did most of the actual bargaining, I did all the numbers, until Dillon decided he wanted to do the calculations himself. And I let him, a proud mamma, for it was his special gift. Early on, it had become obvious that Dillon was precocious with numbers. Good at math, as they say. Though not yet two and still clinging to Jeannine’s hip, he would call out numbers for no apparent reason, “Seventeen! Twelve! Twenty-nine!” And because neither Jeannine nor I could determine the source or meaning of his numbers, we assumed they were random bits, numbers overheard from Woodrow talking on the telephone to someone in the ministry, just meaningless sound scraps that he was repeating for the simple pleasure of it. Until one day I happened to notice that, just before calling out a new number, he would stare intently at the number plate of a nearby parked car, and it dawned on me that he was calling out the sum of the numbers on the plate. He shouted, “Seventeen!” and I looked where he had been looking and added the numbers, five plus seven plus two plus three—seventeen.