The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

by Wayétu Moore

  THE DRAGONS,

  THE GIANT, THE WOMEN

  ALSO BY WAYÉTU MOORE

  She Would Be King

  THE

  DRAGONS,

  THE

  GIANT,

  THE

  WOMEN

  A MEMOIR

  WAYÉTU MOORE

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2020 by Wayétu Moore

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-031-4

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-128-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949911

  Jacket design: Kimberly Glyder

  Jacket art: Shutterstock

  For Junior & David.

  Whatever you are, I am.

  Take your broken heart, make it into art.

  —CARRIE FISHER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have tried to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, and I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations, and places of residence.

  THE DRAGONS,

  THE GIANT, THE WOMEN

  RAINY

  SEASON

  ONE

  Mam. I heard it again from another room, as I always did when the adults were careful not to mention her name around me, as if it was both a sacred thing and cause for punishment, and I ran toward it. Mam is what they called her then. Down hallways, across the yard, behind closed doors—her name the most timid kind of ghost. “Mam so beautiful” or “Mam used to go there plenty” or “That’s not the way Mam cooked it” they would say quietly, cautious not to raise the drapes with the wind of their voices. And I would stumble in, wanting to catch them in the act, to give me that word again for so long that I fell asleep to the sound of it. Startled by my tiny body, they would stop and ask if I had finished my lessons or if I wanted a snack.

  Once when it was raining, I heard her voice outside. An Ol’ Ma, a grand-aunt maybe, told us that all of our dead and missing were resting peacefully in wandering clouds, and when it rains and you listen closely you can hear the things they forgot to tell you before leaving. Mam was not dead, they said, but I stumbled into the rain and stood beside the rosebush where I was sure I had heard her voice, full of laughter and long ago, singing those forgotten things.

  “Tell me where she is,” I would ask.

  “In America, you girl. I told you. In New York,” they would say.

  “Are you sure?” I asked to be certain. “When will we see her again?”

  “Soon,” they said.

  “Can I go there?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  “Why would you want to go there, you girl?”

  They convinced me that Liberia’s sweetness was incomparable—more than a ripe mango’s strings hanging between my teeth after sucking the juice of every sticky bite, the Ol’ Ma’s milk candy that melted on my tongue, sugar bread, even America—none a match for the taste then, of my country. This was all I knew of my home then—that I lived in a place that made words sing, so sweet. Yet it was without my mother.

  In those years, turning five years old tasted like Tang powder on the porch after supper. Little boys drove with their Ol’ Pas, a grandfather or other old man with pupils eclipsed with a dwelling blue, to the Atlantic, to fish facing the sunset. Little boys sat in parlors of opaque tobacco smoke as they watched Oppong Weah kick soccer balls into checkered nets against Chelsea. Little boys could now walk alone to those junction markets that sold everything from bushmeat to shoe-string, to buy the plantains and eggplant driven from Nimba’s farms for their nagging Ol’ Mas.

  Little girls could now help to wash sinks of collard greens in front of kitchen windows that faced pepper gardens. Little girls could draw water from neighborhood wells and balance them on their heads, full of braids and restless musings, all the way back to their houses as the sun lingered at the edge of the sky to make sure they had safe walks home.

  I turned five that day and the greens felt soft between my hands. They only let me wash them once, and afterward I was pushed away and told to leave the cooking to the cooks.

  “You will have plenty time to wash greens, you girl,” Korkor said, laughing from the hollow between the wide gap of her two front teeth.

  “But I want to wash them longer,” I said.

  She picked me up from the stool in front of the sink and carried me to a table where a cake tempted me from the middle of snack plates.

  “Look, you will spoil your fine dress!” she said, straightening the purple linen.

  “The Ol’ Pa will be vexed if you spoil your fine dress,” she rambled, and returned to the sink to complete the cleansing and preparation of my birthday greens. I did not believe that my grandfather would be angry with me if I spilled water from the greens on the dress he had sewn for my birthday. No, Charles Freeman would be proud that he would have one more granddaughter whom he could send for water from the well in Logan Town where he lived with Ol’ Ma.

  It was a famous well, mentioned in many of Ol’ Ma’s stories about Mam’s childhood and those memories of her life before us. It was better than the well near their old home further inside Logan Town. Ol’ Pa was a tailor and Ol’ Ma was a shop owner then, and they had moved with other Vai people toward the city, where most settled in Logan Town after a man they call Tubman, the president at the time, gave jobs to rural Liberians. It was 1966.

  They say the water well was a ground-level brick structure with concrete lining similar to most wells in Logan Town. It was a hand-drawn well with a bucket that dropped quickly in and out. As the bucket rose, Mam would grab the handle and pull it toward her small body to empty the water into her own plastic bucket. Once, alone in the yard, Mam peeked over the well and sang into it, as they say she always did, and the well threw an echo back up. “Dance with me,” she sang, and the well repeated her words, spitting a familiar voice onto the yard. She laughed, and while raising one of her hands to cover her mouth, Mam lost her balance and fell into the well. Darkness smothered her and the water below swallowed her body. The bucket rose and Mam spat the coldness out of her nose and mouth, gripped the rope, and yelled so that someone would hear her. As the bucket ascended, she heaved what she could out of her system and yelled again, scraping her fingers on the inside walls for something she could hold on to. The bucket fell again, and this time she did not know if she was moving or still, if the darkness was her end; the sunlight was so close and yet it mocked her in the distance. When the bucket resurfaced from
the water, Mam’s grip on the rope loosened, and when she opened her mouth to yell, nothing came out. She stretched out her hands, expecting to scrape the concrete walls, to fall again and be lost forever in the Logan Town shadows, but instead, as the bucket rose she felt a coarse palm wrap around her right wrist. Her head lay limp on her shoulder as her body was raised out of the well. It was a Ghanaian neighbor, Mr. Kofi, whom Mam was known to taunt through her window as he walked to work every day. “Thank you,” Mam whimpered, barely conscious. From then on, Ol’ Pa made sure he sent at least two daughters or granddaughters to the well.

  I turned five that day so I knew that I could now be called to go too.

  “But you say I can wash them today,” I said, turning from the pink and yellow birthday fixtures on the table back to Korkor. “You say I can wash them.”

  “And I let you wash them, enneh-so?” she said, placing the greens into a bowl on the counter. Korkor wiped her hands on the lappa tied around her waist and came to me. She took my hand and led me to the den and I dragged my feet so that my white dress shoes scraped the floor behind her.

  “Torma!” Korkor yelled out. “Torma, come get this girl.”

  In the den, Torma sat with my sisters, Wi and K, in front of a game of Chutes and Ladders.

  “Come,” Torma said, taking my fallen fingers. “Come play, small girl. Be on my team. I winning,” she assured me.

  Torma was a teenage Vai girl from the village of Lai, a third cousin, another caretaker who boarded with us after Mam left. Papa paid for Torma’s education in Monrovia, and she, in turn, took care of my sisters and me in Mam’s absence. Korkor mentioned once that the girls from Lai made good mothers. I cried the night she moved in and told Papa that I did not want anyone else to come be my “mama.”

  “She will not be your mama. Mam is coming back. She will be your friend.” When Torma stepped out of Papa’s pickup truck, she was introduced as “your cousin from Lai. Your big sister.” She kept to herself mostly, and alongside Korkor if she was not at the table reading or “taking care of lesson.” Over time the same orange shirt she was wearing on the day that I met her became faded and stained with spilled food. Finger paint remained splattered between the buttons, no matter how many times she washed it.

  “Look, we winning,” Torma said as I knelt in front of the board game. K, a three-year-old with a charming round face who knew the power of being the youngest of the three of us girls, parked in Torma’s lap as soon as she sat back on the floor. She would turn four in only two months and looked to have been coerced to behaving with a party of her own. She twirled the barrette that stopped one of her pigtails between her fingers and smiled toward Wi, my six-year-old sister who concentrated on the board. The den was decorated with colorful helium balloons and metallic streamers taped neatly onto the folds where our walls met.

  “Where my papa?” I asked Torma.

  “Your papa outside with Moneysweet and Pastor,” she said, and sucked her teeth as I bounded out of the room and onto the porch deck of our yard.

  Papa sat in a deck chair beside the pastor of our church, a man who always gently shook my hand when he saw me. The reflection of their water glasses speckled the plastic table where they sat. It was a warm day, and the leaves of towering palm trees swayed above us amid a vast field of freshly watered grass. A radio rested on the rail of the deck and the exaggerated harmonies, the clashing of cymbals and drums, filled the surrounding yard. Papa’s and Pastor’s smiles bent to the rhythm as it vibrated the metal antennae. Moneysweet sat on a stool near the table and peeled a mango plum with a sharp knife. The sweat from his orange, square head descended both sides of his face in the sun, and upon seeing me he extended a slice of plum in my direction.

  “Papa,” I said, whining as I climbed into Papa’s lap. “Korkor say I will wash greens on my birthday and then today she say not for long.”

  “You wash greens you will spoil your dress,” he said, repeating Korkor’s warning.

  “I will not spoil it,” I insisted.

  “Wait, small small,” he said. “After your party you will wash the greens.”

  I bit down on the ripe plum wedge, and the juice from it oozed out and followed the lines of my lips and jaw until the bottom of my face was completely sticky and wet. I worried that Papa would see me and send me back inside to Korkor or Torma to wipe my face, but he and Pastor had already resumed a conversation about a man whose name I heard at least once a day.

  “But Doe has spoiled the country. Liberia spoiled-oh,” Pastor said, shaking his head.

  “It’s not spoiled. Two more years the man’s gone. A new president will come.”

  “He will rig the thing like he rigged the last one. Everybody fighting, everybody wants to be president. Everybody says they president,” Pastor continued.

  “Yeh, the country spoiled. Sam Doe spoiled it,” Moneysweet agreed from the corner of the deck before shoving another slice of plum in his mouth.

  I asked Ol’ Ma who this man was, Samuel Doe, whose name I heard once a day, and she told me he was president of Liberia. Every time I listened to people talk about this man, it reminded me of the Hawa Undu dragon, the monster in my dreams, the sum of stories I was too young to hear. The Hawa Undu dragon was once a prince with good intentions, who entered the forest to avenge the death of his family, all buried now in the hills of Bomi County. He was a handsome prince, tall with broad shoulders, high cheeks, and coarse hands marked by the victory of his battles. He entered the forest and told the people that he would kill the dragons who left mountains of ashes in Buchanan and Virginia, who left poisoned eggs in Careysburg and Kakata. But the prince became a dragon himself. One with asymmetrical teeth, taloned elbows, and paper-thin eyes. One with a crooked back, coarse like the hollows of the iron mines where many sons were still lost, always dying. One rich enough to fly, yet too poor to know where to go. He humbugged the animals, killed for food, forgot his promises. And now, Hawa Undu was president of Liberia, once a prince with good intentions. Ol’ Ma said everybody was talking about him because there was another prince who wanted to enter the forest and kill Hawa Undu, to restore peace. This prince was named Charles, like my Ol’ Pa. Some thought he would be the real thing—that he could kill Hawa Undu and put an end to the haunting of the forest and the spirit princes who danced throughout—but others feared he would be the same, that no prince could enter the forest and keep his intentions. The woods will blind, will blunder. Hawa Undu would never die.

  “You see the Burkina Faso rebels them have entered the country, and come start killing Krahn people left and right because Doe is Krahn man. You don’t think they will kill Doe? They going for him,” Pastor said, rubbing his chin.

  “You hear from Patrick?” Papa asked after a moment.

  “No, the people say he went and collected his Ol’ Ma from the bush and went to Ghana,” Pastor said.

  “His house still there?”

  “They looted it, I hear. But they didn’t get much,” Pastor continued.

  “Mr. Patrick?” I asked. My father nodded, reluctantly. “Mr. Patrick is in Ghana?”

  To this he did not respond, and I wondered about Mr. Patrick and Ms. Genevieve, his wife, and their two sons. Ms. Genevieve always gave us milk candy when we visited their house in Sinkor, which was so big that ten women were able to fit their markets in the front.

  “All the Gio and Mano people running.”

  “Patrick was safe, my man. Doe’s people were not looking for him. They know he was not giving money for no rebel business,” Papa said.

  “Doe’s soldiers don’t know nothing. They see Mano man, he gone.”

  “Hm. Everybody say they will kill man in power and lead better. Say they want kill Krahn man ’cause Krahn man not good president,” Papa argued.

  “And Krahn man want kill Gio man and Mano man,” Moneysweet added. “For what?”

  “And Gio man want kill Mandingo man,” Pastor said loudly as he pointed at Moneysweet.

  “An
d every man want kill Congo man,” Papa said, almost singing. “Quiwonpka tried and now the man dead, enneh-so?”

  Moneysweet laughed, wiped his sticky hands on his jeans, and stood up from the stool where he sat, shaking his head. He vanished into the house and reemerged with a napkin that he used to wipe my face.

  “You will leave, Mr. Moore?” Moneysweet asked Papa.

  When I asked my teacher what happened to Kelly, what happened to Josephine, what happened to Wiatta, what happened to Gerald, what happened to Saa, she murmured, America. I did not believe her until I stopped seeing them. I did not have a chance to share what I wanted to tell Mam in case they saw her.

  “No. Me, I’m staying. The people are not serious,” Papa said. “When the people realize it’s a waste of time trying to push the man out and let him just go on his own through the next election, the country will go back to normal.”

  “Hmph. He will not go on his own-oh. He will not go,” Pastor said matter-of-factly.

  Through a green and clear Liberian April, a car approached us from the flat road with shoulders and elbows sticking out of its windows. When it parked in front of the deck, I stood up when I recognized Mam’s parents, my Ol’ Ma and Ol’ Pa, whom we called Ma and Pa. My uncle was with them also, and a cousin and his mother. I stood up from where I sat with Papa and ran to Pa, a towering man with a round bald head, whose face I could barely see when I looked up and the sun was its highest.

  “Birthday geh,” he said, picking me up with great difficulty as soon as he stepped out of the car.

  “Look, my dress,” I said into his face.

  “It looks good,” Ma said, touching the lace cloth that lined the hem.

  My sisters, who heard their voices from inside, bolted toward Ma and Pa, nearly bowling them over with the charge.