by Wayétu Moore
Bendu Sudan was not in the woods but she was the first face that I looked for after we entered. She scared me when I saw her on our television one night, her black face covered with clods of powder, screaming out to us from the screen. Papa said it was a foolish movie and that Bendu Sudan was just acting. But when she screamed she cried, her dress hanging off one shoulder, and it made me cry. At school some of the children said that she hides in the woods and the forests, and if you walk too far inside, she will grab you. So when we entered the woods after Ol’ Ma and Papa pulled us out of the house, Bendu Sudan was the first person I looked for.
Bendu Sudan used to kiss a man who was married to another woman, a “big big” man, they say, with plenty money. And because she used to kiss him, and leave her lips pressed against his for a long time, and even sometimes use her tongue, even though he already had a wife, she was not a good woman. Her stomach started to get big because she was going to have his baby, and the big big man was afraid and angry because he did not want to tell his wife, so he killed Bendu Sudan. Bendu’s Ol’ Ma told her that when a person whose enemies have not been punished dies, that person could return to punish the enemies. “Death is not the end of life for you” is what they said. Death is not the end. So after Bendu Sudan was gone, people would see her on the beach and around Monrovia, still a fine geh like when she was with the big big man. And if a married man ever tried to kiss her like the big big man did, she would haunt him. And she was so disappointed with the world that she would haunt others. So I searched the shadows of the trees around me for Bendu Sudan’s face. And since death was not the end, I looked for others who may have gone some time ago, who were waiting in those shadowy places to correct their enemies. I looked up at the sky, without sun, without moon or clouds or stars, but Bendu was not there. If I were not so close to Papa, I was sure the ghost would leap out from the leaves to wrap her snakelike fingers around my neck. I had been at the edge of those woods many times before, but Torma or Korkor always stopped me from going farther. The woods were not for small small girls, they would say. There were some good things there, like almond trees and a looming plum tree Moneysweet picked from during the dry season, and we would wait at the edge of those mazes for what felt like an entire afternoon until he reemerged with a netted basket full of juicy red and orange plums, each as big as two fists. But we had heard stories of the badness of the woods too. Like Bendu Sudan. Like the dragons, smaller than Hawa Undu, scaly green creatures with sharklike teeth that even the bushmeat hunters were afraid to challenge. Like the boogeyman and devils. Like the Monkey Men who they say were made by scientists from America and Europe, to see if monkeys and people could fall in love, and were set free in the jungle to live in the mental wasteland of being half monkey and half people way too poor, too joyless to be rescued from surrendering their dignity. Like the children my aunty said work all day in the woods in Harbel tapping tapping tapping the Firestone trees until rubber snailed its way out to be packed in ships and sent to America—these children with no smiles, no stories of yesterday to tell, who had not eaten for so long that she once drove by Harbel and could not tell if they were still children or still people at all. All these things I had heard of these woods, and now the woods were all around me—whispering to us at first, then laughing as the birds slapped the tree branches above our heads in hurried flight. There was a sound like a first raindrop hitting an empty bucket, the hardest rain, loud and too many drops to count. And a sound like thunder, in the kind of storm that the clouds send when they are jealous of those below.
“What is that?” I asked Papa, the popping still around us. We were walking so quickly and his skin was wet with sweat. He moved branches out of the way so that Ol’ Ma’s path would be clear. He moved branches that made the faces of grieving men.
“Drums,” Papa said. “That’s a drum.” And Torma and Ol’ Ma glanced at him, then looked away, and I felt like I had learned something I was not supposed to know, like that the drums were secret or magic.
“I hear another one,” K said and Papa was shaking as we ran. In the distance we heard yelling each time we heard the drum, and the air became smokey, as if something was burning on the stove, and cars were honking, and in the distance people were shouting and the sound of those drums came nearer.
“That’s Malawala Balawala?” K asked, sobered a bit by the thought of festival dancers celebrating not too far away.
“Yes,” Papa said, panting heavily. “Gbessie Kiazolu is dancing to the drums with the Malawala Balawala country dancers.”
“There’s another!” K shouted. I heard it too. It was so loud that I felt the sound behind my eyes. People were running on the road when we left our house, not just us, but it felt like we were alone. Papa and Ol’ Ma, Torma and my sisters and me. I missed Mam and if we did not go back to our house, we could not see her if she came back. So I cried.
“Sh, sh,” Papa said, tapping my leg.
“The people will hear us-oh,” Torma warned.
“What people?” Wi asked, turning to face Torma.
“The bad people,” she answered.
“Sh, sh,” Papa said. “You don’t want go see Malawala Balawala? Want to go dance?”
I looked behind his shoulder. The color of the house was first to disappear through the leaves, then the shape, then the hammock that swung between two posts on the back porch. Sun-dried leaves and sticks cracked beneath Papa’s shoes.
“Where is Mam?” Wi asked.
“We are going to her. We will see her soon, yeh?” Papa said, and he smiled as we worked our way through the branches, the drumming all around us. This made me more happy than I expected to feel. We would see Mam soon.
“But how will she know we left the house? She will wait there?” I asked.
“Just walk quick quick,” he said, at first too fast. “She will know,” he said, slower this time, and smiled. I clenched his shirt between my palms as the drums escalated. I wondered who was dancing on the other side, and if we would be allowed to sit with Papa and Ol’ Ma or if we would have to dance with other children. Who would I see there? If this was all for Hawa Undu, then he certainly was a mighty dragon—one who needed thunder and drums to announce his battles.
“Gus, the people will enter the woods? They saw us?” my Ol’ Ma asked. Her voice shook as she lifted Wi up so that her legs dangled over a large tree stump.
“No. I don’t think so. Just keep going,” Papa answered, moving even quicker.
“I tired, Mr. Moore,” Torma gasped behind us.
“No, no. We can’t stop,” he said. “Pastor house will be right there on the other side.”
“We going to Pastor house to dance?’ I asked.
“Yes, that’s where we going.”
A willowy stream of sunlight bled through the high branches and rested on the side of his face.
“Papa,” I whispered into the light.
“The man now come make his trouble everybody trouble,” Ol’ Ma murmured, louder than me so Papa did not hear me.
“Ma, we will be fine. Pastor house coming. Just pray,” Papa assured her.
“No, that Charles Taylor trouble here,” Torma said between heavy breaths behind us. “He want be president, that’s not the way to do it. Go find boys and give them guns to fight your war? Now look.”
The man she spoke of was the prince. He was the prince who had come to kill Hawa Undu. In their stories, the prince was born in Liberia but he moved to America after stealing from Hawa Undu. He came back with boys from Burkina Faso and Guinea, the rebels, and now he would force the dragon out of the forest.
“The monsters came for the dragon?” I asked, and Papa and Ol’ Ma glanced at each other again in that language that only the old ones spoke, and they agreed.
“Torma, come!” Papa said, turning around as he noticed she had stopped to lean against a tree and catch her breath. She continued behind Papa, scratching her exposed legs as bristly weeds rubbed against them.
“We have t
o find phone to call Ol’ Pa in Logan Town,” Ol’ Ma continued, pulling her lappa over her knees as she stepped over a large branch, the colors paled and ruined. I thought the woods would come alive with every mystical creature that had ever scared me as I walked behind Papa, the breaking leaves underneath his shoes, the heavy breathing and the splitting of the afternoon light.
“Papa, I’m scared,” I said and he finally heard me.
“Nah-mah. We will be out here soon, yeh?” he said.
“Then we will go to Mam?”
He sounded as though he was about to say something else, but before the words could leave his mouth a loud crack made us stop.
“Down!” Papa said, kneeling. Torma ducked to the ground and covered her head. Ol’ Ma leaned against a large tree with Wi’s head pressed against her stomach. She was shaking as she looked back at the path that led us away from the house.
“Gus! Look!” she shouted, pointing to the trunk of the tree that she thought would protect her. Up from the buttress, a slowly rising vapor of smoke ascended from a dark hole where Wi, just a few moments before, was standing, and Ma once again broke with tears.
“They shooting in the woods,” she said.
“Shooting what?” I asked. “What is shooting?”
“No, not in the woods,” Papa said, standing up from where he knelt. “No shooting. I told you, drums—”
And before he could finish what he was saying, those drums came crashing loudly around us. “Let’s go!” he shouted and ran between the trees as K and my head bobbed over his shoulders and by his side. Torma’s arms swung beside her as she followed, and the cracks fell onto us and the surrounding woods.
“Run!” Papa said, and Ol’ Ma led Wi across the uprooted stems as the trees around me came alive. Up from the darkest greens and roaring howls, square faces and sharp teeth appeared in the crevasses of the branches. The boogeyman and Bendu Sudan, Monkey Men and Firestone’s children with scowls so convincing that I shouted. The whisper and echoes of the trees changed to laughter and mourning, and the eyes of the forest stretched open, and its limbs reached out to grab me from Papa’s tight grasp. I closed my eyes tightly and my head bounced against his chest and shoulder.
“Run!” he said again, encouraging Torma and Ol’ Ma not to stop, no matter how painful, no matter how far the earth stretched its hands from the tree stumps to pull their legs and lappas back.
“I coming,” my Ol’ Ma said with the hardness of a rainy season storm, past Papa, with eyes too focused on the end to cry, and a story that meant too much to her to risk ending now.
FOUR
Before the dragon came—a thing, not a person—before Hawa Undu was born, humans ruled the forest. Gola people and Kissi people and Loma people and Gio people. Vai people and Kpelle people and Kru people and Mano people. Bassa people and Krahn people and Grebo people and Gbani people. And these groups, they all ruled in their own way, prayed in their own way, told stories in their own way, loved in their own way. The people had many chiefs and each group had one prince to lead them. But the dragon said the forest was too small, and the ways of the people were not correct, not what the dragons did on the other side of Mami Wata’s shoulders. So. They said no more chiefs no more princes. No more praying no more speaking in those ways. There is one correct way to tell a story, the dragon said. The people fell in line, but those princes never stopped being. Death is not the end. And after that dragon had spent a long time ruling the forest, telling the people the correct ways, princes began to fight. None of them won, but soon a man who used to be a dragon’s soldier rose up. One from the Krahn people. This man promised that the forest would be for everyone again. That there were many different ways to tell a story. Some believed him and were glad, but the faith did not last. Those promises broke into tiny pieces. Papa said it would not be long until this man was gone and order would be restored. Others, like our neighbors, like my schoolmates, like my uncles, believed the forest would die and it was time to find another home, so they left. This soldier man who entered the forest had become a dragon himself, but the most curious kind, one who did not understand the fire within. So when the dragon heard that yet another prince was entering the forest, this one with his own soldiers, this one of Gola blood whose family had come long ago from America, the dragon used the fire too much. The Krahn people from which the dragon came were ashamed. And those the dragon hated most, whose princes had opposed him, the Gio people and Mano people, were also ashamed, were afraid.
Outside of the woods that day as we hurried to Pastor’s house, it was suddenly clear who was Krahn: those most afraid of rebels. And it was clear who was Gio and who was Mano: those most afraid of the dragon’s soldiers, the ones wearing army uniforms in the distance. The Gio and Mano walked faster, gazed at the ground, eyes as though they had been crying, avoiding the gaze of those who could have been the army men sent to kill them.
Papa led us to Pastor’s house immediately after departing the woods. The house—like all of the houses in Caldwell—sat on its own separate hill with a cement porch in the front, a wooden deck in the back, and a garden on both sides visible from the main road. People rushed past his house, some the dragon’s people, some running, as we entered.
A man and a woman ran across the porch and into his house, with a pace as urgent as Papa and Ol’ Ma’s after the drums made us run through the woods.
“What were those?” I whispered to Torma.
“Guns.”
“What are guns?”
“What the rebels fight with. How they beat the drums.”
“For how long?”
“Until the war finish.”
I imagined the rebels were walking around pounding the drums with their guns and sticks and sugarcane. I wondered who was at the front of the line as they marched to fight. Did he have to beat his gun the loudest?
Inside the house, Pastor’s living room was filled with people who sat on his sofas and blue rugs. Against the wall there was a large bookcase with books and pictures of memories with his family and friends. A few children sat against the bookcase with sandwich bags of Kool-Aid that were tied at the opening. A small hole was cut in the corner of the bag where the children sucked the juice out.
Pastor’s wife met Papa at the front door as she cradled and rocked her young daughter, who cried because of the sound of those drums outside. Pastor’s wife was a tall woman with a pretty face who walked like her shoulders were trying to touch her chest.
“Gus,” she said, touching Papa’s arm after he put K and me on the floor. “Thank God you made it. Pastor is in the kitchen with the others.” She placed her hand on each of our heads and hugged Ol’ Ma and Torma before leaving.
Papa pointed to an empty corner in the room and Ol’ Ma led us there through the crowd. Torma followed the pastor’s wife and tapped her on the shoulder, as she bent down toward a woman who ranted that her husband was not at home when she and her son left.
“You know where I can find water? For the girls?” Torma asked.
“Go in the kitchen. We ran out of cups, so you can put it in a bag and tie it,” she said, shaken.
I searched through the breaks in the crowd for Papa. First for his body. Then for his voice. In the kitchen Pastor and a few deacons sat down at the table in front of glasses of water that shook when the drum beating and the gun beating was too loud outside. Pastor looked young, like Moneysweet young, even though we all called him Pastor, and he always wore a shirt made of country cloth with colors that looked like a kaleidoscope. One of the deacons could not sit still in his chair, as if his okra stew was taking too long to arrive, and the rough hairs of his chest were wet, and you could see it all because his shirt was unbuttoned. His glasses had thick frames that rode up and down his nose with each word.
“You all good?” Pastor asked Papa. One deacon stood up and shook Papa’s hand.
“Yeh,” Papa said. “Moneysweet gone. Torma and Ma with us.”
“Good.”
“The
y were past the bridge when we left. The bullets reached the house.”
“The people serious. War is here,” the deacon said, folding his hands at the table.
Torma handed Papa a plastic bag of cold water on her way back to the living room. He took the bag and cut through the corner with his teeth to drink.
“What do you make of it?” Papa asked.
“Me, I going. Some boy passing told me people going to the ETMI to wait. The government set up camp there already,” a man said.
“That’s not far from here,” Papa said of the school. Outside the windows, carloads of escapers filled the streets. Some were barefoot, like they had dropped everything they were doing and left. Others had suitcases or bags of belongings, the things they could not live without spilling out of the plastic. Ol’ Mas balanced bundles of clothes and other effects on their heads, their children and grandchildren running behind them.
“No, it’s not far,” a deacon affirmed.
“How many people you got here?” Papa asked Pastor.
“I didn’t count. They come and go. The house is open,” Pastor said.
“We can go toward the river,” a man shouted. “Another boy said they got ships leaving for Sierra Leone.”
“You go toward the river you have to pass too much bush. Rebels them in the bush looking for people to recruit to fight,” a man argued. “Your children not safe. They will kill you and take your children.”
I saw Papa sit down. I did not understand what they were saying. It was the language the old ones spoke, foreign words and meanings, and I only wanted to see Mam.
“The people already set up refugee camps in Guinea and Ivory Coast is what I hear people saying on the road,” a deacon said. “It will be safer there for those of you who got children.”
“You go through all that trouble and what happens if they kill Doe next week?” a man argued. “This thing will not last. Hide small and the thing will be over soon.”
“It’s different-oh,” Papa said. “This is not small thing. The rebels on the road near the bridge. They’re young boys with guns too big for their own self to hold. They don’t look all right.”
