by Wayétu Moore
“Yeh,” some others agreed.
“That’s big thing here. Not next week thing-oh. If you can leave the country, go.”
“Ah!” a woman shrieked in the living room as a loud bang outside shook the picture frames in the display case she sat underneath. Seconds later, another blast sounded in the distance.
“Where is Mam?” I asked close to my Ol’ Ma’s chest.
“We going. We going to her.”
With the third drum, glass shattered in the den and screams flooded the house.
“They shooting,” a deacon said, rushing out of the kitchen. Papa followed him and came to us.
“Let’s go,” he said to Ol’ Ma.
“Where?” she asked, lifting us from the ground.
“The ETMI. The school,” he said.
“Yeh, go,” Pastor said to Papa. “We will meet you all there.”
Papa took us from the corner where we huddled with Ol’ Ma and Torma. Everyone was rushing again and it confused me. Who were we running from? The dragon? The prince? We hurried out of Pastor’s front door in a greater hurry than when we walked in. The road north out of Caldwell that would lead us out of Monrovia was a long and narrow cement road with tall weed bushes and sugarcane fields on either side.
“Papa, where we going?” I asked him.
“Away,” he said, eyes glued to the road and the people who slowly flooded it.
K remained in Papa’s arms and laid her head against his shoulder. She looked as confused as I felt, as more people crowded the road. Wi and I walked on either side of Ol’ Ma and I squeezed her hand in my fingers like the bread dough Korkor once allowed us to play with when she became too tired to yell at us to stop running around the house. Men, women, and children peeked their heads out of the sugarcane fields before walking out onto the road to join us. There were some who were barefoot, and their walking became jogging when any noise or crack sounded in the distance. Many women traveled with mountains of belongings tied into bundles on their backs and heads, keeping their balance as the bundles wobbled high into the air. Some walked with nothing in their hands.
“Where we going?” I asked again.
“Yeh, where?” Wi echoed, moving closer to Ma as more people joined the road out of Monrovia.
“Away,” Papa answered.
“For how long?” Wi asked.
“I will tell you all soon. Not very long,” he said in one breath.
“And we will see Mam soon?” I asked.
“We will see Mam soon.”
“We going to America?” I asked.
“No, no, not America,” Papa stuttered. “But we will see her soon.”
“Can we go back for my doll baby?” K whined into Papa’s neck, tears now rusted on her cheeks.
“Maybe. We will see,” Papa said.
Questions waited at the roof of my mouth. Just as I was about to begin asking, as the words attempted to seep through the thin spaces between my teeth and fall at Papa’s feet, he stopped walking and waved his arm in the air.
“What is it?” Ol’ Ma asked in a panic before she noticed that the expression on Papa’s face was one of relief.
“James!” he yelled. “James? Brother James!”
Some of the people in front of us ducked for cover, others ran back into the field for fear that the yelling was a warning of dangers. Fifty feet ahead of us, a man turned around, and after noticing Papa, he hurried toward us through the crowd.
“Brother James!” Papa yelled as the man approached.
“Mr. Moore!” he replied as he reached Papa and hugged him. He was a man with narrow shoulders, taller and younger than Papa, and he lived by himself not too far from our house. We saw him at church and he always had candy to give us.
“You well, enneh-so?” Papa asked, patting his shoulder.
“Yeh,” Brother James answered. He picked me up and I felt his body shake.
“The drums?” I asked him after I saw he was startled by the outlying drums. Brother James looked at me and at Papa. Their exchange was cut short when Brother James said:
“Yes. Drumbeats.”
“Why they so loud?” Wi asked Papa.
“I don’t know,” Papa said.
“We must hurry-oh. I want make it to de ETMI before dark. They now set up camp there with food,” Brother James said. I remembered driving by the big school they spoke of many times.
“Yeh. That’s where we going,” Papa nodded and we continued to walk, the crowd of people now nearly shoulder to shoulder as we headed out of Monrovia.
“I’m hungry,” K began.
Papa handed her to Ma and he stopped in the middle of the road. He knelt down and opened the small backpack that he had taken from the house and pulled out a pack of crackers. The crowd shuffled around us. He opened the pack and gave a couple of crackers to K, then to Wi and me.
As I raised the cracker to my mouth, almost tasting the salt on my tongue, another drum, louder than all the rest, was struck so hard that I dropped my cracker on the road.
“Come,” Papa said, placing the bag back on his shoulder. Papa ran, pulling my hand as I was dragged behind him. Everyone on the road was running, screaming. After a hundred yards he stopped, looking in the distance in the direction of the drum.
“You can walk now. Walk now, but quickly,” he coaxed as K began to cry again.
“The rebels now block off the east and south borders,” Brother James said.
“How you know?” Papa asked him.
“I started walking toward there to take bus out of Liberia to Ghana. I got family there,” he said, still trembling, I could tell, though I was no longer touching him. “They will question you if they know your job. I saw them stopping people who look like they work for the government. Even on the road.”
Papa worked for the government, for the water and sewer company, but he was not Krahn like Hawa Undu and his people. Brother James said people like the rebels would think Papa supported Hawa Undu because of his government job.
“Good thing Ol’ Ma with you. Even if they don’t bother you for job, they still see Congo man.”
“Yes. And I got my university ID for the class I teach. I will say I’m a teacher,” Papa said. Brother James nodded.
“What is this ETMI business?” Papa asked, changing the subject, eyeing the travelers around us.
“Camp. I will not stay there long. I want get news from there.”
“Then where you will go?” Papa asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Brother James answered.
The roads looked different when traveled on foot. I realized I did not usually pay attention to what was happening outside of my car seat, where I would have pinching contests with my sisters to see who squeezed hardest, leaving throbbing red circles across our forearms. On foot the road was bumpy, full of rocks and now clothes that had fallen from the duffles of others who had left. Some shirts of different colors, some American shirts with the faces of American people smiling with their happy teeth and powdered skin. The crowd grew around us and my steps were closer and closer together. I squeezed Papa’s hand. Then I pulled it until he looked down. When I finally had his attention, I said nothing. I just stared at him, nearly stumbling along as we walked.
“What?” Papa asked after too long had passed without any words. “We will be there soon,” he said.
“And we will see Mam,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, before quickly looking away.
So my eyes returned to the road and those in front of us. There were Ol’ Mas and Ol’ Pas with canes, wobbling slowly to balance bags over their shoulders and atop their heads. They were with their children, and their grandchildren, who all carried heavier bags, looking nervously out into the fields and crowd, some with stains of tears covering their faces.
There were sugarcane fields on either side of us, the stalks like skinny bamboo at the roots and the brightest green at the crowns. It was rainy season and it had poured heavily only a few short days before, so I j
umped over tiny puddles across the wide dirt road. I counted the puddles as we passed them. Sometimes I jumped over them and sometimes Papa lifted my arm so that my entire body flew over the dead water.
I had counted enough puddles when from behind I was pushed to the ground. A small boy and his mother rushed past me. Papa grabbed my arm and lifted me up, while some women who traveled behind us screamed. I turned around and four men, the prince’s men, rebels, moved through the crowd with long pipes the color of stones. Were those guns? They held them close to their bodies with straps that hung like purses, and none of them had drums. They were wearing plain clothes, dirty clothes, not uniforms, so they were not Hawa Undu’s men; they did not fight for the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). They fought for the prince. They were not taller than my father. The boys looked younger than Moneysweet, and fire and sparks spurted out of the mouths of their guns. Another ran out of the sugarcane field pointing his gun toward the crowd. We were near the front of the crowd and the rebels approached from the back.
“Hands up!” he yelled.
Those who were running stopped.
“Lift your hands,” Papa said and I raised my hands in the air, copying the others around me. I did not understand why the boys were pointing their guns at us or what we had done wrong. Or where the drums were that they used to make the sounds. Papa was a good man. Many people told him this. And I thought I was a good girl, and always apologized when I pinched too hard and one of my sisters cried.
“Don’t cry,” Papa whispered to me.
“Walk!” one of the boys yelled.
So the crowd continued, all of us, with our hands raised in the air and their guns to our backs.
“You all government people here? Where the government people?” one of them asked, his voice a boulder, his words so close together it was difficult to understand. He spoke like those who lived outside of Monrovia. At the pastor’s house the women said that is where the prince found some of his boys to fight for him.
“Who government?” another one asked, poking the gun into the backs of members of the crowd, some of them begging and covering their heads. All of them had big eyes, sharp teeth and moved like they were playing football, chasing a moving target, but nothing was on the ground.
The rebels moved closer to us from the back of the crowd. Papa worked for the government. I looked at him, watched his face for what would happen next.
“Look ahead,” Papa said, low so only we could hear him. “Just keep your hands up, keep walking and looking ahead.”
The drums were loud in the distance and each step felt like an entire day had passed us. The many feelings of a whole day wrapped into those waiting moments, as the rebels got closer. What would Papa say when they reached him? Would they recognize him?
“You all come!” one of the rebels yelled from behind. “Government soldiers them not far.” We heard the others stop, their feet shuffling as they changed directions, only a few feet away from Papa. He sighed, and I heard Ol’ Ma release a short murmur, wrapped in a prayer. The rebels turned around and as quickly as they’d come, they disappeared into the sugarcane field toward the sound of the drums.
When we could no longer hear them, almost at once everyone started to run. Papa held my hand, dragging me. I lost my breath in the rainy season puddles, sobbed into the backs of those drums until I was blinded by the tears, and fear, so crippling that I was not sure if this was a bad dream that Torma or Korkor would eventually wake me up from. Every few steps I could feel the sharp end of a stone tear through my slippers, and I thought of Mam. If she knew what would happen here. If she knew that we were running. And as if I had been pinched, too hard to keep from crying, I realized that I would not be home that Sunday when Mam called. The phone would ring and still ring and we would not answer to tell her about the drums. Or that we had been running but we had been good. That the rebels almost asked Papa where he worked but they ran away first, and I saw Papa’s eyes go back to the time Mam got on that plane, dark, as if he was struggling to see something too far ahead.
When Papa said we were close to the ETMI where we would rest, and far enough from the rebels, he let us slow down. We walked until we could see the sun at the end of the road. We traveled toward it, taking turns sitting on Papa and Ol’ Ma’s hips.
“I want to go home,” K whined.
“Soon, soon,” Papa said. In the evening as we approached the ETMI, the crowd began to move slower in front of us.
“We here,” Brother James said. A sign on the gate read: Elizabeth Tubman Memorial Institute. When the people walking in front of us scattered and our view of the institute was clear, Papa squeezed my hand in his.
“Ay God,” Ma said with her hand over her heart.
Before us, seated on the courtyard of the ETMI and spilling out of the building behind it, to the side of it on the tennis court and soccer field, and behind it, was what looked like everybody in the country. Everybody in Liberia, all the people in one place, on that field, away from the forest.
“Eight thousand and counting,” Brother James said.
“Oh God,” Ma said again.
Men and older boys stood together on the edge of the courtyard in conversations as deep and with faces as long as Papa had when the deacons came to visit Caldwell. People lay on small bags of folded clothes and attempted sleeping.
“Stay close. Don’t let go of each other’s hands,” Papa said as he led us through the crowd toward the building. Inside, mostly women and children occupied the complex. The dragon’s men patrolled the building with rifles, and older women served small cups of dry white rice to a line that wrapped around the interior walls of the complex and continued out of and around the building.
“’Scuse me,” Papa said, touching a soldier as we entered the building. The soldier looked at Papa like he had done a bad thing. Papa pulled his hand away.
“What?” the soldier shouted, the whites of his eyes red and yellowed, his mustache and beard coiled into small balls of hair that wanted nothing to do with each other.
“Do you know when we will be able to return?” Papa asked, nicer than I had ever heard him talk.
The soldier’s lip curled and he did not answer Papa.
“Can you give me estimate of how long they will take to capture the rebels?” he asked.
“You want go home, go home,” the soldier yelled and hissed his teeth at Papa. He spit on the ground before walking away, his gun pointed out into the air by his side. Brother James touched Papa’s shoulder.
“Come, man. They don’t know what’s going on either, and you don’t want to raise suspicion. Let’s just go rest. We will find out what’s happening in the morning.”
I had never heard anyone talk to Papa that way, or walk away from him before he finished speaking. He did not move for long after that. He stood looking in the direction of the soldier.
“Let’s go,” Papa said finally, and led us to a corner inside the complex. There were stains on his shirt from the dust on the road and his clothes smelled sour with sweat.
“What are you doing?” another soldier yelled as Papa and Brother James cleared the space in the corner for us to sit.
“Men not allowed here to rest. You sleep outside,” he said as he moved toward us.
“Okay,” Brother James said quickly, like he was afraid of the soldier.
“On the tennis court!” the soldier yelled. He stood and waited for Papa and Brother James to follow him.
“Stay with them, yeh? We will be right outside,” Papa told Ol’ Ma before kissing her on the cheek. “Right by the door.”
Ma nodded, and she looked as if she would cry.
“Where you going?” I asked, grabbing Papa’s arm.
“I will be right outside,” Papa said over the noisiness of the crowd.
“I want to come with you,” I pleaded.
“Let’s go!” the soldier screamed. Other men with rifles looked his way.
“Come on,” Brother James said to Papa.
/> “I want to come!” I cried.
Torma pulled me away from Papa as he disappeared with Brother James through the crowd and out of the complex to the tennis court.
Ma and Torma pulled us in.
“Nah-mah,” Torma said. Never mind. “Nah-mah, yeh?”
Ol’ Ma hummed and her voice formed a shield around us. In the corners, trash hung around each trash bin—there were too many people in the school and loose paper, lost clothing. The floors were covered with lappas, where other women like my Ol’ Ma sat with small children, silent as they cried, voices gone after those lies of going back home soon soon.
“Where is Mam?” I asked and missed her smell. “Where is Mam?” I asked again but no one answered. Perhaps I was dreaming and when I woke up I would continue watching my American film as Moneysweet cut the rosebush outside and Korkor washed the lunch greens at the sink and Torma braided Wi’s hair as I danced. And Papa would read to me in the evening before calling Mam in New York and I would tell her how well I was doing. Perhaps this was only a long journey to market and the sounds outside were only festival drums and something bad happened at the festival and that was why everybody had to come to this place, but tomorrow we would be dancing together because maybe this was a surprise for us since they liked giving us surprises when we least expected it.
Or maybe since everyone kept saying Hawa Undu’s name, at the pastor’s house and on the road, then at that moment the prince and his men surrounded the forest and Hawa Undu was shaking now, hiding underneath a fallen branch so that the rebels would not see his scales.
At dawn a woman screamed. It was a shriek, a painful sound that made some duck for cover and others awake from their sleep. She cried while she screamed, a continuous sound that I heard in my dreams. She said her daughter was stolen in the night and was convinced that it was a soldier at the ETMI, certain that some of them were rebels in disguise. She was so ruined that she searched the corners and splayed lappas on the floors while calling her daughter’s name. Ol’ Ma stood up as soon as she understood what the woman implied happened to her daughter. She raised us to our feet, folding her lappa and placing it back in a bag that hung at her waist. I had never seen her look so desperate, so furious.
