by Wayétu Moore
“Stand and be recognized,” they would say.
Papa stepped forward.
“What your name? Where you from? You Gio?” a soldier asked him.
“Augustus Moore. Monrovia,” he answered and Ol’ Ma squeezed my shoulder.
“You people Congo? You Congo man?” the soldier said as his eyes scoured our small group for signs. The soldier’s eyes rested on Ma, who wore a lappa like she had just come from the country, and he looked quickly back at Papa.
“You Congo man?” he asked again as Papa avoided his eyes. “Where you work?”
“At the university,” Papa answered.
“You got ID with you?” the soldier asked.
“In my bag, yeh,” Papa said and Torma handed him the backpack she carried. Papa handed the soldier an identification card, and he looked like he did not believe whatever the card said, and he kept looking at Papa to make sure the man on the card was the man in front of him.
“Go,” the soldier said, and we walked past him and joined the rest of the crowd toward the north.
We followed him. Sure that, like all giants, he had the ability to see an end of the road that we could not. I was small, and if I had any power like him, I was no more than a fairy whose hand barely fit into his palm. I left all of my dust in a small teacup in my room corner in Caldwell, so the only power I had to share with him was the power of touch, something that my sisters and I perfected one afternoon as we held hands and flew from our back porch with old lappas tied like capes to our backs. So I touched the leg of his pants as he walked.
“You all all right?” he asked.
“Yeh,” I answered, and did not let go of his pants until the next checkpoint, where Torma took my hand as Papa moved forward to speak to the soldiers.
“Stand and be recognized,” they said. We had just passed a Gola man who lay on the ground sleeping, and Papa stood in line to be questioned while Ma took us ahead to pass the checkpoint. Papa was Gola and Congo, and from Arthington, just like Taylor, so what if the soldiers thought he was like one of the prince’s people and wanted to get rid of Hawa Undu?
Once again he became the giant. The dragon’s men asked the same questions about who he was and where we were headed. The soldiers questioned Brother James and Amos just as thoroughly. Brother James stuttered as he answered the questions, but the soldiers let them all pass down the road walled by flowers with blackened petals.
When we continued, I ran to Papa’s side and continued to hold on to his legs. My power was minimal, but maybe it would be what he needed, if the soldiers came for us, to gather me and the rest of his fairies, Wi and K, and Torma, too, and Ma and Brother James and Amos. Perhaps it would help him, if only small small, but still, to gather us together and hold us over his shoulder until we laughed ourselves into disappearance and rest, fufu dinner and so much Tang powder that our tongues remained orange for days after.
Amos decided that he would try his luck east into Ivory Coast and then Ghana, and he parted ways with us after the second checkpoint. He walked into Papa’s chest and thanked him, crying like a spanked child.
“I will pray for y’all,” Amos said as tears plunged to the ground from his face. “I owe you.”
“Do not worry, Amos. We will be back soon. This thing will finish soon, yeh?” Papa said.
“Yeh,” Amos answered slowly.
By the final checkpoint I had barely any more power to give to the giant; however, I stayed close to his side. We had not eaten all day, because the giant wanted to make sure that we reached Junde by night, so as my stomach twisted with hunger I squeezed the giant’s pants to give him all of the juice that I had left in me.
Again, Torma took my hand as the giant approached the men.
“Stand and be recognized,” they said. Papa stepped forward.
“Where you people from?” I heard a soldier ask him. Another soldier nodded at Ma and she pushed our backs to walk ahead to the end of the checkpoint. The same man pointed at Brother James to stand in line with Papa and continued to sort through the escapers. Papa’s university card had worked so far, and as we moved to the front of the line to cross the checkpoint Ma turned around and stopped so that we could wait for him to pass with us across the final checkpoint.
The giant was taking longer than during the previous checkpoints, and as he spoke to the soldier the man’s nostrils flared and he beckoned more soldiers to come to him. Brother James was cleared and nearly jogged toward us.
“What’s wrong?” Brother James asked when he reached us and noticed Ma’s distressed face.
“The people still asking him questions,” she murmured.
There were three soldiers around Papa now. One of them yelled at the other one and touched the trigger and head of his rifle in front of him.
“Come,” Brother James said and we returned to where Papa stood.
Before we reached him, one of the dragon’s men took Papa’s arm and pushed him toward a line on the side of the road where men stood with their hands behind their backs and looked out onto the road, looked down to the ground with what looked like water around their eyes, or knelt on the ground with folded hands, screaming things like:
“Please-oh! I hold your foot!”
And not too far from the line to which they pushed Papa, there were men lying on the ground. How could they sleep at a time like this? Didn’t they know the giant needed them?
“But my daughters!” Papa said. The soldier continued to push Papa while another pointed the nose of the gun at his head, the air boiling around him.
“Take them to the booth,” another said when he noticed us.
“You all hurry,” he said underneath his breath as we all entered the booth on the side of the road, a small room with a window that faced where Papa and the other men stood.
“What’s happening? Where’s Papa?” Wi asked before looking out of the window to find Papa among the men waiting in the line.
The men in the line were other Gola and Congo men, someone passing said. During wartime, a man will not only find the person he hates to kill him, but he will find and kill anyone whom he thinks the person he hates loves or knows or once did business with. Papa looked at Ma from outside the window.
“Ay-man!” Brother James said, slapping the wall of the booth. He leaned against the wall and buried his face in his hand.
“What we can do?” Ma asked as she tapped his arm.
“Nothing-oh,” he murmured.
“What Papa doing?” Wi asked Ma again.
Ma sat on a small stool in the corner of the booth and while rocking back and forth, she raised her hands into the air and shouted questions to God. Torma attempted to pull us away from the window.
“No,” Wi said, pushing her hand.
I tapped the window in hopes of getting the giant’s attention. He glanced at me, not as though he was happy to see me, but as though I was doing something wrong and he wanted me to stop. I continued and was joined by my sisters. He was a giant and I knew that he would be able to rescue himself from that line and rescue us from that box on the road. Torma stepped away from us and leaned beside Brother James against the wall; she held herself and sniveled softly. I was a “big geh” now with no hand on my back to soothe me as Papa’s face grew pitch black in the last of the golden sun. The soldiers who were not questioning other escapers paced in front of the booth as my sisters and I continued tapping. The giant looked out onto the road.
Wi started crying first, and I wanted to be stronger for my family in the booth, and my hero outside, but I cried as well and with both of my palms I beat on the window of the booth with my sisters. K followed our lead, although she walked back and forth from the window to Ma’s side, where Ma continued to pray, ignoring my small sister’s plea for attention and reassurance.
“Papa! What Papa doing?” Wi screamed through a fury of tears and spit as she pounded the window. We pounded. We beat to overpower the drums. The guns. We pounded.
“Papa, come let’s go
!” I shouted, wanting him to fly to us and gather us up in his arms.
A passing soldier came to the door of the booth, angry as his jaw fell to reveal crooked yellow teeth.
“Shut them up!” he shouted. Disrupted from her prayer, Ma came to get us away from the window; but we all fought to remain, pushed her hand and chest as she attempted to pull us away.
“Shut them up!” the soldier shouted again.
“Children,” Ma said softly first, before her voice escalated in fear. “Shh! Children!” but we pushed and kicked to stay near the window in close sight of Papa.
Our misbehavior in the booth nearly tipped it over and the passing crowd was delayed when they noticed the noise coming from it. Brother James tried to hold us down also, but he was pushed away like Ma and Torma.
After waiting at the opening of the booth for us, and on several occasions grabbing his gun as if he was going to shoot us to sleep, the soldier left the opening of the booth and walked to where Papa stood. He pulled him from the line and asked him more questions. After a couple of minutes he pulled the giant’s arm toward the booth where we wrestled with Ma and Brother James. The soldier pushed Papa’s back and returned to a group of other armed guards. Surprised and trembling, the giant stumbled to the opening of the booth, where we ran to him crying. I wrapped my arm around his leg and squeezed.
“Go, go, go,” he said and we nearly fell over each other’s feet across the line to Junde, all astounded, all grateful, none looking back.
That night as we slept, waiting for the canoe that would carry us along a still river to Lai, I lay against the giant’s chest. Rebels had not seized Junde. It was still one of the dragon’s cities, they had said. In Junde, Papa found a fisherman who agreed to take us to the village in the forest, where we would sail the unstirred waters, where we would walk briefly through the woods until we reached a circle of houses, hidden from the war outside. I unfolded Papa’s hands and pressed mine against his palms in the last house on our journey from Caldwell. There were many families asleep there that night, some hoping to make it all the way to Sierra Leone, some planning to stay in Junde until the fighting in Monrovia stopped. I asked Papa to sing to us, and he did. K and Wi lay near Ma, and Torma lay across from them as she played with the stem of a pink flower that had only one petal left.
NINE
Lai was our hiding place. Mam had told us many stories about her visits there when she was a small girl. The rooster and the sun fought, each morning, over which one would welcome the day. The hum of Lake Piso was a part of every conversation, both during the day and in our dreams. The houses in the village formed a circle around a sandy plot of land, where the villagers frequently met. There were two large orange trees in the corner of the village, close to the lake, Piso, that flowed back to Junde. Behind the houses were woods, full of cotton and kola and ironwood trees, that had to be crossed in order to get to a vast forest, and if you walked that forest for long enough you would reach the Atlantic Ocean, which Vai legend claims was the same beach where old Vai kings did business with German and Portuguese people. When we got to Lai, we saw that Mam’s family from the city was already hiding there. My cousin Cholly was Papa’s roommate. And Ol’ Pa Charles, Mam’s father, a man so tall he made Papa look like his son when he stood beside him, and who always patted my head when he passed me. Torma was home in Lai now, and she joined her family and lived across the village in another house.
On July 29, 1990, a group of boys dressed as Hawa Undu’s soldiers went into St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, where six hundred civilians were hiding. It was two in the morning. When the first shot was fired, those who were hiding quickly arose from the bare floors where they slept and scrambled for an escape from the compound. But as the lanterns were lit in the dark, they found Hawa Undu’s soldiers surrounded them; all the men, women, and children were attacked with guns, grenades, and swinging machetes. On the following day the remains of the six hundred were paraded along the streets and burned. Hawa Undu decided on that day to speak to the BBC.
“I will not step down!” President Doe said. “It was rebels dressed in army uniforms that killed the civilians at the church. Charles Taylor’s men did it. Not army soldiers. Rebels killed them. But no rebel can kill me. Only God can.”
The BBC also said that 375,000 Liberians were now in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
The voice from the small radio was muffled, but loud enough for the small group of men surrounding it to hear. They set the radio on the window of a tiny wooden chicken coop. One of the men stood near the radio and held the edge of the antenna between two of his fingers, twisting it periodically for improved reception. Papa was with them, sitting on a plastic stool close to the outside walls of the broken-down shack. And he looked like he was trying to make a serious face, the kind of face someone makes to hide something serious. Only a few of the men had spent enough time outside of Lai and bordering towns to know English well. Most only spoke Vai, but they crowded around the radio because every other man in the village was doing so. When the man on the radio paused, one of the villagers repeated what he said in Vai. Papa kept his journal with him, a leather-bound book now worn to shreds. While sitting with these men, Papa wrote down words and phrases they were saying. He asked questions when he did not recognize a word, and the villagers took turns telling him the answer.
In the mornings, the front door swung and the smell and sound of the lake rushed to our resting bodies, while Ma laid a mat on the front porch. The rooster from the coop crowed, and she knelt down on the mat and lowered her head several times, murmuring phrases to herself that I did not understand. Ma boiled a small pot of water from Piso and set it on the porch to cool before we rose. We changed into dresses that Pa had recently sewn for us from cloth the villagers gave him, and we joined hands and ran across the village circle to where Papa had already risen and was reading, waiting for us to join him. The girls and I climbed a lumber ladder to his loft.
On those mornings, Papa tutored us in what he had learned, the new words of the small village. We were quizzed on the meanings of words and he made us talk to each other in Vai. The process left me bitter when Papa shook his finger at me for creating words he called foolish and unserious. After our Vai lesson we were given math problems, simple addition and subtraction that we completed with stones he collected from the outskirts of the village.
After we completed our lessons we returned to Ma’s house, where we ate small cups of white rice with her and took turns telling her about our morning lessons.
“Ay-yah,” Ma would say, laughing and touching our faces and cheeks like Mam would. Ma was regaining her strength and weight back from the weeks we spent walking, when she had been reduced to merely skin, bones, and a faint wheeze as she struggled for breath in the sun. Lai was where she was raised, and where Mam was raised before her family moved to the city, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Vai chiefs whose graves sat at the edge of the village toward the woods for everyone to see.
“Go now,” she said after we were finished eating. “Play,” she said, urging us to join the other children in the circle.
“Yeh, go.” Pa playfully swatted us out of Ma’s house. “Go meet the other children.”
We could not fully understand what the children were saying, or they us, so we wanted little to do with them. Our favorite place to gather was between the orange trees, where we had a clear view of the village children as they played in the circle. They chased each other, busied themselves with hand games to which they sang along in Vai, and ran in and out of the houses. They had lived in Lai their entire lives.
While playing, Wi gathered the spoiled oranges left scattered underneath the tree and with them made a circle that surrounded us. When the circle was complete, mud and weeds rested between Wi’s fingers and she came to where K and I sat in the middle with sticks.
“What is this?” Wi asked, drawing two circles attached to one another by a crooked line.
“W
hat is this?” K asked after studying Wi’s drawing and emulating the exact same thing in the dirt.
“That’s the same thing I drew!” Wi said, annoyed and offended.
“No it’s not,” K argued.
“Both of them jah-oe,” I said laughing, pleased that I had found a way to use the word I had recently learned meant “ugly.”
“Jah-oe, jah-oe, drawing jah-oe,” I teased them until Wi pushed me. I continued laughing at her nonetheless. A village girl ran to us from the circle across the village where the other children played. She watched us carefully first; she smiled at the fun I sounded and looked like I was having.
“Hello,” the girl said, pulling the strap of her dress up her arm and over her shoulder. She was barefoot and her hair was parted into small cornrows, like ours. We looked up at her but continued what we were doing—Wi pushing me, me dodging her pushes, and K smiling at what she genuinely believed was her original artwork.
“Hello,” the girl said again. Wi met the girl at the margin of our orange circle.
“You speak English?” Wi asked. The girl covered her mouth with her hands as she laughed and looked down at the ground.
“Hello,” the girl said again.
“Jah-oe,” I shouted at her. I rolled over in the dirt, overcome with laughter. At first she looked surprised, but the girl then covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. Wi laughed also, then walked over to me and pulled me up from the dirt.
“Stop, you will get dirty,” she said. I sat up, still showing my teeth.
