by Wayétu Moore
“Nah-mah,” Papa said, pressing her head into his chest as he held her up. “He will come back,” he said, although he did not look Ma in the eyes. And after he hugged us, he did not look me in the eyes either. Several times during that day, Ma stood up from her porch and looked across the circle to the lake. She walked across the village, past the shrubs that blocked her view, and waited on the shore of the lake for Pa. While watching her, still hoping that she did not remember what I told Pa before he left us, I thought of Mam and wondered if we made her this sad. I wondered if she was walking to the edge of her America and looking across the ocean for a ship that had us in tow, if she was crying, if she wanted us as much as Ma wanted and waited for Pa.
At dawn everyone in the village was awake. The men stood near the radio by the chicken coop, talking about whether or not to send another group to look for Pa if the most recent search came back without him. The women took turns bringing Ma soup and begging her to eat, because for the past week she had sat on her porch crying, and sometimes she even sounded like K did when she had malaria. The children were told not to run around the circle and that we should be mindful that Ma was sick and instead play quietly inside our houses. My sisters and I passed the time by her side.
In front of the lake, a bush shook, and Ma quickly stood up on the porch. The company of men had returned from the search, and when Papa saw them he rushed to them from where he sat near the radio. Before he arrived where the three men stood, one of them, a boy, took his shirt off and ran into the village circle.
“THE OL’ PA DEAD! CHARLES FREEMAN IS DEAD!” he cried before he fell in the middle of the circle, collecting his shirt in between his fingers and burying his face in it. Charles Freeman. That was Ol’ Pa’s name. My heart shook between its walls. Villagers ran out of their houses, and when they saw the boy in the middle of the circle, they started stomping the ground with their feet and yelling with their hands stretched out to God. Ma fainted onto her porch. Papa ran across the circle, picked her up, and carried her limp body inside her house. A crowd rushed in, mothers and daughters and sisters, sons and uncles and cousins, friends. Papa laid her on the mattress, and Torma used a stiff piece of cardboard to fan her. There were so many people surrounding her that I was pushed to the doorway and could only catch sight of her between their busy bodies. I had heard of death in many forms. The kind where spirits joined ancestors and lingered around us. The kind where a person went to paradise and waited for God in heaven to call them up. The kind where a soul is taken by God to a life after the one on earth. None of these seemed to be ways of bringing his body back, of seeing him walk heavily through that clearing with all of us on his mind and a smile so we would know. My Ol’ Pa was gone. I would never see his body again. I stood in the doorway, looking first at the crowd around Ol’ Ma, then toward Lake Piso and its part in it all, and I knew. There was something wrong, deeply wrong, on the other side. There were no drums, no slumber. There was something deeper. Something else. There was no savior to restore a forest full of troubles, and I wanted Mam. I only wanted Mam.
“Wake up, Ol’ Ma,” an older woman said, patting Ma’s face with dry hands. “Ol’ Ma, wake up.”
Ma’s eyes gradually opened to a looming crowd of wet eyes. What had happened, what he said, what it meant, it looked like it all came to her at once, and she tore her dress from her body, spellbound. Standing at the door, I watched Ma throw her head tie to the floor as she frayed her hair with her fingers, and her heart escaped from her mouth.
ELEVEN
The rocks and stones in the forest are plenty, but none will make a sound when they are stepped on. And the skeletons in the forest are plenty, but none will break to make a sound when they are stepped on. And the crocodiles in forest swamps, they fuss plenty and snap and tease, but not even they make sounds when they are stepped on. They just swim deeper. They hide.
When a prince entered the forest, the monkeys were already silent. There were two then—Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson—and Johnson was the prince who entered first to kill Hawa Undu and restore Liberia. Johnson stepped on the plenty rocks and stones, stepped on the skulls and crocodiles and none made a sound. On September 9, 1990, the wind stood still among the leaves and a prince finally captured the dragon. Hawa Undu clawed and howled but his fire had left him. The prince did not want to kill the dragon in the forest, because he believed the forest would one day be his, so he dragged Hawa Undu to his own house by his tail while the dragon’s teeth clapped, and he tied him with ropes made of shaven tree bark. The prince ripped off Hawa Undu’s scales, one by one, while he begged for mercy. The prince’s rebels surrounded Hawa Undu, spat on him, mocked him, made him howl, and praised the prince for fulfilling the promise he made of finally killing the dragon and ending this war.
The prince told them to beat Hawa Undu, and the rebels took their fists and clubs and beat Hawa Undu. He told them to cut his hands, which were guilty of stealing from the Liberian people, and the rebels cut his hands, one finger at a time. The prince told them to cut his ears because he did not listen when they told him to surrender on his own, and the rebels cut his ears. Hawa Undu would have at least tried to run away but they cut his toes, laughing while the ice from American beers chilled their throats. The rainy season was nearly gone so no thunder would drown out the sound of Hawa Undu dying. The powerful dragon who flew into a wall he denied was in front of him. Once a prince like his captor.
The prince dragged Hawa Undu’s lifeless body through Monrovia’s streets and left it there, bleeding from every opening. They said Liberia would be healed of her sickness after Doe was gone, that they had the pepper soup we needed. But these men who said they came to save Liberia, these men who say they come to save the world, they do not understand the curse of the forest. Those dreams of peace and noble rulers, they are gone. The trips to the market, the walks to the well, now ghosts among us. Those days of sweetness burned to ashes. Hawa Undu will never die. His spirit lives on, moves through the greed of those wretched heroes, all once princes, all once well-intentioned men.
By December 1990 the fighting had still not ended. The men in the village listened to a voice from the BBC on a rusty radio placed on a window’s edge, and the latest was that Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson were now fighting each other for the presidential seat after Hawa Undu’s death.
In Lai, we were not allowed to walk inside the chicken coop. It was more Papa’s rule than any of the villagers’ rule. Because Papa said this, we played around it. We opened the main trapdoor and waited for stray chickens and their babies to run out of their tin shack so that we could chase them. We hid outside the coop. Ajala pressed her finger to her lips and grabbed the edge of the shack door. We covered our mouths to keep from laughing. Ajala flung the door open and several chickens ran out, leaving tiny tiny footprints in the dirt. The young boys of the group scrambled to throw the chickens back into the coop.
“Look!” K said, pointing to the door where the orange chicken slowly came out. As it turned around to make its way back into the coop, Ajala shut the trapdoor, and the boys threw the remainder of the loose chickens through the window.
“Pah, y nahla!” Ajala shouted, pointing at a lone chicken. As if the chicken understood what Ajala said, it ran around the side of the shack. We followed, laughing as it managed to escape our clapping hands and waddled between our legs. We laughed as it led us around the coop twice, then through the cooking house, where the women sat over boiling pots of rice and stew. The chicken led us through the rice farm between the yellow stalks, where the farmers yelled at us to take the chicken back to the coop.
In the distance I heard a woman yell. When we heard that more than two women were yelling now, and saw in the distance some elders run toward their houses from the village circle, we stopped. The chicken clucked loudly and I searched the crowd of children for my sisters. Wi took our hands and we ran to Papa’s house, where we were told to go at once if we suspected that anything was wrong. Villagers continu
ed to run into their houses, and a crowd of men approached the opening to Piso, where a woman wore a camouflage vest and dragged a bottle of palm oil to the edge of the village circle. A gun hung on her shoulder, like the one the rebels carried on the road.
“They found us!” a villager shouted as she ran into her house, slamming the door. “I didn’t come to start trouble,” the stranger said to the crowd of men. “I’m looking for Gus Moore. Augustus Moore.” Papa ran out of his house into the circle.
“Go into the house and close the door,” he said to Wi.
Wi, like me, was unable to leave him, and after only a few steps she stopped and looked at the soldier woman from a distance.
“What is the problem here?!” Papa asked as he moved through the crowd of men and stopped when he saw the shiny gun on the woman’s back.
“I’m looking for Augustus Moore. That’s you?” she asked calmly.
“Yeh,” Papa said. “What you doing here? How did you find us?!”
“I’ve come for you,” she said, spitting on the ground in front of him. “You and your daughters.”
“What do you mean you come for me?” he asked, raising his voice. “Who sent you?!” He sounded afraid, he thought he was shouting.
“Mam. Your wife,” the rebel said and watched Papa’s face change. He stood noiselessly. “Your wife come for you.”
DRY
SEASON
TWELVE
Satta. I was still broken. I wanted a way out from thoughts of him, and Satta’s memory came to me one night and stayed. It was a dream about her jug of palm oil, which she carried like a baby that day she came for us. I woke up and said her name in the dark, surprised to have remembered it all those years later. At that point I could not remember when last I had been outside. Some weeks prior I went to a store just below Eastern Parkway, one of the only stores of its kind that still existed among the deluge of coffee shops and yoga studios, to buy palm oil and frozen cassava leaf, to make the dish I knew would heal me, the only Liberian dish I made that tasted like Mam’s. When I arrived, a sign informed me that the store had closed indefinitely, and, returning to my apartment, I felt everything I had been avoiding crashing hard into me, tears staining my skin. I have not been able to wash them off for some time.
Before moving there I rid the place of ghosts. I burned sage—the Ol’ Mas say the spirits do not like the odor. I then called Mam and asked her to pray, certain they would listen to her voice, ascending in that musical way it did from my phone speaker, before they obeyed mine.
“I’ve been thinking about that woman,” I told her that late fall.
“What woman?” Mam asked.
“The rebel. From the war. I dreamed about her.”
“Oh,” she said when the silence overstayed. “Have you spoken to K recently?”
“A couple days ago,” I said.
“And you’ve eaten today?”
“I made cereal,” I said. “Her name was Satta, right?”
“Yes,” she said and breathed deeply into the phone. “You will be all right, Tutu.”
And Mam made that sound of married curiosity and indifference, an impossibility, her best invention.
The five or so steps from my bed to the kitchen felt like uphill lunges. I spent too long looking into mirrors, too long sleeping, buried under covers still marked with our collective smell, every moment I was not working. I had made it to my living room that day and I opened the large window where I placed a vase of Mam’s favorite flowers, lilies, now dried and unrecognizable in the escaping sun. The sill was cold when I climbed onto it, and I rested my slippers on the fire escape where children played below as we once did, and the Brooklyn drivers honked in the street while bits of conversations and laughter spilled from their car windows on the backs of words like move and fell and going and tomorrow, and the sirens came toward me from the distance, then disappeared again behind those words, and the new transplants hurried home, as gentrifiers do when it is almost dark and they are still fearful of corners.
I leaned my head against the stile and wondered how I smelled, how I looked, if music would ever sound the same, especially those songs I knew by heart. Wi called shortly after and I almost did not answer the phone because I did not care for the questions.
“How are you?” She asked this while exhaling, her daughters loud in the background.
“I’m fine,” I answered.
“You getting your work done?”
“I am,” I said, fighting the urge to look at my computer desk, the remote office where I spent a few hours a day consulting and freelance writing, then glaring into the orbit while an unedited novel sat idle on a minimized screen.
“Did you get out today?” She sighed again.
“I’m outside now,” I mumbled, staring through the holes beneath my feet, three stories down to the ground below.
“Outside outside, or on your fire escape?”
I did not answer. So she said my name in that way only Mam would. Then there was that familiar litany of consolations, fumbling pauses and attempts to make me laugh, her optimism harsh against my ears. She reprimanded her girls every few minutes and if I were well I would have smiled. She was that good at it.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just need time.” And I needed my cassava leaf, the way they made it in Lai, spread over parboiled white rice drenched in oil, with shrimp, with dry fish and pepper that wounded my lips, reddened my skin, and those meats that required both hands to eat.
New York. By my midtwenties the transients around me were already collecting AA chips from too many weekends in Chelsea, habits that always felt unnatural to me because I have a low tolerance for pain and hangovers, and because the fundamentalist shadow of Mam and Papa’s early Sunday mornings in Texas, even during my self-proclaimed late-teen rebellion, remained. My habit during those years was love stories. Grand, provoking, almost silly, intoxicating, appropriated from romantic comedies and Old Testament Scripture. I had fallen in love in that city and then out of it too many times to count. And so I fit in perfectly there, in that way wanderers like myself do in refined cities, where most wear love like loose garments.
But he stuck.
We had been together for two years, all of which were long distance. Long-distance relationships begin beautifully, end suddenly, sometimes by accident, and thereafter smoke rises not because all is burned to ashes but because there is always something left in the pipe.
This was the other side of love. Everything infuriated me, everyone was guilty. During the fall after that relationship, the days were long and mornings came too soon. The sun crept toward the body of that girl hidden under blankets, that girl still running, that girl who lay on bare floors with her Ol’ Ma, who lay in New England attics with her new immigrant family, and that girl who lay with her sweetheart on an air mattress that flattened during the night, while he was in college or in med school or unemployed—in those days he could not afford a bed.
The Ol’ Mas did not tell us that you could not throw away love once it was finished. That it would remain on us like blackened scars, underneath blouses and in those places only we could see. That we would reach a point where it, once solid, would melt in our hands and we would never fully wash off its residue; and that some love, the truest love, also the most dangerous, could disfigure our core.
I used freelancing as an excuse to make offices of Brooklyn cafés and city parks. An excuse to take spontaneous flights to visit my brothers and sisters in Texas after spending too many days pretending to understand the meaning of those paintings in Manhattan museums. An excuse to meet friends with nine-to-fives on thirsty Thursdays and giggle as they tried to stay awake at their desks the morning after, cursing me out with emojis via text, and thereafter promising them I’d make it up to them on the following week. Love was all around me, and yet once fall came, I barely left my apartment for reminders.
When we were children and the teachers told stories of love, we did not fully understand. Then th
ey began to have different conversations with the girls than they had with the boys. They separated us into rooms in those elementary schools in Connecticut and in Memphis and in Spring divided by thin walls where we could still hear the boys laughing as they explained our parts, the unmentionable parts, the parts between our legs that were rude to speak of. And when we giggled our way through our questions, the teachers mentioned love, but we did not fully understand it. So Papa and Mam tried to explain it and they spoke of love in that creamy, sterilized way, stripped of those parts that were rude to speak of, and because they censored our parts, neglecting mention of those stiffening limbs, I did not believe its bigness. I ignored the rage in their eyes. “Our love for each other saved our family,” they would say. “Our love for each other got us through the war,” they would say. “My love for Mam,” he said. “My love for Gus,” she said. And how could anything I would find live up to that?
“Have you spoken to Mom and Dad?” Wi asked.
“I spoke to her this morning. Dad was at the university.”
“I still can’t believe they went back there,” she said. “You sound better. A little better.”
To this, nothing.
“Have you heard from him?” she continued.
“Every time I talk to Mam—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Not Dad. I meant … well, sorry, never mind. I shouldn’t have.”
I pressed my bare feet against the cold bars of the fire escape. A cool breeze brushed against my face, separating the phone’s mouth from mine.
“I’ve been thinking about that rebel. Who came for us,” I said.
“What rebel?”
“During the war. It was weird. She was carrying palm oil like a little baby. In my dream. And I’ve had a couple of them.”
“Hm,” the sound came from my sister as half laughter, half disappointment. “Have you spoken to K?” she asked.
