The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

by Wayétu Moore

  THIRTEEN

  At those gatherings, weddings, funerals, where familiar names are stuttered through laughter, those who are old, while boasting of their meekness, will recall the steps that led them to Staten Island or Rhode Island or Minnesota or Atlanta or Maryland or Virginia or Tennessee. The conversation will bend and someone will always start a sentence with: “If the war had not happened …” and so on with the grandest plans, sweet to hear, hard to imagine. “If the war had not happened, Liberia would be a goliath in Africa by now” and “If the war had not happened, our lives would have been better” and “If the war had not happened my wife would have stayed” and they would have built their mansions in the mountains of Nimba, or Robertsport’s beaches, among beds of palm trees, and I always laughed at this familiar song. There they shared the time when Rawlings closed his border at Togo and Liberia became a haven to the Ghanaians, and during Biafra, we were refuge to the Nigerians, and during the Korean War, how we helped the Koreans, and during World War II, how we helped the Americans. “If the war had not happened,” they say. “If the coup had not happened,” they say. Sweet to hear. Hard to imagine.

  But there I was on that therapist’s couch, in that small and dimly lit room, and within the words I said that night were:

  “If the war had not happened.”

  I said: “If the war had not happened, we probably would have met in Liberia.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Maybe,” I answered under my breath. “Our parents were very close friends. Still are. But before the war and everything. We met here, but we would have met there too. If everyone stayed.”

  She nodded and stared.

  At some point in my teens I became intrigued with the number 8, and the number 62 was close to her angular brown face on psychologytoday.com, so I chose her. K mentioned I should consider being more thoughtful about my choice, but “at least I went” I told K after my first meeting. “It’s weird. Talking to strangers about … my stuff. I don’t think it’s for me, but I’ll give it a shot.” A few months before, during my initial session on a cool Wednesday evening, I shared with the therapist my affinity for round numbers, and words, my appreciation of her lamp lighting, and, after some coercion, him. Her presence, her face, her voice were soft. I kept going back and eventually I did not mind having someone other than Mam or my sisters to pour into about things only they could know.

  “What do you think the dream means?” the therapist asked after listening to ten minutes of my exact description of Satta and the details of that day.

  “I don’t know. The fact that she was holding the oil like a baby in all of the dreams she’s shown up in is interesting. I’ve been thinking about going back,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “To Liberia. I haven’t been back since we left. No matter where we moved to, even when we were in Texas, I think I always knew I would go back.”

  “That makes sense. And how long were you in Texas again?” She leaned back and wrote on her notepad.

  “Since I was eight. Eight to seventeen. Then I moved back here for school.”

  “I can imagine you’re curious to see how it’s changed. And to see your parents. It was a big change for them to move back after all these years. Brave.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “And you and your sisters and your younger brothers, you’re all adults now, of course, but it sounds like that was still a big transition.”

  “It was. It is.”

  “You told me last week that you ended your recent relationship. Correct?” she asked softly, almost purring, and I welcomed it. “And since your breakup you’ve been having these night …”

  “Dreams,” I interrupted. “Yes.”

  “Right. You seem to still care for him. Do you ever consider going back?” she asked, her back straightened.

  I must have been shaking my head, facing the window, or have rolled my eyes, taking too long to answer.

  “Is that an upsetting question?” she asked.

  “No, it’s just … we weren’t a good match. If it were easy of course I would go back, but I’ve been sad because I know it wouldn’t be right, and he was like my family, so I lost a member of my family.”

  “I see.”

  “And the long distance. It’s awful. It’s not for me. I spend months at a time up there but how long could that go on for? There was no end in sight really. It made me feel like I was … running.” She nodded again. “But honestly, I’m beginning to believe I’ve been discouraged for other reasons. Not the breakup.”

  “Yes, maybe. Leaving him was your choice,” she insisted and it flustered me. “As I listen to you, I keep hearing themes of loss. When you experience it, as you’ve explained, the nightmares from your childhood, triggered by your past traumas, return …”

  “… I haven’t been having nightmares.”

  “Well …”

  “Just dreams. The woman, Satta. That’s nothing like the dreams I had when I was a kid.”

  “Sure,” she said, returning to her purr, “I understand. But they are strange enough that they’ve caused alarm.”

  “I didn’t experience trauma in the way you’re understanding it,” I interrupted again.

  “Oh?”

  “This isn’t one of those cases.”

  “One of what cases?” she asked before we fell into a silence.

  “I believe I had a happy childhood. That’s my point. I don’t think of trauma in that way. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or spoiled.”

  “Recognizing pain is not ungrateful,” she said.

  “Nothing horrible happened to me. At least I don’t think it did. I think I was lucky,” I managed to say without crying, although the tears lurked, menaced.

  “Your family was tremendously fortunate to have made it out unharmed,” she said nodding.

  “Mostly. My grandfather …”

  “What happened to your grandfather?” Sixty-Two asked and waited.

  “Rebels,” I forced out. “He left the village to get us food and medicine, and rebels killed him. They thought he was a Mandingo man. My mother’s family is Vai. He was very tall, and a Muslim, and he wore a kufi, so they thought he was Mandingo. And the Mandingo tribe sided with the Krahn people during the war, and even before, and the Krahn people were …”

  “The president’s people, right?”

  “Yeah. Samuel Doe’s people.”

  There were few instances when I remembered saying his name out loud. It wasn’t until my twenties that I finally brought myself to watch the beginning of Doe’s taped assassination. I stared at my computer screen and recalled my childhood fantasies, the oblivion, the surprise I still felt in knowing this man, who for so long I imagined as a fire-breathing dragon, had a face, glasses, a human body, human tears.

  “And the Mandingo and Krahn people, mostly government soldiers, were killing Gio and Mano people because of an old conflict when one of them almost overtook Doe’s administration. And there were other minor conflicts, of course, other motivations,” I said, trailing off the familiar recitation, something I’d memorized in high school to explain what had happened in my childhood country, to explain myself.

  “But. My father and my grandmother worked overtime to protect us from trauma. The kind of trauma that would stem from that kind of carnage, you know?”

  I watched her eyes carefully to see if she understood. If she was seeing me, or if my revelations fit me neatly into a box labeled trauma.

  “I feel guilty maybe. Ungrateful, that I became so sad after the breakup. Because I think I was lucky. My father protected us from understanding what it was that was going on. The intensity of it all.”

  “I see,” she said. And then there was that familiar silence. “Yet you understood, you mentioned. You did know.”

  “Kind of,” I murmured. “Eventually. Yes.”

  She wrote something down. She waited for me to continue.

  “I think, as women of color, especially women of co
lor who come from some means, any means really, we tend to play down the unpleasant things we’ve experienced. To bury them,” she said finally.

  “Maybe,” I responded.

  “Perfection or the desire for it, it becomes a mask … a uniform. But there is something underneath. What’s underneath makes us real.”

  I thought of Mam in that moment. She had taught me many things, and at times, especially during those teenage years of promising her I would move far away to New York as soon as I got my diploma, she was more than I deserved. She taught me how to cook, how to write, my posture, how to care for a home, how to love God, how to read. She taught me politeness, creativity, how to write a letter, especially to those who had offended me. How to pray, how to fold clothes, how to love my sisters, how to love my brothers, how to love myself. She taught me about women—how to be one, how to know them, how to befriend them, how to give advice and love them, and how some would betray me because they saw kindness as weakness, and at the first sign of such brutality I should walk away, for such women did not even love themselves. That not all who chose to be around me liked me. That some knew too well how to pretend, and they would raise daughters with these doctrines, so I should remember her words and the words of my Ol’ Mas to raise mine. And some would raise sons they did not want to let go of, and would handle them like marionettes, and I should be careful never to sit in the audience of such a show for too long.

  But there were things I went into the world not knowing. We did not talk about what to do when a boy was unkind, in words or actions, breaking my heart. I was lousy in the ways of healing. Mam had one true love and she married him. She had one true love in a country of women like her, whose sun took turns resting on their deep, dark skin. My true loves in our new country, by either inheritance or indoctrination, were taught that black women were the least among them. Loving me was an act of resistance, though many did not know it. And Mam could not understand this feeling, the heaviness of it, to be loved as resistance, as an exception to a rule. To fight to be seen in love, to stay in love throughout the resistance. This was my new country.

  In middle school most of the faces around me were white. There was one black boy I thought I would marry, before I knew the meaning. He wrote me a letter, folded at both ends. He told me I was beautiful, but that my skin was too dark and he couldn’t date a dark-skinned woman. In high school after I became homecoming queen, after being crowned under those Friday-night lights, a single black feminine body in the middle of that green turf, overlooking a sea of American dreaming, that same boy came up to me at the edge of the field and whispered, “I told you that you were beautiful.” And if my childhood dragons wanted me to believe that I had no home, no country, no place in this world, the monsters in my new home, in that statement, consented, complied: I could be beautiful in a place and still not enough, not because of who I was or anything I had done, but because of something as simple, and somehow as grand in this new place, as the color of my skin.

  In college I dated black men who previously only dated white women, although they were certain they did not have a type. In my twenties, in Harlem, I occasionally found myself in the arms of men who admitted I was the first dark-skinned woman they had ever been in a serious relationship with—the others were black women who were light, fair, racially ambiguous. “But you’re better looking than all of my exes, to be honest. Even being dark-skinned,” they would say, as if giving me a compliment. In my thirties, a man I loved told me I was beautiful in the same breath that he admitted he did not believe I was physically enchanting enough for mainstream American audiences, the first to throw a stone at my dreams of Hollywood. Mam did not know the ways of this—the indoctrination of a black woman socialized here. I found I loved her more for that. That she never told me to stay out of the sun when it was highest. Never obsessed over my edges being straight enough that maybe the boys would forget my blackness when they looked at my hair. I enjoyed the sun like any child should, while many of my friends hid in the shade. Mam never feared her blackness. So I never feared my blackness, until the men.

  How does it feel to be an exception? They taught me. Then they led me to that conversation. To the purring woman casually mentioning my traumas. Love gives us the coordinates to these rooms.

  I may have shrugged.

  “What you and your family have been able to do in this country … it’s something. But that doesn’t erase those months during your childhood, and the attention it all deserves.”

  “Honestly, I had an experience in Texas that was more traumatic than the war,” I said quickly, casually.

  “And still … that still does not erase the war’s trauma,” she insisted.

  “Sure, sure. I understand what you mean. But what I’m saying is, they protected us. They did whatever they could to protect us. I had a happy childhood. A blessed childhood.”

  “They seem like wonderful people. And your mother,” she added, and I could tell she was closely watching my face. “But that doesn’t mean what you experienced was any less harmful. The childhood nightmares, your recurring dreams, they seem to be triggered when you experience feelings of loss … which makes sense. That’s a chapter of life it sounds like you never confronted. And your feelings of loss, your ability to deal with the adjustment to your new life after that trauma, even to your relationships, that’s all connected. And I wonder if … if you’ve thought of your recent relationships in that way.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well … what makes you leave?” she asked.

  “A number of things have made me leave. But … I don’t think it’s linked to anything from my childhood.”

  She gave me a Mam look. One that believed that everything is linked to everything else. What we have done to what we are doing, from where we’ve come to where we’re going, our five-year-old actions to this morning’s breakfast.

  “Texas,” she began again. “Tell me about your time there.”

  In the seventh grade, we were allowed to sit where we wanted in the lunchroom, and on my first day of this freedom, I sat with them. It was not a conscious choice, it was more a forced understanding that the table was the only place we belonged; so every day my gangly legs reached our haven in the back of the lunchroom where there was an empty seat waiting for me to sit with a dozen or so Blackgirls among the hundreds of white faces of our suburban middle school.

  I had become inconspicuous, not only sounding and dressing like my classmates, but acting like them as well. At the table, I was still African, but I was one of them. Every day at lunch I went to our table, an array of brown faces with glossed lips, and either braids or shoulder-length relaxed hair. We were friends but we barely had anything in common. Except that we were black. Some of us athletes. Two of us in honors classes. Different interests, different backgrounds, different styles, different hygiene, different daddy stories, different momma stories, different tastes in boys, different accents, different grades, different, but we were friends because we were all black.

  If we were beautiful then, we did not know it. True confidence was much too tiresome a pursuit, so we pretended. We were barely on television except for that channel, in the books we read except for that chapter, or in the magazines, and damn those magazines. They did not see us except when we were together. They called us the Blackgirl table and we did not mind it because they thought we were cool. And to maintain this blackness, this shiny, special thing that was bigger than any other part of our identity, so big that it had to go first—in order to maintain this blackness, we mimicked the only representations we saw of ourselves on those channels and in those books and in those magazines. We spoke louder, shouted even, yelled at each other in jest when we entered rooms. We created a language of gestures bigger than ourselves. We were children and how else would they see us? We performed our race, our prefix. When the others wanted to be our friends, they came to us snapping their fingers—though they were usually well-meaning people and could not know they were offensi
ve—sometimes even rolling their eyes and placing nervous fists upon their waists.

  These others, they didn’t ask us, when we were all together, about papers or school. Never about school. Never math or how well we did on the last test. That was not our purpose. We were the Blackgirls. Not Jasmin, not Kim, not Shabreka, not Olu, not Martina, not Charlotte, not Ashley, not Christine, not Jareika, not Sheri, not Roxanne, not Emily, not Ebony, not Lauren, not Sara, not Whitney, not Sheika, not me.

  By then my experiences in my kindergarten class in Monrovia were a distant memory, the ease, the orange tint of mornings, the not knowing that the color of my skin they considered a stain across the ocean.

  Spring, Texas, was a working- and middle-class suburbia that bordered one or two horse ranches and a shooting range. The residents were mostly peaceful, well meaning, and conservative. My parents quickly found a church they liked and we spent three days a week wedged between the pews, singing Southern Baptist hymns from memory. Because it was a white church, for us as we were growing up, Brother so-and-so and Sister so-and-so were all white. For Mam and Papa, Christ was their race and Christians, all Christians, were treated like extended family. They looked for God in people before they looked to skin color for clues on how the relationship would unfold. Casually watching basketball games, Papa would sometimes say, unprompted, “You know that guy is a believer” with pride, as if he knew him personally. I noticed this difference when I went to friends’ houses, where the phrase “you know how white folks are” first entered my psyche and made some things that happened in our new country make sense.

  The children I attended middle school with were the same who stared at me on the first day I entered the citrus-smelling elementary school after our move to Texas. They knew my name and found it “neat” that I was African, all smiling, all curious, especially when they saw Mam at school events wearing a traditional lappa rather than one of the many pairs of jeans she had recently purchased. I did not talk about the war or Liberia beyond my classmates’ general knowledge that I was “African.” I did not have the time to give while I was trying to understand that in this new place that Mam and Papa had told us was home, skin color was king—king above nationality, king above life stories, and, yes, even king above Christ.