This inland territory, the bush, was ancient. Primeval. From before the Fall, it seemed. Here the needs of nature and humanity were collaborative and far more peacefully meshed than back along the coastal region, where Monrovia, the capital, and the other, smaller cities of Liberia—with their modern industrial spoilage and smoke-spewing cars and diesel trucks and buses—waged warfare against the jungle that surrounded them. Down there, from the border with Côte d’Ivoire in the east to the border with Sierra Leone in the west, human beings and their machines were chewing their way inland, greedily devouring the land and everything on it.
It was like that all over equatorial Africa then, especially on the coast, and is even worse now; but in the mid-1970s, when this journey took place, the upland region of Liberia still remained essentially untouched by industry and technology, by modernity; and as we moved farther and farther away from the coast and the plantations on the lower plateau, I felt myself steadily slipping backwards in time. The twentieth century disappeared behind us, then the nineteenth was gone, the eighteenth, and the seventeenth. Lost to my mind were the crowded, rapidly swelling coastal cities, the rubber plantations, the railroad lines, even the roads that had spread inland from the seaside trading stations built first by Europeans and then Americans. The iron mines hadn’t yet been established, the gigantic mahogany and cotton trees still loomed overhead, blocking out the sun, and diamonds hadn’t been uncovered and sold for guns. Chimpanzees hadn’t been captured, caged, and bred for the development of multibillion-dollar drugs. They and all the other now-decimated species were still out there in the jungle, abundant, invisible, silent, watching us pass. This, I thought, is as close as I will ever get to West Africa as it was when the first Europeans arrived.
THE ROAD, barely a grassy trail now and no wider than the car, led to the edge of a slow-moving, brown river. A large raft made of cut poles lashed together with vines was waiting at the bank and the half-dozen men beside it, barefoot and wearing loose shorts, watched us approach as if expecting our arrival. The river was not wide—a boy could toss a ball to a boy on the other side—and a thick vine tied to a tree on both banks crossed the river just above the sluggish surface of the water.
“Beyond this river is my village,” Woodrow said. “Fuama.”
These were the first words he had spoken to me since I’d stepped from the car nearly two hours earlier and had been overcome by … what? A vision? A seizure. If I don’t know what to call it now, I certainly didn’t at the time. It had been a sudden, thoroughgoing confusion of needs and desires, I knew that much, even when it was happening, and little else. But looking back these many years later, I see it more clearly now, and if it was a vision, then it must have been the felt aftereffect of a collision between two conflicted desires that had been germinating in my subconscious for months. One desire had been generated by the woman named Hannah Musgrave, who wanted to become wholly herself again, free to go back to her parents and homeland; the other by the woman named Dawn Carrington, who also wanted to become wholly herself, but hoped in the process to disappear from her pursuers safely into Africa. My decision to marry Woodrow was turning both women—the lost but still loving daughter and the fugitive revolutionary—into a bourgeois African man’s loving American wife. It had set Hannah’s and Dawn’s opposing desires on a collision course. If I married Woodrow, Hannah would never go home again, and Dawn would not disappear into Africa. It would be as if neither woman had ever existed, as if both had been from the beginning nothing more than fictions. In deciding to marry Woodrow, I was deciding to abandon my dream of assuming the identity I had been given in childhood and youth, as well as the identity I had replaced it with.
I glimpsed that fact that day, and it terrified me, and when I fled from the safety and comfort of the ministry car and embraced that poor, pathetic, female goat, it was not to comfort her, but somehow to induce her to comfort me. To help me believe that what I saw coming towards me would not arrive.
THE CAR COASTED from the road onto the raft and stopped. To the man in charge Satterthwaite spoke a few words in the man’s language and dropped a coin into his hand. Satterthwaite closed the window and let the motor and air-conditioner continue to purr, as the crew of muscular men, like a team in a tug-of-war, somberly, rhythmically pulled on the thick vine and drew us slowly across the river, where I saw gathered on the farther bank a large, rapidly growing crowd of naked and near-naked men, women, and children. They were a somber group, like a photo from an old National Geographic, the women with large, pendulous breasts, the men with tightly muscled arms and chests, the children with round bellies and protruding navels—a passive, yet withheld and slightly suspicious-looking crowd, as if waiting for us to make our intentions clear, not exactly welcoming, and not in the slightest ceremonial. I suppose I expected feathers and masks and drums, elaborate headdresses, leopard-skin capes, and woven breastplates, not, as they seemed, a loose collection of poverty-stricken hunters-gatherers. Woodrow’s people. His family. Soon to be mine.
Satterthwaite drove the Mercedes slowly from the raft and onto the mudded clearing, parting the crowd, and shut off the motor.
“End of the road,” Woodrow said and chuckled. He put his pith helmet on and, checking himself in the rear-view mirror, squared it.
“End of the road,” Satterthwaite repeated, and he, too, chuckled. He stepped from the car and opened my door for me to exit, then jumped to Woodrow’s door.
Immediately, as soon as we were out of the car, the people surrounded us, all of them talking at once in loud voices pitched at the same high, flattened tone, their rapid-fire cries, calls, and speeches directed entirely at Woodrow, who shook hands with the men like a visiting plenipotentiary, smiled and nodded politely to the women and children, but said nothing in response to anyone and did nothing to present or even to acknowledge me. Satterthwaite, leaning against the hood, arms folded across his chest, waited by the car and with a sly smile on his face watched Woodrow and me in our city shoes and clothes make our awkward way up the slippery embankment.
Woodrow reached the top of the bank before the rest of us and without a pause plunged into the forest there. The crowd, focused entirely on Woodrow—their village champion returned from a far country in triumph—followed him, and I followed them, more or less ignored, except for the smallest children, the babies, who stared at me with wonderment and a shadow of worry on their brown faces, until their mothers caught them looking and turned them around, shifting them to where they couldn’t see me anymore or else covered their faces with a flattened hand or a large leaf torn from a nearby tree.
It was very hot, and the ground was wet and muddy, and the path was narrow and half-covered with wet, overhanging ferns and bushes. I had difficulty keeping pace with the others and at one point, hurrying to catch up, slipped and fell, smearing my dress, hands, and lower legs with red mud. I blurted, “Shit!” but no one looked back. No one paid me the slightest attention. To everyone, it seemed, except for the babies, who’d been all but blindfolded by their mothers, I was practically invisible. Which, before I arrived there, may well have been what I wanted. I wanted to see them but didn’t want them to see me. It was not, however, what I’d expected. And now that it was happening, it made no sense to me. Some welcoming party, I thought.
Soon the others had gotten so far ahead that I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I couldn’t hear their chatter and ululating calls to one another. I was alone and damned near lost in the middle of the jungle, and I was growing angry. Furious.
I felt like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and almost laughed out loud at the thought. Woodrow in his pith helmet and eyeglasses as Bogie? But I slipped and skidded and stumbled on, and after a while, a half-hour or so, the path brought me face to face with a palisade nearly eight feet high, made of thick poles roughly cut and peeled and lashed together with vines. The path split right and left alongside the wall, with no indication of which way led to the entrance to the village. I could see
on the farther side of the wall thatched roofs like conical hats and the green leafy tops of fruit trees and caught the aroma of wood smoke and roasting meat.
I chose to go left and, like a princess locked out of her castle, made my way along the wall, looking for the drawbridge or gate, a doorway, a hole in the wall, a tunnel—any way in. I heard drumming, high, thin, rapid-fire patters at first, then a heavy bass drum joined in, and the click of sticks on a log, and singing—those high-pitched female ululations orchestrated cleanly into a chorus now. The sun shone aslant in the sky, behind the trees, but it was still very hot and humid, and I was sweating and muddy. The mud had a cold, metallic stink to it. I took off my shoes, and carrying them like pathetic gifts, one in each hand, walked along the path barefoot, whimpering with frustration and anger and confusion. Where was the damned gate? Where had everyone gone? What was going on in there? Why hadn’t Woodrow or someone, anyone, stayed back to lead me into the village? It was turning into one of those awful dreams of rejection and repressed rage that you think will never end. When, after walking for what seemed like hours but could not have been more than twenty minutes, I realized that I had actually walked full circle around the village without having come to a door or a gate and had arrived back where I had started, and I was suddenly afraid.
There must have been something important said or done back at the car that I utterly missed, I thought. I’d been distracted, confused, when we came to the river, not paying attention. Back there, when we crossed the river, a gesture, some sort of instruction or lead, must have been given to me by Woodrow or Satterthwaite or by one of the people who greeted us, something that would have told me what to say and do when we arrived and thus, as a result of my not having said or done it, would explain what was happening to me now. I must have unintentionally insulted Woodrow or his people. Perhaps I offended one of their ancestors or broke one of their taboos. Good Lord, I thought, this is Alice’s Wonderland—the rules are different here, and I haven’t a clue as to what they are, and everything I do is wrong!
Barefoot and muddy, sweating and scared, my shoes in my hands, my hair damp and in stringy tangles, I grimaced and began half to laugh over my plight and half to cry. I felt like a traveler from another planet whose compatriots had left for home too soon. A shadow crossed mine, and when I turned there was a slender boy of fourteen or fifteen standing beside me. He was silent and motionless, as if he’d been transported there by magic. Shirtless and barefoot, wearing little more than a loincloth, he was a pretty, almost girlish-looking boy who smiled slightly and gestured for me to follow him. Turning, he walked gracefully downhill a short ways, looked back once to be sure that I was coming along behind, then stepped into the bushes and disappeared into the bright greenery, and when I arrived at the place where he’d become invisible, I saw a narrow footpath and took it.
In seconds, the path had joined a wider path, a trail, actually, that soon broadened and swept beneath a head-high, earthen trestle overgrown with ferns and tall grasses. As I passed beneath the bridgelike structure, I glanced up and saw the high palisade above it and realized that in my search for an entrance to the village I had simply walked across the top of it and had missed the gate entirely. I followed my lissome guide under the bridge and entered the village of Fuama.
It was a large, circular compound of ten or twelve daub-and-wattle, whitewashed, windowless huts, each with a single, low doorway facing a packed dirt yard the size of a basketball court. A crowd of people, which I recognized as the same crowd that had greeted us when we first stepped from the car, was loosely gathered around a fire pit. Two large, skinned, piglike carcasses, headless and without hoofs, were slung across the red coals alongside a fifty-gallon drum whose steaming contents I could not see but assumed was a soup or stew, made no doubt from the heads, hoofs, and innards of the beasts roasting on the fire. While the children mostly held hands and watched in silence from the edge of the crowd, men and women of all ages drank from gourds and soda pop bottles, laughing and talking excitedly with one another and every few seconds breaking into scraps of song. It was a party, a drunken celebration. Off to one side were the drummers—four sweating, muscular, young men—eyes closed, heads thrown back, as if each were chained to a private, throbbing world of sound. And there, behind the drummers, rising above the crowd on a dais at the entrance to a hut significantly larger than the others, stood a very tall, elderly man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and trousers, four older women in colorful wraps, and Woodrow.
Standing next to Woodrow and slightly behind him, yet making herself visible to the crowd, was a young woman with a thick, pouty upper lip. A naked baby was perched on her wide, outslung hip. The woman was very dark, almost plum colored, with glistening hair that was braided and coiled like a nest of black snakes and wore a bright yellow-and-white sash across her bare breasts. She stared at me unblinking. Everyone else seemed not even to notice my presence. Woodrow, too, ignored me. Or perhaps he just hasn’t noticed my arrival yet, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t notice my absence in the first place.
I flipped a small, discreet wave in his direction. Over here, Woodrow! He saw me. I know he saw the tall white woman standing at the edge of the crowd. How could he have missed me, for heaven’s sake? But he seemed to look right through my body, as if it were transparent, a pane of glass between him and his people.
I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my guide, the boy who had brought me here, and said, “What should I do?”
He smiled sweetly and shrugged.
“Do you speak English?”
He nodded yes and said, as if reciting from a textbook, “I learn it at missionary school. I go to missionary school.”
“Like Woodrow. Mr. Sundiata.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Albert,” he said. “I am Sundiata, too. Same like Woodrow. My father and Woodrow’s brother the same-same.”
“Should I go over there?” I asked. When I pointed towards Woodrow and the others on the dais, they were stepping down from the low platform and entering the hut, one by one.
Albert shrugged again. Smoke from the fire bit at my eyes, and my nostrils filled with the smell of roasting meat. The women in the crowd had resumed their high-pitched singing, and the drumming rose in volume with them. A wizened, toothless old man shoved a gourd in front of my face, and the vinegary smell of palm wine momentarily displaced the smoke and the aroma of the meat. I grabbed the gourd and took a sip from it and shivered from the sudden effect, felt my heart race, and found the courage to make my way quickly through the lively crowd towards the hut.
I passed through the low doorway and stood inside. It was dark, and I thought I was alone in the room. Tricked. A prisoner. The hut was stifling hot, the air heavy with the sour smell of human sweat. I stepped away from the entrance, let in a band of sunlight, and saw Woodrow seated on a low stool against the far wall. On either side of him, also on low stools, sat the tall, elderly man and the eldest of the four women. The others, including the young woman with the baby, lay on mats on the floor nearby, watching me.
“Woodrow, I hope—”
“Please sit down,” he said, cutting me off. “Welcome.”
I looked around in the dimly lit space and followed the example of the other women and lay my long body down on a mat by the door.
There was silence for a moment, an embarrassing, almost threatening silence, until finally Woodrow said, “This is my father, and this is my mother. They don’t speak English, Hannah,” he added.
The old man and woman seemed to be examining me, but they said nothing, and their somber, inward expressions did not change. It was as if I were being tested, as if everyone knew what was expected of me and were merely waiting to see if I could figure it out on my own. If my ignorance or lack of imagination forced them to tell or show me what was expected, I’d have failed the test. They were an imposing, almost imperious group, but at the same time they were utterly ordinary-looking people. Co
mmoners. Working people. It was the context, the social situation, not their appearance, that gave them their power over me.
Woodrow’s father’s skin was charcoal gray, his face crackled and broken horizontally and vertically with deep lines and crevices. His neck and arms had the diminished look of a man who’d once been unusually muscular and in old age had seen everything inside his skin, even the bones, shrink. His hair was speckled with gray and, except for a few thin tufts on his cheeks and chin, he was beardless. The old woman, Woodrow’s mother, was very dark, like Woodrow, and small and round faced, with a receding chin, also like Woodrow. I could see him in her clearly. In twenty years, the son would look exactly like the mother.
I hadn’t noticed, but Albert, my guide, had followed me inside the hut and was now squatting by the door. Woodrow rattled several quick sentences at him, and the boy leapt to his feet and went back outside, as if dismissed. We continued to sit in silence. I dared not break it. What would I say? Whatever words came from me, I was sure they and my voice would sound like my mother’s—that insecure, coy, jaunty banter she always fell back on when addressing black or working-class people, as exotic to her as the people of Fuama were to me. I waited for one of the Africans to speak, any of them, in any language, it didn’t matter. I longed for the sound of human speech, regardless of whether I could understand it, as long as it wasn’t me doing the talking.
Then suddenly Albert was back, lugging a basket filled with steaming chunks of what looked like roast pork and a handful of palm leaves, which he distributed to everyone, starting with Woodrow and his father. He placed the basket on the ground before Woodrow and disappeared again, returning at once with a large open gourd filled with a thick, gray stew. Woodrow gave him another order, and the boy left again, this time returning carrying a batch of pale Coke bottles filled with what I assumed was palm wine.
The Darling Page 14
