The Darling

Chapter I

AFTER MANY YEARS of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at the farm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situate myself. I couldn’t recall the dream’s story, although I knew that it was in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, and that somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round, brown, masklike faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in my bed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, and found myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon return there.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to return. More a presentiment is all it was, a foreboding perhaps, advancing from the blackest part of my mind at the same rate as the images of Liberia drifted there and broke and dissolved in those dark waters where I’ve stored most of my memories of Africa. Memories of Africa and of the terrible years before. When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well. So, yes, into my cache of forgotten memories of Liberia and the years that led me there — that’s where the dream went. As if it were someone else’s secret and were meant to be kept from me, especially.

And in its place was this knowledge that I would soon be going back — foreknowledge, really, because I didn’t make the decision until later that day, when Anthea and I had finished killing the chickens and were wrapping them in paper and plastic bags for delivery and pickup.

It was at the end of summer, the beginning of an early autumn, and though barely a year ago, it feels like a decade, so much was altered in that year. The decade here: now, that seems like a few days and nights is all, because nothing except the same thing has happened here day after day, season after season, year after year. No new or old returning lovers, no marriages or divorces, no births or deaths, at least among the humans. Just the farm and the world that nourishes and sustains it. Timeless, it has seemed.

The farm is a commercial operation, inasmuch as I sell most of what I grow, but in truth it’s more like an old-fashioned family farm, and to run it I’ve had to give over my personal clock. I’ve had to abandon all my urban ways of measuring time and replace them with the farm’s clock, which is marked off by the needs and demands of livestock and the crops, by the requirements of soil and the surge and flux of weather. It’s no wonder that farmers in the old days were obsessed with the motions of the planets and the waxing and waning of the moon, as if their farms were the bodies of women. I sometimes think it’s because I am a woman — or maybe it’s merely because I lived all those years in Liberia, adapted to African time — that I was able to adapt so easily to the pace and patterns and rhythmic repetitions of nature’s clock and calendar.

It was as usual, then, on that August morning, with the darkness just beginning to pull back from the broad river valley to the forests and the mountains looming behind the house, that I woke at five-thirty and came downstairs wearing my flannel nightgown and slippers against the pre-dawn chill, with the dogs clattering behind me, checked the temperature by the moon-faced thermometer outside the kitchen window (still no frost, which was good, because we’d neglected to cover the tomatoes), and put the dogs out.

I made coffee for Anthea, who comes in at six and says she can’t do a thing until after her second cup, and the other girls, who come in at seven. I lingered for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, enjoying the dark smell of it. I never drink coffee, having been raised on tea, a habit I took from my father as soon as he’d let me, but I do love the smell of it when it’s brewing and buy organic Colombian beans from a mail-order catalogue and grind them freshly for each pot, just for the aroma.

For a few moments, as I always do, I stood by the window and watched the dogs. They are Border collies, father and daughter, Baylor and Winnie, and when they have done their business, the first thing they do every morning is patrol the property, reclaiming their territory and making sure that during the night nothing untoward has happened. Usually I watch them work and think of them as working for me. But this morning they looked weirdly different to me, as if during the night one of us, they or I, had changed allegiances. They looked like ghost dogs, moving swiftly across the side yard in the gray pre-dawn light, disappearing into shadows cast by the house and oak trees, darting low to the ground into the garage, then reappearing and moving on. Today they worked for no one but themselves; that’s how I saw them. Their gait was halfway between a trot and a run — fast, effortless, smooth, and silent, their ears cocked forward, plumed tails straight back — and they seemed more like small wolves than carefully trained and utterly domesticated herding animals.

For a moment they scared me. I saw the primeval wildness in them, their radical independence and selfishness, the ferocity of their strictly canine needs. Perhaps it was the thin, silvery half-light and that I viewed them mostly in silhouette as they zigged and zagged across the yard, and when they’d checked the garage, an open shed, actually, where I park the pickup truck and my Honda, they moved on to the barn and from there to the henhouse, where the rooster crowed, and then loped all the way to the pond in the front field, where they woke the ducks and geese, never stopping, running in tandem, a pair of single-minded predators sifting their territory at peak efficiency.

In their mix of wildness and control, they were beautiful. In their silence and indistinct, shape-changing fluidity, they frightened me. Five minutes ago they had been under my control, curled in my bed, crowding me to one side of it like a pair of human children. And now they were wild dogs, the kind of beasts the ancient people glimpsed slipping through the brush at dawn between the campsite and the forest.

They had not changed overnight, of course. But maybe, because of my dream of Africa and the chimps, I had, and the dogs were sensing it, as if I had somehow betrayed them. Then when Anthea drove in along the lane from the road, headlights bobbing like heavy fruit on a tree as her beat-up Jimmie pickup passed along the ruts, the dogs ran to her truck as they do every day, and when she stepped out they greeted her with their usual yipping commotion and followed her to the side porch. But when they entered the kitchen behind her, they slipped quickly into the living room, then furtively circled through the dining room to the kitchen again and made for the door and scratched at it to be let back out.

Anthea yanked off her cap and ruffled her auburn curls with one hand and watched the dogs. She screwed up her face and said, “What’s with them doggies?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe something spooked them.”

She opened the door, and the dogs bolted across the yard and out of sight. “Must be you that’s spooking them, Hannah.” She laughed and filled her mug with coffee, sighed heavily, and sat down at the table.

“Maybe it’s the moon. I had strange dreams all night. You?”

“Nope. Slept like a hibernated bear. Full moon’s not for another three days anyhow.” Anthea is impish and winking, a large woman, strong; if she were a man you’d call her burly. She has a broad, flat face the shape and color of a raspberry, a peasant face, some might say, and probably a lot of the summer people have. But if you look, you can tell at once that she’s good humored and hard working and possesses an abundance of mother wit. Everything about her expresses intelligent energy.

She’s a local, and I, of course, am not. When I first bought the place from her aunt and uncle and learned at the closing that Anthea had run the farm by herself for years, I knew that I would need her at least as much as her invalided uncle and bedridden aunt had, and I hired her on the spot to be my manager. Besides, I felt sorry for her and angry on her behalf. Her aunt and uncle, having elected to move to the village and live at the Neighborhood House, an assisted-living home for elderlies, had put the farm up for sale without consulting her. She told me that she drove home one afternoon from picking up their weekly groceries at the Stop & Shop in Lake Placid and saw a For Sale sign posted where the lane left the road, and another stuck in the middle of the front yard.

Anthea should have inherited the farm. Or her uncle should have somehow arranged for her to buy it from them. Her parents died when she was a child, and her uncle and aunt had raised her as their own. But she was an unmarried woman in love with a married woman from the next town, and the affair was widely known, probably known even by the woman’s alcoholic husband, a house painter who rarely worked but was liked and looked after in the town because of his sweet nature and their three small children.

Her aunt and uncle went straight from the closing at the realtor’s office to the Neighborhood House. When they are dead, whatever’s left, if anything, of the nearly one hundred thirty thousand dollars I gave them for the farm will likely go to Anthea. But it won’t let her buy the place. Not even if I were willing to sell it. The farm is worth three times now what it went for in 1991. I may feel sorry for Anthea and angry on her behalf, but I wouldn’t sell her the farm at a discount. The truth is, I’m not very generous and don’t mind saying so.

The other girls, Frieda, Nan, and Cat, arrived at their usual times, Frieda and Nan together at seven roaring up on Nan’s motorcycle, and Cat, drifting in ten minutes later like a petal falling from a daisy, strolling blithely down the lane as if wondering what to do with this lovely, end-of-summer day opening up ahead of her, when she knew very well that Anthea and I had her day all laid out for her. Cat’s a third-generation hippie, in her late teens, a dreamy throwback to the sixties, her grandparents’ era. My era. Catalonia’s her real name, given to her at birth by her parents, Raven and Rain, who got their names in adulthood from a Bengali guru on a New Mexico commune, Cat told me. Her woozy, laid-back affect and language are the same as her parents’ and grandparents’, but she’s replaced their form of soft, open-ended rebellion with a post-hippie, puritanical adherence to abstinence. She’s a drug-free, home-schooled, vegan virgin from Vermont, childlike and winsome on the surface, but inside tight as a fist. Cat’s the type of girl thirty years ago I would have tried to recruit for Weatherman. Cat is a girl you can picture nowadays becoming a born-again Christian fundamentalist, dark and judgmental. She’s the kind of girl I once was.

But Anthea and I and the other girls love Cat and can’t help protecting her — mostly from ourselves, as it turns out, and our rough edges and indulgences. None of us is drug free, virginal, or even a part-time vegetarian. We smoke, drink beer after work and stronger stuff often till bedtime, and eat meat whenever possible.

I hadn’t meant to hire an all-female workforce and don’t hold to it on principle. It evolved naturally, first with Anthea, who knew who in town was looking for work — which turned out to be pretty exclusively women and girls. It was early summer when I moved in, and all the men and boys who wanted to work already had jobs, most of them seasonal, and weren’t interested in organic gardening or raising free-range chickens or renovating long-neglected apple orchards — women’s work. And they certainly weren’t eager to take orders from two women, one of them a skinny, white-haired, rich bitch from away, as they say here, who didn’t know what she was doing anyhow, the other a tough-mouthed lesbian from town who knew all their dirty little secrets. So we hired local high-school girls, out-of-work nurses, college dropouts living temporarily with their parents, young mothers whose husbands had left them and weren’t paying child support, and sometimes off-season winter athletes, like Frieda and Nan, ski bums and ice climbers who spend the six snow-and-ice-free months up here in the mountains.

The place is called Shadowbrook Farm, a name I’d never have given it myself — a little too poetic or, if taken another way, morbid, almost gothic — but it came with the property. And since it was still known locally as Shadowbrook Farm and reflected the physical fact of the wide, year-round brook meandering through the fluttery shadows cast by the groves of birches and other hardwoods at the far end of the broad front meadow, I saw no reason to change the name. The brook — it’s really a river, the Ausable River — is the most picturesque aspect of the old farm, which is otherwise a simple, nineteenth-century colonial house with a wide front porch; the three tipped outbuildings we use for storing vehicles, farm machinery, hay, and feed; a tool shed; and the henhouse and sheepfold that Anthea and I built ourselves that first summer.

Strangely, more than anything else about the farm, more than the land or the buildings or the animals and crops, I feel the river is mine. My permanent, personal property. Yet, unlike everything else here, the river continuously changes. It talks to me: I’ve heard voices coming from it. The voices of children, usually. I hear them from the porch, from the kitchen, and from my bedroom upstairs at the front of the house, at all times of day and night in all seasons, even with the windows closed — long conversations and sometimes songs whose words I can almost make out, as if there were a playground out there on the far side of the field and the children were calling to one another or to me in a language other than English or were singing another country’s nursery rhymes and songs.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s all women, but over the years everyone I’ve hired has seemed to enjoy working here. It’s hard work, and I can be demanding, I know, and edgy, moody, and not all that communicative or personal, although I like to think I’m democratic and fair-minded and, when it comes to expectations, reasonable. But I’m not easily intimate, haven’t been for years. Maybe never. And while I think of Anthea, for instance, as a close friend, perhaps the closest friend I have in this town or anywhere, a woman who tells me everything she knows about herself, the truth is I don’t really return the confidence or offer her much information about myself, especially my past. I’ve given her only the bits and pieces that I’ve given everyone else in this town since the day I first arrived here eleven years ago, a suddenly wealthy woman who had inherited from her recently deceased mother, the widow of her famous father, an estate worth half a million dollars after taxes and the copyrights to the famous father’s five best-selling books. No one locally knows the details, of course, although it was obvious from the beginning to everyone that I was a woman of means.

Keene Valley is a small town, a village, and because I couldn’t really keep it a secret and didn’t want to anyhow, everyone knew or soon learned from my lawyer, from the realtor who handled my purchase of the farm, or from Anthea — to whom I had to confide a few things, after all, or I’d look like I had something dangerous to hide — that before coming here to the Northcountry I had lived for many years in West Africa, in a country called the Republic of Liberia.

Wherever that is. Someplace out there in the jungle was close enough.

TEN DAYS LATER, I rode overland in the dark, traveling northwest from Côte d’Ivoire into Liberia and down to the coast from the Nimba highlands, most of the time hidden under a tarpaulin in the back of a truckload of milled boards. At first and for several hours, I rode up front beside the trucker. I had crossed the border illegally, but with no more difficulty than if I’d been a crate of Chinese rifles or a case of Johnny Walker whiskey. In West Africa, if you’re carrying enough U.S. cash, nearly any legal technicality can be erased. It had been a quick, hundred-dollar arrangement made with the driver of the truck, a slim, middle-aged Lebanese from Monrovia, a man with yellow eyes who licked his lips a lot and smiled like a lizard. His name was Mamoud. He owned the truck and was able to buy gas for it and bribe the guards at the borders — obviously an intelligent man thriving in evil times, and was dangerous therefore. I’d been passed on to Mamoud by the driver of the bush taxi I’d hired at the Abidjan airport to take me as far as Danane, a few kilometers east of the Liberian border. I hadn’t known it, but they were a team, the taxi driver and the trucker. Everyone in West Africa eventually turns out to be a member of a team.

At this particular crossing I was only smuggled goods, contraband, but at Robertsfield Airport in Monrovia or at one of the more carefully patrolled crossings, I’d have been a potential enemy of the state, stopped for certain and turned around and sent back to Côte d’Ivoire or possibly arrested and jailed. Which is why I had flown from JFK into Abidjan, on a Côte d’Ivoire tourist visa with no entry visa for Liberia. There had been no point in my even applying for one, and no reason to fly directly from Abidjan to Monrovia — quite the opposite, if I wanted to get into Liberia at all. Although the war was officially long over, the man who’d begun it, Charles Taylor — with whom I had once enjoyed a longtime personal relationship, let me say that much, and I will eventually tell you about that, too — was now president, elected by people who had voted for him to stop him from killing them. His enemies, the few who had come out of the war alive, had scattered into the jungles and across the borders into Sierra Leone or Guinea and had regrouped or, like me, had made their way to North America and Europe, where they plotted the death of the president and their own eventual return.

We had no problems at the border crossing, where Mamoud was evidently known and liked and must have had outstanding favors owed him. The soldiers simply waved him through, even with an unknown white woman sitting beside him. Mamoud’s French girlfren’, prob’ly. Dem Lebaneses got a taste for dem skinny ol’ white ladies. Laughter all around.

And then I was back in Liberia once again, passing darkened daub-and-wattle huts with conical thatched roofs and clusters of small cinder-block houses with roofs of corrugated tin and bare front porches and swept dirt yards and, alongside the road, a barefoot man or boy walking, suddenly splashed by the glare of the headlights, refusing to show his face or turn, just stepping off the road a foot or two, then disappearing into the blackness behind. Inside the roadside huts and houses I saw now and then a candle burning or the low, orange glow of a kerosene lantern, and here and there, close to the door, the red coals of a charcoal fire pit, and I caught for a second the smell of roasted meat and a glimpse of the ghostly figure of a woman tending the fire, her back to the road. It was all immediately familiar to me and comforting, and yet at the same time new and exotic, as if this were my first sight of the place and people and I had not lived here among them for many years. It was as if I had only read about them in novels and from that had vividly imagined them, and now they were actually before me, fitting that imagined template exactly, but with a sharpness and clarity that subtly altered everything and made it fresh and new.

It was the same anxious, edgy mingling of the known and unknown that greeted me when I made my first journey into the American South nearly forty years ago, when I was a college girl using her summer vacation to register black voters in Mississippi and Louisiana. I was an innocent, idealistic, Yankee girl whose vision of the South had arisen dripping with magnolia-scented decay and the thrill of racial violence from deep readings of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. A newly minted rebel, fresh faced and romantic, I rode the bus south that summer with hundreds like me into Mississippi, confident that we were about to cleanse our parents’ racist, oppressive world by means of idealism and simple hard work.

Up to that point, my most radical act had been to attend Brandeis instead of Smith, and I had done that solely to please my father and to avoid granting my mother’s unspoken wish that I follow her example. I’d never been out of New England, except for a high-school civics class trip to Washington, D.C., and a flight to Philadelphia for an admissions interview at Swarthmore, my second choice for college after Brandeis and my father’s first choice. But I had gazed overlong into those Southern novels and stories, and for many weeks that first summer in the South they provided the reflecting pool in which I saw where I was and the black and white people who lived there. Eventually, of course, literature got displaced by reality, as it invariably does, but for a while my everyday life had the clarity, intensity, and certitude of fiction.

A FEW MILES WEST of the town of Ganta, the road bends perilously close to the Guinea border, where, as I knew from the newspapers at home, there had been sporadic fighting in the last year between small bands of regular and irregular soldiers from the two neighboring countries — the usual jockeying for control of the Nimba diamond traffic. Even the New York Times seemed to know about that, which had surprised me. It was here, in the middle of a long stretch between rural villages, that Mamoud abruptly pulled over and parked the truck by the side of the road.

He told me to get out and bring my backpack, and I thought, Damn him! Damn the man. He knows who I am, or he’s just figured it out and he’s got evil on his mind. Back at the border, just as we crossed, he had insisted on learning my last name. When I said it, Sundiata, Woodrow’s well-known last name, he didn’t react. But I knew at once that I should have said only what it read on my passport, Musgrave, my father’s last name. Mamoud had merely smiled and then said nothing for the entire two hours after.

The old, all-too-familiar, Liberian paranoia came rushing over me. It’s in the air you breathe here. It’s like a virus. You can’t escape or defeat it. It hits you suddenly, like when you’ve had a close call. At first you feel foolish for not having been more frightened and warily suspicious, and you promise yourself that it won’t happen again, it had better not, because next time you may not be so lucky. From then on, you assume that everyone is lying, everyone wants to hurt you, to steal from you, and may even want to kill you.

I got slowly down from the truck, slung my pack onto my back, and made ready to bolt. On the near side the jungle came up tight to the road, but on the far side of the road I saw a field of high sawtooth grass and knew that if I got there before him, he’d have trouble catching me in the dark. I had no idea what I’d do after he gave up the chase and drove on. If he gave up and drove on. I was three hundred kilometers from the city of Monrovia, a white American woman afoot and alone. Never mind that there was probably a standing warrant for my arrest and the U.S. embassy would do nothing to protect me. All my chits with the Americans had been spent a decade ago. And never mind that there would probably be rumors of a reward offered by Charles Taylor personally, making me a target of opportunity for any Liberian with a knife or machete to slice my throat or take off my head. Liberia is a small country, and in any village, even out here in Nimba, my corpse could be exchanged for a boom box or maybe a motorbike and passed along in a farther exchange and then another, the price going up with each transaction, until finally what was left of my body, maybe just my head with its telltale hair, got dropped at the gate of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia.

Beyond all that, even if I was just being paranoid in that Liberian way, and none of it were true, and there was no warrant, no reward, and in the passage of time and the blur of alcohol and drugs and the intoxication of having ruled his tiny country with absolute power for so many years, Charles had forgotten me altogether, I was nonetheless a white woman alone, a sexual curiosity, spoilage, perhaps, at my advanced age, but with a little use still left to the madmen and crazed boys here in the madhouse.

For the first time since leaving my farm in the Adirondacks, I wondered if somewhere along the way — going back to those early days in Mississippi and Louisiana and coming forward to the afternoon at the farm when I suddenly announced to Anthea that I was returning to Liberia to learn what had happened to my sons — I wondered if I had lost my mind. Not figuratively, but literally. I thought, I could be a madwoman. And I wondered if I was standing there in the dark by the side of a narrow, unpaved road in the eastern hills of Liberia because somewhere back there, without knowing it, I’d lost touch with reality. Lost it in small bits, a single molecule of sanity at a time in a slow, invisible, irreversible process of erosion, and couldn’t notice it while it was happening, couldn’t take its measure, until now, when it was too late.

On the driver’s side of the truck, Mamoud was hurriedly unfolding a stiff, old tarpaulin and spreading it over the lumber and tying it down at the corners. He worked his way around to my side, and I darted four or five steps away from him, ready to make my escape. I looked toward the front of the truck, searching for a rock, a brick, something to injure him with.

Mamoud said, “Checkpoints be comin’ up now, missy. Dem won’t bother me none, but mebbe best f’ you t’ hide back here.” He held up the corner of the tarp and indicated with a nod a hollowed-out area the size of a coffin in the middle of the cargo.

“Oh! You want to hide me,” I said, relieved. “You don’t think that’s the first place they’ll look, under the tarp?”

They wouldn’t look there, he explained, because they knew that that was where he carried the stuff he didn’t want them to see. Perfect Liberian logic. Surprised at the turnaround and a little shaky, for I had gone into fight or flight and my adrenalin was running high, I climbed onto the stacked lumber. When I had lain myself down in the hiding place, Mamoud drew the tarp over me and finished tying it at the corners, leaving a flap loose so I could peek out and breathe fresh air. A moment later, the truck was chugging along the rutted road and then trundling steadily downhill from the highlands towards the towns of the savannah and the cities of the coast.

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT I rode back there, stretched out between the boards, sweltering from the heat, jostled, pitched, and bumped, and every now and then I peered out from under the tarpaulin, and when I did I felt more borne down by the wet air than by the stiff canvas. A decade in the hills and valleys of upstate New York and I’d almost forgotten the moist weight, even at night, of the tropical air against my body, its nearly tangible density, as if, between the tarpaulin and the freshly planed planks that I lay upon, a large animal were holding me down. And the odor of the bleeding green lumber and of the canvas that hid me, old, patched, and smelling of rotten fruit and urine and wood smoke, made me nauseated and dizzy.

My discomfort disappointed the puritan in me. I wondered if in those few years away I’d turned delicate and, traveling again in Africa, would have to hold a scented hanky to my nose. For that’s all this was, the same old smell of Africa and its sense-surrounding, watery heat and its sounds — the blat of a battered, out-of-tune diesel truck and, whenever the truck passed through a village or town or came to a crossing and slowed and the clatter of the engine eased, the yips of a small dog, the clack of dominoes against a masonite lapboard, or a transistor radio playing its lonely juju song to no one at a village crossroads cookshop. Once, I heard the call of a desperate boy from the side of the road as the truck rumbled past him, Take me wit’ you, take me to Monrovia, to the city, an’ from there, m’am, carry me to the Great World beyond, where is plenty of jollof rice an’ tinned meats an’ good water, where no one sick, no one hungry, no one ’fraid! All of it, his whole, long, hapless plea compressed into one repeated, fading cry, “Hoy, hoy, hoy!” as the truck picked up speed and roared down the red-dirt road into the African night.

Several times the truck was stopped at checkpoints — gates, we used to call them — at Ganta and where the road crosses the St. John River. Without looking, I could tell where we were, because the map of Liberia and its few roads were still clear in my mind’s eye, and I knew people in these towns, or once had known them, and was even related to some of them by marriage, for we were not far now from Fuama, my husband’s tribal village. But surely most of those people, all Liberians, were gone by now, dead or swept away like dry leaves by the fierce wind that had blown across the country in the civil war and burned by the fires of chaos that had followed. Even if they had somehow survived and still lived in their old homes and villages, they would have been of little help to me anyhow. Not now. Not back then either, when we were all running for our individual lives.

The truck wheezed and slowed and downshifted, then crept along for a few moments at a walking pace, and I knew that we were approaching another checkpoint. Then the truck stopped, and I heard men’s low voices, speaking first in a Krahn dialect, then switching quickly to Liberian English for Mamoud, the Monrovian Lebanese, with light, conspiratorial, male-bonding laughter interjected — he was a regular on this route, obviously, and he paid the soldiers on time and gave them good dash. Yeah, Mamoud, him a good Arab guy. A loud hand slap on the front fender of the truck, like a slap on a horse’s flank, granting permission to leave, and the truck moved ahead again, soon picking up speed.

I was wrapped in my thoughts in the darkness like an animal hiding in its burrow. I had a plan. I wasn’t so out of touch with reality, I wasn’t so far gone that I had come out here without some sort of blueprint. Lord knows it wasn’t much of a plan. It couldn’t be; there was so little here that I could predict or control. I had in my mind merely a vaguely worded, partially completed outline whose blanks I would fill in as I passed from moment to moment: I would get into the country somehow; I would make my way to Monrovia; I would ask after my sons in a way that would not put me or them in danger, although I had no idea yet whom I would be able to ask; and I would either go to my sons, wherever they were, and try to bring them home with me or, if no one could tell me where they were, I would leave the country and return to my farm. That was it. That was as far in advance of my actions as I was able to think.

I was carrying enough U.S. currency around my waist and in my backpack to buy my way through these few steps and probably enough to let me take advantage of any exigencies or opportunities that arose. Unless, of course, I were attacked, stripped, robbed, or worse. Mostly, though, I counted on buying my safety. The comforting and most useful thing about total corruption is that it’s total. It’s systemic, top to bottom, and therefore predictable and more or less rational. So I wasn’t being especially brave or even reckless.

I don’t travel in fear anyhow; I never have. When I am afraid, I don’t travel at all; I stay put. Years ago, when I was in my early thirties and living underground in the States, moving from safe house to safe house, I was taught by comrades more experienced at flight than I that if a person, especially a woman, travels in fear, she is never safe. So if you’re afraid, don’t move. Freeze. Disappear into the scenery. You’ll only attract attention to yourself by running.

Despite my plan, however — which was like a long-faded path through the jungle, nearly overgrown now, with only a few landmarks still recognizable — and despite there being an ostensible goal, a consciously chosen destination that I’d imagined lying at the end of the path, it felt as if I were being mysteriously drawn towards that goal by a magnet, and that the pull was generated out there, in Liberia. Not here, inside me. I was being reeled in. I could say, and had, that I was going out to Liberia to learn what happened to my sons after I left the country those many long years ago and, if possible, to bring them back with me to the States; I could say, and had, that I was going out there to honor my husband’s memory somehow, a private, solitary thing I had to do. I could say that I was going to try to learn what happened to my friends and my husband’s family. I had said these things any number of times — to Anthea, to the other girls at the farm, to the few good citizens of Keene Valley whom I counted as friends. And to myself. I said them especially to myself. All the way across the Atlantic to Abidjan, then in the bush taxi to the border between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, and down to the coast from Nimba in the back of the truck, I kept naming my reasons for coming there.

And I will tell you something that at the time made me ashamed, although now it makes a kind of sense. Not moral sense, but psychological, emotional sense. From the beginning, from the day that I decided to leave my farm and return there, I did not once picture my husband Woodrow’s dark, perpetually somber face in my mind; nor did I see the faces of the boys, little Dillon, my crackling smart, hyperactive one, or angelic Paul, my peacemaker, or William, as somber as his father. They were my family — the only husband I have ever had and probably ever will, and my missing sons, my only children, for I know that I will never bear another. I am too old. Old and dried up, a husk of a woman. So they are not just the family of my past; they are the family of my future as well. But it was as if they had become names only. I have their photographs in frames on the sideboard in my living room at the farm, all four faces gazing at me, and another set is on my bedroom dresser. Yet once I had actually departed from the farm and driven in my Honda along the lane to the road and headed down the Northway from the Adirondacks to New York City, once I was on my way to Africa again, I did not, I could not, I would not see their faces. No, the truth is I saw only the faces of my chimpanzees.

On a deep — perhaps the most basic — level, my chimpanzees were drawing me back. Not my husband’s memory, not my sons. My chimpanzees. And during that long night coming down the half-destroyed road from Nimba to Monrovia, enduring the pronged heat under the canvas tarp as if I were inside a covered, black, cast-iron pot baking in an oven, I lay there and remembered the creatures that I had abandoned, my chimpanzees. I did not remember my husband or my sons or our life together. I remembered only those poor, confused creatures whom I had nurtured and protected for so long, the innocents for whom I had been willing to give my life — or so I had believed.

In the early days, when I first set up the sanctuary, I cared mainly for the babies, newborns and infants. I had two helpers more experienced with chimps than I. They took care of the older, more demanding and sometimes dangerous chimps, who often arrived at the sanctuary traumatized by abuse and from afar, found stuffed into packing crates at JFK or LAX or in birdcages or cat carriers on their way to an even more abused life and a mercifully early death in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Vienna or New Jersey. To help them, one needed much more experience and knowledge of animals than I had then. So at first I worked in the nursery, as we called it, and from the appearance and actions of the babies in my care, from the quality of their gazes and the intensity of their attention, I thought it was in their nature to dream, even when awake. From the start I tried to penetrate their consciousness, for it was obvious that they possessed consciousness, and to me its particular quality was the same as what the Australian Aborigines meant by dreamtime — not drifting or soporifically sliding through life, their attention always askew or elsewhere, like ours, but behaving as if they were free to look at every single thing as if it had never been seen before, as if everything, a leaf, an ant, a human ear, were of terrible and wondrous significance. As it is in a dream. Or as it must be for someone suffering from dementia. For them, it seemed there was no consciousness of past or future, only the immediate present, from which nothing could distract them. For us it’s almost the opposite. They are nonhuman animals imprisoned on the far side of speech, but they share nearly ninety-nine percent of our genes and more closely resemble humans than a bluebird from the East Coast of the United States resembles a bluebird from the West. But because they’re mute, from birth to death locked out of spoken language, their powers of concentration appear to exceed ours — except when we dream, when we, too, are mute.

And so I began to call them dreamers. Mornings, when I headed from the house for the lab or later on for the sanctuary, I might say to Woodrow, “I’ve got a new dreamer coming in today, a baby. They found him in a market in Buchanan with a chain around his neck.” At first Woodrow would smile tolerantly in his usual manner, maybe slightly amused by my, to him, eccentric insistence on referring to them as dreamers. But before long he, too, gave up relying on the word chimpanzee or chimp. The boys, even sooner than their father, took to calling them dreamers, especially Dillon, for whom the word seemed to have a special resonance, as if he thought that he himself might be a dreamer. “How were the dreamers today, Mammi? What’s happening with the dreamer that came down from Nimba last week, the one whose mother you said got eaten by the soldiers? Why do they even want to eat dreamers, Mammi? You’d have to be kind of crazy, right?”

Early on in the work at the lab and later at the sanctuary, before it had become my obsession and, in a way, my salvation, I wondered where the word chimpanzee had come from. It was a peculiar word, I thought. Whenever I said it aloud, I heard a combination of sounds that were slightly comical to me. Their name was a little bit ridiculous and thus ridiculing. Once, shortly after I started the sanctuary, I looked the word up in Woodrow’s battered old Webster’s Collegiate, because I hated calling them that, chimpanzees and chimps. Their name seemed to make subtle fun of them, to diminish and demean them, and was not at all a word like human or even like the names we give to other mammals putatively lower on the evolutionary ladder than chimps, like dogs and lions and horses.

It’s a bantu word from the Congo, meaning “mock-man”—a name derived, not from the creature’s own nature, but from its relation to us, to humans, as if its essential nature were a lesser version or a negation of ours. It’s the only species named in such a purposefully distancing way. It’s the not-human. The not-us. The un-man.

Maybe its scientific name would be better, I thought, more democratic somehow, since chimpanzees and humans belong to the same genus, Anthropopithicus. But, no, the zoologists had long ago named the creature Anthropopithicus troglodyte, and every mother’s child knows what a troglodyte is.

Nonetheless, I looked that word up, too, hoping, I suppose, that it would turn out actually to mean something like “a highly intelligent and sociable animal found in sharply decreasing numbers in the jungles of West Africa.” But a troglodyte is “one of various races or tribes of men (chiefly ancient or prehistoric) inhabiting caves or dens.”

It was circular and kept coming back to us — to not-us.

I KNEW THAT the truck had come to a stop beside the sea, for I smelled salt in the air, even from beneath the heavy tarp, and heard the waves breaking on the reef and sandbars beyond. I pushed my way out and inhaled the cool, fresh air of dawn. I grabbed my backpack, rolled off the bed of the truck, and swung down to the gravel roadway. The sky was milky in the east. Half hidden in the mists a few kilometers south, beyond the all-but-abandoned Freeport, was the humped back of Cape Mesurado, and sprawled across the cape like a rumpled, drunken sleeper was the city, Monrovia.

Mamoud leaned from the cab and said, “This where you tol’ me to put you, missy. Still got a ways to get to town, y’ know.”

I said no, this was fine, which puzzled him. He slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it and studied me for a moment. “Don’ make no sense, missy,” he said. He studied me some more, as if for the first time considering my use to him and not his to me, and said, “Gimme some dash, missy.”

“I paid you already. We’re even.”

He shook his head no and licked his thin lips, took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Gimme dash,” he repeated, and when he reached for the handle to open the door and come out of the truck, I bolted — scrambling from the road down the crumbly landfill through the thorn bushes into the dark, gloomy gully below. I shoved my way through the brush down there for half a hundred yards or so, stumbling over garbage and old tires and broken bottles, sea wrack and road tossings, and then stopped, scratched on the face and bare arms by the puckerbushes, and waited there, crouched close to the wet ground, breathing hard, listening. Finally, I heard the door of the truck slam shut, and heard the truck chunk into gear and slowly move on down the road.

A light, cooling breeze drifted through the underbrush from the sea to land. I stood up and heard the waves lap the shore on the farther side of the gully and break on the reef a quarter mile out and smelled the stink of dead fish and wet sand. Then suddenly the yellow African sun was in the glowing sky, and dawn had been here and gone almost without my seeing it. There are no gray shades this close to the equator, no evening’s gloam or dawn’s early light. There’s night, and then there’s day, and night again. The wind shifted slightly, and I smelled wet, charred wood and rotting citrus and fresh human feces. I was alone.

No, I wasn’t alone. A dark brown young man, shirtless, scrawny, and wearing only a pair of pale blue nylon running shorts, stared at me from a few feet away. He backed off, eyes wide open, as if frightened of me — but why, I wondered, frightened of what? It should have been the other way around. But I was not afraid of him; he was exactly whom I should have expected to see there. It must have been my long, white hair, straight and undone — surely peculiar to him — my pale skin, the inexplicable presence of such a strange creature in what was probably his gully, his personal territory. All of that, I supposed. But there was something more than my oddity reflected off his wide-eyed gaze — it was as if he thought I was a jumby, a ghost.

He waggled a finger at me, no-no-no, turned, and scrambled back up the side of the gully to the road, and then away, in the same direction the truck had gone, towards the city.

A madman, I thought. He’ll never return now to this place, which had been his field, his little garden, where, like an insect, a dung beetle, he had learned to scavenge his daily food and safely hide himself at night. I had contaminated his place, put a ghost into it. I slung my pack onto my back and made my careful way along the garbage- and trash-strewn incline out of the gully and over the low ridge to the narrow beach below, away from the road, where I turned toward the city, the harbor, the mouth of the river, and the island in the river where, ten years earlier, I had abandoned my dreamers.

AT THE FARM in Keene Valley and throughout the village, I was thought to have gone out to Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer and somewhere along the way had married an African man and had borne him three brown children. I had framed photographs of them in the house. “That’s me with my husband, Woodrow. And those are my sons when they were little boys, Dillon and the twins, Paul and William.” And then the photographs of my parents: “That’s my father. Yes, the Doctor Musgrave. And my mother. Both dead.” And no one else.

I volunteered as little as possible. In a partial and carefully reticent way, which people understood once they heard what I had to say, I let on that in the late 1980s, when Liberia erupted in civil war, my husband and sons had been caught up in the violence. “It’s one of those wars that never seem to end.”

I related this in a way that did not invite further questions, told my story in a low, flattened voice that deflected both inquiry and suspicion that I might be lying or had something to hide. “It was a terrible time… People were being brutally murdered… There was chaos everywhere… There still is.” And so on. It’s easy to construct a believable false story from a miscellany of partial truths.

People felt sorry for me and admired my reticence. In my neighbors’ and workers’ minds, even Anthea’s, Africa generally and the Republic of Liberia in particular were places from which any sane American woman would flee anyhow, whatever the cost. Everything I had told them, everything they heard in the post office, at church, at the Noonmark Diner, convinced my fellow citizens that I had suffered enough already. It was as if I had endured and miraculously survived a terrible disease, and no one wished to cause me unnecessary additional pain by asking for details.

THE DAY IN LATE AUGUST when I decided to return to Liberia arrived and passed in a normal enough manner. Frieda and Nan drove the pickup out to the northside orchard and were filling it with late McIntosh apples, and Cat was in the greenhouse seeding the last crop of lettuce for the season. The dogs slumbered in a circle of sunshine on the grass in front of the house. It was warm, in the high fifties by noon, and sunny — a golden day. The leaves of the maple trees, oaks, and birches in the cool spots along the river had begun turning, tinting the air with pale shades of reflected red and yellow and orange light. Occasionally the first Vs of Canada geese crossed the cloudless sky from north to south, their harsh calls and cries rousing the dogs, who looked at the sky and considered for a few seconds the idea of giving chase, if only to keep up appearances, then gave it up, yawned, and went back to sleep.

Soon there was something far more interesting for them. With the dogs’ help, Anthea and I herded the chickens together so we could pack them four to a crate. Though the dogs, Baylor and Winnie, easily kept the hens clustered in one corner of the large, fenced-in pen, the birds were hysterical — there’s no other word for it — making the job absurdly difficult and therefore slightly humiliating. Finally, however, we managed to crate enough to fill our standing orders, four dozen of them, all plump broilers, Rhode Island reds, and lugged the crated chickens to the shed that we call the butcher shop, an old tool shop with a cement floor, a double laundry sink, a hose, and a floor drain.

We waited till after lunch before beginning the nasty work of killing the chickens, which we do the old-fashioned way, with a machete and a wooden chopping block. The chopping usually falls to me, as if it were my responsibility, or perhaps my privilege, though I’m sure Anthea would do it if I asked her. I don’t really mind; Lord knows, I’ve seen worse. But it wouldn’t be nearly as unpleasant if, when you decapitated the chickens, they didn’t bleed the way they do — profusely and in spurts that last longer than you think they should — and their headless bodies didn’t scramble wildly around the shed as if in crazed search of eyes and mouths and tiny brains. It’s strange, I don’t really like poultry or birds generally. They don’t quite register with me as animals. They seem more like complicated plants or higher-order insects, and that’s more or less how I treat them, providing them from the moment they hatch with the same carefully calculated food, water, space, and shelter as I do the vegetables. Until it comes time to kill them, when they seem suddenly to possess all the familiar mammalian emotions — fear and sadness and love of life. Consequently, whenever I have to decapitate thirty or forty or fifty of the squawking, wild-eyed creatures in a row, it’s a stressful, wrenching time for me.

Yet I wouldn’t for a minute think of fobbing the job off onto Anthea or anyone else. It feels somehow just and necessary that I do it myself, that I let Anthea lay the puffed-up, panting body of the chicken against the block, that I slap my left hand around the creature’s small head as if covering a child’s coin purse, stretch out the neck, and with my right hand lift the machete over head and bring it swiftly down, as if driving a nail with a hammer, cutting cleanly through the neck with one stroke. I drop the head into the bucket beside the block, and Anthea tosses the body aside, to let it pump out as much of its blood as it can before the heart stops, and its body staggers in smaller and smaller circles, and finally flops over onto the concrete floor, quivers, shudders, and is dead. The dogs, who know what is happening now, are locked outside the butcher shop, barking wildly, almost joyfully, to be let in.

Forty-eight times I do this. Then we fill the double sinks with water that’s hot enough nearly to scald our gloved hands and gather up the still-warm bodies and dip them, and working in a kind of mindless fury, we yank the feathers out by the handful, tossing them in the air, hurrying, pulling feathers with both hands, before the skin of the hens cools and the feathers set and can’t be pulled out without tearing the flesh. We cover ourselves, each other, the entire room with feathers — making a bloody, gruesome mess of everything inside those four walls. We stack the naked, headless bodies of the chickens on a counter top, one on top of the other, until we have them arranged in a neat pile, a pink, squared mound of flesh, and all that’s left now is the removal of the innards, evisceration, which we do together, standing at the counter side by side with our slender knives, enlarging the anus, reaching into the body cavity and pulling out the organs, separating the liver, gizzard, heart, and kidneys, which we stuff into small plastic bags, and when we have washed the body in cold water, we shove the bag of organs back inside the cavity. Our long, white aprons and knitted wool caps and our faces, hands, and rubber boots are splashed with blood. Feathers and guts are stuck to us everywhere, as if we have been tarred and feathered by an angry mob. We are breathing hard. We have been at this for hours and are nearly done.

We wrap each body in plastic and again in paper, and now it is simply meat, food, protein and fat, ready to be delivered to the little Keene Valley Supermarket or picked up later today by our special-order customers — forty-eight organically fed, free-range chickens, a luxury item here in the Northcountry, hundreds of miles from any gourmet restaurant or store, sold at a price that’s competitive with mass-produced, chemically fed, chain-store chickens. I pity those poor sick creatures that, unlike our more fortunate hens, are dosed with antibiotics and spend their entire lives packed in tiny boxes under bright lights in food factories somewhere in Maryland or Arkansas, birds from start to finish raised, fed, watered, killed, plucked, and packaged entirely by shiny machines, never touched by human hands. Our creatures, we believe, have been provided with lives worth living, and they repay us with their healthy, clean bodies.

This, I have convinced myself, is our little battle won. It’s me and Anthea and the girls against Tyson’s and Frank Perdue and the industrialization of the food chain, and for us it justifies the carnage and the stress and high feelings that the bimonthly killing arouses in us. There’s still something of the ideologue inside me, I guess. All these years later. It explains why we find ourselves at the end of the day standing there, bloody and feathered and smelling of gore and guts; it tells us why we are near tears, panting, our chests heaving and our legs weak; and why we look at each other like suddenly estranged lovers. We’re doing it, by God, for a reason. It’s political.

“I never get used to this,” Anthea said and lighted a cigarette and with a shaking hand passed it to me and lighted another for herself.

I smoked and said nothing. There was still work to do, the cleanup. The dogs, sensing the fun was over, had drifted off, so I swung open the door of the butcher shop and let fresh air and late-afternoon sunlight into the room to dispel the smell of wet rust and motor oil, the odor of spilled blood and opened bodies — the stink of fresh death.

But there was something else, it was the residue of my dream of Africa, a stream of vague, almost erotic feelings that had been released in my sleep and then got left behind when I awoke and the dream dissipated and I could no longer call the generative images and story back to mind — a range of forgotten emotions that the killing of the hens today had summoned and now had suddenly brought forward and that unexpectedly and against my will had taken on the hard focus of a specific desire. I said to Anthea, “If I had to be gone a while, do you think you could run the farm? Could you handle it okay?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. Sure, I could. For how long?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks, maybe longer. Maybe less. Depends on what I find out there.”

“Where?”

“Liberia. Africa.”

Anthea stared at me in disbelief. “Geez, Hannah, you sure? I mean, Africa. How old are they now, your sons? I mean, if they’re…” She stopped herself mid-sentence. “What’re their names? You told me once, but I forget.”

Their names, yes. “Dillon and William and Paul.” When I left Liberia the names of my sons were Fly, Worse-than-Death, and Demonology. I didn’t tell that to Anthea. I added the numbers, the years since I had left Africa, and said, “Twenty-four for William, the twins are twenty-three,” and finished her sentence for her, “… if they’re still alive.” But I did not tell her that when I left our home in Monrovia they were fourteen and thirteen. Little boys. She could work out the numbers if she wanted to, but I knew that she wouldn’t, because she’s a kind woman and loves me.

“All right. Go ahead, and don’t you fret the farm, honey. Me and the girls can keep the place running like clockwork. Stay out there in Africa as long as you need to.”

“Let’s get cleaned up,” I said. “You pack the chickens in the cooler, and I’ll hose this place down. Then let’s take a swim. You up for it?”

“Too damned cold! You got to to belong to one of them whatchacallits, polar bear clubs, to swim this time of year,” she said, and peeled off her bloody apron and cap.

BUT IT WASN’T too cold after all. Nan and Frieda drove in from the orchard, and a little later Cat joined us on the porch, where by then we were drinking beer and yacking in our usual way — I think Frieda was trying to convince Nan to join her on a climb in the Ecuadorean Andes in November, while Anthea and I teased the two, saying there was no way they could handle altitude with their kind of drug use. I sent Cat for the towels, and when she returned, we tossed our empty beer cans in the trash, and the five of us walked arm in arm across the lawn and cut through the field in front of the house, making our way gaily down to the river.

I felt strangely liberated that afternoon, almost like singing, not faking my comradery, as I normally did on these occasions. Up ahead the dogs bounded through the tall grass, scaring up small flocks of slow-moving, chilled grasshoppers, snapping the insects out of the air as they ran.

On the near bank the grove of tall, spreading, fifty-year-old oak trees cast its long shadow out to midstream. Beyond the shadow, all the way to the far bank, the river was in sunlight, glittering and warm. We stripped off our clothes and entered the cool, shaded water, Frieda and Nan first, plunging ahead, showing off their tanned, athletic bodies and their reckless abandon, followed by Anthea, who shoved her way into the water and hollered as she got waist deep, swearing at the cold and at us for talking her into doing a thing this dumb, and behind her came Cat, slender and childlike, holding her arms over her small, tight breasts, until she was up to her chin, when she finally let go of her fragile protection and swam like the others for the sun-warmed water on the farther side.

Finally I entered the stream, more timidly than they, for I am a little shy, actually, and because I am the old one among these women: my breasts are no longer perked, and my thighs and belly are loose, my pubic hair has thinned and is turning gray. But once I was entirely in the water and swimming — my feet free of the ground, my back arched and arms sweeping ahead of me, my legs scissoring easily, powering me into deeper and deeper waters — none of that mattered. My long white hair, still a point of vanity for me, swirled behind me like a bride’s veil, and my body felt strong and taut and young again, so that there was no perceptible difference between my body and the bodies of the other women. We were, all five of us, a school of porpoises dipping, diving under, surfacing, rolling over on our backs, and swimming out of the fast-running, shaded half of the stream into the sunlit pool beyond. Once there, we floated in place, and when we spoke our voices were softened and low, as if each of us had entered her own mind alone and when she spoke it was only to let the others know that she was still there, still close by, still their friend.

I leaned back in the water, my arms behind my head, and peered up at the cloudless, drum-tight, pale blue sky, and brought my gaze slowly down to the mountain ridges that surround the valley, where the foliage from halfway up the mountains was already glowing with early-autumn reds and yellows. Turning from the bright striations of the higher altitudes, I looked lower and lower, down through the evergreens to the near bank. And there were the dogs, my black-and-white Border collies, Baylor and Winnie, standing on the shore, watching us. They weren’t prancing up and down the bank as they always do, yelping excitedly and after a few moments leaping into the water themselves and paddling out to join us. Instead, today they both stood stock still, tails and ears lowered.

I swam a few yards downstream, separating myself from the others, and when I looked towards shore again, I saw that the dogs’ gazes had followed me. I was the one they were watching. Not the others.

“Really, Hannah, what’s up with the doggies today?” Anthea called.

“I… I don’t know.”

Nan laughed and said it was because they were too smart to swim in water this cold, and Frieda agreed.

Cat said, “This is so awesome,” and disappeared beneath the surface, and when she reappeared a minute later and ten yards downstream from me, the dogs didn’t react. They kept their gaze fixed only on me, and their expression was both accusatory and sorrowful, as if I had committed a crime, and only they and I knew about it. But at that moment I could think of nothing bad that I had done.

I suddenly felt heavy, gravity bound, and old again. “I’m going in,” I said, and started swimming slowly for shore. When my feet felt the smooth rocks on the bottom, I stood, my shoulders and breasts exposed, and stared back at the dogs. They both cocked their wedge-shaped heads and looked as if they were capable of speech but were waiting for me to speak first.

“What?” I said to them. “What do you know?” I asked. “ What do you want to know?”

They turned their heads away, and I nervously laughed and cupping my hands tossed water at them, and they grinned and leapt and yelped. Then, as if suddenly remembering why they were there, the dogs jumped from the bank into the water and, mouths closed, breathing sharply through their nostrils, paddled happily out to join the girls, and I clambered from the river onto the grassy bank and covered my body with a towel and gathered up my blood-stained clothes.

MY STORY IN all its versions is only a tale of too-late. Maybe at best it’s a cautionary tale. To my sons I used to say, “Be careful what you wish for. Know what you love best. Beware the things that catch your eye.” And this, which I tell to you as well: “Never love someone who can’t love you back.” The truth is, most of the time, even now, I don’t want to tell my story. Not to you, not to anyone. It’s almost as if I’m beyond all stories and have been for years. You want to see me in light, but I’m visible only in darkness. I’m obliterated by light, and can’t cast it, either. I’m like a white shadow. And at night, when I’m visible, wherever I am, even here on the farm in the heat of summer, I lock all the doors and windows and pull down the shades, draw the curtains, and keep the dogs shut inside my bedroom with me and the bedroom door latched and bolted. I’m as afraid of the dark in upstate New York as the bush people are in Liberia, who sleep with their huts closed tight against the thousands of evil spirits that come in the night to steal people’s souls — leopard-devils that bite your throat first and eat you before you die, and two-step snakes that bite you and you take two steps and die, and bad white men and black men from the coast remembered in tales of slave catchers passed down by the elders.

I’m an elder myself now. Fifty-nine this year, in late middle-age, but old enough to have watched other people, my parents, for example, find themselves suddenly elderly and soon dead. Old age is a slow surprise. And at a certain point one’s personal history, one’s story, simply stops unfolding. Change just ends, and one’s history is not completed, not ended, but stilled — for a moment, for a month, maybe even for a year. And then it reverses direction and begins spooling backwards. One learns these things at a certain age. It happened to my parents. It happens to everyone who lives long enough. And now it’s happened to me. It’s as if the whole purpose of an organism’s life — of my life, anyhow — were merely for it to reach the farthest extension of its potential with the sole purpose of returning to its single-cell start. As if one’s fate were to drop back into the river of life and dissolve there like a salt. And if anything counts for something, it’s the return, and not the journey out.

When I returned to Liberia from my little farm in upstate New York that last time and saw at once that I had come back too late, I wondered if it had been, from the very beginning, too late. It was my question way back then; it’s my question now. Should I instead have stayed in Liberia a decade ago when the war was still raging and somehow lived there for as long afterwards as possible and shared my husband’s known fate and the unknown fates of my sons? Lord knows, it’s a simple enough question. But the simple questions are the hardest to answer. They always seem to carry with them a hundred prior questions, all unanswered, and probably in the end unanswerable now anyhow. They had to be answered at the moment they were first asked. Intentionality may be all that matters, but who knows a woman’s true intentions? Who knows what she truly wished for? Or what she loved best? Or even what caught her eye? Not Hannah Musgrave Sundiata. Not I. Especially not back then, over a decade ago, when I fled Liberia and left that endless war behind, turned away from the savagery and the madness of it, and abandoned to its flames my home, my husband’s body, my lost boys, and left to be shot and eaten by the soldiers my innocent, frightened, beloved dreamers, the eleven apes that had been placed in my charge.

My poor animals; they were mine to protect, the creatures I loved nearly as much as I loved my husband and sons and whom I tried, vain and proud and deluded, to save by placing them onto an island. Which I suppose was only what I wished someone would do for me. Place me onto an island.

A fantasy, that’s all it was. Just another fantasy of self-sanctification. It was futile then, and probably futile now, all of it. Even here on this little island.

And yet, that day in the midst of the war, when I boarded that final flight out of Monrovia, if I’d known my true motives for leaving, if I’d examined them closely enough at the time, they might have seemed puny to me, puny and unworthy, and I would not have left at all. I wouldn’t have made it to this enchanted isle, my farm — in the good, cheerful company of Anthea and the girls and my faithful collie dogs, all of us caring for sheep and hens and my beautiful gardens — with its inhabitants, me included, sanctified and blessed. And I wouldn’t have been obliged to return to Africa one more time as I did last year.

Mainly, we return to a place in order to learn why we left. Nothing else. That’s what all those nostalgic novels of return are really about. Had I known at the time my true reasons for leaving in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing what women have done for eons: I wouldn’t have become one of those wives and mothers walking mournfully through the wreckage and desolation made by men and boys trying to kill one another. I wouldn’t have become one of those howling widows searching like some ancient Greek woman for her slain husband’s body, so that he can be properly buried, would not have become a doleful mother asking for the whereabouts of her lost sons, so that her sons’ rage can be calmed, their fears assuaged, and their wounds cleansed and dressed. I would not have gone out to the river island where I had so cleverly placed my dreamers, my charges, and when I got to the island found only their hacked, burnt bones and broken skulls.

In vain. All of it in vain. It’s always been that way, yet we keep on doing it. For tens of thousands of years, since before Biblical times, since the species first learned to make weapons and tame fire, women have fled carnage and returned later to gaze at the wreckage of their plundered homes, stunned by the violence of the destruction and its force, and tried to understand why we came back to it, if this is all we can come back to, and why we fled in the first place, since we have no choice but to return, and nothing but loss and permanent grief await us there.

SOMEHOW THE CHIMPANZEES are central to my story, and I can’t tell it without them. My heart stops when I picture them in my mind. And I can’t think of my husband or my sons at all, beyond naming them. Not this early in the story. And so I’ll tell you instead of what happened to the dreamers.

Before I fled the war, for a few days I had help in transporting them to the island from the Toby sanctuary, help I needed, especially with the adults and the adolescent males. We took them out in Kuyo’s borrowed motorboat. Kuyo was the man who had worked at the house for us for years, a cousin of Woodrow’s, and for a long time he had shown no more interest in non-human animals than most Americans do. Less, actually. To a poor Liberian, an animal that can’t be eaten and can’t be put to work or serve as trade goods is a liability and deserves only to be punished for it. But somehow the dreamers had begun to invade Kuyo’s imagination. Or maybe it was merely my love for them that lit up his sympathies, for he had always regarded me with genuine interest and apparent affection.

I remember sitting on the back steps bottle-feeding a wide-eyed baby girl named Gilly. Kuyo, a tall, dark brown, almost black man, flat chested with wide, bony shoulders, stopped in the patchwork shade of the cotton tree, leaned on his rake, and asked me, “Why you wanna take care of them monkeys alla time, ma’m?”

I tried explaining to him that soon, if we don’t take care of the chimps, they’ll be gone from the planet forever, and Kuyo’s grandchildren and mine will live and die without having seen one. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren won’t even know that such a creature ever existed, except in legends.

He pushed his lips out and asked me, “Was there, long time before now, way way long time, some kinds of animals, d’you think, that we don’t know about? Strange animals to us that we be scairt of in our dreams, but not so strange an’ scary-scary to the ancestors? Animals we got no names for no more?” He chewed on his lower lip and studied Gilly for a long moment.

As if the tiny chimp knew the man was watching her and for the first time in his life was contemplating the fate of her species, Gilly rolled her head slightly towards him and returned his look. Kuyo said, “Mebbe one day soon I come out to Toby wit’ you an’ view these monkeys for myself. See if mebbe I can give ’em a little care now an’ then. Just to check what they really like close up an’ all.”

“That’s a fine idea,” I said. “Why don’t you go over on your way home? I’ll be there then feeding them, and you can help me.”

Which he did, and soon he was a regular visitor at the sanctuary, and within the year he’d forsaken his job as our yard man and had become one of the caretakers at the sanctuary. And that was where he was killed, later, after he’d helped me move our clan of dreamers away to Boniface Island, where we hoped to hide them until the war was over.

What an absurd pair we made, Kuyo and I, carrying the babies and leading the adolescents by the hand, as if they were frightened schoolchildren and we humans were their teachers, shuttling the older dreamers in the wheeled cage along the winding pathway to the dock on the river where the boat was hidden, ferrying our terrified charges in twos and threes under the shroud of darkness across the broad, moonlit estuary, putting them carefully ashore, and returning to the sanctuary on the west side of the city for more. A couple of confused, frightened, latter-day Noahs we were. What naiveté and vanity on my part, faithfulness and belief on Kuyo’s, and trust on the part of the dreamers, who squatted on the island among the mangroves and out on the muddy landing and watched the humans head back towards Monrovia, knowing somehow that we would return with the others, until finally all eleven had been moved there.

We left them food enough for a few days — bananas, rose apples, squashes, and several baskets of leafy greens — promised we would soon return, and departed for what turned out to be the last time. The dreamers did not know that we were not saving them, we were abandoning them. Nor did we. The dreamers did not know that Kuyo and I, as if in cahoots with the soldiers, had trapped and imprisoned them on the island.

I walked alone to my silent, empty house on Duport Road, in town. The streets were deserted, and everyone who had not fled the city had barred his door and shuttered the windows. I heard the occasional stutter of distant gunfire from Waterside and the rumble of military trucks and jeeps entering and departing from the Barclay Barracks, where the remnant of the president’s special Anti-Terrorist Force was encamped. In darkness I sat out on the patio, exhausted, utterly unsure of what to do next, now that I had done what seemed to me the only and the last thing I actually could do. Half a bottle of gin was sitting on the patio table with a filthy glass next to it, inadvertently left behind, no doubt, when the servants fled. I filled the glass and drank it down slowly, bit by bit, and filled it again, until I had drunk half a quart of gin with no tonic and no ice, a thing I’d never done before. Then I went inside and lay down on the sofa, and with all the windows and doors of the house wide open and the gate to the street unlocked, slept for twelve hours, till evening the next day.

Kuyo had gone back to the deserted sanctuary in Toby southeast of town to gather up the record books, the ledgers and data we’d accumulated over the years, to carry them to me for safekeeping. He’d wanted instead to flee the city for his family’s village in the back country of Lofa and hide there and had argued against going back to the sanctuary. “Them’s only papers, Miz Sundiata, ain’t no point to gettin’ ’em now wit’ all them soldiers about.” But I had insisted. This was the last time that I still believed I could somehow protect valuable documents for the duration of the war — for who, I wondered, would want to destroy numbers, calculations, the birth, death, and kinship records of chimpanzees? Despite everything that had already happened, I’d still not imagined the discovery by men and boys of the pleasures of pointless destruction. Back then, at least until that night, murder, rape, pillage, and the butchery and roasting of animals, even chimpanzees, when it occurred, still had to have a political point — the sad but necessary consequences of warfare.

At the sanctuary, Kuyo came out of the office lugging a plastic milk carton overflowing with the papers and was met in the yard by three men with guns. I never saw them myself but can all too easily imagine them. You’ve seen magazine photographs of them, I’m sure. Americans, especially white Americans, like to scare themselves with those photos. Most of the fighters in that war wore parts of cast-off nylon exercise suits and torn and filthy tee shirts with American college and sports team logos and oversize high-top basketball sneakers, do-rags and baseball caps turned backwards — hip-hop leftovers looted from the stores and shops and scavenged from the street markets of the villages and towns they had rampaged through on their way to Monrovia. Some of them, especially the young boys, wore women’s clothes — nightgowns and skirts and bonnets — and they flashed fresh tattoos on their arms and bare chests and juju amulets around their necks and white paste on their faces. These were the soldiers I had been seeing for weeks on the streets of Monrovia. The officers in their armies — for there were three armies of Liberians fighting one another at that time, President Doe’s, Charles Taylor’s, and Prince Johnson’s — had put these boys in charge of the checkpoints in and out of town and all across the country, and their actions had been generating tales of random drug-and alcohol-fueled murders and rapes and always robbery, looting, and pillaging. Here in town, when off duty, they were seizing houses, painting their names on the walls — Rambo, Quick-to-Kill, Flashdancer — to claim ownership for their planned return when the fighting was over. So far, no one had claimed our house.

The soldiers had come to the sanctuary for the dreamers. Bush meat. There was a sixteen-year-old girl, also a cousin of Woodrow’s, Estelle, who lived on the grounds and had not yet left for her village. She didn’t know which army the men belonged to, Prince Johnson’s or Charles Taylor’s or the army of the man who was still the president of Liberia, Samuel Doe. She had climbed into a cotton tree to hide from the fighters, and the following day, when she finally dared to come to me, Estelle told me that the men had cut off Kuyo’s penis and made him eat it and then had shot him many times in the mouth. They threw his body into the river, she said, and drove away. She said, “Mebbe they be Prince Johnson men, them was in so big a hurry-hurry to get away from town before Charles Taylor’s men come get them an’ kill them dead. Or mebbe them be President Doe’s men who mus’ be scairt of everybody now, even the peoples.”

My journals, years of meticulous records and data, were still at the sanctuary, scattered across the sandy, blood-spattered yard where Kuyo had dropped them, wet from rain and driven into the dirt by the fighters’ jeep and feet as if they were old newspapers. For hours, Estelle and I gathered up the soaked books and loose sheets of paper, until finally we had them all collected in the plastic milk carton.

I held the carton and looked at the contents for a long moment. Then, halfway through that moment, something inside me cracked and split, and there the dark entered in. Weeping, I dumped the contents of the carton onto the ground at my feet. Without thinking, mindless, as if merely following orders, I doused the pile with kerosene from a lamp, lit a match, and tossed it onto the papers. An auto-da-fé it was. The heap burst into yellow flames and sour-smelling smoke and began to burn. I felt the light inside me, what little of it still shone, dwindle and die, smothered by the dark.

Grabbing my arm, Estelle yelled at me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz’ Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!”

I shook my head and said slowly, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t.” It was the simple, perplexing truth. I told her that I was sorry not to know, and instructed her then to run home to her village and stay with her family and not to come back to the sanctuary ever again. “There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. Like the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too.”

As if before her eyes I had turned into a ghost, the girl simply turned and ran, and I never saw her again. Estelle is probably dead now, if she was lucky. Or a ghost herself. She was a pretty little young woman, from Samuel Doe’s mother’s tribe, the Gio. During the months and years that followed, until the people elected Charles Taylor president to stop him from killing them, most of those women, especially the younger ones and the girls, were lucky to have been killed.

TEN YEARS AND A LIFETIME later, I walked in painfully bright sunlight along the narrow beach outside Monrovia towards the harbor and the town, passing the spot on the beach where, nearly twenty years and two lifetimes ago, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his men erected thirteen telephone poles in the sand. I knew the story. I was there. Everyone in Liberia knew the story. Drunk and high on drugs, bloodlust ramping through their veins, Samuel Doe’s men had eviscerated their president, William Tolbert, in his office and carried his ministers, fifteen baggy old men stripped naked, to the beach, where they lashed them to the poles and shot them dead in front of television and home-movie cameras and a crowd of wildly jeering citizens and left their bodies tied to the poles to feed the vultures and the dogs. The poles lie buried in the sand now, and the bones of the corrupt old men have long ago washed out to sea.

At the far end of the beach, where the land elbows into the harbor, I saw the same man in nylon shorts who had fled from me at the gully after the Lebanese truck driver, Mamoud, had let me off. The man stood beside a beached, dark red pirogue, with both hands on the bow in a proprietary way, as if he were about to launch the boat, and watched me approach. So he was a fisherman, then, not a mad scavenger, as I’d first thought, and I must have interrupted him at his morning toilet. He had merely been embarrassed by me, but not frightened. With West Africans, the two sometimes look the same.

A pair of osprey swooped past, dipped close to the glittering surface of the sea, and methodically cruised the length of the beach a hundred yards from shore, searching for breakfast. Now that the man and I could see each other’s faces clearly, I covered my teeth with my lips and smiled, and he smiled back. How strange, I thought, and how nice—a relief, in fact, that a Liberian man and I were greeting each other with friendly curiosity. I hadn’t thought that possible anymore.

I wished the man good morning, and he said the same, and soon we were talking about how bad the fishing had been in the last few months, since the end of the rains, he said. He was named Curtis. He was a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, with a wife, he said, “An’ five pick’nies. But wit’ no fish to catch me can’t feed them, an’ so the wife gone on the streets now, sellin’ pens an’ Bic lighters an’ other suchlike t’ings but ain’t nobody can buy t’ings in dis country no more, so what a man t’ do?” He spoke rapidly, anxiously, as if afraid I’d cut him off. “Can you help me out wit’ a little somethin’, Miz?” He held out his hand. “Can you gimme dash?”

“Do you know Boniface Island?” I asked him. He did, though he’d never been there. I asked if I could hire him to take me there in his boat. “I’ll pay you twenty American dollars,” I said. “To go out and back. And to wait for me for an hour or so. I won’t need to stay long.”

He wondered why I needed to go to Boniface. “Nothin’ t’ see on those little bitty river islands but birds an’ crocodiles an’ mangroves. Turtles sometimes though,” he added.

“I was there long ago,” I said. “During the war. Some of my friends were killed there. And I need to pray for them.”

He nodded, understanding. From Cape Mount to Maryland County, all over this land, “people’s friends an’ family needs prayin’ for,” he pronounced. “The war not over yet, mebbe never will be over,” he said and held out his hand again for money. I placed a folded twenty-dollar bill into it.

AT BONIFACE ISLAND, the long pirogue, shaped like a plantain, slid onto the dark landing. It was a short, sloped, brown beach with a small clearing surrounded by low bushes a short ways beyond and, on both sides, a mass of tangled, head-high mangroves half in the water and half out. Though it was the largest of the river islands in the broad estuary of the St. John River, it was barely the size of a schoolyard. Standing barefoot in the bow, my sneakers stashed in my backpack, I stepped from the boat and went ashore.

Behind me, squatting in the stern, Curtis held the boat tight to the beach with his single long paddle. He was looking in my direction, but his face was expressionless, as if I weren’t there. Then, without warning, he moved his oar up to the bow, placed the end of it into the mud, and shoved the boat away from shore. It floated past the mangroves, where it caught the river current and slowly spun stern to bow towards the wide, gray waters of the estuary. Standing, he took his long oar in hand and like a Venetian gondolier worked the handle back and forth, driving the boat still farther from the island and into the river.

“Wait a minute! What are you doing?” I cried. “Curtis! Where are you going?”

He was a hundred yards or more from the island now, and he said nothing, did not look back, kept rowing.

I screamed, “Don’t leave me here! Please, Curtis! Don’t leave me here!”

Then he was gone to the far side of the island, heading rapidly on a line towards the city of Monrovia, in the distance downstream. In moments, he was out of my sight altogether, twenty American dollars richer than this morning, when he found me, but with no more money coming to him again for a long, long time — unless he was willing to hit me with a rock and leave me on the island for dead. He must have been too timid a man to do that, I thought, and turned away from the disappearing boat. Afraid that if he’d killed me he’d end up sleepless at night with my spirit haunting his hut, he had done the next Liberian thing, he’d merely taken the twenty dollars and abandoned me.

I looked around at the drooping mangroves, their roots like limp snakes dangling their heads into the water, and stepped away from the shore in search of shade against the glare of the sun. But there was none, unless I were willing to crawl on hands and knees into the tepid water and huddle beneath the mangroves leaves. But the water looked filthy enough to make me sick on contact, and I remembered the crocodiles that Curtis had mentioned and was afraid to leave the clearing in spite of the sun’s beating on my head.

Though I was alone on the tiny island, from the instant I stepped ashore I knew that I was alone with the ghosts of my dreamers. I could almost see them shuffling side to side in the heat-crinkled air. I sensed their presence all around me. There was a rustling from the bushes as if a cool breeze had blown over, but everything was dead and heavy. Then I heard a familiar huffing sound, the low woofs of a pair of adult male chimpanzees, as different from one another as two human voices, and as recognizable, and I knew at once that it was Ginko and Mano. And then came the distinctive pant hoot of the leader of the clan, Doc, the first of the apes that I had dared to name, followed by the chuckling close by of mothers Deena and Wassail and Ellie, nursing their babies and scolding their older children, and the squawks and high-pitched screeches from the adolescents vying for rank and dominance — they were all over this tiny, brush-covered islet! I looked for them in the low, leafless, prickly bushes at the edge of the clearing, tramped from one side of the island to the other, and peered under the mangroves, but could not see them.

But they were here, I knew, still waiting after all these years for me to come back and save them. Or, no, they were waiting for me to step forward, to bow my head, and receive their judgment. Yes, that was it. I suddenly realized that I’d come solely for this. It was the possibility and the necessity of receiving their strict, final judgment that had driven me from my farm and drawn me across the ocean to this tiny island. And I hadn’t known it until now. I hadn’t allowed myself to know it, until, like the dreamers, I myself was trapped on this island, and it was suddenly all too clear why, after years of safe retreat, I’d taken it upon myself to leave my quiet Adirondack valley one autumn afternoon and fly away to Africa.

The dreamers gradually went silent, as if they had seen me standing in the center of the small clearing and knew that I was alone. Emerging slowly from the dense scrub brush, one by one they came forward, all eleven of them, the entire clan, as if they had never been abandoned, slain, eaten. Bent over slightly, looking ready to spring, they hitched themselves cautiously towards me, closer and closer, until they had surrounded me. Their eyes were wide open, with heavy brows lifted in mild surmise, lips sucked tightly together, and when they stared up at me it was in sad puzzlement, not in accusation — which I expected and could have endured and may even have welcomed. After having first made them trust me to provide for their safekeeping, in spite of my weakness and fearful self-interest, and to know what was good for them, in spite of their own best knowledge, I had treated them shamefully. Unforgivably. And now, in consequence, though calm, almost placid, they had been transformed from my charges into furies. Their gaze showed me — as if I needed fresh reminding — that the themes of my life were betrayal and abandonment.

It came to me then that where I now stood in the clearing was the exact spot in which my dreamers had been slain, their corpses butchered and eaten. Their skulls and bones and the charred remains of the fires in which their flesh had been roasted lay like midden deep in the silt beneath my feet. It had been ten rainy seasons since Kuyo and I last stood here, and many flood tides had washed over the island, leaving behind each time a thick carpet of fresh mud floated down from the eastern highlands, sinking the remains of my dreamers deeper and deeper into the body of the island. They were buried far beneath me, and yet it seemed, nonetheless, that I had placed myself in the midst of those old bones as if at the center of a charnel house. The bones were piled up to my knees, a rough pyramid of leg and arm bones, of spines with hooped ribs still attached, skulls large and small, the bones of fingers and toes, yellowed teeth, and thatches of brown and black hair.

The large, yellow, equatorial sun lay pasted against the pale gray sky directly overhead. I knew that my blood and brain were dangerously overheated. I was dizzy and could not see clearly anymore. The faces and shapes of the ghosts of the dreamers had grown fuzzy and indistinct, and they resembled now a cluster of hooded medieval priests at prayer, kneeling in a circle around me. My legs were weak and began to tremble. Everything was spinning. I had not brought water from the mainland — there was no fresh water on the island, none at least that I could have located myself, and the river was brackish and filthy with sewage and rotted corpses — and I had not eaten since the previous night, when Mamoud had stopped briefly at the cook shop outside of Gbanga and the boy had run after us begging for a ride away.

I know now, of course, what was happening to me, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I had thought I was on a secret guilt trip, a return visit to the scene of my crime. One of my crimes. It was sunstroke and dehydration and hunger, but to me it was a vision. And here it came, a huge wave rising in front of me and then breaking and falling over me, shoving me to my knees, bending my body into an A, a wave replaced by a second, still bigger wave, and a third and a fourth, rolling me over, their enormous weight and force pummeling my body to the ground.

I lay on my back and looked up at the silhouette of a black, featureless head blocking out the sun. It was the large, gray-splotched face of Doc — who had been both the fiercest and the gentlest of the dreamers and the most intelligent — staring down at me in rage, a monstrous Caliban. He opened his mouth wide and bared his large canine teeth. The others, male and female alike, adults and offspring, all the dreamers, gathered beside and behind Doc and watched him intently, as if waiting for him to give the signal that would free them. Free them to do what? To rend and disembowel me and devour my raw flesh? It’s what I expected. It’s what I thought I deserved.

I crouched against the muddy ground and extended my hands in a pathetic gesture, as if to fend them off. They had come forward from the spirit world with no other purpose than to avenge themselves on my stringy, old lady’s body, to tear my hair from my scalp and toss bloody handfuls of it like gobbets into the air, to scream bloody murder and spit into my face. These were my imaginings. It’s what I must have desired. For years, since my youth, hadn’t I been seeking exactly this? The freeing of the slave, the resurrection of the slain, the revenge of the betrayed and abandoned human and not-human. I’d not been able to become any one of them, and had grown angry and then had slain them, the not-us. Now the not-us had come back to claim blood kinship by returning blow for blow, curse for curse.

And Doc spoke. I heard him speak to me! His voice was low and dark, his accent and intonation West African. He called me by name, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, he moaned, as if making a mysterious, final, despairing benediction for humankind, for my kind in particular, and he said that I had once made much of him and his clan, and I had fed them and had taught them the names and uses of things that they had never seen before. And when I had let them believe that I and they were kin, I had imprisoned them on this island and had delivered them into the hands of the soldiers, who saw them only as food and viewed the babies of their clan as toys to be sold on the streets.

His large, powerful hand descended towards my face as if he meant to tear my pale mask from the bone beneath. Blackness interceded. And that is the last of my memories of the vision.

UNTIL I FOUND MYSELF with my head lying against the brown thigh of a man who was trickling fresh cool water into my mouth. He must have seen that I was now aware of him, for he tipped my head forward slightly and smiled and brought the plastic jug closer to my lips so that I could drink more easily. There were broad, green mangrove leaves overhead, shading us from the sun. The man was the boatman, Curtis, who had carried me to the island and left me there — permanently, I had thought. But no, there he was, pushing my wet hair away from my face, helping me drink, and speaking softly to me, “You gonna be fine now, Miz, don’ you worry none, you gonna be jus’ fine. Good t’ing I come back f’ you an’ bring water, or by now you in the belly of the crocodiles for certain, Miz.”

He helped me sit up and let me hold the jug myself and drink from it. Then he held his hand out to me. “Gimme more dash now, Miz. The water not come free, y’ know. Nothin’ come free in this country anymore. Not for me, an’ not for you neither,” he said.

WHEN A YEAR AGO I went back to Liberia, I thought it was in search of my lost sons, and found something very different instead. Twenty-seven years ago, however, the first time I went to Africa, it was to Ghana, to avoid arrest and imprisonment or possibly simple assassination in the United States. It was 1975, and I was living with Carol — poor, large-hearted Carol — in New Bedford, as part of a tiny Weather Underground cell made up, as far as I knew, of just me and a man named Zachary Procter.

Zack was actually a mainline Cincinnati aristocrat whom I’d known in the Movement back at Brandeis. He was tall — six-and-a-half feet at least — and slim, with ginger-colored hair, freckles, pale blue eyes with crinkly, premature laugh lines at the corners, and teeth like Chiclets. Zack and I had marched arm in arm at various peace protests at the university, but otherwise we had avoided each other. Perhaps because we sensed that we were too much alike. We could see behind each other’s mask of idealism and ideology the face of the privileged, angry kid who, in the name of peace, justice, and racial harmony, had declared war against the state, the university, and, before long, his parents’ entire generation. The face behind the mask was not a pretty sight. Later, the mask absorbed the face and became it, and for a while at least we weren’t ashamed of what we were looking at. Then, eventually, I guess the mask got peeled away, and we saw our true faces again.

Zack’s major was anthropology; I was pre-med. It was the mid-1960s. In our dorm rooms we listened to folk music, Negro blues, and jazz; smoked dope; drank cheap red wine from basket-wrapped bottles; and wore black turtlenecks, jeans, and peasant sandals to class, even in winter. We were conventionally ambitious students, however, and worried about our grades and calibrated our final class standing two and three years before graduation. But on our own, outside of class, we read Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre in Anchor paperbacks, loved Godard and Bergman movies and called them “films,” and cultivated what we regarded as morally meaningful alienation from bourgeois society and values. Our forms of rebellion had been handed down to us from the fifties, after all, by the Beat Generation and famous European-café existentialists.

It was a sweet, almost innocent interlude, especially compared to what came later. Zack and I slept together for the first and last time the same night we organized the SANE chapter at Brandeis. At that age, sex is usually part of one’s family drama, and at college Zack had a hankering for middle-class black and Jewish girls, anyone not like Mom, and I was attracted only to middle-class black and Jewish boys, anyone not like Dad. As a result, sex between me and Zack was too close to incest to give us anything but anxiety. The next morning we somberly agreed not to do it again, and we didn’t, ever. We insisted that it was nothing personal, and the truth is, it wasn’t.

After graduation, Zack went to Ghana with the Peace Corps, and I went to Mississippi and Louisiana for the first time with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That September I returned to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Medical School, where I helped form the SDS chapter, got myself arrested twice by the Cambridge police for disturbing the peace — committing acts of civil disobedience, we called it, blocking entry to the provost’s office and disrupting military recruiters on campus. Making peace by disturbing it. We hadn’t yet brought the war home. But in 1966, as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements blossomed and exfoliated left, right, and center, I dropped out of school six months before finishing and became a full-time political activist. A year later I was living in a commune in Cleveland, organizing and then running a day-care center for working mothers by day and printing pamphlets and broadsides and the occasional phony ID by night. I wasn’t ever a leader; I was a worker, and it was my point of pride. SDS, and before long Weatherman, had become my university, my employer, my church, my family.

THERE’S MUCH ABOUT that period that you don’t need to know, or perhaps much that I don’t care to remember right now. Or can’t remember. I was a different person then. After the Chicago Days of Rage in 1969 and my federal indictment in 1970, I came back to New England and went underground. My name was Dawn Carrington. Carol, who was my lover and roommate, thought of me not as a Marxist and certainly not as a terrorist but as an intellectual, some kind of college-educated, deep-thinking, liberal Democrat was all.

A trusting, utterly honest woman, Carol was small, almost child size, with urchin eyes, wide, round, and dark. Stubborn like a child and willful, she was always exactly who she seemed and claimed to be, my extreme opposite, in a way. To her, I was the distant, gruff, skeptical woman a few years older than she whose presence in her life kept her from falling in love again with the kind of man who would beat her and cheat on her, a man like her daughter Bettina’s father. Though she had been on the streets for years, I was more worldly than she, skeptical and sharp edged. “You make me stronger than I am,” she used to whisper to me, and I would say, “Cut the shit, Carol. You’re as strong as you want to be.” And it was not “Dawn” that she called me, but “Don.” Sometimes she wrote it in little love notes left on the kitchen table for me to find when I left the house early for work, while she slept till Bettina woke her for breakfast. Good morning, Don. I wanted to wake you up when I got in but it was too late and you looked too peaceful asleep. I’m off tonight so let’s go have a cookout at the beach when you get home. XXX

Neither Carol nor I was a bona fide lesbian. We were just sick of men, and lonely. We’d both gotten to the same place, but by rather different and class-specific routes. A mill-town bad girl, Carol was homeless and hooked on speed by fourteen; married, pregnant, and abandoned by sixteen; turning tricks for rent and food money by eighteen. I was a veteran communard by the time we met, someone whose bourgeois sexual conditioning and power structure had been attacked and revamped by months of group critique, group sex, and recreational drugs. Carol and I both, in our own way, just wanted to be alone for a while, and that’s what we provided for each other, a comforting solitude.

For the first year and a half that we were together, I was only marginally a Weatherman, filling coded mail orders for phony IDs and passports, a specialty I’d developed in Cleveland and was able to practice easily in Boston, thanks to my job at the hospital, which provided opportunistic access to the IDs of the dead and dying, and a flirty friendship with the teenaged kid who ran the hospital print shop. I was able to think of myself as a revolutionary, but didn’t have to put myself at high risk.

Then one night, after I’d put Bettina to bed. Carol was working at the bar, and I was as usual flopped on the mattress on the floor of my room in the apartment, a book-cluttered sanctuary from which I had barred both Bettina and Carol. “This is where I work,” I told Carol. “It’s where I read and write and think, and those are things you do alone, in private. It’s like going to the bathroom, taking a shit. You understand?” She understood. I was reading — who knows what, probably Franz Fanon or Régis Debray — and listening to music on my portable stereo, classical, I’m sure, because Carol hated classical. It made her insecure, she said, and I only played it when she was at work, because I couldn’t stand her insecurity sometimes.

I remember at one point, very late, I dimly heard the door buzzer from down the hall, a steady, unbroken, irritated noise made by someone kept waiting too long. This was more than unusual. We never had uninvited nighttime visitors. The police, I thought, the FBI, U.S. marshals — oh, Jesus, the pigs!

I panicked and looked around my room, suddenly seeing it with a cop’s eye. In a shoe box under the bed: aha! a batch of unfinished phony IDs and half a dozen stolen Massachusetts driver’s licenses. And in the dresser drawer: an ounce and a half of marijuana. And over there on the table: a spiral notebook with the names and addresses of four or five people who’ll find themselves being interviewed by the FBI tomorrow. Stupid! Stupid!

There was someone banging on the door now, and a man hollering my name, my real name, “Hannah! Hey, Hannah, open up!”

So it wasn’t the cops. I tiptoed down the hall to the door and listened. Silence. Then a man’s voice, “Shit,” and an audible sigh.

“Who’s there?”

“Hannah? Hey, it’s me, babe. Zack.”

“Who?”

“Zack Procter, for Christ’s sake.”

“Jesus! Shut up. Are you alone?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I’m alone. Lemme in.”

I jerked the door open, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him inside, and shut and locked the door. “Asshole!”

“You’re hard to find, babe, but not that hard.” He talked as he walked ahead of me down the hall to the kitchen, dragging a large army-surplus duffel and carrying a paper bag that he set onto the table. “Dawn Carrington, eh? Where’d you get that one? Sounds like a character from a TV soap opera. Want a beer?” He pulled a six-pack from the bag, opened a bottle for himself, and sat down at the table. He studied me, a mocking smile on his face, took a long, slurping pull from his beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Oh, man, I needed that!”

I watched him from the door, my arms crossed at my waist. Zack was even thinner than he’d been in college, and his face had turned craggy, wearing a new set of vertical lines on either side of his mouth, as if he’d actually done a little suffering in the intervening years. But it was only a fresh mask, I decided; he still looked like a gleefully defiant boy.

“You shouldn’t have called me Hannah,” I said evenly. “I’m glad my roommate isn’t here and her kid’s asleep.”

He apologized in that easy way of a man who knows he’s quickly forgiven, and asked if I’d like to know how he’d found me, which in fact I did, but hadn’t wanted to ask. He explained that he’d bumped into a couple of old Brandeis SDS contacts who’d stayed more or less out of trouble but were still politically active in the Boston area, and they’d put him in touch with New York Weatherman, people who, he said, took him in and really turned his head around on what’s going down here in the States. From them he heard about my having been busted during the Days of Rage pillage and riot three years earlier and that I’d gone underground, was still more or less Weather, and camped out here in New Bedford. He said word had come down from the Weather Bureau that he should come here and crank up a functioning cell with me, generate a little more action than manufacturing phony IDs. “So I went to Detroit for a crash course in bomb-making, which was cool, and caught the Greyhound for New Bedford,” he said. “They told me about the Dawn Carrington bit; it’s not that big a secret, babe, which is why I figured if I called you Dawn you’d freak and think it was the pigs or something, but if I called you Hannah you’d definitely open the door for me. Maybe you oughta change your name again, babe,” he said and drained the bottle. “Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“Yeah, okay, give me one,” I said and sat down across from him, believing about half his story.

Gradually, Zack brought me up to date on his life. “Changes, man, big changes.” After his tour as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, he’d taken our generation’s version of the Grand Tour. Though he didn’t say it, I knew he’d been financed by his trust fund as he drifted through most of the Third World, with extended stops in Tangier, Calcutta, Nepal, and Thailand for drugs and enlightenment, shorter visits to Saigon, Mexico City, and Havana for politics, and had ended back in the States, convinced that a worldwide revolution was inevitable and imminent. For Zack, the introductory music for the Revolution had already been struck up, and the theme song was “Street Fighting Man.”

“The past is prelude, man, and the prelude has passed. We’re in it now!”

Around two in the morning, Carol came home, and I introduced Zack as my cousin. From his extreme height, he splashed kindly attention onto her, and she responded with surprised pleasure and quick affection, and when he asked if he could crash at our apartment until he found a job and a place of his own, she readily agreed, without so much as a sideways glance in my direction.

“Where’s he gonna stay, Carol?” I asked.

“Your workroom,” she said. “It’s only temporary. Right, Zack?”

And to his credit, it was. A few days later, he rented a room in a downtown flophouse and took a part-time job driving a local cab.

It was hard not to like Zack, and especially hard for me not to take some of his voltage and use it to charge my own depleted batteries. Until he showed up, I had been moving slower and slower with every passing week. For the first time in my life, I depended more on habit and routine than on political commitment to get me though my days and nights, and no matter how much comfort I took in Carol’s and Bettina’s familial presence, I was lonely and sad and aimless most of the time. For years, since adolescence, I’d lived with the sense that soon, very soon, something life changing, maybe world changing was going to happen, that a political Second Coming was locked into the calendar, into my personal calendar. That belief had made my life seem exciting to me and purposeful. But in the past year, especially in the last few months, as the Vietnam War chewed up Southeast Asia and ate away at the American economy, and the body count kept rising, and Lyndon Johnson’s America got replaced by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s, and as I found myself growing older, in my thirties now, gray hairs showing up in the tub drain, it had started to seem that all I had to help me explain the content of my present life was the form of my past life.

There is a crucial transition from radical activist to revolutionary, and when you’ve made that crossing, you no longer question why you have no profession, no husband, no children, why you have no contact with your parents, and why you have no true friends — only comrades and people who think they’re your true friend but don’t know your real name. Until Zack showed up, even though I was paying the price of being a revolutionary, I hadn’t really made that crossing yet, and consequently my life had come to feel shriveled and gray, boring and pointless. I had the effects, but no cause.

Zack changed that. Almost immediately, as if we were a couple of pimple-faced kids starting a fan club for a rock star, he and I formed an independent Weather cell together — which was how it was generally done in those days, as there was no central authority or headquarters that kept track of us or passed out membership cards and a handbook. We were expected to work independently and generate and carry out actions against the War Machine ourselves. Within weeks, in the dingy, damp basement of the three-storey wooden tenement building on Phillips Street, while in the apartment upstairs, Carol and I and her daughter, Bettina, still pretended that we were a family, Zack and I were in the basement, two or three nights a week and on weekends, trying to make pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Cousin Zack, as the little family half-jokingly called him, and I hinted to Carol that what we were making was cool and secret, which she assumed was a present for Bettina’s upcoming birthday, a dollhouse, maybe.

The rest of the time I sleepwalked through what passed in those days, the early and mid-1970s, for a normal, if quasi-bohemian, life. Except for the fact, of course, that my parents and no one from my childhood or adolescence or even from most of my adult life so far knew what my name was now or where I was living and working or the name of the young woman I lived with and what we did together on those few occasions when we were alone and in bed. And even the young woman herself did not know the truth, and probably never would, for as soon as Zack and I built and successfully set off our bombs, I intended to disappear from her life. I had in fact already cleaned up my room, packed my clothes and books and a few records, and destroyed everything that might connect me to Carol and incriminate her in any way. She had to be able to say, “I didn’t know anything about it,” and be telling the truth. In thirty seconds, all signs of my ever having lived in that apartment could be erased, and would be.

Otherwise, my life passed for ordinary. If I got caught trying to set off a bomb in the Federal Building in Boston, which was our primary target, or the Shawmut Bank or the eighteenth Precinct Boston Police Station, two of our secondary targets, or if one night, God forbid, down in the basement Zack or I, a little stoned on grass maybe, touched the wrong wires together and blew ourselves and the building to bits — like Diana, Ted, and Terry, when they blew up the townhouse on West Eleventh Street back in ’70—and if as a result of the accident we killed Carol and Bettina and who knows how many others in their sleep, then the neighbors and my co-workers at the hospital and the guys who ran the deli on the corner of Phillips and Bay Streets and the mailman and the guy who read the electric meter and the Greek who collected our rent once a month (in cash, always in cash), they’d all say, I dunno, she seemed like a nice enough girl, quiet, though, kept pretty much to herself, always paid the rent on time, didn’t smile much, didn’t socialize with anybody, except her friend, the other girl, the one with the kid. Never came to any of the office parties, didn’t hang out in the bars, not even the bar where her friend worked. Really kind of an ordinary girl, I guess. The kind of person you don’t actually notice. You could call her a loner. More a loner than a loser. Like whatzizname, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Basically, it was a childish fantasy, wanting to survive your own death so you could overhear the postmortem, read your own obituary, attend your own funeral, and I indulged it often. But at the same time I was aware of something rumbling beneath it, a hidden desire to get caught, to fail in a spectacular, even suicidal way, and it made me very nervous. It was the feeling I sometimes got driving over a high bridge: one quick tug of the steering wheel to the right, and it’s over the edge and straight down. I had to force myself consciously to resist that impulse, or else pretend that I wasn’t on a bridge — no, I was driving across the Plains, somewhere west of Iowa, nothing but flat, solid, grassy ground beneath me stretching from horizon to horizon.

WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING with me in the basement or driving his cab, Zack had taken to traveling to New York City for days at a time. “I’m making some very cool contact down there with our black comrades-in-arms,” he told me. “These brothers, man, they’re the forward force of the revolution, the elite corps. A lot of them have been in the joint, some of the brothers are vets back from ’Nam, man. And they’re pissed. They make Weather look like candy stripers, man.”

I asked him if they were Black Panthers, but he said, “No way, these guys are in deep cover, man. And the kind of action they’re into is almost beyond politics. These brothers are much heavier than the Panthers.” Again, I believed about half of what he told me. But the half I believed lifted my spirits. For years, ever since the Civil Rights movement got taken over by blacks, and the white college kids like me and the white lawyers and clergymen were sent home from the South, leaving us with only the splinters that were left of the antiwar movement — SDS, Weatherman, the Yippies, Diggers, and so on, all of whom were white and middle class — I’d felt somehow cheated out of my true mission, as if in my chosen line of work I’d been deprived of an essential tool, and that tool was black people. Practically from childhood, and especially in high school and college — thanks to my father’s old-time New England hierarchy of values, I’m sure, and his heavy emphasis on noblesse oblige — my heroes had been the nineteenth-century white abolitionists, most of whom were educated, upper-class women from New England. Like me. And my father had nothing for those women but unqualified praise and admiration. “Among all our distinguished ancestors, Hannah, those female abolitionists are the ones I hold in highest regard. The others, the men, all they ever did was make money. Until I came along,” he’d add, laughing, as if he, a world-famous pediatrician who wrote best-selling books on child care, had somehow managed to avoid making money.

I wanted to know more about these mysterious black proletarian warriors in New York City with whom Zack claimed to have initiated an alliance. But beyond offering hints, winks, and vague allusions to plans for bank robberies and high-jacked armored trucks and heavy weaponry, he wouldn’t tell me anything specific or concrete, which disappointed me, and after a while I figured they were largely a blend of rumor and fantasy cooked up by Zack and some of his male friends, the New York — based members of Weather. Radical white-boy wet dreams.

Until the late-winter night that he came banging on our door at two A.M. When I let him in, he collapsed on the floor in the hallway, bleeding through his jacket, and I knew right away it was from a bullet wound. I’d seen enough of them in the emergency room at Peter Bent Brigham not to confuse a bullet wound with any other kind of injury — it was usually the face of the victim that gave it away, scared, in pain, but mainly surprised. Zack had that look.

I helped him to his feet and led him into the kitchen, where he let go of all restraint and like a child terrified by a nightmare — suddenly awake and safe in his own bed — began to sob. Carol and I carefully removed his torn, blood-soaked jean jacket and shirt, and I saw that the bullet had gone cleanly through his shoulder and seemed to have missed bone and arteries.

“It’s not as bad as it looks, but you’ve lost some blood. You’re going to have to get to the hospital,” I told him.

“No! I can’t! You fix it!” he cried, as if I were his mommy.

“Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Carol asked him.

“Jesus, you tell her,” he said to me.

Bettina had come into the kitchen and stood by the door in her pajamas, looking scared and confused. “Carol, take care of Bettina,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Carol obeyed and scooted Bettina towards her bedroom. “Zack’s okay, honey!” I called to the child. “He just had an accident, that’s all!”

I knew enough anatomy and emergency first aid to clean the wound quickly and staunch the bleeding, and when Zack had recovered himself sufficiently to ask for whiskey — a line he probably took from a Western movie — I knew he’d not lost as much blood as I’d feared.

“You going to tell me what happened?” I asked and poured him a teacup of Jim Beam.

Carol had returned to the kitchen, and Zack jerked his head in her direction. “I’ll have to tell you later, man.”

“Carol, please, we need some privacy,” I said.

“This is weird,” she said. She walked back into the living room, flipped on the TV, dropped herself onto the sofa, and sulked.

“Oh, man, she drives me crazy sometimes. Now, Jesus, you. Fucking public enemy number one.”

Carol flipped off the TV, got up, and stuck her head into the kitchen. “I’m goin’ to bed, Don. You comin’?”

I was at the sink scrubbing the bloodstains out of Zack’s jean jacket and denim shirt, and shot her a dirty look. Then felt sorry for it. All she wanted from me was a little straightforward affection mixed with respect — no reason to treat her like a dumb dog. The bedroom door closed behind her, and Zack was already talking.

He’d blown it, he explained, blown it big time, and we were going to have to leave the apartment, get out of New Bedford, out of the country, probably. We not only, as always, had the FBI sniffing after us, but now we were also being hunted down by these black guerillas from New York City, Zack’s very heavy dudes who, he had suddenly discovered, were not Maoist revolutionaries after all, but gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers. “The real thing, man!”

He’d tried to draw a line, he said, on dealing drugs, specifically heroin, and in Newark, on the way to make a buy, they’d had an argument, a misunderstanding, actually, based not on money, he assured me, but principles. Although they had thought it was about money, which is why the misunderstanding had gotten out of hand, so to speak, and they’d suddenly turned on him. He was lucky to have gotten out of there and back here alive, he said. And now these guys were more dangerous to us than the FBI was, because he knew stuff about them that no one else did, and they knew our names and where we lived, the city of New Bedford, at least, but not the actual street address, he assured me. So we had a little time, maybe a day or two, before they came knocking on the door.

“What the hell do you mean us and we? What the hell did you tell them about me?”

“Nothing, man, just your name in passing, you know, on account of the Weather thing. I mean, you think you’re only a peon in the Movement, but you’re well known, man, a poster girl. You were sort of like my bona fides, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Who are these people anyhow? I mean, really? I thought they were SLA or Black Liberation Army. Borderline, but more or less legitimate.”

“Well, yeah, I guess at first I did, too. But they sort of work both sides of the street, play one side off against the other. Look, Hannah, I got confused…”

“Dawn.”

“Yeah, sorry. Dawn. But you know what I mean. Christ, half of Weather and half the Panthers are FBI informers. Half the Klan is on the federal payroll. The Muslims killed Malcolm, and J. Edgar Hoover probably had Martin killed, and who the hell knows who killed Bobby and JFK? Probably LBJ. The point is, there’s nobody left who isn’t wearing some kind of disguise. So who do you trust?”

“You trusted these New York guys, obviously. And I guess they trusted you enough to let you know too much.”

“Mistake. Big mistake. On both parts, mine and theirs.”

In a strange way, I felt almost relieved that everything seemed to be coming undone, and it was difficult not to show it. “Do they know me as Hannah Musgrave or Dawn Carrington? Or both?”

“Oh, no, just Hannah Musgrave, your poster-girl name,” he said, but I knew he was lying.

“What about Carol?”

“She’s cool. I never mentioned her. No reason to.”

That much I did believe. To Zack, Carol and Bettina were like my houseplants. “Where will you go?”

“Way I figure, it’s gotta be back to Ghana, man. Tomorrow. I’ve got enough bread to get me there, and I know how to get by okay in Accra. It’s a very cool city, man, especially for Americans.”

“Lucky you. But where am I supposed to go? Tell me that. I’ve got less than a month’s pay in my checking account, and then I’m broke. And I can’t just walk out on Carol, not without at least leaving her enough for the goddamn rent. This is fucking ridiculous, Zack!”

“No, no, it’s not. You should come with me to Ghana. I feel guilty for this, man. Really. I’ll pay your way; it’s the least I can do. I’ll make a stop at the friendly family trust officer in Boston in the morning, and we can be taking off from Logan on Air Ghana by lunchtime.” He said he knew people in Accra who would find me a job. As it happens, people with my skills, hospital skills, Harvard Medical School skills, were highly employable in Ghana.

“It’s a chance to start over.” He passed his gaze over the apartment. “This, all of it, everything you’ve got here, this slummy apartment, the little girlfriend, the job at the hospital, even the bomb-making in the basement — it may be your way of stopping the War Machine, it may even be your way of starting the Revolution. But it’s bullshit.”

“You didn’t think so yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, yesterday I had more time to play with, time for finding out what’s bullshit and what isn’t, and yesterday I hadn’t been shot yet by a crazed, paranoid black guy who couldn’t tell the difference between liberating the people and selling them drugs. I’m outa here in the morning, and with this arm and the painkillers that you’re gonna score for me at Peter Bent Brigham, I’ll need someone to drive for me. We can commandeer my cab and drop it off at the airport, and twelve hours later we’ll be kicking back in Accra.”

I stood and walked to the window and looked down at the wet, gray street and the triple-decker houses that lined it on both sides. It was five-thirty in the morning. The sky was pinking in the east, out beyond the bay — in the direction of Africa. It must be midday in Africa, I thought. The street below seemed cold and colorless, as if it existed only in grainy black and white, and the radiators hissed and banged as the coal-burning furnace in the basement kicked in, and the darkened hallway smelled of corned beef and cabbage and moldy, wet, threadbare carpeting on the stairs. An empty municipal bus began its roundup of the first-shift mill workers. I could see my car down on the street where I’d parked it, the beat-up old Karmann-Ghia I’d bought in Cleveland. I’ll leave the car keys on the kitchen table for Carol, I decided. And a check for what’s left in my account.

“Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Providing we go now, this minute. If I wait around, I’ll change my mind.”

“Cool. What about Carol and the kid? Doncha wanna wake them up?”

“No. Let’s go now. I’m basically all packed anyhow. I’ve been packed for months. Half expecting this, I guess.”

“No shit? Don’t you want to say goodbye?”

“I hate goodbyes.”

“Man, you are cold.”

“Who is? Hannah or Dawn? No, you’re right,” I said and started towards my workroom to get the duffel with my belongings. “I am cold. Both Hannah and Dawn, we’re like icebergs.”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, you’ll see, man. Africa’s gonna melt you.”

AND SO, LIKE water following gravity, my course and rate of descent more or less determined by the lay of the land and by whomever or whatever happened to lie in my path or by my side, I came to Ghana, a place that on my mental map of Africa was located in the region marked “unexplored.” When you let go of your life like that, unexpected turns occur, and before long your life’s path has become a snarl of zigs and zags. It’s how one comes up with what’s called “an interesting life,” I guess. And my brief stay in Ghana with Zack was merely that, another zig, another zag — the makings of an interesting life.

It was more complicated than that, of course, but I didn’t realize it at the time it was happening. One never does. I was, in a sense, passively following Zack, who knew how to disappear safely and, as it turned out, comfortably in far-off Ghana. But he wasn’t leading me, and he certainly wasn’t dominating me. He was a facilitator, one of any number of people who could just as easily have played the role as he. Or the role of comrade-in-arms. Or lover. Back then they were all essentially the same to me.

The truth is, I used Zack. Just as I had used Carol. I wasn’t as passive as I seemed. Almost without knowing it I’d reached a point, long before I ran out on Carol and fled New Bedford, where I wanted desperately for my old life to be over and a new one to begin. But I had no idea how to go about it — without turning myself in to the FBI. And there was no way I’d do that.

It wasn’t the likelihood of spending a year or three or even more behind bars that kept me from turning myself in — I might actually have welcomed jail time, a few years to reflect and pay mild penance; a time to organize my warring memories into a coherent narrative. It would have meant publicly voiding my previous life, however, canceling it out, erasing all its meaning, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. My life so far had cost me and everyone who ever loved me and everyone whom I had loved too much, way too much, for me simply to say, “I’m sorry, Daddy, and I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, everybody. I have for more than ten years been making a terrible mistake. And, oh yes, everyone who was led to believe that I was someone other than I am, my apologies to you, too. It was all a dumb mistake, Carol. All of it.”

And besides, I had no better alternative life to propose. No meaningful future for me alone or me with anyone else. So it was jail time, and public confession and shame, or get the hell out of Dodge, lady. Disappear. I was like a late-stage drug addict, unable to admit her addiction because of the damage it has done. She goes off the map altogether and no longer associates even with other addicts. I grabbed my duffel bag and my phony passport and followed Zack to Ghana. That way I could keep my mask, and no one could see it for what it was. Except Zack.

WITHIN A WEEK of our arrival in Accra, we had rented from an ex — Peace Corps friend of Zack’s a small, two-bedroom, second-storey furnished apartment in a pink stuccoed building downtown, with a balcony overlooking the bustling street below and a view of the vast, open-air Makola market. Another week, and I had a job. Zack seemed to have friends everywhere in this city, at all levels of society — expatriate Englishmen, Ghanaian nationals, African-Americans in search of their roots, American businessmen, and ex — Peace Corps volunteers gone native — and he managed through a pal at the U.S. embassy to get me hired as a medical technician for a New York University blood lab that was using monkeys and bonobos for research on hepatitis.

My job was essentially a clerical one. I worked with the blood, not the monkeys, cataloguing and shipping plasma back to the States. I barely saw our simian donors and never handled them. Two years of Harvard Medical School under the name of Hannah Musgrave and my job, later, in the plasma lab at Peter Bent Brigham as Dawn Carrington had qualified me nicely for a similar, difficult-to-fill position here. In the days before computer checks, nobody checked. You could take off, put on, and mix and match identities like sportswear. You got caught only if you couldn’t do what you said you could. Or if someone informed on you.

Once I had my job and living quarters settled, it wasn’t long before Zack and I began to fall away from each other. Mostly, it was my doing. Back in the States — starting at Brandeis and finally in New Bedford — I’d been willing to dismiss his egoism and grandiosity as the typically elaborate feathers and coxcomb worn by just about every man I’d ever known in the Movement, without lowering my estimation of his political commitment and integrity. But that wasn’t possible here in Ghana. For ten long years, in the vain attempt to create a revolution, I and hundreds of women like me — and, yes, men like Zack — had literally risked our lives and sacrificed our families and friends and given up on the comfortable futures we’d been promised. It was who we were back then and now and who we’d be for the rest of our lives. We believed it. We insisted on it. We needed it. But for Zack, once we’d landed in Accra, all that turned into merely a stage in his life, a phase he claimed to have passed beyond.

I wouldn’t have been offended by his having designated those years a phase instead of a life, implying that it had been merely a phase for me, too, and I might even have been grateful for it. It might have provided the start of a way out for me. But in Africa, Zack quickly set himself up as a “businessman” of a particularly embarrassing and loathsome type. At least to me it was, especially then. And that, in turn, flipped him into a defensive posture, which only made things between us worse. For a long time, I said nothing to him about it. But he knew. My presence silhouetted his new life sharply against the brightly lit background of the old, and it made him angry at me, as if I were in charge of lighting.

He’d become a middleman. The bottom-feeder of capitalism. The enemy, as far as I was concerned. The Ghanaian economy had collapsed in the middle 1970s, and the inflation rate of the cedi, the local currency, was doubling by the month against the U.S. dollar. Small farmers and merchants were slipping so deeply into debt it would take generations for them to climb out again. These were Zack’s suppliers. He spoke Fanti and a little Twi from his Peace Corps days, and as soon as his shoulder had healed well enough for him to drive, he bought with the dregs of his trust fund a little red Suzuki motorcycle and roared off to back-country cocoa-farming villages and along dusty country lanes from one small market town and city to another and prowled up and down the back streets and alleys of Accra, buying up from desperately frightened debtors their last hedge against financial ruin — ancient Ghanaian artworks and religious artifacts, principally Ashanti gold. He bought the precious objects with American dollars at flea-market prices, then sold them the next day at a colossal markup to the agents and dealers for rich American and European collectors and galleries, who waited for him in the air-conditioned lobby of the Golden Tulip Hotel out by the airport. It was, as he said, “sweet.”

He was thriving, and within a month he had bought himself a Mazda van to carry his goods. I remember sitting with him one afternoon at a beach bar called Last Stop that he liked and had made his informal headquarters. It was a Sunday and very hot, and he had talked me into meeting him there “For the breeze,” he said, “if nothing else. Who knows, you might actually enjoy yourself for a change and meet somebody you’d like and maybe even fall for.” For some reason, Zack was eager to see me involved with a man. “Or a woman,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to me, so long as you get your own pad if you decide to shack up with him. Or her. Two’s company, three’s a drag.”

We sat out on the terrace and drank the local Gulder beer and watched a gang of small boys and girls chase the surf while their tall, slender mothers stood knee-deep in the water with their skirts pulled up and talked. The breeze off the sea was aromatic and cooling. I kicked off my sandals and showed my face to the sun and admitted to Zack that I was glad I’d come out there.

“Yeah. Too bad there’s nobody interesting here today. Probably still too early.” He’d completed a successful sale that morning of a half-dozen rare, elaborately carved chieftain’s stools to a midtown Manhattan gallery and was more pleased with himself than usual. “Actually, this gig’s going so good I’m thinking of setting up a gallery of my own here, with maybe a branch in the States in a year or two. Cut out the middleman, you know?”

“You’re the middleman,” I said. “Jesus, Zack, do you have any idea how you sound?”

“Look, there’s no more trust fund, babe,” he said, spreading his empty hands. “Same with you, y’know. No more checks from Mommy and Daddy waiting at the American Express office. This is Africa, babe, not Ameri-ka. So lighten up, will you?”

“I never took money from my parents, you know that. And don’t call me ‘babe.’”

He scowled. “You put me down all the time, but look at you, for Christ’s sake. Taking U.S. dollars from a university lab that’s financed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company that’s trying to patent and sell a drug that cures a disease that’s been inflicted on the liver of some poor African-American woman who’s addicted to another drug that’s imported by the CIA from Southeast Asia. Terrific. I suppose that’s better than being an upscale African street peddler like me? Because that’s all I am, you know. A street peddler. I mean, c’mon, Hannah, which of us is really working for the enemy?”

“Dawn.”

“Hannah. We’re not underground anymore.”

“Dawn Carrington is who I am here. So I’m still underground.”

“Yeah. Whatever,” he said and flagged the waitress impatiently.

“I used to think I was attracted to dangerous men,” I said. “Dangerous to me, I mean. And I don’t necessarily mean sexually attracted.”

“Fuck you. Find yourself a dangerous man then.” He waved his hand around the bar like an impresario or a pimp. “A little while and the place’ll be full of ’em. The whole fucking city’s full of ’em.” And it was. In the mid-1970s, Accra, and this bar in particular, along with several others like the Wato and Afrikiko’s, were catch basins for First-World drop-ins: anti — Vietnam War draft dodgers, black U.S. military personnel gone AWOL, and ex — Peace Corps volunteers, and probably more than a few of them were CIA agents collecting information on the rest of us and sending it back to Washington. They were Zack’s and my tribesmen and — women, although only a few were women. West Africa was peppered with Americans like us in those years.

“You used to think I was dangerous,” Zack said. “And now you don’t. Is that what you’re saying?” He grinned in a manic way, showing me his perfect teeth. With his gingery hair worn in a ponytail he looked more like a Colorado ski bum than a fugitive would-be terrorist. I didn’t know what I looked like anymore. Actually, I’ve never known. I used to tell people that on the FBI wanted poster I looked like a Mexican hooker, but I wasn’t really sure and in fact was only asking for an opinion.

“I never thought you were dangerous, Zack.”

“Man, you are cold. Just like with Carol, man.” He shivered and abruptly stood. “I’m outa here. I’ll see you back at the apartment later, maybe,” he said and strode off.

I’d hurt his feelings and didn’t care, and he knew it. And he was right: from his point of view, Africa hadn’t warmed me up. Though we shared the apartment, we kept to our separate bedrooms and were rarely there at the same time anyhow, never ate together, and didn’t socialize with the same people. Actually, I socialized with no one, and he hung out with everyone. I liked the city of Accra, though. The huge, bustling city sprawled inland from the sea for miles and was such a glorious and inviting contrast to the gray, old mill towns I’d left behind — those recently abandoned, rust-belt cities like New Bedford and before that Cleveland, which had borne me down almost without my knowing it — that I found Accra irresistible. It was hot, equatorially hot, but thanks to the steady breeze off the Atlantic not uncomfortably humid, and as long as you kept out of the direct sun, it felt ideal — the climate to which human anatomy, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, was perfectly adapted. And I liked the Ghanaian people. They were excitable, loud, confident, and in your face, but in an engaging and good-humored way, waving hands, gesticulating, bending, bowing, and spinning as they talked, haggled, hassled, gossiped, and sang. Like the people, the city itself competed tirelessly for your attention and ear with its unbroken din of car horns and buses and trucks without mufflers, radios blasting from windows and open storefronts and hawkers hawking, babies crying, jackhammers pounding. Everywhere you looked Accra worked to catch and hold your eye with bright, busy color — the tie-dyed and beautifully woven wraps on the women and their elaborately coiled, braided, and beaded hairstyles, glossy black, hatlike structures as precarious as wedding cakes; the Chinese bicycles repainted in gaudy colors; the jammed minivans called tro-tros, the dazzling heaps of fruits and vegetables in the Makola market; and the barbershop signs with crude, hand-painted portraits of black men wearing spiffy Detroit-style haircuts called “747 Wave” and “Barracuda Zip” and “Concord Up.” I liked the street food, especially keli-weli—savory little chunks of plantain fried in palm oil and flavored with ginger and hot peppers and served on a banana leaf — and even grew fond of the culinary leftovers from colonial days, a cup of hot Milo in the morning and for lunch at the office a thick sandwich of Laughing Cow cheese and the spongy white bread that Zack, just to get on my nerves, liked to call bimbo bread.

Never much of a cook, evenings I dined alone and mostly in little hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the neighborhood, where I favored the chopped-spinach dish called kontumbre and fish and rice jollof and the thick, darkly spiced stews. And I liked smoking the very strong Ghanaian marijuana. It was called bingo and sometimes wee, sold by a dealer named Bush Doctor, who hung out by the pool at the Golden Tulip. Zack bought it by the pound and, whenever he motored off to the backcountry on one of his art-buying jaunts, he carried enough with him to fill a tobacco pouch, leaving the rest carelessly behind at the apartment in a quart jam jar. Those nights when he was away, I’d dip into his jar, roll myself a pencil-size joint with tissue paper stripped off the foil liner of a cigarette pack, get sky high in a single swoop, and sit out on the balcony, hidden in darkness, and watch the thronged street below as if ensconced in a private box at Shakespeare’s Globe in seventeenth-century London.

But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models — those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality — and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.

Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely he wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.

It seemed to me, however, that at bottom nothing had changed. Despite the beauty and energy of Accra, when I looked beyond its exoticism to the day-to-day reality of people’s lives, I saw that they were made poor and weak so that I could be rich and powerful; they watched their babies shrivel in their arms so that my children, should I ever want to bear them, could be inoculated against the plagues and run in the sun and someday go to Harvard. I could no more alter my relationship with the Africans who surrounded me in Ghana than I’d been able in the United States to alter my relationship with the Americans whose African ancestors had been enslaved and shipped to the New World. In the United States I’d been stuck with being white; in Africa I was stuck with being American.

And while this was not a problem for Zack, for me there was no morally acceptable response to it, other than guilt. Which, to be honest, was not a problem for me, even though it alienated me even farther from Zack. Over the years, I had learned to live with guilt and had even come to embrace it, for I was the strictly engineered product of an old New England puritan line, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with my parents. With my father in particular, who believed in his bones that one’s consciousness of guilt led straight to good works and awareness of God. One’s awareness of guilt was a barometer of one’s virtue. Absence of that awareness led straight to sinful self-indulgence and damnation. And unlike feelings of mere regret or remorse, which mainly work to separate people from one another, feelings of guilt, thanks to my father’s teachings, had always felt warmly humanizing to me. Even when I was a child, it was guilt that had let me join the species. And there in Africa, for the first time in years, those feelings emerged in a pure, de-racialized stream. It was all about class, I decided, not race, and I dove into the stream and swam as if born to it.

I knew I seemed cold to Zack. I couldn’t help it. His presence numbed me, as if by anesthesia. Whenever he bragged about how much money he made buying and selling Ghanaian art, I merely sniffed and turned away, and when in response he swarmed all over me with explanations and rationalizations, I could not bother to answer. I was a bitch.

Finally, there came the night that we both had been secretly waiting for. He’d shown up unexpectedly at the apartment where, having thought he was off to buy art, I’d gotten stoned and was sitting out on the balcony, blissfully watching the show below. I had seen him drive up in his van, but felt too heavy and thick bodied to move or put out the joint. He went straight to his bedroom, and changed his shirt for a fresh one. As he started back out he caught a whiff of the sticky sweet smoke from the balcony and followed his nose.

“Where’d you get the wee? Any good?” he asked, laughing and ruffling my hair affectionately. He plucked the joint from my fingers and took a hard hit. “You been copping my shit?”

“Once in a while.”

He laughed and handed back the joint. “Just don’t leave me an empty jar, that’s all. You oughta get outa this pad more. You’re gonna dry up and turn into one of those gray, sour-faced old ladies sitting on their verandas. Maybe you oughta get laid, for chrissakes,” he said. “C’mon, I’m heading over to Afrikiko’s. Let’s get juiced, do some dancing, and I’ll introduce you to some people.”

Afrikiko’s was a small, dim bar on Liberation Avenue where American expats sometimes hung out and traded job and housing information and bought and sold drugs, so I knew what kind of people he meant. His friends. Deadbeat dads on the lam, Black Panthers under indictment in the States, dope-smoking white Rastafarians who’d spent too much time in Jamaica. But he was right, I needed to get laid.

The place was crowded with men, most of whom were non-Africans, and a small number of women, most of whom were Africans. We grabbed a table in a corner, and Zack ordered us each a Gulder. When the waitress brought the beers and we’d taken a sip and had visually cruised the bar and hadn’t seen anyone Zack recognized or anyone I was in the slightest curious about or eager to meet, I suddenly, without forethought, blurted out, “I’m splitting, Zack.”

“We just got here. You are weird.”

“No, I mean splitting from Accra. From Ghana.”

He studied me for a moment. “Yeah, well, I kind of figured that’s what was up. You’re ready to cop a plea and go home to Mommy and Daddy. You’ve had that look for weeks, man. I can read it.” He lighted a cigarette, held up his empty Gulder bottle, and waved again for another. “Yeah, no shit. You and Mark Rudd and all the other wunderkinds. You guys bob up at press conferences with famous liberal lawyers at your side after making secret deals with federal prosecutors because you’re worried about turning thirty.”

“I don’t mean that, going aboveground. Besides, I’m already thirty-four. No, Zack, I’m just splitting. Splitting off from you. Going it alone from here on.”

“That’s not your style. There are followers and there are leaders,” he pronounced. “You, you’re a follower, believe me. Bernardine, Kathy, Tom, Bill Ayers, even Mark — I mean, they’re leaders, man. But you, you are not,” he said. “Me neither, if you want to know the truth,” he added and shrugged, as if he didn’t much care.

“Maybe I don’t have to be a follower or a leader. Maybe I can be something else.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know. A loner. Myself.”

“A loner!” He snickered. “Yourself. Yeah, well, good luck. It’s a little late for that, I think.” The waitress finally brought him his Gulder, and he unfolded his long legs and stood as if to say goodbye. He paid her, picked up his drink, and crossed the room to another table, where a pair of white kids with matted brown dreadlocks were playing dominoes. Turning his back to me, he drank and smoked and from his great height watched them play.

I started to get up from the table, when suddenly Zack turned and strode over to me, his face red and fisted. “Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Fine.”

I sat, and he looked evenly past my mask and into my eyes, as if about to confess that all these years he’d been in love with me. Or all these years he’d hated me. Instead, he said, “You’re here on false premises, Hannah, you know that?”

“No shit.”

“No, I mean it. I’m gonna tell you something you won’t like hearing, but if you’re set on leaving you probably oughta know it.”

“So tell.”

“You think you had to get out of New Bedford and leave the country, that you had no choice. You think it’s because you got caught in a stupid crossfire between me and some very heavy black dudes, et cetera, and it was the only way for you to protect Carol and her kid.”

“Yes. Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not true.”

“It’s not true? What’s not?”

“No. The truth is, I shot myself.”

“You what?”

“I shot myself. By accident. Did it with my own fucking gun, too, trying to stash it under the seat of my cab.”

I looked away and pretended I hadn’t heard him.

“There never was any black dudes or SLA. Or whatever, Black Liberation Army. I mean, there was, there is, but I never knew them, not personally. I only heard about them from some Weather guys in New York.”

“Why, Zack? Why’d you blame black men?”

“I don’t know. Shit, I guess I thought it would impress you if you believed I was tight with them. I bought the gun in New Hampshire, actually, at one of those roadside guns ’n’ ammo shops, and carried it around in the cab in case some jerk tried to rob me. Then I figured I better learn how to use it, so I drove out to some woods on the other side of Plymouth one night to practice with it. I shot off a bunch of bullets, then got worried about the noise and local cops, so I reloaded the damn thing and when I leaned down and tried to shove it back under the seat of my cab, I shot myself. I guess I forgot to put the safety on.” He shook his head at the memory. “Pathetic.”

“And you’re telling me this now? Jesus, why now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “In case maybe you want to go home, I guess. You know, to Carol. To the States. And the truth is, the longer you’re here, the more guilty I feel about it. So in a way I’m glad you’re splitting. I mean, it pisses me off, but it gives me a chance to sort of clear my conscience.”

“But why did you come to me? When you shot yourself, I mean. Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?”

“I’d bought the gun with a phony ID,” he said and smiled wanly. “I was underground, babe. Remember? Like you.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I wasn’t angry, that’s certain. After all, he’d given me exactly what I’d wanted and hadn’t dared to ask for. He’d provided me with an excuse to abandon Carol, her child, the New Bedford apartment, my crummy job at Peter Bent Brigham, my sordid and lowly role in the Weather Underground — everything that had become an intolerable burden to me. And along with the excuse, he’d handed me a plane ticket to Africa, a place located as far from my burden as I could have imagined. Here in Africa, I’d enjoyed his protection and advice, and he’d laid his old Africa hand onto my shoulder just heavily enough to make me capable in short order of shrugging it off. And now the dear foolish man was telling me that I was free to abandon him, too. Go on, babe, split. You want to be a loner now? Go ahead, do it. Do it without guilt, without embarrassment, without regret. You’re free, babe, free as a fucking bird.

I should have said, Thank you, Zack, a thousand times I thank you. Instead, I said nothing. I simply got up from the table, turned towards the door, and left my old life and entered a new life, as if walking from one empty room into another.