The Darling

Chapter II

OR ENTERING A DARKENING SKY. And I was following the sun into it, flying like a petrel out along the westering Atlantic coast of Ghana towards Liberia, a tiny country wedged between Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, a place I knew not at all, where I had not a single friend or acquaintance to turn to, no old Africa hand to aid and abet me in my flight. I had little more than a man’s name, Woodrow Sundiata. And all I knew of him was that he was an assistant minister of public health in the government of President William Tolbert and had studied business administration in the U.S. and was said to welcome the arrival in Liberia of English-speaking foreigners with medical training of any sort.

Some weeks earlier, as so often happened, I’d found myself alone one afternoon in the NYU lab office in Accra with no work to do. Bored and restless, I’d opened a file folder marked “Confidential” and had cruised casually through a lengthy correspondence on official stationery between a Mr. Sundiata and my Ghanaian employers, along with copies of letters exchanged between Mr. Sundiata and my employers’ American bosses at NYU, including memoranda and cables to and from both employers and bosses concerning the good use to which the directors of the NYU blood plasma lab might put this mid-level West African official who was evidently eager to provide exclusive access to Liberia’s large population of chimpanzees, both in the wild and captive, in exchange for American-trained medical personnel and supplies.

Such an arrangement could eventually present us with a unique opportunity to obtain at relatively low cost a significant number of animal subjects without violating ITTA regulations and without alerting our competitors to this abundant new source of animal plasma. As we understand the situation in Monrovia, we are to provide Mr. Sundiata’s ministry with a few nurses and/or laboratory assistants on renewable six-month contracts, with housing costs and salary to be covered by our New York office, and a single shipment of sterile syringes and miscellaneous antibiotics (quantities yet to be determined). In return, the subject animals are thereafter to be placed effectively under our control. Please explore the matter further at your first opportunity. And confirm the above assumptions re: our anticipated costs …

The night I walked out on Zack at Afrikiko’s and abandoned the reality we’d more or less shared since college, I went straight back to the apartment, sat down, and, before I could change my mind, composed a letter to the Liberian assistant minister of public health, asking for a job interview, and the next morning posted it to him. Within a week, I had my answer.

ALL THESE MANY YEARS later, my first meeting with Woodrow still remains vividly clear to me. A ceiling fan turned slowly, stirring the humid air, but not cooling it. My body had been wet with sweat since the moment the plane from Accra landed at Robertsfield Airport. I entered the shabby, disordered office, self-conscious and anxious about my appearance. Compared with the heat and the nearly suffocating humidity here in Monrovia, the weather in Accra had been positively balmy. My hair was frizzled, and my white cotton blouse was wrinkled, and I knew that I had huge, gray sweat circles under my arms. Rivulets trickled between my breasts and down my sides. I felt fat, fleshy.

Seated at his desk, he flattened his hands and splayed his long, slender fingers and slowly, deliberately lifted his face to meet mine. Woodrow Sundiata, Assistant Minister of Public Health of the Republic of Liberia. He was a small, tight-bodied man with a large, nearly bald head, his complexion as dark as a bassoon. He was not a conventionally handsome man, but to me then and there he was sexy. His eyes were light brown, the color of tea with milk. I guessed his age — accurately, it would later turn out — to be forty. He was wearing a pale blue, short-sleeved guayabera shirt, starched and pressed, a heavy gold Rolex on his left wrist, and on his right a bracelet of tiny, white cowrie shells strung on braided leather. No wedding band, I observed.

That first day I saw him as more like an old-time samurai than a modern, post-colonial, West African bureaucrat. It was a first impression that would hold up for several months. There was a visible tension between what I took to be his passionate nature and the means by which he kept it in check — he stood up in a single motion, as if caught by surprise, although Miss Dawn Carrington had been twice announced to him, by phone from his outer office and then by his personal assistant, a young, very tall, very black man named Mr. Satterthwaite, who had showed me in and quickly left us alone.

Woodrow Sundiata stepped back against the latticed window, clasped his hands together high on his chest, and made a little bow. He moved with the confidence of a man used to being in charge of situations and people, I thought, a familiar type to me. He looked directly into my eyes, nowhere else, as if everything he needed to know about me was revealed there. Then, abruptly, he looked away, gestured towards a chair next to his desk, and said, “Please sit down, Miss Musgrave.”

Musgrave! I was suddenly dizzy and sat down quickly, more to keep my bearings than to be polite. I stammered, “I’m sorry, but … but why… why do you say that name?” I was sweating even more heavily than before and had trouble breathing, as much from alarm as the heat and the wet weight of the air, which seemed to have been doubled by his words. Miss Musgrave! It had been more than five years since a stranger called me by my father’s last name. Even underground no one called me by that name, except for Zack, and then only when trying to antagonize me. Was I no longer underground then? Was my secret out? Just like that?

Relief and fear washed over me in successive waves, each nullifying the other. I felt neither emotion on its own, although I knew as a fact, as data, almost, that I was both immensely relieved and very frightened. No, what I felt was simple, mind-numbing shock. Shock at finding myself suddenly no longer underground, for that is what his calling me Miss Musgrave meant. It was now a fact. I said to myself simply, This is amazing!

“Yes, well, the American embassy in Monrovia, as you no doubt know, keeps track of American citizens residing in West Africa,” he said and slipped me a weary, knowing smile and a conspiratorial sigh. “We help them; they help us. Though we, of course, have somewhat different priorities and concerns than do they.” His accent was almost Caribbean, British with a musical, lower-register lilt. “Would you prefer that I call you Miss Carrington then?” he asked.

“No. No, that’s fine. I’m a little … confused, however. And surprised, I guess. That is, that you … that I was allowed to enter the country, I mean.”

“I imagine so. But all appearances to the contrary, Miss Carrington, and in spite of our ancient and mostly honorable, historical connections to the United States, we don’t work for them. And from the file we received, it didn’t seem that your Miss Hannah Musgrave was of any particular danger to the Republic of Liberia,” he said. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

He laughed. He had a pencil-thick gap in the middle of his upper front teeth which was strikingly attractive to me. “Oh, either one. Are you a danger to us? Are you Hannah Musgrave?”

“No,” I said. “To the first question. And yes to the second.” It was true, I posed no danger to anyone. Not anymore, not after today. Except possibly to myself. And in spite of Dawn Carrington’s name in my passport and on my Ghanaian exit visa and my Liberian entry visa, I was indeed Hannah Musgrave. And loved hearing this man say it. My name. And wanted him to say it again. Miss Musgrave. Hannah Musgrave.

We sat opposite each other in silence for a long moment, while I tried letting the name cover my body and my mind. But it wouldn’t fit over or around me. It pinched and pulled and seemed too small, as if cut for some other woman’s body and mind, a woman who was practically a stranger to me. I was no longer the Hannah Musgrave who’d gone underground in 1970, who’d disappeared from the world of parents, town, college, and university, where she once upon a time had played a central role, or at least a known and recognized role. And I could no more return now to being the old, abandoned Hannah than I could leap forward in time and become the new, nicely recovered Hannah, thank you very much, who tells this story these many years later. I might have been once again dressing myself in Hannah Musgrave’s name, but the woman who was born wearing it was gone, apparently forever, as if she were the unexpected victim of a rare, fast-acting, fatal disease. But if I wasn’t that woman anymore — and was no longer Dawn Carrington — then who was I? Desperately, that afternoon in Assistant Minister Sundiata’s office, I struggled to become the thirty-four-year-old Miss Musgrave freshly arrived in the city of Monrovia from Accra in search of a job, any kind of job, Mr. Sundiata, and housing, any sort of shelter will do, and intelligent company, for I am utterly alone, cut off from all the communities to which I previously belonged. Oh, and yes, thank you, I would be pleased to have dinner with you this evening, sir.

“My assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, will drive you to your quarters, so you can get settled. Perhaps you’d like to take a short nap and freshen up a bit? I’ll come ’round at seven o’clock, if that’s not too early.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said. “But… I’m a little confused. Look, I’m sorry to ask, but I have to. How can I be sure that you’re not…?” I paused. “All right, let me say it. How can I know that you won’t turn me over to the American embassy?”

He smiled. “To tell you the truth, you can’t. But really, Miss Musgrave — may I call you Hannah?”

“Yes! Please do.”

“It’s a lovely name,” he said and flashed his gap-toothed smile. “Yes, Hannah, you wouldn’t do us much good wasting away in an American jail, now would you?” He stood and took my hand in his and examined it, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss it. “You’re not married, are you.” It was more a statement than a question.

“No.”

“And you’ve come here alone. That’s quite something. What about your American companion in Accra?” He glanced back at an open file folder on his desk. “Zachary Procter, he calls himself. Not his real name, of course.”

“No, it’s his real name. He’s still in Accra. In fact, I don’t think Zack even knows where I am. I don’t think he knows I’ve left Ghana. I… I’m quite alone.”

“That’s good. Good for him, I mean. Because I don’t see how we could be as … lenient with Mr. Procter as we are being with you. But let me assure you, Hannah,” he said, and now he did indeed kiss my hand, a gesture that was both comical and elegant, making me smile. “You are no longer alone.”

WOODROW’S OFFICE in the Ministry of Health was located off Tubman Boulevard at the southeastern edge of Monrovia in a freshly built, three-storey, cinder-block cube attached to the John F. Kennedy Medical Center. His assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, drove the ministry Mercedes, a ten-year-old, velvety, dark gray sedan in immaculate condition, and I sat in air-conditioned ease in the back and gazed at the city as we passed through it. Earlier, coming in from Robertsfield Airport some fifty-five kilometers south of the city — packed into an antique Plymouth sedan with six other passengers picked up along the way until I was finally dropped off at the ministry — I had been so distracted by the heat and so anxious and tentative about my reasons for being in this place, this city, this country, this continent, that I barely noticed where I was, and if the driver or one of my sweating, placid, half-asleep fellow passengers had told me that I’d been returned to Accra by mistake or had been magically transported to New Bedford, Massachusetts, I might have believed him. That’s how disoriented I’d become since leaving Accra. But as I saw clearly now, I certainly was not in New England. And Monrovia was not Accra, and Ghana was not Liberia.

In those days, Monrovia, the capital, was still lovely, if somewhat bizarre looking, at least to my innocent eyes. Innocent, that is, of Liberia’s odd history. The principal buildings of government — the copper-domed capitol; the bright, white palace of the president; the supreme court building; the treasury building; and so on; each pointed out with obvious pride by Satterthwaite as we drove into the city from the ministry offices on the outskirts — were miniaturized versions of the same structures in Washington, D.C., as if down-at-the-heels country cousins were putting on big-city airs. Bisecting the center of the city, its spine, was Broad Street, its two lanes divided by a grassy, parklike island and bordered on both sides by towering trees. Here, along the meandering ridge of Cape Mesurado — the rumpled, densely populated, yet still green peninsula where the Mesurado River meets the sea — white wood-frame houses with wide verandahs and floor-to-ceiling shuttered windows sprawled behind neatly hedged and trimmed front yards garnished with meticulously tended flower beds. Scarlet, yellow, and pink bougainvilleas sloshed against porch steps and over walkways, and lawn sprinklers carved glittery pale arcs in the sunlight. The wide main streets and sidewalks were free of trash and cleanly swept, and at nearly every crossing a steepled Protestant church kept the faith. Unpaved side streets and rutted alleys cut downhill from the ridge into brush-filled gullies, where, as we passed, I glimpsed clusters of one-room shanties, small shops, and narrow, single-storey shotgun houses hand built from cast-off lumber and recycled construction materials. The neighborhoods of the poor. But the poor did not look all that poor. As if the men had gone off early to steady jobs someplace else, almost all of the people I saw down there were babies, small children, and women neatly dressed in cotton skirts and blouses and brilliantly colored traditional wraps and headdresses, adults and children alike carrying something — water in plastic tubs, baskets of groceries and garden produce, firewood, bunches of bananas, a chicken.

West of Broad and strung along United Nations Drive towards the cliffs that overlooked the sea were the luxury hotels, the Ambassador and the Mamba Point, half hidden behind high walls and palms. Along Broad and for several blocks off it, public and commercial buildings preened, many of them fronted by tall, neo-classical columns — the Liberian national bank and branches of U.S. and British banks, the municipal police headquarters, the central post office, the Rivoli Cinema, a few small hotels, public utilities, and most imposing of all, the yellow-brick Masonic temple. Oddly, the streets and buildings of Monrovia and the overall ambience of the city, despite its size and sprawl and mix of architectural styles, didn’t so much suggest late-twentieth-century West Africa as it did a 1940s sleepy Southern county seat; and the city might have been a set for a sentimental movie about postwar Dixie, To Kill a Mockingbird maybe — except that all the actors in the movie, even the extras, were black.

In their dress and demeanor and comportment, and with their slightly diluted coloration, the citizens of Monrovia looked more African-American than African, which in a sense they were, although I knew nothing of that yet. And it was the bourgeois, small-town African-Americans of the 1940s and ’50s that they resembled, not of the 1970s, certainly not of today. In Monrovia, even as recently as twenty-five years ago, when the good citizens left their homes, they dressed up. The middle-class men wore seersucker or linen suits and neckties and sported homburgs or Panama hats, and the women wore respectable calf-length, flower-patterned dresses and white gloves, and even carried parasols. Their children walked hand in hand in simple, neatly pressed school uniforms. Occasionally, one saw a batch of Liberian soldiers bully through the traffic in a U.S. troop carrier or jeep, and one remembered the Cold War and Liberia’s special allegiance to the U.S. One remembered that the country was our man in Africa, as it were. One saw more heavily armed police officers directing traffic than there were vehicles on the streets; and one noticed cadres of uniformed cops with automatic weapons providing security at the banks and other public and corporate buildings; and one recalled the eagerness with which the three-term president, William Tolbert, and his predecessor, the seven-term president Tubman, both men much admired in Washington, had peddled their beautiful country to foreign investors like entertaining and gracious pimps.

But this was before the bloody coups and the civil war — when the population of the city was still made up almost entirely of civilians. The porticoed homes along the ridge were still owned by the descendants of nineteenth-century African-American settlers, and the people living in the gullies and on the side streets were the descendants of the native Africans the former had displaced, tribal villagers who’d run out of arable land and had come to the big city for work. Down by the harbor nestled the shops and warehouses and homes of the Indian and Middle-Eastern traders and merchants who for decades had been migrating there from Uganda and Rwanda. Everyone seemed to be getting by and getting along. And here and there, striding impatiently through the crowd as if looking for the exit, came the few foreigners, who were white and either in Liberia on business or else attached to one of the embassies — the main one being the American Embassy, pointed out to me by Satterthwaite where UN Drive bent north and east towards the Mesurado River and the bay.

“That the American headquarters,” he said, nodding in the direction of a palatial white estate surrounded by high, razor-wired, cinder-block walls. The Stars-and-Stripes drooped from a flagpole, and a spindly forest of antennas and several large satellite dishes scanned the skies from the flat, palisaded roof of the main building. “CIA, FBI, the Marines — all of ’em in there,” Satterthwaite said, as if to himself, and chuckled. “Busy, busy, busy.”

“Oh,” was all I said. And thought: My country, my enemy.

I knew almost nothing then of the history of Liberia and its deep and abiding connections to my country, my enemy. Piecemeal and from various sources I gradually discovered where I had landed. Liberia is a tiny nation, barely the size of Tennessee and shaped like a thick-bodied lizard, and for generations has given the appearance of being of no newsworthy importance to anyone not actually in residence there. There is fertile land for growing rice and other tropical crops; and rubber, of course, but not much; and beneath the jungle floor a few small caches of diamonds, but hardly enough to sell off or trade away, it was thought. And were it not for the end of the Cold War and, within a year or two, the discovery of a deep and wide vein of diamonds running the length and breadth of the land all the way into Sierra Leone and Guinea, the country might have remained — except to its residents and academic and U.S. State Department specialists — an all-but-forgotten backwater, a misplaced packet of towns and jungle villages and one small city squeezed between its larger, richer, more socially elaborate and cantankerous neighbors on either side, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

To get to the beginning of the modern history of Liberia and to understand its peculiarities, you have to return to the early nineteenth century, when religious, financial, and racial interests in the United States neatly converged over the idea of installing a man in West Africa. In the early 1820s, white Americans, having noticed the presence of a growing number of ex-slaves on the streets of northern cities, began to realize for the first time that they were facing not just a slavery problem, but a race problem as well. And while the first problem was political — merely the price a republic had to pay for the economic advantages of owning a self-perpetuating, constitutionally protected slave-labor force of nearly three million people — the second, the “race problem,” was moral, emotional, cultural, and, I suppose, sexual. Its dimensions were mythic and deeply threatening to most white Americans’ dearly held view of themselves as a morally and racially pure, not to say, superior, people. Besides, the presence of growing numbers of freed black Americans living more or less like white people in cities like Philadelphia and New York was having an unsettling effect on the slave population in the South. Before you knew it, the free blacks would want the vote. Before you knew it, they’d join with the radical abolitionists and in some states would come to outnumber the pro-slavers.

Thoughtful white and some black Americans asked themselves, Why not send the freed slaves back to Africa? Why not create an alliance between northern white Christians and anti-slavery advocates and slaveholders from New York State to Georgia, and give the already free and manumitted blacks some seed money, an ax, and a Bible? And why not raise government and philanthropic funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved blacks — especially the more troublesome ones — give them a one-way ticket to Africa in exchange for their freedom, and let those people go?

Baptist and Methodist missionaries on reconnaissance had already spotted a corner of coastal West Africa overlooked by the British, French, and Portugese slave traders that perfectly suited these purposes. It was a large tract of impenetrable jungle, mangrove swamps, and malaria-infested estuaries, a plot of super-heated, saturated ground that no one else wanted — except, of course, for the fifteen or sixteen tribes of illiterate, black-skinned savages who happened to be living there unencumbered by legal deed or title. The word Liberia was not on any map, though surely the native people had a name for the region and for the Mandingo tribal village situated conveniently for coastal trade between the Europeans and the tribes from the hinterlands on a high peninsula at the seaside terminus of a large river. Why not ship forty or fifty thousand mostly literate, nominally Christian black-skinned Americans overseas to Africa, then? Why not send them from the fatherland to the motherland, from the home of their masters to the home of their ancestors, tell them this land is your land, and let them make the place safe for Christianity, civilization, and capitalism?

The place was perfect. The first American settlers — several hundred Christian freedmen and — women and recently manumitted slaves — came ashore in 1825. They named the Mandingo trading village on the peninsula Monrovia, after James Monroe, the fifth American president, who had been an early sponsor of the notion of return. And thus, in short order, was established the first U.S. colony. Soon to be known as the Republic of Liberia, it was organized from the start to operate not as a straightforward colony, but as a covert surrogate, clamped tight to the white-skinned leg of its North American founding fatherland. Consequently, as early as the 1840s, the Americans, unlike their European cousins, had installed in West Africa a homegrown, self-replacing class of overseers — a loyal ruling class made up of tens of thousands of freed and escaped ex-slaves who’d been making Philadelphia, New York, and Boston so scary, and nearly as many manumitted slaves, almost all of them from the South, who’d been offered and had accepted banishment in place of slavery. And for a long time, even to today, the arrangement paid the investors back handsomely.

After the Civil War, of course, it grew increasingly difficult to convince African-Americans to relocate to the soppy, equatorial jungles of West Africa, when they could homestead instead in Kansas or the Oklahoma Territory. Recruitment by the American Colonization Societies, as the founders were called, fell off. In Liberia, however, a diminished ability to recruit new settlers turned out not to be a major handicap. By the 1870s the black American settlers were running things — mainly from the coastal towns of Monrovia and Buchanan — efficiently and ruthlessly enough to generate a wide range of exports at little or no cost to the Stateside importers. Not only was this a feel-good program for white Christians in the United States, but also the resident tribes of savages in the nation were proving to be nearly as economically advantageous as the enslaved African-Americans had been back before the Civil War. The black Americans in Africa had duplicated nicely the old Southern and Caribbean plantation overseer system. It had worked there; it could work in Africa, too. No reason for the whip hand to be white.

By the end of the nineteenth century, just as in parts of the deep South and the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth, one percent of the population of Liberia for all intents and purposes owned the other ninety-nine percent, and a huge chunk of the profits generated by the back-breaking labor of that ninety-nine percent went straight to the board rooms of America. Where, after the usual executive skim, it got distributed to the white Christian shareholders whose parents and grandparents had put up the original investment. When you pay for the seeds, you get to keep most of the crop. That’s why they call it seed money.

Until the turn of the century, the main exports were rice, lumber, spices, bananas, cocoa, and from the hinterlands, ivory. In the twentieth century, with the development of the auto industry, the main crop became rubber. But things change. Not everything, of course; principles of exploitation and use remain the same. Where once there had been enough black-skinned savages and rubber to put treads on every motor vehicle in the West and enough banana trees to put a banana on every plate, by the late 1950s, cheaper, closer-to-home supply sources for both rubber and tropical fruit had been located. The Firestone, B. F. Goodrich, and United Fruit ships turned towards Central and South America and Hawaii, and our man in Africa got left behind.

After that, when it came to Liberia, the Americans seemed interested only in the Cold War. If you happened to be a member of the old boss class — if you were one of those Liberians who, since they couldn’t distinguish themselves from the savages by skin color, had turned to calling themselves Americo-Liberians — this wasn’t all bad. Having become the true inheritors of the post-bellum mentality of the grandchildren of the old southern slave holders, the Americos were mostly right-wing, conservative Protestants who believed in the moral and cultural superiority of their gene code, which they had inherited from their African-American ancestors. Consequently, to the delight of U.S. politicians and State Department officials, when the Cold War arrived, the Americos turned out to be as anti-Communist as Barry Goldwater, making the Cold War years, for the Americo ruling class, boom years. Foreign aid fluttered down from the skies like manna onto the wide verandahs and lawns along Broad Street from Mamba Point to Tubman Boulevard, missing altogether the rest of the country, where millions of increasingly disgruntled savages lived in near-starvation in mud-hut jungle villages. This, then, in the spring of 1976, was Liberia, the country to which I had fled.

SATTERTHWAITE AND I stepped from the hushed, air-conditioned interior of the Mercedes into dense, wet heat and a cloudburst of cacophonous sound. It came from a distance. It came from a place out of our sight, but loudly surrounding us, as if blasted from speakers hidden in the branches of the cotton tree spreading overhead — an arrhythmic, sustained slamming of thick flesh against steel, crossed by loud, high-pitched, rising screeches. Not human, not animal, something in between; and not in pain or anger, but something of both.

After a moment, the banging and screeches faded to a held silence. Then abruptly they returned, louder than before. Satterthwaite gestured vaguely in the direction of a large, rusting Quonset hut at the rear of the walled-in compound. “Seems like nobody here today, ’cept them chimps,” he mumbled.

Close by, facing the red-dirt yard, was a squat, four-square building of unpainted cinder-block that looked like a military interrogation center and that Satterthwaite said housed the administration office and lab. He told me to wait by the car and entered the building, returning at once with a ring of keys, which he handed to me. “S’posed to be some kind of caretaker guarding the place alla time,” he said crossly and led me around the main building to a wide, tree-shaded yard behind it, where three small wood-frame cottages with front porches were located side by side. Here the sounds of the chimpanzees were slightly muffled, and for the first time since stepping from the car, I could focus my attention and began to see and hear what was in front of me.

“Them was small-small Firestone houses built for the native foremen. We got ’em moved an’ set ’em up special for the Americans who run the blood lab,” Satterthwaite explained.

Inside, the units were identical — a single room cleanly swept and minimally furnished with a narrow, stripped bed, a table and two chairs, a kitchen counter with a hot plate, a few plastic buckets, enough dishes and utensils for two people, and a closet-sized bathroom. All three buildings were empty and evidently unclaimed. I chose the cottage farthest from the chimps.

“Can’t promise water or ’lectric full time,” Satterthwaite said, smiling. “But mostly it comes. I’ll check on that caretaker fellow,” he added, then dashed back to the air-conditioned comfort of the Mercedes and drove from the compound slowly, almost delicately, as if hoping to be seen by passersby.

I dropped my duffel in a corner. My worldly possessions, entire. Then lay down on the cot, exhausted from travel and the relentless heat and the several shocks of the day, and tried to sleep. But it was impossible. The screeches and banging of metal from the Quonset hut were like an ongoing accident, a slow-motion highway pileup. The racket frightened and confused me. I couldn’t stop hearing it, and couldn’t get used to it either. I wanted only to replay my meeting with Woodrow Sundiata and savor the details, ruminate on their implications. What was wrong with the chimps? Why were they so agitated? Weren’t there people to take care of them, to feed and quiet them down? I’d never seen chimpanzees in the flesh, only on television and in circuses wearing cute costumes — grinning, mischievous little creatures that made us laugh and shake our heads, amazed by their uncanny resemblance to humans and relieved by the difference. But these creatures sounded like huge and powerful beasts. They sounded violent and insane.

I tried covering my head with the thin pillow, but it did no good. Finally, I got up and went into the musty, windowless bathroom, closed the door, and stood in darkness inside the shower stall with the plastic curtain drawn shut on me — and at last could no longer hear them. After a few moments, not so oddly, my thoughts drifted back for the first time in a long time to a rainy night in 1967, standing in line for a movie in Durham, North Carolina, at a small art-house theater. The theater was located across the street from the county jail, a high, dark-brick building with bars in the third-storey windows facing the street and the line of moviegoers below. I’d been sent to North Carolina to help organize SDS chapters at Duke and Chapel Hill, and I remembered the movie — it was Easy Rider, of all things — because it was the only movie I saw that entire fall and I came away loathing it. While I waited in line for the theater to open, a few of the prisoners, men barely visible to the moviegoers on the sidewalk below, started shouting down at us, perhaps at first as a joke or to harass us, hollering obscenities and curses. Hey, you assholes! Motherfuckers! Hey, you cocksuckers, suck on this! And so on. Then other prisoners joined in. I imagined that all of them were black, although surely some were not. In seconds there were dozens of them calling down to us, and their hollers had turned into wild, uncontrolled, enraged screams, and they were banging metal objects against the bars, their tin cups, I supposed, or maybe just their fists — a clamorous, outpouring of anger that so shocked and frightened me that I wanted to break out of line and flee down the rain-soaked street and into the night.

When at last the door to the theater opened and we were able to get inside, the sudden silence of the lobby was even more terrible than the noise outside. It was as if we had become prisoners ourselves. We looked around the lobby at the posters, inhaled the familiar, friendly smell of fresh popcorn and candy, caught one another’s scared gazes, recognized them as our own, and quickly looked elsewhere.

Lost in the memory of that night, I slowly sank to the cool, dry floor of the shower stall — when suddenly something with claws darted across my ankle and calf. I half leapt, half fell from the stall onto the bathroom floor, pushed open the door to the outer room to let in light, and looked carefully back. A brown rat the size of a man’s shoe stared at me from a dark corner of the shower stall. I reached around for something to club it with, something to protect myself from it. Nothing. The bathroom was bare — just a toilet without a seat, an empty plastic pail for a sink. And then I saw the cockroaches. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, though surely they’d been there all along, watching me. Despite the sweltering heat, my body went cold, as shiny, dark-brown packs of brooch-sized cockroaches moved in undulating waves across the walls and over the crackled, lime-green linoleum floor. Scrambling to my feet, I heard again the undiminished screams of the chimps and the clang and bang of large, hard bodies being hurled relentlessly over and over against the steel bars of cages. It was the noise of bedlam, the cries from a madhouse or a torture chamber.

I ran from the bathroom, slammed the door shut behind me, and leaned against it, breathing hard. Though the room in the fading, evening light was half in darkness, I could now see cockroaches there, too — whole legions of them marching across the cot and pillow where minutes earlier I had lain my head. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Had I been that disoriented, that distracted by fatigue and the noise of the chimpanzees? The insects swarmed over my duffel, scattered from clusters on the kitchen counter, and regrouped on the hot plate. They raced across the dusty surface of the small dresser in the corner. They were everywhere, spreading over the formica-topped table as if spilled from a pail and shuddering over the floor and across the threadbare braided rug — hundreds of cockroaches, thousands, fleeing from my sight into pockets of darkness between walls, behind and beneath furniture, plates, and utensils, as if I had unexpectedly caught them doing a forbidden thing, a black mass or an obscene sexual act.

I held my breath and didn’t move. The cockroaches seemed to do the same, as if watching, waiting for me to attack them or run. I began to tremble, from my hands up my arms to my body and onto my face. I felt my lips purse involuntarily, and my right cheek started to twitch, as if with neuralgia. What is wrong with me? I wondered. Even though alone, I felt embarrassed. But this is the way things are in Africa, I reminded myself. It’s the tropics, for heaven’s sake! What did I expect in a house that’s been empty for weeks or months? I’d had to displace cockroaches and rats before, in my apartment in Accra and before that in dozens of rented rooms and filthy apartments and so-called safe houses in the States, and had disinfected my living quarters, set traps, put out poisons, washed floors with lye and scrubbed counters down with ammonia water. And though the chimps were louder and more raucous than I might have expected, I’d heard laboratory animals before — monkeys and bonobos yelling to be fed at this time of day — and had not been frightened by them, only worried that someone might not be there to feed them on time and clean their cages and change their water.

Slowly, carefully, as if walking on loose sheets of paper, I crossed the room and stepped onto the small open porch. The dirt yard needs sweeping, I noticed. I’ll buy some candles and mosquito coils at the little corner shop we passed coming in, and tonight when I sleep I’ll burn them near the bed. With relief, I saw a bundle of mosquito netting tied to a ceiling hook above the bed. Tomorrow I’ll scrub down the cottage and put out traps and poison. Tomorrow I’ll dispossess these tenants and take over the place, make it my own. I’ll meet the people who are supposed to care for the chimps, and I’ll learn their schedules and tasks, so that I can fill in for them when they’re late or for some reason can’t come in to work. And, in fact, right now I’ll see if I can figure out how to calm the chimps myself somehow. Perhaps all they need is fresh water, and maybe what and how to feed them will be obvious to me. As soon as I can, possibly this very evening, I’ll present myself to the woman who Mr. Sundiata said runs the lab and the man who feeds the chimps and cleans their cages, and they’ll tell me what sort of work I am to do here. I’ll work hard, very hard, and they will quickly find me irreplaceable. I’ll find good friends here, men and women. Liberians speak English, after all, and they’re said to like and admire Americans. It will be easy and enjoyable. I may call myself Dawn Carrington, or I may say I am Hannah Musgrave, and I’ll make a useful, satisfying, aboveground life for myself here in Liberia. And someday I’ll return to the United States, and at last I’ll see my mother and father again.

These were my thoughts as I crossed the compound and approached the door of the Quonset hut. I neared the windowless building, and the screams of the chimpanzees rose in volume and intensity, as if the animals could somehow see and hear me coming. The door was padlocked, like the doors to the cottages. I took from my skirt pocket the ring of keys that Satterthwaite had given me and tried the keys at random until one of them snapped the lock open. Removing it, I swung back the heavy door and faced a black wall of impenetrable darkness.

A vegetative stench gushed from the interior and washed over me. It was oily, hot, and dense, like composted fruit mixed with fresh barnyard manure, but cut with an ingredient that I had never smelled before, something acidic and glandular and starkly repellent, like the brain chemicals of a psychopath. The howls and screeches of the chimpanzees and their compulsive, arrhythmic banging against their cages had merged and become a congealed and hardened quantity of sound, as if it were an object, a quarried thing, a room-size block of stone. My eyes grew slightly used to the darkness, enough to make out a light switch on the wall just inside the door. I reached in and flipped it, and the building filled with cold fluorescent light. Then I stepped across the iron threshold and entered.

The barred cages, racked in two layers from the front of the Quonset hut to the rear, were actually not as small as I’d pictured, not as small as the cages they’d used in the lab in Accra. These were the size and dimensions of a large kitchen appliance, a stove or dishwasher. At first I couldn’t see the creatures inside the cages, and for a second I wondered if the cages were empty and all the noise were just a tape-recording being played at high volume, some kind of special effect, as if a bizarre fraud were being carried off here. I looked around the large chamber, half expecting to see a wizard of Oz playing a diabolical noisemaker in the corner. Then I saw the chimpanzees — saw their wild eyes and pink lips and flared, flat nostrils, their almost human faces, their thickly knuckled hands wrapped around the bars, their hunched bodies — and I thought, Oh, my God, they’re much too large for their cages, they’re huge, much bigger than I’d ever imagined. They’re the size of human beings!

There were some who were children, looking stunned and almost comatose, lying in the corners of their cages. Others, with barely enough room to pace a few short, angry steps, back and forth, back and forth, were evidently adolescents. A half-dozen more, full-grown adults — females, I could tell from their huge genitalia — were forced to stand bent over, nearly filling the cages with their bulk. Farther down, I saw four or five even larger adults shaking the bars with terrible force — clearly males, with surprisingly small penises, although I didn’t know why I was surprised and was embarrassed for having noticed at all. The big males spat at me and threw garbage and chunks of their feces in my direction, glowered, and showed me their cavernous, wide-open, nearly toothless mouths. I couldn’t understand. Why were they toothless? Their teeth, their powerful canine teeth, must have been removed, yanked out with pliers. The chimpanzees’ shoulders and chests were scabbed, and they had pulled out patches of hair all over, the young as well as the old. And, good Lord, what a stench of brutality filled that place! The animals were in more physical and emotional pain than I was capable of imagining. Why is this happening? Who has done this?

I could not absorb what I was seeing. It had no meaning. The scene bewildered me, as if it had been contrived by a species other than human, a species as clever as ours, as organized and rational, but demonic. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and stared at the dark faces of the chimpanzees, and I couldn’t stop myself, I suddenly began to weep. I cried for them, certainly, their pain and suffering, and then I wept for the humans who had imprisoned them. And then I felt my stomach knot and unknot, and in confusion I cried for myself. When, suddenly, I felt a touch on my shoulder. The dead weight of a hand. I glanced at my shoulder and saw a black hand with long, slender fingers lying there, and I leapt away from it.

“Ah, forgive me, Hannah. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

It was Woodrow — Mr. Sundiata to me then — facing me with a benign smile. It was the dark-brown face of the man whom in a few short months I would marry, the man whose three sons, in less than two years, I would bear. The husband whom I would deceive and abandon and to whom I would later return. The man who would betray and forsake me and who would later beg for my forgiveness and receive it. The man who would be chopped down and killed before my eyes. You may not believe me, but in those few brief seconds I saw what was coming. It was as if in the darkened room of my future an overhead light had been switched on and immediately, as soon as the room was illuminated, turned off again, dropping the room back into pitch darkness, and though I would remember what I had seen, the way one remembers a week-old dream, I would not glimpse it again until after it was long past and gone.

“I’m a bit early, I know,” Woodrow said, still smiling. “My apologies, dear Hannah. But I wanted to show you a little of our fair city before darkness descends.”

I fell into his arms, weeping freshly, out of control, ashamed of myself and feeling foolish, a silly, weak-kneed American girl falling into the arms of a big, strong African man. But I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t tell him what it was that had made me weep and practically ask him to hold me. I didn’t know if it was the sight of the mutilated, imprisoned chimpanzees that had made me weep or this awful, roach-ridden, rat-infested place. Or the fear of Africa, of being so alone this far from anything or anyone familiar to me. Zack, who had made Africa seem almost friendly and as already known to me as it was to him, was no longer there. I’d come so far away that everyone I had ever known was gone from my life now. Then I thought that perhaps it was the shock and relief from having suddenly found myself no longer living underground. Yes, that’s why I’m weeping, I decided. Replacing my false identity and the fears and comforts that accompanied it with my ill-fitting old identity and its fears and comforts had to be a sharp blow to the psyche. It had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I was reacting to it only now.

Or was it the quickly fading vision of my future?

Or all of these at once?

Woodrow eased me from the building to the yard outside, where it felt comparatively cool. For the first time since entering the building I inhaled deeply. Woodrow drew the heavy door shut behind us, clicked the lock onto the hasp, and walked me slowly towards the waiting car, all the while murmuring into my ear that I was surely exhausted, that I needn’t worry about the chimps. He had roused their attendant, Haddad, from a nap, and the man was on his way over now to feed and water the poor beasts. And a nice air-conditioned ride about the city would revive me, and then, over a leisurely dinner on the terrace of the Mamba Point Hotel overlooking the sea, we would get to know one another better and more personally.

“Hannah, I want you to know that I have decided to take an interest in your situation,” he said. “Does that please you?”

I didn’t answer him. But the truth is it did please me. It pleased me immensely.

FOR THE FIRST few months of our courtship, as in the old days with Zack, I felt that one of us, Woodrow or I, was wearing a mask. But I had no way of knowing which. With Zack, it had been as if both of us peered through eyeholes, so no problem: Zack and I were each two people, and knew it.

Maybe it was this courting business. Over the years I had been involved with many men — not many, actually, even though it’s the sixties and early seventies we’re talking about here, and my twenties. Numerous, let’s say. And I had believed at least twice that I was in love, once for as long as six months, both times wrongly and inconsequentially. They were crushes, infatuations, fixations, maybe, and there’s no point in my going into detail here. The truth is, I had never really been in love. And, perhaps more important, I had never been courted before. This was new and strange and exciting, and although the process confused me, I plunged ahead anyhow.

I wondered if this was how it had been for my mother and father. “When your father and I were courting…” my mother’s illustrations from her youth frequently began, but when it came to matters of the hearts and minds and men and women and the language used to portray them, I was a pure product of my generation and thus hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about.

Two or three times I’d stopped my mother’s story and asked directly, “What do you mean, ‘courting’?”

“You know, dear, when Daddy and I were first together. When he was in med school and I was still at Smith…”

“What do you mean, ‘together’?”

“Well, dating, I guess. And all that. Getting to know one another. The way one does,” she said, her voice rising. “Before one marries, I mean.” Her eyes darted nervously away from my gaze, as if I’d accused her of having done something disgraceful. “Why are you asking this, Hannah? I was only telling a little story.”

Why, indeed? I knew what my mother meant. I knew my mommy’s language, her silences and euphemisms, her code words and coy abbreviations, knew them better than I knew the language of my friends. My mother was right to feel defensive and angry. I was attacking her. But for what? For her timidity concerning the subject of sex, I suppose. For her placid reliance on words like courting and dating, as if they meant the same to every woman of every age and thus could be used politely under any and all circumstances to conceal as much as they revealed.

I wanted to say, Do you mean when you and Daddy were first fucking, Mother? Is that what you’re remembering at the start of your twenty-times-told tale of the day that he took you to meet his parents for the first time? And while you all sat in the parlor — it was a parlor, not a living room, right? — waiting for the maid to call you to lunch, the three of them, Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother Musgrave, silently read, Grandmother from her Bible, Grandfather from the Wall Street Journal, and Daddy from a medical textbook; and you, Mother, sat alone on the wide, hard sofa with your legs crossed primly at the ankles and stared at your lap, silenced by the silence of the others, as if the three of them were not reading but were lost in private prayer.

Courting. And now here I was myself dealing with a man in the same way, meeting him for lunch and dinner three and four times a week, talking on the telephone almost daily, giving and receiving little gifts, meeting his friends, and soon, soon, he promised, his family, but plenty of time yet for that. I was dealing with Woodrow Sundiata in a way that I knew could only be called courting.

And we weren’t fucking. We were barely kissing. We held hands when walking along the moonlit beach, but rarely in public, and were held in each other’s arms when dancing at the Mamba Point Hotel or at the several government and Masonic balls that Woodrow invited me to. Mostly, though, we talked, talked to one another, talked in the way that is specific to courtship, speaking at first, as all lovers do, through a mask to a mask — long hours of talk that over time, weeks, months, slowly, atom by atom, transformed the mask of the other into an actual face and made one’s own mask as invisible to the wearer as to the viewer. It was how one lost track of the masks and how one came to know oneself anew. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being in love! I get it. You become a new person! A person unknown.

I told him the story of my life, most of it, a version of it, and he told me his, and in the telling both storytellers came to believe that their stories were true. I’m the person I’m describing, I thought, I really am! I knew that I was editing the story as I told it, but not to hide anything or to protect myself — I believed that I wanted Woodrow to know everything about me, no lies and no secrets that mattered. But I was telling my story to a man, not another woman, and therefore edited it accordingly. And I was revealing what I knew of myself to a black African, not a white American, to a Christian, not an atheist, to a conservative government official, a member of the True Whig party, and not to a neo-Marxist fugitive under indictment by her own government for acts of civil disobedience and suspicion of terrorism. I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.

And Woodrow was doing it, too, I was sure. He was the person he was describing — at least I believed he was, even though he, too, must have been editing his story in hundreds of large and small ways to protect me from my abysmal ignorance of lives like his and to assuage my fears of the vast differences between us. He was doing for me what I was doing for him and now for you. As my mother and father had surely done for each other long ago during those months when they were courting, before they were married, so that when finally they did agree to marry and started fucking, each knew whom she or he was fucking and was confident that the other person did too.

Which is almost how it happened for me and Woodrow. I remember a night in May: Woodrow and I were returning from a policeman’s ball at the huge, yellow-brick Masonic temple at the center of the city. There had been a considerable amount of drinking and hearty male laughter at our table, which was not the head table, of course, where President Tolbert and his half-dozen closest ministers and their large, tulip-shaped wives had sat, but close enough to it for me to gain a considerable amount of favorable attention from the important men. That night, Woodrow proposed marriage to me.

Not exactly proposed marriage, but I knew it’s what he meant, and I didn’t exactly accept, but he knew what I meant, too. We were in the back seat of the Mercedes, with Satterthwaite driving, as usual, watching us in the rear-view mirror, as always. Woodrow was uncharacteristically voluble. He was happy and a little drunk. All evening long, from the tone and tune of the greetings he’d exchanged with the big men — from President Tolbert himself to the American ambassador to the chief of police — and from the way the big men had so politely flirted with me, it was becoming clear that Woodrow was about to enter the next inner circle of power, where at the center the president stood alone. And far from hindering his progress towards that center, the young, white American woman — whose past was known among the Americo-Liberian community to have been “adventurous” and possibly even a little politically dangerous, especially for a woman, the woman named Hannah Musgrave, whose passport still had her name as Dawn Carrington — that woman was in fact an obvious help to him. In that circle I glamorized the otherwise dull and officious little assistant minister of public health, for I knew that’s how they viewed him, as one of the cadre of boring, competent, American-educated bureaucrats whom the president used to keep the government running and the Americans happy. Woodrow was one of a contingent of Liberians whose business would have been business had they been of Lebanese or Indian descent or Mandingo, but because they were black Africans of at least partial African-American descent, their business was government.

Satterthwaite pulled the car over at the gate to my compound and shut off the headlights, but kept the motor running. He stepped from the car and walked slowly around to my door, as he always did when Woodow returned me to my residence, and waited for his boss to say his goodnights, spread my shawl gently over my shoulders, and reach across me and open the door.

Woodrow, however, placed his left hand onto my knee. “Hannah,” he said in a descending voice, as if about to deliver unexceptional bad news. “It’s time that I introduced you to my mother and father and my grandmothers. My people.” He cleared his throat and continued. “We have reached a very important point in our relationship, you and I.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Good! I’m eager to meet them.” And I was. It had been nearly four months by then that we had been courting, and from the beginning Woodrow had spoken of his family members with a respect that bordered on awe, as if they, too, like the president and his cronies, made up an inner circle of power and prestige that he very much wished to enter.

“Also my father’s other wives,” he said. “And his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands, and my brothers and sisters, too, and their wives and husbands and children.”

I laughed abruptly, involuntarily, but he went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “It’s the time that we go to visit my people,” he said, placing heavy emphasis on people. I knew that his father was a farmer, an elder in the Kpelle tribe, and that the household was located in a tribal village in Bong County, about seventy miles inland from Monrovia. The family was Christian, Woodrow had told me in a reassuring way, although like most Liberians, especially country people, they practiced what he called “the old religion” as well.

I viewed myself as a firm atheist, so didn’t mind that at all. I reasoned that, since one superstition was pretty much like another, two or more practiced together were weaker than one alone. I was more threatened by a Baptist who believed only in the resurrection of Christ than I was by a Baptist who believed in both the resurrection of Christ and astrology. Thus I was more concerned about Woodrow’s own strict Christianity than about his Christian family’s reliance on “the old religion.” After joining the government, he himself had become a deacon in the United Methodist Church in Monrovia. He attended services every Sunday, and on several occasions had invited me to join him, until finally I was honest with him. “I’d feel like a hypocrite,” I said.

Woodrow seemed pleased. “Spoken, Hannah darling, like a true Christian.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, you view hypocrisy as a sin, a thing to be avoided at all costs.”

“Nearly all costs.”

“Yes, yes, nearly. Quite right. Don’t worry, my dear, the Lord has His ways and plenty of time. But never mind,” he said and smiled benevolently down upon me, as if having uttered a silent prayer for my conversion.

“I’m not worried,” I said. But I was. Look at me, I thought. I’m in love with a Christian, a black African man who believes more in the god of my parents than in the gods of his. How had this happened? I was in the midst of its happening, but still I had to ask. I was intelligent enough and sufficiently self-aware, even back then, to have tried viewing it as merely a reaction to my isolation and loneliness. During those first months in Liberia, I was utterly alone at the so-called plasma lab, except for the chimps and their caretaker, a man who fed them twice a day and who once a week made a half-hearted attempt to clean their cages, and the woman who took the blood samples from them. Everyone else I knew in this country, even the Americans posted at the embassy, I knew only through Woodrow. These people, all the foreigners, in fact, I deliberately avoided anyhow, regardless of Woodrow’s assurances that I was safe in Liberia under his protection, and that I never, he emphasized, would be extradited to the United States.

And you can be sure that I’d questioned the racial aspect of my love for Woodrow. I had dealt with that in the Movement long ago, after I’d gone through a rather lengthy period, eighteen months or so, of wanting to sleep only with black men. And did, with way too many of them, until finally, one night in Cleveland after a long, grueling, self-critical session with my Weather cohort, I saw myself as a racist commodifier of sex, acting out the age-old exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer. At least that’s what I confessed to. It wasn’t long afterwards that I began my first love affair with a woman, a white social worker named June.

But all that had faded, blown away like wisps of clouds after a storm. Now I can’t even remember June’s last name. Irish, I recall that much. June was Irish and had gone to Antioch. Of the too many black men I slept with, with the exception of the two or three I’d worked with in the Movement, I remember not even their first names. Calvin? Daryl? Walker? Why even call up the names of those poor men? It was long ago. And wrong.

So what was it about Woodrow Sundiata that brought me to believe that I had fallen in love with him and that made me, after a few short months, decide to marry him? My initial attraction had been mostly sexual, and within weeks, once I got used to his rigid, nearly expressionless face and constricted manners, had weakened somewhat. I no longer saw him as an African samurai. What, exactly, then, did I see in him, other than a benefactor and protector? If it wasn’t the color of his skin, perhaps it was the fact that he was African. That he was pointedly not American. In those years, I was bone weary of my war against everything American. The war against American racism, the war against the Vietnam War, the war against the System — all of it. It felt like I’d been at war my entire life, even as a child and adolescent waging the war against my parents. I hadn’t realized it until after I’d left Ghana and Zack, my last links to the Movement, but by the time I arrived in Monrovia, I was in a sense shell shocked.

Here in Liberia with Woodrow, it was peacetime for Hannah, almost as if all those old wars had been won, instead of lost or merely abandoned. Never in my life had I felt as free of anger as I felt then. That old, constant, edgy watchfulness, an irritated grasping after righteousness that I could never really trust anyhow — I felt none of it there. This was Africa, and the people who surrounded me and the man who was courting me were Africans. American racism, the Vietnam War, even the Cold War and the System that fed off it, and my parents — they mean nothing to the Africans, I thought then. And, presumably, could mean nothing to me, too.

Later, of course, I would think differently, but for the time being, floating between two identities, the one called Dawn Carrington, and the other Hannah Musgrave, I was at peace. A woman with two names I was nameless, with so many pasts I had no past. Leaving Ghana and Zack behind, I’d come to Liberia and had stumbled into bliss. It was in a state of surprised blissfulness, then, that I had met Woodrow Sundiata, and now I was about to meet his people and, if they approved, to marry him. Which, I knew, would take me even farther away from my wars, my parents, my pasts, than I had managed so far.

“When shall I meet them?”

“Saturday. I’ve sent word ahead, so they can prepare for your visit. This will be a significant day for them. In my family I am the only one who has not yet married. You’ve not yet been to the back country, have you?”

“No, I guess not. How … what shall I wear?” I felt foolish asking, but I knew that in an important sense this was a ceremonial occasion. I kept thinking of my mother’s first meeting with her future in-laws, the anxious silence in the parlor as the people who would become my father and grandparents read their respective Bibles, and the girl from Smith College sat alone on the sofa and looked from one Musgrave to the other, wondering who these people were, that such weird behavior could seem natural. And when they had finally been called to the dining room by the maid in her starched black uniform with the white collar and everyone was seated, Mother Musgrave said to her son, “Bernard, will you say grace?”

The college girl watched the others, and when they lowered their heads and closed their eyes, she did the same and for the first time heard her fiancé pray aloud to God and His resurrected Son. When he had finished, In Jesus’ name, amen, she opened her eyes and saw the cold, clotted vichyssoise suppurating in the dish before her. Oh, dear, she must have thought. What have I gotten myself into?

No one spoke. Silver clanked. The father slurped. The maid arrived with bread and soundlessly paddled back across the thick carpet to the kitchen. Finally, the son, the Yale medical student, cleared his throat, placed his soup spoon carefully down, and said, “Mother? Father? I have an announcement to make.”

The others looked up and placed their soup spoons as carefully down as he. The college girl did as they and put her hands in her lap. The mother dabbed at the corners of her thin, lipless mouth with her napkin. The girl did the same. The father turned in his chair to face his son, as if interviewing him for a position at the bank.

“Announce away!” Father Musgrave ordered.

The son, a tall, too-thin boy of twenty-four with permanently tousled brown hair and a large Adam’s apple, cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I’ve asked a girl to become my wife.” He looked across the table at the girl who would become my mother and smiled nervously, and the girl smiled back in a way that she hoped was reassuring and proud. “And I’m happy to say that she’s accepted!” he declared and laughed awkwardly. “How about that?”

There was a brief silence. His father turned back to his soup, as if deciding not to hire the boy after all.

His mother said, “That’s nice, dear,” followed by a long pause. “Who’s the girl?”

The story always ends there, its point, as far as my mother was concerned, made. She was the only one who told it, and she never told it with my father present and of course never in front of my grandparents. She believed that it was about her, after all, not them. But I had always wondered, what happened then? Did the girl get up from the table and run out? Did the boy try to smooth over the sudden rumples in the occasion by quickly excusing himself from the table and following his fiancée to the foyer? She already had her coat on and buttoned, tears of shame and humiliation in her eyes, and he held her by the shoulders and explained that she mustn’t take it personally, his parents were cold only because they were frightened.

“That’s what powerful people do when they’re frightened, darling, they go cold on you.” I can hear him now, his voice seductively calm, so reasonable sounding — a kindly, wise man, even back then, when he was little more than a college boy. “They have only me, you know. And they’re afraid of losing me to you.”

They touched hands lightly, and the girl took off her coat, wiped her tears away, and the two returned to the table as if nothing untoward had happened.

But I know it didn’t go like that.

The girl who would become my mother didn’t leave the table. She wouldn’t dare. She sat there instead with a sickly smile pasted onto her face and wondered, as she would for the rest of her years, if she had been insulted, which was why she told the story repeatedly. And the boy who became my father, his voice raised a register, as if driven by excitement rather than fear, said, “The girl I’ve chosen to marry is right here with us today! It’s Iris!”

My grandparents turned their hard gazes on my mother, and both of them nearly smiled, as if suppressing frowns. My grandmother said to my mother, “Well, then, welcome to the family, Iris.”

“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Welcome.”

And my mother said, “Thank you. Thank you both.”

She herself had no family to which she could welcome them and thus, struggling to find something appropriate to say, could only say thank you, over and over, and in time came to believe that her gratitude was genuine.

Except for an aunt in Windsor, Ontario, my mother was alone in the world. Her parents had been killed in the crash of a small private plane piloted by her father, my other grandfather. He had been a speculator in Canadian farmland, very successful. He and his wife were returning to Windsor from a combined western holiday and the auction of a cattle ranch in Alberta, when, somewhere over Lake Superior, with my grandfather at the controls, the plane entered a suddenly rising zone of thunderstorms and didn’t come out the other side. Their bodies were never recovered, and my mother’s aunt, her sole surviving relative, delayed telling my mother for nearly a month, waiting for the girl to finish her exams at Smith. It was my mother’s freshman year, the first time the girl had been away from home, so no need to make things worse than they were, losing both parents like that, by obliging her to postpone or cancel her end-of-semester exams. There was no funeral to come home to, anyhow, and my mother’s aunt, who had been managing her now-deceased brother’s office for years, while he flew about the continent buying and selling tracts of land, could easily take care of any legal and financial matters that came up. She had power of attorney, and the girl was a minor.

My mother seemed to have spent her entire life in a state of low-grade mourning, which was why she never wanted more than one child. She still loved her own prematurely lost childhood too much, or so I believed then, to give it up and try becoming an adult.

With my father, it was different. But only in degree, not kind. In fear of his parents’ disapproval of any family structure unlike theirs — a mother, a father, and a single, obedient, overachieving child — he had cut his life to fit their template. He became a pediatrician, eventually, and through his child-rearing books, a world-famous pediatrician, not out of a love of children, but as a secret rebuttal to his parents’ unwillingness to love their single, obedient, overachieving child. And because all the world’s children were his, none was. Except me, of course. I was his child. But much of the time when growing up, I felt less his child than his test case, the proof in his pudding, exhibit A-to-Z put forward to an adoring public as evidence of the wisdom and practicality of Dr. Musgrave’s theories on progressive and humane child-raising in America at mid — twentieth century.

But all that was before 1968, before the Chicago Democratic Convention and 1969 and the Days of Rage and my arrest, indictment, and flight, and before the years in the Weather Underground, the bombings, the robberies, the terrorist campaign against the war, against colonialism and U.S. imperialism — all that was before Africa.

WOODROW WASN’T EXACTLY sure, but he thought that altogether he had forty-two brothers and sisters. Maybe more.

My mouth dropped. Woodrow smiled. An old joke. But that was counting all his father’s children by his four wives, he said, still smiling. From his father’s first wife, he farther explained, there were only five children, of which he, Woodrow, was the youngest, which is why he had been allowed to attend missionary school and from there enroll in a preparatory school here in town, in Monrovia, and then, on a church-sponsored scholarship, travel to the United States, where he had studied business at Gordon College, a Baptist school in Beverly, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Emerson, the town where I had grown up. Woodrow’s older brother, Jonathan, and his three sisters had stayed in the village, because of their responsibilities to the family. Woodrow had met his responsibilities to the family by finding jobs for about twenty of his half-siblings and cousins so far, in the government of President William Tolbert and in the True Whig party, of which he was a national officer, as were all cabinet ministers and sub-ministers. He was able to do this, he said proudly, because his mother and grandmother were Americos, descended directly from the African-American founders of the Republic of Liberia, and not full-blooded Kpelle like his father and grandfather, who were headmen descended from headmen.

Woodrow’s family pride was much greater than mine. It colored his every reference to them, and I envied him that pride. I admired it. I wanted it for myself. “Woodrow,” I said, as he reached across me to open the car door, “would you like to stay with me tonight?”

I had startled him. He blinked, frozen in mid-reach. I’d startled myself as well. Where had that come from? I hadn’t once, all evening long, thought of sleeping with him. I’d enjoyed attracting him and was aware that the attention I’d received from the big men at the head table had aroused Woodrow, but making love with him? Now? It had not crossed my mind. This was not usually the case — for no other reason than because he was an African, I actually thought Woodrow sexually unusual, let’s say, and wondered almost constantly what he would be like in bed. Tender or rough? Gentle and generous, or harshly demanding? Knowledgeable of a woman’s body or, like almost every man I had slept with so far, woefully ignorant of it?

He was a small man, small hands and feet, small ears. I liked small men.

“Well, yes, of course,” he said. “Of course. Yes, I would like to stay with you tonight. But, no. No.” Then, regaining his balance, “It’s not the right time, Hannah darling. Not yet. I don’t mean to seem a prude, you understand. Or to suggest that you’re not desirable to me. Quite the opposite. No, it’s just—”

“I am really embarrassed,” I said, interrupting. “I guess … well, I thought that was what was on your mind.”

He laughed, affecting the big African man’s deep, dark laugh. “Always! Always! But first things first. As you Americans say. Hannah, I want you to meet my people. Then … then we will be free to follow our desires.” He chuckled the Englishman’s chuckle.

“Is that customary?” I asked him. “Do you usually have your family meet a woman before you sleep with her? Am I being too frank, Woodrow?”

“No, not at all, not at all. Not too frank at all. It’s only the American way of speaking, isn’t it? I like the American way of speaking, even in a woman. But in answer to your question, you are the first woman I have invited to meet my people. Remember, I’m inviting you to meet them, not inviting them to meet you. I’m my own man, Hannah, not theirs. This meeting is for you. For you and for me. Not them.”

He pressed the door handle, and Satterthwaite opened it wide for me to exit. Woodrow kissed my hand, as had become his custom by then, and smiled sweetly, and I stepped from the car. “When you have met my people, then we can sit down and decide what we will do next. Together. Goodnight, Hannah,” he said.

“Goodnight,” I said. “I’m sorry, Woodrow, if I misunderstood.” I felt almost bawdy, what my mother used to call “cheap.” I turned away before he could respond, and made for my cabin. The car pulled out onto the road. Halfway across the compound I stopped and watched its taillights fade and disappear and then stood for a long, lingering moment in thick darkness, letting a flurry of images of slow, comforting sex with Woodrow and marriage to him and bearing his children and settling into a permanent life in Africa flutter randomly down, obliterating neat, orderly thoughts of tomorrow and the next day and the next, the mundane details of my daily routine. I was bored by the thoughts of tomorrow and my ongoing days, one by one by one — but, oh, the images of a permanent life in Africa, though they frightened me, they were exciting and made my skin prickle. They signified a future! I hadn’t had a vision of an actual, believable future in a long time, not for years.

A wedge of shadow darted past my ear. A bat. In the distance a dog barked once and went silent, as if kicked. There was a rustling noise coming from the Quonset hut at the rear of the compound, and I started quickly for my cabin. Before I reached the porch steps, a single chimp had begun to pant and hoot, and in seconds another had joined in, then more, and by the time I opened the door of the cabin, the chimps, all of them, were howling and banging against the bars of their cages.

WOODROW ARRIVED AT the compound early the following Saturday, chauffeured in the ministry car by the faithful and ever watchful Satterthwaite. He hadn’t answered my question the night before about what to wear, and I was shy about asking him again, but figured I’d better dress like a proper white lady — a pale yellow cotton sundress, a floppy, broad-brimmed hat, and sensible, low-heeled shoes, purchased in town the day before. Which turned out to be correct. My usual daytime uniform of jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers would not have cut it. It troubled me slightly that, bit by bit, week by week, my African wardrobe was coming to resemble my mother’s collection of resort wear.

Woodrow’s outfit that day resembled nothing from my father’s closet, however. He wore a starched, white guayabera shirt, pale blue Bermuda shorts, brown British shoes and knee socks, and a new pair of round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Beside him on the seat an old-fashioned pith helmet lay at the ready. Evidently, when a government sub-minister goes to his village, he does not want to be mistaken for a villager.

I got in back and kissed him on the cheek. “You look like a missionary, Woodrow,” I said and smiled: Just teasing, honey. He frowned. I kissed him again.

“You don’t approve?” he said. His frown became a scowl.

“No, I like the look. Especially the eyeglasses. I mean, you seem very… official. For a family visit, that is.”

“Yes, well, in a sense I suppose this visit is somewhat official.”

The car sped along the road, splashing through steaming puddles of water. It had rained earlier, and sunlight flashed like strobes off the overhanging, bright green foliage and fronds. We were headed north from the compound, which was located east of the harbor on the inland edge of Monrovia. I hadn’t been out this way before. My travels in Liberia so far had been strictly limited to the immediate neighborhood of the plasma lab and to the commercial area downtown and west of the city out to the beaches and hotels beyond, where I’d gone solely in Woodrow’s company. Due to the attention I attracted, especially from other white people, and my residual underground paranoia — which I clung to in spite of Woodrow’s assurance that there was no possibility of my being arrested by the Americans or anyone else — I was still wary of traveling about the country on my own.

Pavement turned to gravel, and the brightly painted, air-conditioned homes of the affluent Monrovians, with their close-cropped lawns and iron-spike fences and the occasional security guard on patrol, gave way to one-room roadside shops and small, rectangular, daub-and-wattle cabins, many with zinc or thatched roofs. Manicured lawns and flower gardens were replaced by vegetable patches and burned-over fields ready for planting and long stretches of dense brush, then solid, continuous jungle. Soon the road was red dirt, and there were fewer and fewer vehicles: Chinese bicycles wobbling under two and three riders, handcarts pushed by shirtless boys, and now and then a crowded rattle-trap of a van or mud-spattered pickup headed for the city.

A crippled yellow dog — Satterthwaite refused to slow for it or adjust speed or direction an iota — heroically dragged its hindquarters across the road just in time to avoid being hit. People walked alongside the road, mostly women and girls with babies strapped on their backs and heavy loads of garden crops balanced on their heads. They watched us blow past and, expressionless, as if the Mercedes were weather, turned away from the wake of dusty wind that followed and resumed trudging towards Monrovia and the weekend market there.

“My father’s name is Duma,” Woodrow said. “Duma Sundiata. He’s the headman of his quarter in the village. Not head of the village its ownself, which has a chief, a paramount chief, above the headmen. So some people like to say my father Duma a small-small man.” His voice had dropped a register, and he had slipped into rapid-fire Liberian English, usually with me a sign of easy intimacy. But today he sounded anxious. “But he’s abi-namu,” he said. “That means he’s a direct descendant of the Kpelle ancestors, and he has many farms and many children, so even the paramount chief of the village thinks very well of him and invites him to the most important palavers.”

“Palavers?”

“For settling disputes and such amongst the peoples. The village name is Fuama. Fuama is very small, very isolated. Small-small. Only a village. Fuama is about fifty miles from here, three and a half, maybe four hours.”

I couldn’t tell if he was worried more about the impression I would make on his people or the impression his people would make on me, so I said nothing. Reassuring Woodrow was not my strong suit then. He was still too much a mystery to me.

“My father, Duma, he comin’ to receive us,” he continued. “But him want to present us to the chief and to the other headmen, prob’ly. Same for my mother, Adina, and the other headmen wives. Alla them know why we comin’ out,” he added.

“Oh. They do? Why exactly are we coming, Woodrow?”

He turned to me, eyebrows raised above his glasses, surprised by my question. “Well, it’s to tell them of our plans, Hannah darling,” he said, his low-voiced Liberian-English turning subtly British again, almost a patrician drawl.

“Plans?”

“Our plans to marry. So they won’t be surprised and have hurt feelings when they find out about it later. Since we won’t be able to do it in Fuama, and certainly not in the traditional way,” he said.

“I don’t know why not. I can handle that. I might even prefer a traditional wedding,” I said. “But, look, Woodrow, you haven’t actually proposed marriage to me. Not formally, I mean.” I tacked on a small laugh. Keep it light.

“Ah!” he said, as if suddenly remembering. He smiled gently, but his nose and forehead and upper lip were shiny with sweat, as if the conversation were becoming a wee bit uncomfortable. “Yes, well. Yes, I assumed, after our talk the other night—”

“No, no, that’s okay, I assumed it, too,” I said, interrupting. “I didn’t expect you to get down on one knee and ask for my hand, and you can’t very well go to my father and ask his permission. No, it’s okay. I knew what you were saying. And I agree. I mean, I accept your proposal. Consider it accepted.” I didn’t want to make him say what he seemed reluctant or maybe unable to say, but at the same time I wondered what else had I missed all these weeks we’d been together? What other exchanges had I agreed to, other offers accepted?

“Tell me what you mean,” I said. “That we won’t be able to do it in Fuama in the traditional way.”

“Well, you … you’re a foreigner. And there are certain important conditions that a Kpelle girl, that any native girl, has to meet.”

“Conditions?”

“A certain type of education and experience. And it’s … it’s rather too late for you. It would be too late even if you weren’t a foreigner, because a woman learns it as a child, as a young girl. She learns it from her family and her people. She learns it from the older women, and in a special way that’s not known to men. We males, we learn other things.” He was silent for a moment, and his face was shut, as if he were trying to remember the words of an old song. “We … the people, they have societies for this,” he said with slight embarrassment. The societies for the girls and women were called Sande, he explained, and Poro for the men, secret, highly ritualistic associations, a bit like American college sororities and fraternities, I gathered, except that the Sande and the Poro were ancient and engaged the entire community in their rites and governance. They had strict rules and harsh punishments for violators of the rules; they had officers and emblems of office, secret signs and words, and elaborate regalia and ceremonies that the ancestors had established long before the Europeans arrived. Sande and Poro connected the living to the dead, the physical world to the spiritual world, girls to women and boys to men and men and women to each other, and through rite, secret knowledge, and shared belief they organized and facilitated a person’s transition from one state of being to another.

“But that’s not a problem,” Woodrow assured me. “Your being a foreigner and all. Not for me, certainly, because, as you know, I’m a modern man. One of the twi, as the people call us. No, no, we’ll get married in town, in Monrovia, in a proper church way,” he declared. “We’ll have a Christian marriage. It will be fine and good, you’ll see. The president may even come and celebrate with us. He sometimes does that, President Tolbert.”

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

THE ROAD, up to now a shaded tunnel through the crowding green jungle, had opened on both sides to the geometrically laid out orchards of a rubber plantation — row after row of tall, high-branched rubber trees protected against wandering cattle and human beings by barbed-wire fencing. At each tree a man in tattered shirt and loose pants stood tapping latex into a white plastic tub, as if collecting his winnings from a casino slot machine.

“Firestone,” Woodrow said. He sucked his lips for a moment and stared out the window. “Everybody from here and people from far away works for them now. Good money, best they can get.” He paused and examined his carefully manicured fingernails. “But the people, they got to buy food now, instead of growing it. Even rice. A big problem,” he said, his brow furrowed with worry. “Big-big problem.”

Woodrow’s politics, like those of most educated Liberians, were conflicted. He was all in favor of President Tolbert’s so-called Open Door policy of making it cheap and easy for foreign, especially U.S., companies to acquire monopolistic, long-term leases to vast tracts of land and ownership of everything on and under it, avoiding taxes and tariffs, unions, and regulations on wages and working conditions. But he was aware of the price being paid by the natives.

“It’s the fastest way to civilize the tribal people,” he went on, switching back to town talk. “And this country is mostly tribal people, you know. The foreign companies build schools for the children of the workers and make bush hospitals and company stores for them, so the workers will leave their villages and live close to the plantation.” He paused. “And they help our balance of payments. Something the Peace Corps does not do,” he said, smiling. “And it brings hard currency into the economy.”

Right, mainly in the form of bribes, I thought, but did not say — payoffs and misdirected foreign-aid funds siphoned into the pockets and secret bank accounts of President Tolbert and his inner circle of ministers and bureaucrats. Nothing trickling down to Woodrow Sundiata, however, whose Ministry of Public Health had little to offer the representatives of foreign corporations and governments and no power to restrict their field operations. Once the necessary under-the-counter payments were distributed in Monrovia, the companies were free to loot whatever they wanted from the land — rubber, citrus, rice, cocoa, and in recent years a small but growing quantity of diamonds. With Liberian government collusion and assistance, they rounded up and, on contract, hired tribal people and made them into indentured workers, paying them a dollar a day to help extract the raw materials, and then processed what they’d taken and sold it abroad at a colossal profit. Sometimes they shipped and sold it right next door — rice to Guinea, flour to Sierra Leone, powdered milk to Côte d’Ivoire. They even peddled Liberia-grown crops back to the Liberians themselves, dumping foodstuffs at inflated prices for credit or cash on the Lebanese and Indian traders in Monrovia, who in turn marked up and distributed the goods to every small shop and market in the land.

This troubled Woodrow and depressed him. He explained that his father, Duma, who owned many farms, on instructions from the village headman had leased the land under his control to a Norwegian company that insisted he plant nothing but rice on it. In the evenings, Duma’s four wives cooked rice that had been grown and harvested on Duma’s land, carried in bulk by truck to Monrovia, shipped to Nigeria for bagging, and sent straight back to Monrovia, where it was purchased for cash at the village shop in Fuama by Duma’s wives at a triply inflated price.

“The people eat poorly now, much worse than in the past. It’s a bad system,” he pronounced. “But we got nothing else available. Except communism, socialism, whatever you want to call it. And we’re not stupid, we see what happens when you try that. We see what happens to African countries when they get big socialistic ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. And America we know. England and so on, them we know, too. China and Russia, them we don’t know. So we live with the system we’ve got. Besides, communism, socialism, no matter how I might like some of their ideas, in the end they’re no good for anybody. At least capitalism is good for some of us. Right?”

“Right,” I said, and nothing more.

WE RUMBLED ALONG the rutted dirt road through scattered crossroads towns and small villages and after a while wound slowly up to a more populous highland district. Now I saw large numbers of ordinary Liberians everywhere — the tribal people, poor people, men, women, and children bent over hand-tilled rows in their small burned-over fields. Also great numbers of people who seemed to have no work — knots of idle boys and men sitting in the shade of a tree as if waiting for a boss in a truck who would never come and crowds streaming alongside the road aimlessly, it seemed, as if having just departed from a sporting event.

We passed an old man and woman holding hands, both blind, tapping their way with sticks, abruptly stopped in their path by a sleeping black pig. They stood and poked at the pig with their sticks, trying to determine what was blocking them. A plaintive-faced boy, machete in hand, watched over a row of fresh coconuts for sale on the ground. Leaning against the front of a bamboo roadhouse — above the open door, a scrawled tin sign, Champion Sam’s — a pair of teenaged girls in unbuttoned jean jackets, miniskirts, and plastic spike-heeled shoes flashed us with their long black legs and tobacco-colored cleavage. In the middle of a field adjacent to the roadhouse, a tall, thin, shirtless man stood, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, lay his hoe on his bony shoulder, and watched his toddler sons, little more than babies, lug a burlap sack of seed across the field towards him.

I gazed on the Liberians as we drove swiftly past them, poor people eking out their day-to-day livings and enduring terrible hardships and humiliation in the process, and all of a sudden, with no warning or buildup, I felt a powerful urge to ask Satterthwaite to stop the car. Let me out of this air-conditioned chariot, let me be one of them, not one of you! Let me walk unnoticed with them along this dusty road to the market and not ride smoothly over it. Let me mingle out there with the men, women, and children whose backbreaking labor and suffering are used to pay for this German car and its driver, to pay for the power and privilege of the man beside me, my future husband, also to pay entirely for me, for my safe, secure, undeserved life!

My eyes filled, and I was breathing hard. And even though it caught me by surprise, it was an old impulse, one all too sadly familiar to me, this desire to separate myself in the dance of life from the people who had brought me and become one instead with the people excluded from the dance, the people who set up the chairs, served the food and drinks, provided the entertainment, and cleaned up afterwards. I knew the desire was illicit. It wasn’t rooted in compassion or altruism; it wasn’t even political.

In a voice louder and bolder than I intended, I called to Satterthwaite, “Stop the car! Please!”

“What’s the matter?” Woodrow asked. “Are you ill?”

Satterthwaite brought the car to a halt in the middle of the road. In the tangled brush next to the car, a goat looked at me through the window glass. It was an ordinary red-haired goat with large, fly-clustered yellow eyes, a scrawny female with a swollen udder and a thin piece of rope trailing from her neck into the dense, thorny bushes behind it.

“No! I just… I need to get out of the car,” I said and opened the door and stepped outside, face to face with the goat. A bulky wave of cooked air broke over me, nearly knocking me down. I shut the door and took several unsteady steps away from the car and toward the goat, which seemed suddenly afraid, backing away, wide eyed.

A gang of naked and half-naked children appeared out of nowhere, round-bellied babies and boys and girls, some on the edge of adolescence, the girls with rosebud breasts, the boys with man-sized hands and narrow shoulders and spindly arms, all of them barefoot, their legs covered with road dust, sores, old scars, their noses and eyes running. They extended the pale palms of their hands to me and murmured, “Gimme dash, miss, gimme dash, miss, gimme dash.” I heard Woodrow behind me shout at them through the open window of the car in a language I didn’t understand, Kpelle, I supposed, and the children backed off a ways and gazed at me in silence.

Except for the buzzing of the flies, all the noise of the world seemed to have been banished, and after a few seconds even the flies went silent. There was only the heat, the impossible heat. And the face of the goat staring wide eyed through the heat at me as if I had no other wish than to kill it and had all the power to do so. And me staring back. Somehow that broken-down, used-up animal’s pathetically scared gaze had turned for one brief moment into the central reality of my world, erasing everything that surrounded it, shutting out everything that had preceded it, memories even, blotting out Woodrow’s presence and Satterthwaite’s, and erasing my reasons for being there today. It wasn’t a symbol of the world that surrounded me; it was the world itself, as if I’d suddenly been made incapable of perceiving anything else.

I’m describing this moment from memory, obviously, many years afterwards, but while inside that moment I had no memories to associate with it and thus had no correct understanding of it and no context for it. I’m not sure I understand today what happened alongside the road to Fuama that day, except that afterwards I was a subtly changed person, and Africa no longer frightened me.

I approached the goat, put my arms around her neck, and drew her to me and held her tightly against my breast. Strangely, the animal didn’t resist or pull away; she gave herself over to my embrace.

Sounds began to penetrate the silence, first the buzzing of the flies, then the children, murmuring again, “Gimme dash, gimme dash,” and Woodrow saying, “Come now, Hannah, come back inside the car.” I felt his hands on my shoulders. Slowly, I let go of the goat and stood away from her and allowed Woodrow to help me back into the car.

Before he joined me there, Woodrow tossed a handful of coins into the air in the direction of the children, sending them scrambling after the money. The goat had disappeared, swallowed by the bush. People, most of them adults standing on both sides of the road, watched us impassively, as if we had merely slowed in our passage through their village but had not stopped.

“All right, Satterthwaite, drive on now,” Woodrow said and closed the window on the universe. “We have a long ways to go yet.” Without turning, he said to me, “From now on, my dear, when dealing with the tribal people, you’ll have to stay close to me and follow my example and my instructions. Understood?”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll do that,” I said. “It’s a promise.”

BEFORE LONG, we passed beyond the villages and small farms into a region that was even less populated. Here the isolated roadside settlements, small clusters of daub-and-wattle huts with thatched roofs, looking more like family encampments than communities, were separated from one another by dark green jungle too thick with trees, vines, head-high ferns, and flowering bushes for any earthbound animal to penetrate. Snakes, lizards, and insects might make their way unimpeded along the ground, but otherwise it was strictly parrots and arboreal animals like monkeys and tree sloths that ruled. When suddenly a human being appeared — a man with a machete or a woman and her baby — it was as if he or she were emerging from a wall of green water, stepping gracefully from the jungle onto the road ahead, usually carrying a large bundle of cut sticks or a gunny sack stuffed with groundnuts.

The sky, floating overhead, was a creamy ribbon. Here below, the road was its shadow, growing rougher as it narrowed, with deep pits, potholes, and corrugated ruts carved in the red dirt by the morning and evening daily downpours — not by motor vehicles, surely, for there were no tire tracks anymore, save ours. To avoid the holes and ruts, Satterthwaite drove more slowly and elaborately now, cutting from one side of the road to the other as if on an obstacle course. Every few hundred yards we passed people walking towards us and away, always walking, never just standing, never idly waiting, men, women, and children and sometimes elderly people, all of them walking with bundles on their heads and in their arms — sugarcane stalks, firewood, baskets and swollen burlap bags and large and small babies strapped to their mothers’ backs or clinging to their hips — everyone, regardless of the burden, moving along with a lovely, easeful, straight-backed carriage. They wore loose clothing, brightly colored, traditional, topless and over-the-shoulder wraps on the women, the men usually shirtless in baggy shorts or trousers, battered straw hats or sometimes baseball caps on their heads, most of them barefoot or in broken-backed sneakers worn as slippers.

We slowly drew abreast of them and passed by. The people turned and looked at us. A Mercedes sedan carrying a white woman accompanied by two black Africans in Western city clothes way out here in the bush had to be an unusual sight, extraterrestrial, almost; yet the expressions on the native people’s faces remained unchanged, placid and incurious — as impenetrable as the jungle itself. At least to me they were. I could not know how, or even if, Woodrow and Satterthwaite read them.

By this time, after nearly six months in Africa, I had learned the names of some of the trees and flowers, although it was difficult way out here to separate and identify individuals from the tangled, green throng. As we passed strangler figs and huge cotton trees with gray, winglike extensions at the ground, I named them to myself. For miles we drove alongside a closed palisade of thick bamboo, then a grove of ferns high as a house, and everywhere liana vines, blooming epiphytes, wild coffee plants, aloes. Swatches of frangipani and oleander blossoms tumbled to the roadside. Among the fan-shaped traveler’s-trees and papaws and in thickets of the malagueta pepper plants that so excited the early English traders that for a century they called this place the Pepper Coast, I saw black hornbills pecking for seeds with their ax-like beaks, and dusky plovers and parrots. And wherever there was standing water, usually a pool covered with water lilies or a shining green swamp, I saw kingfishers in flocks, egrets, and herons.

This inland territory, the bush, was ancient. Primeval. From before the Fall, it seemed. Here the needs of nature and humanity were collaborative and far more peacefully meshed than back along the coastal region, where Monrovia, the capital, and the other, smaller cities of Liberia — with their modern industrial spoilage and smoke-spewing cars and diesel trucks and buses — waged warfare against the jungle that surrounded them. Down there, from the border with Côte d’Ivoire in the east to the border with Sierra Leone in the west, human beings and their machines were chewing their way inland, greedily devouring the land and everything on it.

It was like that all over equatorial Africa then, especially on the coast, and is even worse now; but in the mid-1970s, when this journey took place, the upland region of Liberia still remained essentially untouched by industry and technology, by modernity; and as we moved farther and farther away from the coast and the plantations on the lower plateau, I felt myself steadily slipping backwards in time. The twentieth century disappeared behind us, then the nineteenth was gone, the eighteenth, and the seventeenth. Lost to my mind were the crowded, rapidly swelling coastal cities, the rubber plantations, the railroad lines, even the roads that had spread inland from the seaside trading stations built first by Europeans and then Americans. The iron mines hadn’t yet been established, the gigantic mahogany and cotton trees still loomed overhead, blocking out the sun, and diamonds hadn’t been uncovered and sold for guns. Chimpanzees hadn’t been captured, caged, and bred for the development of multibillion-dollar drugs. They and all the other now-decimated species were still out there in the jungle, abundant, invisible, silent, watching us pass. This, I thought, is as close as I will ever get to West Africa as it was when the first Europeans arrived.

THE ROAD, barely a grassy trail now and no wider than the car, led to the edge of a slow-moving, brown river. A large raft made of cut poles lashed together with vines was waiting at the bank and the half-dozen men beside it, barefoot and wearing loose shorts, watched us approach as if expecting our arrival. The river was not wide — a boy could toss a ball to a boy on the other side — and a thick vine tied to a tree on both banks crossed the river just above the sluggish surface of the water.

“Beyond this river is my village,” Woodrow said. “Fuama.”

These were the first words he had spoken to me since I’d stepped from the car nearly two hours earlier and had been overcome by … what? A vision? A seizure. If I don’t know what to call it now, I certainly didn’t at the time. It had been a sudden, thoroughgoing confusion of needs and desires, I knew that much, even when it was happening, and little else. But looking back these many years later, I see it more clearly now, and if it was a vision, then it must have been the felt aftereffect of a collision between two conflicted desires that had been germinating in my subconscious for months. One desire had been generated by the woman named Hannah Musgrave, who wanted to become wholly herself again, free to go back to her parents and homeland; the other by the woman named Dawn Carrington, who also wanted to become wholly herself, but hoped in the process to disappear from her pursuers safely into Africa. My decision to marry Woodrow was turning both women — the lost but still loving daughter and the fugitive revolutionary — into a bourgeois African man’s loving American wife. It had set Hannah’s and Dawn’s opposing desires on a collision course. If I married Woodrow, Hannah would never go home again, and Dawn would not disappear into Africa. It would be as if neither woman had ever existed, as if both had been from the beginning nothing more than fictions. In deciding to marry Woodrow, I was deciding to abandon my dream of assuming the identity I had been given in childhood and youth, as well as the identity I had replaced it with.

I glimpsed that fact that day, and it terrified me, and when I fled from the safety and comfort of the ministry car and embraced that poor, pathetic, female goat, it was not to comfort her, but somehow to induce her to comfort me. To help me believe that what I saw coming towards me would not arrive.

THE CAR COASTED from the road onto the raft and stopped. To the man in charge Satterthwaite spoke a few words in the man’s language and dropped a coin into his hand. Satterthwaite closed the window and let the motor and air-conditioner continue to purr, as the crew of muscular men, like a team in a tug-of-war, somberly, rhythmically pulled on the thick vine and drew us slowly across the river, where I saw gathered on the farther bank a large, rapidly growing crowd of naked and near-naked men, women, and children. They were a somber group, like a photo from an old National Geographic, the women with large, pendulous breasts, the men with tightly muscled arms and chests, the children with round bellies and protruding navels — a passive, yet withheld and slightly suspicious-looking crowd, as if waiting for us to make our intentions clear, not exactly welcoming, and not in the slightest ceremonial. I suppose I expected feathers and masks and drums, elaborate headdresses, leopard-skin capes, and woven breastplates, not, as they seemed, a loose collection of poverty-stricken hunters-gatherers. Woodrow’s people. His family. Soon to be mine.

Satterthwaite drove the Mercedes slowly from the raft and onto the mudded clearing, parting the crowd, and shut off the motor.

“End of the road,” Woodrow said and chuckled. He put his pith helmet on and, checking himself in the rear-view mirror, squared it.

“End of the road,” Satterthwaite repeated, and he, too, chuckled. He stepped from the car and opened my door for me to exit, then jumped to Woodrow’s door.

Immediately, as soon as we were out of the car, the people surrounded us, all of them talking at once in loud voices pitched at the same high, flattened tone, their rapid-fire cries, calls, and speeches directed entirely at Woodrow, who shook hands with the men like a visiting plenipotentiary, smiled and nodded politely to the women and children, but said nothing in response to anyone and did nothing to present or even to acknowledge me. Satterthwaite, leaning against the hood, arms folded across his chest, waited by the car and with a sly smile on his face watched Woodrow and me in our city shoes and clothes make our awkward way up the slippery embankment.

Woodrow reached the top of the bank before the rest of us and without a pause plunged into the forest there. The crowd, focused entirely on Woodrow — their village champion returned from a far country in triumph — followed him, and I followed them, more or less ignored, except for the smallest children, the babies, who stared at me with wonderment and a shadow of worry on their brown faces, until their mothers caught them looking and turned them around, shifting them to where they couldn’t see me anymore or else covered their faces with a flattened hand or a large leaf torn from a nearby tree.

It was very hot, and the ground was wet and muddy, and the path was narrow and half-covered with wet, overhanging ferns and bushes. I had difficulty keeping pace with the others and at one point, hurrying to catch up, slipped and fell, smearing my dress, hands, and lower legs with red mud. I blurted, “Shit!” but no one looked back. No one paid me the slightest attention. To everyone, it seemed, except for the babies, who’d been all but blindfolded by their mothers, I was practically invisible. Which, before I arrived there, may well have been what I wanted. I wanted to see them but didn’t want them to see me. It was not, however, what I’d expected. And now that it was happening, it made no sense to me. Some welcoming party, I thought.

Soon the others had gotten so far ahead that I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I couldn’t hear their chatter and ululating calls to one another. I was alone and damned near lost in the middle of the jungle, and I was growing angry. Furious.

I felt like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and almost laughed out loud at the thought. Woodrow in his pith helmet and eyeglasses as Bogie? But I slipped and skidded and stumbled on, and after a while, a half-hour or so, the path brought me face to face with a palisade nearly eight feet high, made of thick poles roughly cut and peeled and lashed together with vines. The path split right and left alongside the wall, with no indication of which way led to the entrance to the village. I could see on the farther side of the wall thatched roofs like conical hats and the green leafy tops of fruit trees and caught the aroma of wood smoke and roasting meat.

I chose to go left and, like a princess locked out of her castle, made my way along the wall, looking for the drawbridge or gate, a doorway, a hole in the wall, a tunnel — any way in. I heard drumming, high, thin, rapid-fire patters at first, then a heavy bass drum joined in, and the click of sticks on a log, and singing — those high-pitched female ululations orchestrated cleanly into a chorus now. The sun shone aslant in the sky, behind the trees, but it was still very hot and humid, and I was sweating and muddy. The mud had a cold, metallic stink to it. I took off my shoes, and carrying them like pathetic gifts, one in each hand, walked along the path barefoot, whimpering with frustration and anger and confusion. Where was the damned gate? Where had everyone gone? What was going on in there? Why hadn’t Woodrow or someone, anyone, stayed back to lead me into the village? It was turning into one of those awful dreams of rejection and repressed rage that you think will never end. When, after walking for what seemed like hours but could not have been more than twenty minutes, I realized that I had actually walked full circle around the village without having come to a door or a gate and had arrived back where I had started, and I was suddenly afraid.

There must have been something important said or done back at the car that I utterly missed, I thought. I’d been distracted, confused, when we came to the river, not paying attention. Back there, when we crossed the river, a gesture, some sort of instruction or lead, must have been given to me by Woodrow or Satterthwaite or by one of the people who greeted us, something that would have told me what to say and do when we arrived and thus, as a result of my not having said or done it, would explain what was happening to me now. I must have unintentionally insulted Woodrow or his people. Perhaps I offended one of their ancestors or broke one of their taboos. Good Lord, I thought, this is Alice’s Wonderland — the rules are different here, and I haven’t a clue as to what they are, and everything I do is wrong!

Barefoot and muddy, sweating and scared, my shoes in my hands, my hair damp and in stringy tangles, I grimaced and began half to laugh over my plight and half to cry. I felt like a traveler from another planet whose compatriots had left for home too soon. A shadow crossed mine, and when I turned there was a slender boy of fourteen or fifteen standing beside me. He was silent and motionless, as if he’d been transported there by magic. Shirtless and barefoot, wearing little more than a loincloth, he was a pretty, almost girlish-looking boy who smiled slightly and gestured for me to follow him. Turning, he walked gracefully downhill a short ways, looked back once to be sure that I was coming along behind, then stepped into the bushes and disappeared into the bright greenery, and when I arrived at the place where he’d become invisible, I saw a narrow footpath and took it.

In seconds, the path had joined a wider path, a trail, actually, that soon broadened and swept beneath a head-high, earthen trestle overgrown with ferns and tall grasses. As I passed beneath the bridgelike structure, I glanced up and saw the high palisade above it and realized that in my search for an entrance to the village I had simply walked across the top of it and had missed the gate entirely. I followed my lissome guide under the bridge and entered the village of Fuama.

It was a large, circular compound of ten or twelve daub-and-wattle, whitewashed, windowless huts, each with a single, low doorway facing a packed dirt yard the size of a basketball court. A crowd of people, which I recognized as the same crowd that had greeted us when we first stepped from the car, was loosely gathered around a fire pit. Two large, skinned, piglike carcasses, headless and without hoofs, were slung across the red coals alongside a fifty-gallon drum whose steaming contents I could not see but assumed was a soup or stew, made no doubt from the heads, hoofs, and innards of the beasts roasting on the fire. While the children mostly held hands and watched in silence from the edge of the crowd, men and women of all ages drank from gourds and soda pop bottles, laughing and talking excitedly with one another and every few seconds breaking into scraps of song. It was a party, a drunken celebration. Off to one side were the drummers — four sweating, muscular, young men — eyes closed, heads thrown back, as if each were chained to a private, throbbing world of sound. And there, behind the drummers, rising above the crowd on a dais at the entrance to a hut significantly larger than the others, stood a very tall, elderly man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and trousers, four older women in colorful wraps, and Woodrow.

Standing next to Woodrow and slightly behind him, yet making herself visible to the crowd, was a young woman with a thick, pouty upper lip. A naked baby was perched on her wide, outslung hip. The woman was very dark, almost plum colored, with glistening hair that was braided and coiled like a nest of black snakes and wore a bright yellow-and-white sash across her bare breasts. She stared at me unblinking. Everyone else seemed not even to notice my presence. Woodrow, too, ignored me. Or perhaps he just hasn’t noticed my arrival yet, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t notice my absence in the first place.

I flipped a small, discreet wave in his direction. Over here, Woodrow! He saw me. I know he saw the tall white woman standing at the edge of the crowd. How could he have missed me, for heaven’s sake? But he seemed to look right through my body, as if it were transparent, a pane of glass between him and his people.

I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my guide, the boy who had brought me here, and said, “What should I do?”

He smiled sweetly and shrugged.

“Do you speak English?”

He nodded yes and said, as if reciting from a textbook, “I learn it at missionary school. I go to missionary school.”

“Like Woodrow. Mr. Sundiata.”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Albert,” he said. “I am Sundiata, too. Same like Woodrow. My father and Woodrow’s brother the same-same.”

“Should I go over there?” I asked. When I pointed towards Woodrow and the others on the dais, they were stepping down from the low platform and entering the hut, one by one.

Albert shrugged again. Smoke from the fire bit at my eyes, and my nostrils filled with the smell of roasting meat. The women in the crowd had resumed their high-pitched singing, and the drumming rose in volume with them. A wizened, toothless old man shoved a gourd in front of my face, and the vinegary smell of palm wine momentarily displaced the smoke and the aroma of the meat. I grabbed the gourd and took a sip from it and shivered from the sudden effect, felt my heart race, and found the courage to make my way quickly through the lively crowd towards the hut.

I passed through the low doorway and stood inside. It was dark, and I thought I was alone in the room. Tricked. A prisoner. The hut was stifling hot, the air heavy with the sour smell of human sweat. I stepped away from the entrance, let in a band of sunlight, and saw Woodrow seated on a low stool against the far wall. On either side of him, also on low stools, sat the tall, elderly man and the eldest of the four women. The others, including the young woman with the baby, lay on mats on the floor nearby, watching me.

“Woodrow, I hope—”

“Please sit down,” he said, cutting me off. “Welcome.”

I looked around in the dimly lit space and followed the example of the other women and lay my long body down on a mat by the door.

There was silence for a moment, an embarrassing, almost threatening silence, until finally Woodrow said, “This is my father, and this is my mother. They don’t speak English, Hannah,” he added.

The old man and woman seemed to be examining me, but they said nothing, and their somber, inward expressions did not change. It was as if I were being tested, as if everyone knew what was expected of me and were merely waiting to see if I could figure it out on my own. If my ignorance or lack of imagination forced them to tell or show me what was expected, I’d have failed the test. They were an imposing, almost imperious group, but at the same time they were utterly ordinary-looking people. Commoners. Working people. It was the context, the social situation, not their appearance, that gave them their power over me.

Woodrow’s father’s skin was charcoal gray, his face crackled and broken horizontally and vertically with deep lines and crevices. His neck and arms had the diminished look of a man who’d once been unusually muscular and in old age had seen everything inside his skin, even the bones, shrink. His hair was speckled with gray and, except for a few thin tufts on his cheeks and chin, he was beardless. The old woman, Woodrow’s mother, was very dark, like Woodrow, and small and round faced, with a receding chin, also like Woodrow. I could see him in her clearly. In twenty years, the son would look exactly like the mother.

I hadn’t noticed, but Albert, my guide, had followed me inside the hut and was now squatting by the door. Woodrow rattled several quick sentences at him, and the boy leapt to his feet and went back outside, as if dismissed. We continued to sit in silence. I dared not break it. What would I say? Whatever words came from me, I was sure they and my voice would sound like my mother’s — that insecure, coy, jaunty banter she always fell back on when addressing black or working-class people, as exotic to her as the people of Fuama were to me. I waited for one of the Africans to speak, any of them, in any language, it didn’t matter. I longed for the sound of human speech, regardless of whether I could understand it, as long as it wasn’t me doing the talking.

Then suddenly Albert was back, lugging a basket filled with steaming chunks of what looked like roast pork and a handful of palm leaves, which he distributed to everyone, starting with Woodrow and his father. He placed the basket on the ground before Woodrow and disappeared again, returning at once with a large open gourd filled with a thick, gray stew. Woodrow gave him another order, and the boy left again, this time returning carrying a batch of pale Coke bottles filled with what I assumed was palm wine.

At the sight of the food and drink, Woodrow’s father’s expression had changed from unreadable impassivity to obvious delight, and he reached across Woodrow and with one hand grabbed a Coke bottle and with the other picked up his leaf and snatched a piece of the meat from the basket. He took a mouthful of the wine, mumbled what I took to be a quick prayer, and spat a bit of it onto the ground before him, then swallowed, smacking his lips with pleasure. He tore off a large piece of the meat with his teeth and, almost without chewing, swallowed it — his eyes closed in bliss — and then a second large mouthful, and a third, by which time the others had joined him, and the hut filled with the sounds of chewing, slurping, swallowing.

The young woman on the mat opposite me lay back and ate in a leisurely, luxurious way, as if at a Roman banquet, nursing her baby at the same time. She glanced over at me, smiled to herself through half-closed eyes, casually passed a Coke bottle to me, then returned to eating. Woodrow’s sister? His father’s youngest wife? Or Woodrow’s village wife and baby? I didn’t know how to ask and was afraid of the answer. Flies buzzed in the darkness, cutting against the thick, muffled noise of the drums and singing outside. I took a small sip of the wine and as the others had done spat half into the dirt before swallowing. With leaf in hand I plucked a small piece of the pork from the basket.

I glanced around and realized that everyone had ceased chewing and was watching me with friendly but inexplicable eagerness. And then, of course, it came to me. This was bush meat. The skinned beasts roasting on the fire were adult chimpanzees, their heads and hands and feet removed and boiled with their innards for stew, their cooked haunches, shoulders, ribs, and thickly muscled upper arms and legs cut into steaks and chops. It was bush meat — a profoundly satisfying, probably intoxicating, delicacy to be savored in celebration of the return of Fuama’s favorite son and the foreign woman who had agreed to become his wife.

I slowly returned the chunk of meat to the basket, wiped my hand on my dress, and stood up. “Woodrow,I… I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t.” His face froze. The others simply stared at me, uncomprehending, confused, as if they and not I had made the terrible mistake. I knew that it was an insult to them, an unforgivable breach of decorum, and Woodrow was being humiliated before his people. But I could no more eat the flesh of that animal than if it had been human flesh. I’m not in the slightest fastidious about what I eat, and have devoured the bodies of animals all my life without a tinge of guilt or revulsion. I’ve eaten snakes and insects, badgers, woodchucks, bison, and ostrich. I could have eaten dog or cat or rat, even, if that were traditional and were expected of me as a way of honoring the hospitality of family and tribe. But not chimpanzee. Not an animal so close to human as to expect from it mother-love and grief, pride and shame, fear of abandonment and betrayal, even speech and song.

I turned and left the hut and made my way back through the crowd to the gate, where I retraced the path back to the palisade, where Albert had first found me. No one tried to stop me from leaving the village, and no one followed me. I was alone again, and familiar to myself again. My thoughts were mine again — safe, known, fixed.

From the palisade I slowly, carefully, walked back along the path through the jungle to the riverbank, where down by the river Satterthwaite leaned against the hood of the Mercedes, smoking a cigarette and chatting with a teenaged boy, one of the crew that had pulled the car across on the raft. The raft, I saw, was halfway across the river, empty, on its way back or over, I couldn’t tell. Satterthwaite looked up and smiled pleasantly, as if he’d known I’d arrive like this, a woman alone and angry and frightened and glad to be back at the car, and he knew exactly how to make me feel better.

“You finish, Miz Hannah?” he said.

“Give me a hand,” I said and started down the steep embankment towards him. He came forward and, just as I was about to slip and fall, grabbed my arm, righting and easing me to level ground, reeling me in like a kite. “Thanks.”

“No trouble,” he said and flipped his cigarette into the brown river water and swung open the rear door of the car. As I passed him, he placed one hand over his crotch, looked down at it, then at me. I stopped, halfway into the car, halfway out, and returned his look. He said, “Anyt’ing I can do to make you a little more comf’table? Gonna take a while before Mr. Sundiata turn up. Be dark soon, y’ know.” His smooth, dry, hairless face was close to mine, and his breath smelled strongly of palm wine. I’d never been this close to him before and saw for the first time that he was a very young man, much younger than I’d thought, probably not yet twenty, and reckless and naive and dangerously curious. Dangerous to me, possibly, but definitely dangerous to himself.

I slipped past him and sat down in the welcoming shade of the leather-upholstered interior. I reached out and touched his wrist with my fingertips and said, “Can you find me something to drink? Beer would be nice. Or some of that palm wine you’ve been drinking. And some fruit to eat?”

He smiled broadly — beautiful teeth, I noticed, also for the first time. “Not a problem,” he said and went to the boy, spoke quietly to him, and handed him some coins. The boy ran along a riverside path I’d not known was there, in seconds disappearing from sight and taking the path with him. Satterthwaite strolled back to the car and said, “Want the air-conditioner? Can turn it on if you like. We got plenty of gasoline still.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” I said and closed the car door. He slid into the front, turned on the engine and the air-conditioner, then slung his arm over the seat back and looked at me with — oh my, yes — a handsome, elegantly formed, young man’s look of lust. The dark, leathery interior of the car smelled like ripe peaches. I leaned back in the seat and let the cooled air flow over me. It pleased the skin of my face and neck, my bare arms, a breath from the arctic blowing across my legs, and I drew my mud-spattered dress up a few inches to my knees and closed my eyes.

“When the boy come back wit’ the wine and fruits, I can make him go ’way.” He spoke in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, as if reluctant to wake me from my reverie.

“Fine,” I said. And after a few seconds, “When do you think Mr. Sundiata will come back?”

“Oh … not till long time. If him not come before dark, then not till mornin’.”

We both spoke very slowly, as if under water. “He won’t come looking for me?”

“Naw. He gots him a heap of fam’ly bus’ness to settle first.”

“All right, then. I can wait.”

“Me, too. Us two can wait together.” He extended his pack of cigarettes, I took one, and he lighted it with a flip of his heavy, chromium Zippo.

I cleansed my mouth with smoke, and thought, So this is how it’s going to be, married to Woodrow.

A SHARP WHISTLE woke me. I pried open my eyes and peered from the car. It was blue outside, dawn’s first light. A pale exhalation of thin mist floated above the river. Hands on hips, feet apart, Woodrow, in his explorer’s outfit, stood at the water’s edge, peeing into the river. Doctor Sundiata, I presume. He zipped up, whistled a second time, and waved impatiently at the figures of the three men and a boy sprawled sleeping on the raft drawn up on the opposite bank. They sat slowly, stood, stretched, and made ready to bring the raft over.

Satterthwaite’s first name was Richard — I’d learned it during the night. He lay snoring like a gigantic rag doll flung across the front seat of the Mercedes. I was in back, alone now, and a good thing, too. I felt poisoned — the raw palm wine we’d drunk, which had tasted so fine going down, was hammering nails into my brain, and my mouth, which last night had been so warm and wet and open, felt sewn shut and dry as parchment. The car was rank with stale cigarette smoke and vinegary fermentation — or else it would have stunk of sex. A pair of empty, cork-stoppered Coke bottles lay scattered over the floor in back. I shoved them into a far corner of the seat, then quickly buttoned and straightened my clothing, finger-combed my hair, and licked my fingertips and wet my eyelids.

Woodrow pulled open the door beside Richard and shook him awake. “Hey-hey, Satterthwaite! C’mon, wake up, boy! Time t’ leave,” he said in a rough voice. “You better not been runnin’ that air-conditioner all night long, usin’ up all the gasoline.”

“Naw, Boss, don’ worry none ’bout dat,” Richard said and started the engine. “We got plenty-plenty still!” he declared, a little too loudly. He seemed suddenly foolish, a boy in fact.

Then Woodrow was beside me in the dank interior of the car. He removed his ridiculous hat and placed it carefully on the floor, leaned his head back on the seat, and took off his eyeglasses. He closed his eyes and yawned. And said not a word.

Nor did I. Until nearly an hour had passed, and we were coming down onto the plateau, passing into the region of rubber plantations and small farm villages. As we approached one of the larger roadside settlements, Woodrow instructed Richard to pull over and find us some breakfast. Richard parked the car beside a tiny, windowless, mud-walled shop, and got out. When he disappeared inside, I turned to face Woodrow for the first time since our departure from Fuama.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” I said to him. “I really am. But I didn’t know what to do. Why did you ignore me for so long? And then, when I needed your help, you wouldn’t help me. You and the others. Your people.”

“I might ask you the same question.”

“What do you mean? What did I do wrong? I know I refused their… hospitality, I guess. But bush meat! Really, Woodrow! I just wasn’t ready—”

He interrupted with a long-suffering sigh. “Hannah, there’s too much to explain. Too much … difference.”

“Between you and me? No, I don’t believe that, Woodrow.”

“Not between you and me. Not that.” He paused and rubbed his jiggling knees. His face was clenched like a fist. “Too much difference … between me in the city, the person you know already … and the me back there,” he said and pointed behind us, towards his home. His origins. His ancestors. “I made a mistake, Hannah. I shouldn’t have taken you to Fuama with me, I should have come alone this time. You weren’t ready. I wasn’t ready,” he quickly added. He shook his head from side to side, sad and puzzled, and studied his hands as if seeking a solution there. “Maybe later it will be all right, but not now. I don’t know how to explain certain things. It’s very difficult to … what can I call it? It’s hard to integrate things. To mix the worlds together. I have Monrovia, the city world, and my position in the government. I have my education and my travels and all the different kinds of people I know and do business with. All that. And I have the world of Fuama, too. Both worlds are very strong inside me, Hannah. But you know nothing of Fuama, and I know everything. It’s not like that with your people. I know much of them. Remember, I have lived in your country and gone to a college there with American boys and girls. White people. No,” he said, “you did nothing wrong, Hannah darling. I did. Even before we got to Fuama, back on the road, I saw that it wouldn’t work, and I became angry with myself. But you,” he said, “no, you did precisely the right thing.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You went back to the car and patiently waited for me to return. And when I returned, you didn’t press me to explain. Until now, when we’re nearly back in our world and can speak in private again. We’re back in the world we share. I thank you for that,” he said and reached across and took me in his arms and self-consciously kissed me, as if he thought we were being photographed.

Over his shoulder I saw Richard approach from the shop, carrying meat patties and what looked like bottles of Fanta. I pulled away and said, “Come, Woodrow, let’s have something to eat. I’m starved.” I opened the car door and stepped into the blinding bright sunshine, then leaned back in and said to him, “It’s all right. And thank you for explaining. We don’t have to go back there, Woodrow. Not until after we’re married. And not even then, if that’s what you want.”

He followed me into the sunshine, a broad smile of gratitude spreading across his face. It said, Married! We’re going to be married!

WE FOUND STOOLS beneath a cotton tree and settled there to eat and drink, the three of us. I noticed a group of idle villagers a short distance away who were watching us and said to Woodrow, “Back in Fuama, when the people first met us at the river, all the mothers tried to keep their babies from looking at me. They kept covering the little ones’ eyes. Except for that young woman in the hut, the one with the baby. Did you notice that, Woodrow?”

He shook his head no and went on eating.

“Who was she, Woodrow?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the hut.”

“Just a woman from the family,” he said. “Her name is Marleena.”

“Who is the father of her baby?”

He didn’t look up from his food. “She didn’t say. The father is probably away from the village. Must be working in the mines or some place like that. The young men from Fuama, they stay at the mines and come back only once in a while.”

“Why didn’t she cover her baby’s eyes, like the other mothers did?”

“I don’t know!” he said. “Why you asking so many questions anyhow! Eat your food. You said you were hungry, didn’t you?”

I gave up and did as instructed. But it didn’t matter; I knew the answers to my questions.

For a while we three ate in silence, and then Richard spoke. “You know ’bout Mammi Watta, Miz Hannah?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Mammi Watta. She the spirit of the river an’ all that.”

Woodrow said, “It’s nothing. A story. A bush people pickney story is all.”

“The peoples use it to scare the picknies when they bad and for makin’ them do good,” Richard said.

“Has it got something to do with me?” I asked him.

“No. Nothing at all,” Woodrow said.

“Excep’ Mammi Watta a white woman an’ come from the river,” Richard said and gave a goofy little laugh.

“It’s just that you’re probably the first white woman those little picknies have ever seen, that’s all,” Woodrow continued. “And the mammis all know it’s impolite to stare at people, ’specially grownups.”

“Tell me the story,” I said.

“It changes all the time,” Woodrow said. “And there’s different ways of telling it in different villages. I mostly forget it anyhow.” He stood up and brushed the crumbs from his shirt, finished off his warm Fanta, and said, “All right, we better get moving. I got work to do. And so do you, Satterthwaite.” He looked pointedly at Richard, who quickly got up and headed for the car.

As we neared the car, Woodrow leaned down and in a low voice said, “That boy’s getting to be one uppity nigger. He’s my cousin’s son, but I frankly don’t know if I’ll keep him.”

“Oh, do!” I said. “He’s good at what he does. He’s just a little foolish sometimes, that’s all.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said. He put his arm around me as we walked. “Thank you, my darling,” he said, “for being so understanding.”

“Oh, think nothing of it, Woodrow. We all have our little secrets. Especially women and men.”

“Yes!” he said. “Especially women and men!”

IT WAS PERHAPS a little odd and certainly not characteristic of me, but after returning from Fuama, as soon as I was alone, the first thing I wanted to do was write to my parents. Hundreds of times over the years, I’d wished that I could simply sit down and write them a letter, even a short note — any form of written communication would do, my voice on the page to their ears, calling their fading voices back to me. But I couldn’t. Mostly because it was too dangerous, but also because, as the silence between us stretched into months and then years, it grew nearly impossible for me to imagine what I would write to them. If I ever got the chance to communicate with my parents directly and freely again, where would I begin? Where would I end?

Dear Mother and Daddy,

This letter comes to you from very far away, as you can see from the postmark and return address. All the way from Monrovia, in the African nation of Liberia! How I got here is a long, complicated story, and I hope someday I can tell it to you. But for now, just know that my being here is what lets me contact you directly for the first time in years. Even though it’s still possible that you’ll never receive this letter or if you do that it’ll arrive already opened and read and copied by the FBI. But you don’t have to worry about that (I think) as I’m more or less safe here in Liberia, and nothing I write to you will be in the slightest incriminating of you, or of me, for that matter. Although I do wish I had a good American lawyer, Kunstler or Ramsey Clark or one of your guys, Daddy, available here to check it out first. Anyhow the point is that for the first time in almost seven years, since my indictment in Chicago, actually, I’m not taking a risk or putting you at risk by writing to you.

When I was underground, a telephone call had been out of the question — too dangerous, unless it were prearranged and placed pay phone to pay phone. In those days, everyone I knew more than casually simply assumed that the FBI was tapping his or her phone. What could my parents and I have said to one another, anyhow, what intimacy could we have shared, knowing that it was being heard and tape-recorded by a pair of government agents eating jelly doughnuts and drinking coffee in a van outside the house? It wouldn’t have been my voice to my parents’ ears or theirs to mine — we’d be too circumspect, too self-conscious and coded. We were nearly that as it was, under the best of circumstances. Besides, in those years our need to communicate with one another directly never seemed quite desperate enough for us to be willing to go all clandestine, as if we were mobsters or Soviet spies. As a result, from the beginning until the end of my underground years, we resisted going through the elaborate dance of setting up calls between pay phones outside a convenience store, one for my parents in Emerson, Massachusetts, the other for me down the block from a safe house in Cleveland or New York or New Bedford. Daddy wasn’t the type to endure that. If it weren’t in response to a verifiable, life-threatening medical emergency, he would have regarded any such arrangement with contempt and as beneath his dignity, even if it meant depriving himself of his daughter’s voice. And Mother certainly wasn’t the type. If she’d been told by me or Daddy that every time she left the house she was followed by an FBI agent, she’d probably have had an old-fashioned nervous breakdown, a paranoiac seizure that would have paralyzed her and sent her to her bed for weeks. I exaggerate, I know, but not by much.

I’ve been out of the States for a while now and therefore haven’t heard anything about Daddy in the news, which in recent years is the main way I kept track of you two, you know, and as a result I’m left hoping but not knowing for sure that you’re both okay, in good health, etc. So I hope you’ll answer this letter with news of home and family. Maybe you should run it by your lawyer first, though, just in case I’m being legally reckless. If you wish, feel free to show it to Mitchell Stephens or Ron Briggs or whoever represents you nowadays, Daddy. I’ve been assured by a friend here — he’s sort of my boss, actually, a man positioned fairly high up in the government — that the Liberians won’t extradite me. I’m working for a blood plasma lab doing research on hepatitis with chimps. Not really doing the research, just supplying and shipping chimp blood to the U.S. It’s sort of a NYU, U.S.A., and Liberia jointly funded operation, and it is interesting work but has gotten stressful for me because of the chimps and what we have to do to them, so I’m not sure how much longer I can work at the lab. I have no intentions of leaving Liberia in the foreseeable future, however, and even if I wanted to, where could I go? Anywhere else and I’d risk being arrested and would have to go underground, which, believe me, I never want to do again as long as I live.

For years, Mother and Daddy and I relied on go-betweens, people in the Movement or Weatherman who, to the best of our knowledge, were not being followed or tracked by the FBI. From Mother’s point of view, no news from me was not necessarily bad news. It left her free to fantasize that, in spite of appearances, everything was actually hunky-dory, as if I were living on a hippie commune somewhere in Oregon and “going through a stage.” I never sent messages to the house or Daddy’s office at the clinic. From time to time, maybe once every three or four months, I did leave word with one or another of Daddy’s lawyers or his literary agent in New York, messages that I hoped would provide some small comfort to my parents without at the same time putting them or me at risk. I’d say to a receptionist or an answering machine, “Please tell Doctor and Mrs. Musgrave that their daughter is safe and in good health,” and then hang up.

Mother and Daddy, a lot has changed in me since I left the U.S. Not my underlying political beliefs, Daddy, I’m sorry to say, although you’ll be happy to know that I have pretty much separated myself from Weatherman and have no contacts with them anymore. That’s a whole other story, which I hope to be able to tell you someday in person. But something that’s possibly even deeper in me than politics has been changed. My mentality? My underlying temperament? I don’t know. But for the first time in my adult life I’m not part of a movement, I’m not a member of a group or organization dedicated to political and social change. I’m alone. Wholly alone. And it’s a little bit weird for me. A lot weird, actually, and I can see that it’s changing me in unpredictable ways. Who knows, Mother, I may turn up one of these days with a husband and a baby asking to swap recipes and gardening tips. No, not likely — just teasing. Actually, there is a man here with whom I’ve become seriously involved, but there’s nothing about the relationship that I need to burden you with, not just yet anyhow, if ever. Trust that he’s a good man, however, very kind and helpful to me.

In the months since I’d arrived in Africa, the literal physical distance between me and my parents had grown so great that for the first time in years I found myself unable to imagine their daily lives, and I think that’s what made me suddenly want so badly to communicate with them. Somehow, even though back in the States we’d been unable to speak or safely write to one another, as long as we were located close enough to get to one another in a matter of hours if need be, I’d been able to imagine Daddy and Mother going through their usual day-to-day activities and not feel especially worried about them. Once in a while I’d catch an item about Daddy in the news — his arrest at an antiwar protest with a dozen other distinguished citizens, people like William Sloan Coffin and Arthur Miller and the Berrigan brothers, an interview or essay under his byline in The Nation or The New Republic, his appearance on TV as a McGovern delegate at the ’72 Democratic Convention, and so on. Sometimes an item showed up on the book pages or in the culture section of the New York Times, usually having more to do with his liberal politics and exemplary personal life than his best-selling books. I could tell that, through it all, Mother was still playing her lifelong role as the loyal, selfless Wife of the Great Man. She was occasionally photographed at his side, although during those post — Civil Rights years when he was seen arm in arm with like-minded, earnest white men of a certain age and position, if a woman other than my mother was present, she was usually a famous folk singer.

Now, however, with no access here in Africa to those reassuring, though distant, glimpses of my parents, I had begun to worry about them. I fretted mainly about their health. They were in their sixties, and back then, in my mid-thirties, that seemed elderly to me. With no clear prohibitions against my contacting them by mail, I had on several occasions sat down to write them a letter. But I didn’t know who they were anymore; nor was I sure of who I was. So what on earth could I say to them?

What else can I tell you that won’t take pages and pages? It feels so strange writing to you like this. I wish I could tell you about the country and the people, about my life here and about how I came to be here in the first place, but I’m not sure how to say it yet. Just know that I love and miss you both very much, that I’m all right and in good health, mentally as well as physically, and that I feel safe here.

Better to say nothing, I decided, and again and again tore up the letter and put away my pen. Until that evening when I returned from my first visit to Fuama. I sat down at the table in my cottage, and by the light of a kerosene lamp — the electric power was off, and Woodrow still hadn’t been able to locate a working generator for the compound — began finally to write my letter.

Write me back, if this letter reaches you. If yours reach me I’ll let you know by return mail, and then we’ll once again be in touch, after so long, too long, all these months and years. I hope you know how grateful I am for the way you both have stood by me throughout those years, even though out of necessity we’ve had to remain at such a distance. I’m sure it’s been difficult for you, especially since our political beliefs, though they overlapped, never quite matched. But despite everything, they are not lost years. I know that my actions and their consequences have been hard on you, painful and frightening, and I often wish that it could have been different. I love you both and always have, and I think of you all the time, even way out here in deepest Africa.

Love,

Hannah

The impulse to write my parents satisfied, I mailed the letter and quickly forgot about it. Then, two weeks later, I was leafing through the day’s mail, the usual packet of lab reports from the NYU administrators of the project, who still seemed to think of me as their field agent, someone who could make sense of the charts, graphs, and statistics they’d derived from the blood samples I’d shipped them months earlier and who was therefore eager to read them, along with the odd jumble of official Liberian government pamphlets and studies financed by the UN and USAID and distributed to every agency in the Liberian government, regardless of its area of expertise and responsibility or lack thereof. From the day of my arrival at the lab, I had not read more than the opening paragraph of any of these reports and had simply dumped them unopened into the trash for burning later. But this time a stiff, white, business-size envelope fell out of a report on the practicalities of developing a fish-farming industry on the St. John River. It dropped into my hand as if seeking it out.

My dear Hannah,

How thrilling and, after so long, what a relief to receive news of you and to receive it from you directly! Your mother and I literally wept with joy when your letter arrived. I cannot begin to express the pleasure it gave us (and you may be pleased as well as surprised to know that it arrived unopened, with no evidence of its having been tampered with). I hasten, therefore, to answer it. I will be discreet and discursive, as you were, so as not to compromise your situation in any way.

I’d known at once what it was — I’d seen that envelope a thousand times before, since childhood. It bore the return address of Daddy’s clinic, his familiar letterhead, and I recognized in my name and address the typeface of his equally familiar IBM Selectric, probably typed by Ingrid, Daddy’s doe-eyed Danish assistant, and I thought, Damn him, he can’t even write my name and address by himself and in his own handwriting, he has to dictate the letter on his little tape recorder, probably on a plane to Houston or someplace, and on his return have that poor, lovelorn sad-sack, Ingrid Andersen, type it out and leave it on his desk for his signature. She’ll even fold and seal the letter and lick the stamps for him. Suddenly I was sorry that I had written my letter and wanted to toss his into the trash. It was stupid of me to have contacted Daddy and Mother, stupid and self-indulgent and sentimental, and now I’d pay the price, and the price was having to open and read my father’s answer.

We were delighted to know that you are safe and in good health, although astonished to hear from you at such a vast distance. I looked up your country in the atlas and encyclopedia (I confess, I barely knew of its existence) and am learning quickly as much as I can about its rather intriguing history and culture and its perverse connection to the roots of our homegrown racial conflict. I feel almost as if you have joined the Peace Corps and have been stationed out there for two years, and I do wish it were so, for, sadly, I fear that your stay may run a bit longer, no? I do believe, however, that someday there will be a general amnesty declared for all of you who put yourselves on the line against the war and the men who ran, and continue to run, this country as if it were their own private fiefdom. I won’t go into specifics here (as I’m not confident, all indications to the contrary, that our letters are not being copied by the FBI for J. Edgar Hoover to peruse at his leisure), but there are signs, thanks to Jimmy Carter, that clemency is in the air, and not just for Agnew and Nixon this time. It may take several or perhaps five or more years for it to happen, unless, of course, someone like the idiot actor who’s currently cast as governor of California becomes president after Carter, which seems extremely unlikely to me, after what this country has been through. But who knows? I’ve guessed badly on presidential elections before. Remember Nixon vs. Humphrey?

By the time I entered the sixth grade I’d passed to the left of my father. It was either that or go to his right. His liberalism, cleansed of anger and tainted by melancholy, ill suited my temperament, and temperament always trumps ideology. He was like Adlai Stevenson. He even looked like Stevenson, a tall, angular version with the same high forehead, the same sad eyes and too-pretty mouth. He believed in non-violence because he himself was incapable of committing a violent act and, to work his will on others, frequently resorted, therefore, to manipulation. He was charming, articulate, witty, and of course intelligent and reasonable, and if you valued those qualities — and who among us did not? — then you bent your will to his. Which was all he wanted, the mere concession that he was right and that you, as a result, were wrong, implying, if you persisted in your belief and acted accordingly, that you were unintelligent, unreasonable, witless, inarticulate, and boorish. And who among us valued those qualities? He was a hard man for a wife and a female child, an only child, to resist.

Well, I did not mean to get into politics. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear from me. Despite everything, your mother and I are fine, one might even say happy, except of course for the continued absence of our beloved daughter from our daily lives. Even at our advanced age — not so old, really, still hale and hearty at 68 and 66—we’re as engaged and busy as ever, me with the clinic here in Emerson and over at the hospital, although I’ve cut back some on the latter, and with my books and a certain amount of political activism, and your mother with the house and her gardens and bonsai collections and with helping me. She continues to be, as always, my irreplaceable amanuensis. I’ve had to travel a great deal in the last year or so, more than I like, mostly lecturing in the U.S. and Western Europe, where they find my ideas on child-rearing a little more challenging than useful, perhaps, but worth listening to nonetheless.

After my father died, I hoped that I’d find among his papers the first letters I wrote to him and Mother, their only child’s letters home from Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp, a funky, pseudo-socialist, overpriced retreat for privileged kids from the suburbs. The camp was located in the Adirondacks, not many miles from my farm here in Keene Valley, as it happens. For five summers, my liberal parents shipped me off to the wilderness to be with other rich white kids with liberal parents, until I began to see through the hypocrisy and cynicism of the camp directors and was finally old enough to insist on staying home in Emerson doing volunteer work at the hospital. Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp is defunct now — not enough affluent parents in the 1980s and ’90s, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years, wanted their kids to experience the rigors of manual labor, which happened to save the camp considerably on staff, food, and maintenance costs, or learn the words to folk songs that helped us love and admire the oppressed, exploited workers of the world and ignore our own mild version of it. But I was innocent of all that then, at least at first, and for eight weeks every summer was free of my mother’s hovering, fearful shadow and my father’s constant, watchful evaluation of my behavior and development — I was always his Exhibit A, don’t forget, the visible proof of the wisdom of his theories on child-rearing. And every week for five summers, from that happy, unguarded center of consciousness, I wrote a letter home. After he died, I wanted to hold those letters in my hands and read them, to reconnect my adult self, inasmuch as I had a self, to the girl I was then. During those eight weeks at Saranac every summer, I was truly happy and as near to being my natural self as I have ever been, before or since. I never questioned then the simple fact of my own essential reality. It’s why, so many years later, when I went looking for a farm to buy, I came up here to the Adirondack Mountains and bought Shadowbrook Farm and why I have settled permanently here, hoping to find again that lost self, and finding it, cling to it. My father, as you might have guessed, did not save those long-ago letters from Saranac. Nor did my mother. Among his papers were the letters written to him over the years by the readers of his books, his colleagues, ex-students, ex-patients, state governors, cabinet officers, and presidents, and even the letters written to him by my mother from Smith when he was at Yale Medical School. But nothing from little me. I had even less hope of finding anything from me among my mother’s papers. Daddy, who’d always intended to write his memoirs, saved everything he might someday want to refer to; but there was nothing in Mother’s life, other than her relationship to Daddy, that she deemed sufficiently memorable to preserve for posterity. Predictably, when it came time for me to sift through her papers, I found every love letter and note, every Christmas and birthday card, that Daddy had written to her over the years, starting with his formal invitation to a mixer in New Haven in 1939 and ending, forty-five years later, with his final instructions to her on the dispersal of his personal library and manuscripts. But not a shred from their daughter. Before Mother died, I asked her why she and Daddy hadn’t saved my early letters from camp or any of the hundreds of letters I’d written from boarding school and college and later from the South during my Civil Rights stints and when I was organizing mothers on welfare in Cleveland, before going underground. “Well, after you were indicted and didn’t show up for the trial and disappeared,” she said, “Daddy thought it would be wise if we destroyed them. I think he showed them to Ron Briggs, his lawyer, and he advised it. To keep them from being used against you by the government or the press or whomever else might want to hurt or expose you. So we burned them. Besides, you know how protective he was of his private life. Don’t forget, Daddy was famous practically from before you were born.”

We miss you, my darling, and pray for your continued safety and well-being. Speaking of prayer, Bill Coffin was here this past weekend, and we took the liberty of sharing with him the good news of your letter (the fact of it, not the letter itself, of course). He sends his love and prayers. We continue to be as circumspect as possible in all matters regarding you. Many, many people ask after you, of course, both your friends and ours and also numerous longtime supporters from the Movement, who come by from time to time or who call and/or write me at the clinic. In any event, inasmuch as it’s somewhat unclear to us how careful you want us to be regarding your current whereabouts and circumstances, we remain utterly discreet concerning both and shall continue to do so. There will come a day, I know, in the not-too-distant future, when we shall all be together again. In the meantime, please remember that we love you.

Fame is like a drug, and when one person in a family is famous, it affects everyone else in the family, shaping and deforming it in many of the same ways an alcoholic or drug addict does. You can’t ignore fame — it colors everything — but you’re not allowed to acknowledge it openly, either. It’s why you prefer to associate with other people who are famous or who have someone famous in their family. They understand. You can trust them the way an addict trusts his fellow addicts and enjoy their company the way an alcoholic enjoys the company of drunks. They make you feel normal.

And now that we are at least in touch by mail, if there is any way we can be of help to you, anything we can send to you, medical supplies, clothing, books, or money, whatever, just tell me and I’ll have it sent at once. Do you, by the way, have access to a telephone? You could call us collect anytime, you know. Of course, that may still be a little too much exposure. In which case, your mother and I will happily rely on your letters.

With love,

Dad

BM/ia

Another two weeks went by, and then came my mother’s letter, handwritten on her embossed, peach-colored, personalized stationery. Still, such a lady. I hadn’t answered Daddy’s letter and didn’t for many months, and when I did, kept it short and impersonal, for reasons suggested, I assume, by his letter to me and for reasons I’ll likely explain later. Mother’s, however, I answered at once. Hers to me first. Then mine to her.

Dear Hannah,

I was so happy and relieved to hear from you again and to know that you’re safe and sound, even if you are in far-off darkest Africa. I can well imagine you out there, believe it or not, as it somehow seems almost like an extension of your unselfish and adventurous nature. I am sure that your generosity of spirit and lifelong compassion for the poor are contributing mightily to the welfare of the people there. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible that your social commitment can be put to even better use among the Africans than it could here at home, where there is little but opposition to change.

Mother always viewed my political commitment the same as she viewed her own, as noblesse oblige, as a modest way of acknowledging that one had only by accident acquired social and financial privilege. It wasn’t that the poor and downtrodden were exploited; they were merely less fortunate. In that way, one avoided contending with any self-incriminating guilt and felt free not to surrender one’s privilege.

I’ve been remembering so much lately, ever since your letter arrived, remembering you as a child, my blond, blue-eyed baby girl with the heart of gold who used to bring home all the lost and abandoned animals in the neighborhood, and even some that hadn’t been lost or abandoned and had to be returned to their owners, and a few years later bringing home all those bedraggled, sad-faced children, your schoolmates from Huntington Chase, “the losers,” as you once explained to me when I asked who were these children, and when you went off to Rosemary Hall how every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter break you would come home with the students who for whatever reason couldn’t be with their families for the holidays. Do you remember the girl named Anna from Jordan, or was it Turkey? I remember sitting up late one Christmas Eve with her, decorating the tree and telling her the story of each of the tree ornaments, how they were passed down from your father’s family and how every Christmas we added three new ornaments to the collection, one for each of us. I told Anna how every ornament had a special emblematic meaning in our family. You were out on a date, as I recall, and your father couldn’t get home until halfway through Christmas dinner the next day, but your friend Anna loved the stories, all those Musgrave associations going back to the early 1800’s, when the tree ornament collection first began, and she and I were able to get very close that night. And of course I’ve been remembering your college years, when political activism became so central to your life, the summers in the South working with SCLC registering black voters, when we were so worried about you that your father went South, too, and joined the marches himself, although of course he was there mainly because of his own passionate commitment to civil rights. That was the period when your principles and character had begun to change and shape ours, which leads me to say what I wanted to say at the start of this letter: that your principles and character have probably had a greater impact on my life, and I dare say on your father’s, too, than ours have had on yours. And I want you to know, Hannah, that despite the difficulties and anxieties we’ve experienced as parents in the last twelve or fifteen years, we are grateful to you for that. Many is the time when late at night, taking the measure of our lives (as we long-married couples sometimes do, my dear), your father and I have said to each other, “If it weren’t for Hannah, we’d have probably ended up a couple of country-club Republican fuddy-duddies.” That possibly sounds funny coming from me, but it’s true, and I want you to know it. We are thankful to you, Hannah, and thankful for you.

My mother’s letter, more than my father’s, brought with it a flood of memories. As she had intended, no doubt. They were not, however, the memories she had hoped to evoke. Within the structure of our family, we each from the beginning performed different, supportive functions, and our memories of the early years more clearly reflected those differences than the overall structure of the family itself. Over the years, on my farm here in Keene Valley, I’ve seen that a river or a stream running through a valley or plain or tumbling over rocks across and down the side of a mountain, like an artery or vein, brings that otherwise immobilized land to life and implies the existence, embedded like a heart, of a separate source of life. Without the Ausable River running through it, my farm would be inert, stilled, and were it not for the wind in the trees — a noise from the sky, not the earth — the land would be utterly silent. It may seem arrogant, but in my youth I sometimes felt that I was the river running through the lifeless, soundless landscape of my dry little family. Yes, I abandoned them and ran off to sea, as it were, and disappeared there for years. But I never forgot the pleasure and meaning that I took from my perceived role in the family as life-giver, as the creator of movement and change. It gave me a sense of power that I got from no other source. My mother’s letter brought all that back to me. Living up to that role had seemed my life’s destiny. An only child, I had, practically from birth, felt best defined in terms of my relation to my parents. Our family was a trihedron, a closed, three-sided, geometric form. In deserting my mother and father, running off as I did to change the world by any means necessary, I broke the thing apart, depriving all three of us of an essential aspect of our shared and individual identities. I knew at the time what my desertion would do to them, but I didn’t care then. I knew that, without my ongoing, supportive presence as one side of our three-sided family, they would break off into a pair of monads, and each of them would end up with a solitary life for which neither had the slightest preparation. Or else they would pretend that I had not left at all, that the river still ran through their pastoral valley, somewhat dwindled, perhaps, reduced to a trickle, but still there, still flowing, greening their grasses and causing their flowers to bloom and the leaves on their trees to bud and open in the sun.

Well, I almost started to cry, writing that. I may have to re-write this letter entirely if I can’t stop being so maudlin. I do want to assure you that both your father and I continue to enjoy good health — although I had my gall bladder removed last summer, which was no big deal, really, and actually helped me shed a few excess pounds, thanks to the two-month-long nonfat diet that preceded the surgery. We’re as physically active as ever, especially your father, who has taken up bicycling lately with the same discipline and energy that he devotes to everything in his life. I’m content with tennis (mostly doubles nowadays) and golf in the summer months and swimming at the club pool in the winter. We’ve kept up with most of our old friends, all of whom constantly ask after you, of course, and we even took a white-water rafting trip down the Grand Canyon this spring with Bibby and Marsh Mansfield and John Kerry and his lovely wife (he’s a young Kennedy-type liberal Democrat running for Congress in the 5th district, a man who many of us think has presidential potential, certainly more than Teddy, but don’t get me started there). We don’t travel quite as much as we used to, although your father still does a fair amount of lecturing and book promotion for his publishers around the country and abroad. The Carter administration has asked him to join several federal commissions on health and childcare and so on, but he has steadfastly refused. He does serve on a number of corporate boards now, however, which take up a lot of the time that he once devoted to political activism. But with the war in Vietnam over and the struggle for civil rights behind us, he is much less active in politics, as am I, of course. Mostly, we’re engaged now by local and environmental issues, where we inevitably end up siding with the young idealists against the greedy capitalists. So, not too much has changed, I guess!

When I was a little girl, from as early as I can remember, we had a dog who loved me the same way I loved her, a white female Samoyed named Maya. Her name suggested Daddy’s taste, surely, not Mother’s, but I didn’t think of it that way then: Maya’s name came with her, and she embodied it, just as I did mine. I had no invisible friend to keep me company, and never wished for a brother or sister. I had Maya. Before all others, I loved Maya, and knew her, and she loved and knew me. We were authentically whole individuals to each other, unique and irreplaceable. Not that I thought she was human or that I was a dog — our species difference mattered less than if we’d had different genders. We played and studied together, slept together, even talked to one another in a language that only we two understood. But Maya grew old faster than I did, and when I was eleven and she was eleven, she developed arthritis and took to snoozing in the shade under Daddy’s car. Her habit was to lie under the rear bumper after she’d gone outside in the morning and had finished her business, as if the effort of peeing in the side yard necessitated a short period of private rest and reflection afterwards. This was before I went away to Rosemary Hall, and every morning, when he was not traveling, Daddy drove me to school at Huntington Chase. His habit was to start the car and run the engine for a minute before backing it out of the driveway, to give Maya time to crawl from beneath the car. But then, inevitably, there came the day, a blustery, unseasonably warm, spring-like February morning, when Daddy turned on the ignition, waited the usual ninety seconds before putting the car into reverse, and as soon as the car began to move, we heard and felt a bump underneath, and he and I knew instantly that he had run over Maya and killed her. I had just begun to insist on being called Scout then, and Scout didn’t cry when her dog was killed by her father. Without looking up from the open schoolbook in her lap, Scout said simply, “You ran over Maya.” I remember Daddy practically leaping from the car and lifting Maya in his arms. He held her as if she were a full-length fur coat and stood by the open car door, looking back at me with a strangely puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had done. “I’m so sorry, dear,” he said. I didn’t respond. In my rapidly hardening heart I knew that he’d grown weary of her inconvenience and the demands that her old age put on us and for an instant had willfully blocked out the fact of her existence. I had no word for it yet, but I believed in the unconscious and knew that it was very powerful, especially when it came to adult behavior. He said, “I think she was already dead, though. She was very old. Old and weak. I think she must have died before we came out. Or she’d have moved from under the car the way she always does. We’ll bury her in the backyard, okay? We’ll stay home this morning, you from school and me from the office, and we’ll bury her by the pear tree. How does that sound, Hannah?” “Scout,” I said and went back to my book. “Scout,” he repeated, his voice dropping to a whisper. Mother suddenly appeared at the door behind him. “What happened to Maya?” she asked. Daddy turned and showed her, and she said, “Oh, my! Are you all right, Hannah dear?” “Scout,” I corrected. “I’m fine,” I said and looked up at her. “It’s Maya who’s dead.” “Yes, of course. Yes. Poor Maya,” she said. I turned back to my book and pretended to read, while my parents stood there by the car, my father with the dog in his arms, my mother wringing her hands uselessly, the two of them staring in hurt confusion at their cold child. Without looking at them, I said, “It’s not like Maya’s a person, you know. A human being. And we don’t have to bury her by the pear tree. We can take her to the vet’s, and they can do whatever people do with dogs that die of old age.” And then I told my father to hurry up and drive me to school or I’d be late.

Dear Hannah, how I would love to be able to hug you and sit face to face with you and talk the night through. I wonder if it’s possible for us to visit you there. I understand, of course, that you can’t visit us here, but maybe we could fly over to Africa and be with you for a few days. It would mean so much to us if we could all be together again, however briefly. I would love to see where you work, meet your friends (especially this mysterious new man-friend you mentioned), and travel about the countryside some and “see the sights.” Neither your father nor I have been to Africa before, you know, although your father keeps saying he wants to go to South Africa and support the anti-apartheid movement in some fashion that’s appropriate to his profession and his public standing here in the U.S., probably by forming an international organization of physicians opposed to apartheid. It’s possible that we could come first to Liberia for a few days or a week and then fly on to South Africa. What would you think of that? Naturally, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way and would stay in a nearby hotel, rent a car, and so on, and would amuse ourselves quite capably while you were at work. We could hire a local guide and go sightseeing, then meet up with you afterwards. The very idea of it is exciting to me, and when I suggested it to your father, he was thrilled.

It amazed and disappointed me to see the ease with which my parents, simply by presenting themselves to me, could turn me into that cold child again. I read their letters and was transformed into Scout. Here I was, a woman in her middle-thirties who had accumulated a lifetime’s experiences that her parents would never even know about, let alone experience for themselves; yet, in their presence, even in as disembodied a form as an exchange of letters, my world shrank to the size and shape of theirs, as if I’d never left it.

I’ve gone on and on, especially for a letter that I’m not one hundred percent sure will even get to you, and so I really should close now. I love you, darling, and miss you terribly. Please write back soon.

All my love,

Mother

I didn’t take the time to refold her letter and put it back into the envelope, before I was writing my answer. My hand trembled as the words scrawled across the page, and when I had finished, I did not bother to reread what I had written. I immediately sealed it, slapped on an airmail stamp — one of those famous Liberian chimpanzee stamps printed in small editions for foreign collectors — and headed straight for the little neighborhood post office, where, after a ten-minute wait for the postmistress to return from lunch, I handed it to her.

Dear Mother,

The last thing I need is for you and Daddy to show up at my door! How can you even think of doing such a thing! I’m not a post-deb taking her Grand Tour in Africa and I’m not in the Peace Corps, thank you very much, Daddy. Please understand that my situation vis-à-vis the government of Liberia and the U.S. State Department is extremely delicate, and I’m more or less free to stay here solely by their leave. And I mean that, more or less free. And by their leave. The American authorities pretty much run the show in Liberia and they know who I am. I’m no longer underground, but as you surely must remember, Mother, there is still a federal warrant for my arrest that could be acted on any time they wish, for any reason they wish. Relations between the two countries are conducted not as between equals but rather on the basis of what’s in the best interests of the U.S. At the moment, because of an acute shortage here of medically trained personnel, it’s in the interests of the U.S. State Department and probably a few congressmen from New York and New Jersey to allow me, even with my low-level skills, to be employed basically as a lab assistant for an academic front financed by some huge, politically connected pharmaceutical company. The university is doing research that requires blood from chimpanzees, an animal that happens to be abundant in this region, research that, if successful, will some day produce the patent for an anti-hepatitis drug that will generate enormous profits for the pharmaceutical company sponsoring the research and in the end will make the shareholders of the company obscenely rich. Thus the complicity of the U.S. government and thus their interest in having me employed here. (I can’t believe I have to explain this to you!)

Mother viewed people as either lucky or unlucky, Daddy saw them as overprivileged and underprivileged. He failed to note, however, that the underprivileged among us could not be eliminated without first doing away with the overprivileged. Nonetheless, in my parents’ dreamy, meandering, hand-holding march towards universal justice — where the downtrodden would be uplifted and the sick and the starving healed and fed — Daddy was a step ahead of Mother. He was a logical man, a decent and kind man, but a liberal. He believed that no one’s property need be confiscated and redistributed on the long march towards universal justice and that none of the overprivileged would have to be lined up against a wall and shot and none of the underprivileged would have to be deliberately sacrificed along the way. Thus he saw no reason why, for the duration of the Revolution and for as long as desired thereafter by him and his descendants, his own pocket could not stay filled.

Besides, I know that the American embassy has someone watching me just to be sure that I’m not engaged in any anti-American political activity. The Liberians probably watch me, too. In spite of Liberia’s willingness to do the U.S.’s bidding in Africa by turning itself into a CIA listening post and its one airport into a B-52 base, this is not an especially stable country. There are many groups and individuals who would love to see the present pro-American government overthrown and replaced by one allied with the Soviet Union or China or God forbid with the non-aligned nations of the Third World. As a result people like me (who are not tourists or Peace Corps volunteers) are viewed with suspicion by all sides. It’s as if I’m under house arrest, Mother, and if you and Daddy or anyone else from my past suddenly shows up here calling attention to yourselves by hiring guides and poking around the country “sightseeing” (and you know what Daddy’s like when he travels), I’ll very likely be extradited to the U.S. and sent to prison for a long, long time.

I’m no longer the same person I was when this exchange between me and my parents took place. But I can see how, just in telling you about the exchange, I revert, not quite to my childhood state of mind, but to adolescence, or even to pre-adolescence. Both my parents are long dead now. In the intervening years I’ve been married, widowed, and borne three children; I’ve perpetrated a hundred large and small betrayals and abandonments; perfect lovers have been replaced by other perfect lovers, men have replaced women and boys have replaced men, and Africans have replaced Americans, who have been replaced by Americans again; chimpanzees in cages have replaced a childhood pet, and Border collies, free-roaming farm dogs, have replaced the chimpanzees; and I’ve gone on alone, untouched, undeterred, unbetrothed, a woman whose essence is a white shadow, a spirit of the river, one of those mammi wattas. Yet despite all that, today, in telling of a brief correspondence back in 1977 between me and my parents, and in the process bringing my father and mother wholly back to my mind, the person I was so long ago returns to me, invades and inhabits me.

In writing to you and Daddy I took a small chance that I’d be compromising my position here slightly. All I wanted was an intimate exchange of family and personal news so that we might not feel so estranged from one another. But after reading Daddy’s letter and now yours, believe me I feel more estranged than ever. I know you mean well, and no doubt Daddy does, too, but please, please, please, try to respect the difficulty of my position here and my feeble attempt in spite of it to reach out to you. In very different ways the two of you seem unable to know me as a person. Daddy’s still addressing me as if I were one of his young, awestruck interns, and you act like I’m a troubled teenager emerging from her rebellious years. I think it would be better — since we now know that all three of us are still alive and well — if we didn’t try to communicate any farther, at least for the time being. I’m sorry to have to write that to you, but I see no useful or safe alternative.

Love,

Hannah

But there came a time several months later, after my marriage to Woodrow, when I first learned that I was pregnant, and I felt a powerful need to break my silence once again. I wanted my father to know, of course. Not of the marriage, necessarily — though I had no reason to keep it a secret. I wanted him to know of my pregnancy. I wanted both my parents to know that they were going to be grandparents. I was also motivated by a desire to shock my father, perhaps to frighten and hurt him. That was Scout operating.

Daddy,

I’m writing to tell you that I am married and ten weeks pregnant with my husband’s child. You may inscribe in the big old Musgrave family Bible that my husband’s name is Woodrow Sundiata. He is 43 years old and is the Deputy Minister of Public Health for the Republic of Liberia. We were married in Monrovia by a Methodist minister on September 12th 1977. Witnesses were Hon. William Tolbert, the President of Liberia, and my husband’s close friend and colleague, Hon. Charles Taylor, who is the Minister of Public Services. Rest assured that I’m healthy and receiving the best possible medical care here. I will let you know when there is anything more to tell you about my ongoing life. Mother keeps me well informed as to your ongoing life, so you need not answer this.

Love,

Hannah

My father did not write back. Nor did my mother.

YOU THINK IT’S never going to end. First the fucking. Then the pregnancy. The delivery. The infancy. And then it actually ends.

It’s not that any one of them goes on forever — some, like the fucking and the actual birthing part, last only minutes or hours. But all of them, while they last, seem without beginning or end, and whatever stage of the two-year-long process you’re enduring, from fucking to the end of infancy, it seems to be all there is. And I went through it twice, overlapping — first with Dillon; then, just as I finished nursing him, with the twins, Paul and William.

First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it’s shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I’m the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature’s sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.

Over and over, the same cycle, month after month. This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she’s a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.

THIS IS THE END of my history, I thought. My life has become a series of endless moments. There’s no more story to it. I got pregnant right away, probably the first time Woodrow and I fucked. Sorry about the language, but I can’t call it “made love.” I don’t think Woodrow and I ever actually made love, although, Lord knows, we fucked constantly, at least in the early years we did. At his urging always, never mine. From the very beginning, Woodrow’s way of making love to me, and consequently my way of making love to him, was chilled, methodical, obligatory, and, even when slow and drawn out, brutal. It was the same for years as it was on our “honeymoon” at the posh beach house south, along the coast, loaned to Woodrow by Liberia’s friendly World Bank representative.

That first night, still half-drunk from the reception champagne — ten iced cases of Dom Perignon delivered to the reception by the president himself — and exhausted and confused by the crowd of people I barely knew, and weirdly, unexpectedly desolated by loneliness, I went straight to the bedroom that looked out on the moonlit beach and crashing surf beyond, doused the lights, undressed, and literally tossed myself onto the enormous, king-size bed and stared up at the slow-moving, overhead fan, and said to myself, Thank God that’s over!

And then thought, But, Lord, Lord, what have I done?

I could hear Woodrow where I had just left him, prowling proudly through the house, patting the leather-upholstered furniture imported from Miami and checking out the brand-new, stainless-steel kitchen appliances from Sweden, opening liquor cabinets and linen closets with undisguised glee and rising dreams of gluttony. He was delirious with happiness. And because I knew the reason he was happy, I hated him. And because I was the reason, the agent for his happiness, I hated myself, too. He had a Christian wife at last, and better yet, a white Christian wife, and better still, a white Christian American wife!

His marriage ceremony, to be sure, had been a little unusual — his bride had invited to the wedding no family members or friends of her own to raise toasts and share in the hosting or to present her, and had offered him no dowry, not even a single cow or a meager plot of arable land; she had brought him and his family nothing. I had arrived like a captured bride, booty. Nonetheless, an ordained Christian minister had presided over the nuptials, and at the reception in the grand ballroom of the Mesurado Point Hotel, where the air conditioning and sound system broke down fifteen minutes into the party, Woodrow Sundiata had been visibly honored by all the elite members of government in attendance and by the chief representatives of business, foreign and domestic. Woodrow’s people had come in from Fuama village, nearly thirty of them in elaborately feathered and wooden tribal costumes, carried to Monrovia in the back of a flatbed truck, and had danced, drummed, and sung for him and his bride and their guests all the hot afternoon long, and his father and mother had declared publically (although they’d had to do it in their native language rather than in English, and no one seemed to hear them) their pleasure and pride in this marriage, or so I was told by Woodrow, and there had been many florid toasts and speeches from members of the government. Not from the president himself, of course, but several of the more lugubrious ministers spoke. And despite my shortcomings, because of what I was rather than who I was, there was now a certain glamor to Woodrow and an almost enviable modernity. Suddenly Woodrow Sundiata possessed visible evidence that he was a city man, a worthy member of the Liberian elite, clearly a man fit for the president’s inner circle. If he had married a Liberian woman instead, even a descendant of the old African-American ruling class, he would have remained the same little, slightly boring, American-educated bureaucrat, the clever, but not too clever, missionary-boy from the bush. (By now I saw how he looked to others and was beginning to look to me, as well.) With me as his wife, however, Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him access to power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite. Women flirted with Woodrow now, showed him their bare brown shoulders, large bosoms and butts, their big, bright teeth. Men sidled up to him and spoke confidentially to him of deals and possibilities and newly conceived alliances, then reported back to their brethren: Hey, my brother, you see? Even the Belgian representative of the World Bank has given the man the use of his private, very lovely, very expensive beach house for a honeymoon cottage. He’s now a man to keep track of. Woodrow Sundiata sleeps on fine Belgian cotton sheets tonight. The sub-minister sleeps with a white American woman tonight and every night. And she will connect him to the big American and European world out there beyond Liberia where, mysteriously, people get quickly rich and end up with power over other people’s lives and livelihoods. Woodrow Sundiata, my brothers, has become a man to deal with.

He strolled into the darkened bedroom, where I lay splayed on the bed in my underwear, lost in morbid thoughts of having somehow lost my history, of being trapped inside an endless moment. I couldn’t explain it to myself. I wondered if, when my politics disappeared, my only hope for an autobiographical narrative had disappeared, too. It had happened piecemeal, in small erasures, going back to New Bedford and barely noticed at the time, and now I seemed to be living outside of time, without cause or consequence.

Woodrow’s sudden presence in the bedroom hadn’t interrupted my thoughts. I was barely conscious of my brand-new husband’s silent body, even though I could smell him — alcohol, cigarettes, sweat — and in the half-light could see him. As if I were alone, I rolled off the bed, undid my bra and took off my panties, and slid under the covers.

“Ah, I see that you’re ready for me,” Woodrow said. He had already shed his jacket, shirt, and shoes and now slowly unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers and shorts, stepping from them with knees high as if from a tub. He was erect and surprisingly large sized. This was the first time I had seen him naked. He still wore his socks and garters, like a man in an old-fashioned pornographic film.

I remember asking him if he had a condom.

“A condom? You’re not serious,” he said and gave one of his British chuckles, a low, belching sound that came from his chest. He spotted a candle on the dresser and matches and sashayed over and lit it. The long shadows of the blades of the overhead fan passed slowly across his dark brown chest and shoulders. “Ah, that’s better!” he pronounced. In the flickering candlelight his erection gave me a good-natured, straight-armed salute.

“Of course I’m serious,” I said to him. “I don’t want to get pregnant. Not yet, anyhow. Not this week, or even this year, maybe. Woodrow, I’m still absorbing the idea of being married, for God’s sake.” I pulled the cool outer sheet to my neck and tried to make a winsome smile. “One thing at a time, Woodrow. Okay?”

He laughed. “Hannah darling, this is a matter in which you must do as I say.” His erection, I noticed, was starting to droop, as if fatigued.

“Oh, come on. Now you’re not serious.”

“Decidedly so,” he said. His face darkened. He reached forward and with one hand grabbed my wrist and with the other whipped the covers away, and, lo, his erection had returned and was again at full salute.

Oh, dear, oh, dear, I thought in my mother’s voice, and said in mine, “Wait, Woodrow, please! You don’t have a condom. You didn’t bring any condoms? Let me at least…” I began, with no idea how the sentence should end, thinking that maybe there was something I could do to myself that would protect me from being made pregnant. Why hadn’t I anticipated this, bought a box of condoms myself in Monrovia? Surely they sold them at the Mesurado Point for the American and European men who were afraid of disease as much as I was afraid at this moment of becoming pregnant. I had thought of it, actually, many times, in sober anticipation of this very night, my wedding night, when for the first time Woodrow and I would make love, but each time had realized that in Liberia the women who bought condoms were likely to be prostitutes, so had put the idea out of my mind, until now, when it was too late. Too late. Too late, as Woodrow forced my legs apart with one knee between them and, scowling, spit on his hand and glistened up his cock, and then, too late, he was on me and in me.

I remember the fact of it, but not much more, because after that first time it was always the same with Woodrow, who never seemed to lose his erection and rarely came. He merely grew weary or sleepy or bored or had to leave for an appointment elsewhere, and that’s what finally, after long hours of it, stopped him. He could not follow a natural arc of rising passion — the drive toward orgasm, and the post-climactic, floating lassitude afterwards. No beginning, middle, or end for him, and consequently, none for me, either. Not once in all those years. I don’t think he knew that such an arc was possible or even desirable. He thought this was good sex, good for him, good for me, and was proud of his ability to keep us grinding away for hours like a pair of millstones groaning on wobbly axes, the thump of the bedstead bumping against the wall like a drum beaten by a dumb, arrhythmic drummer, on and on, making me first sore and then numb, until before long I was outside my body, floating somewhere overhead, thinking penny thoughts and making lists and averting my gaze from the two of us humping below like a pair of mechanical dolls that never finished what they’d begun but only ran slowly down until they finally stopped, batteries drained, and were still and silent.

And so ended one endless moment, the fucking, and another took its place. In a matter of weeks, Woodrow had come back at least once, and I was definitely pregnant, and in June of 1978 I bore Woodrow his first son, whom he named Dillon, after his mother’s father, to affirm the lad’s Americo heritage, and Tambu, after his father’s father, to maintain his lineage connection to the Kpelle, and Sundiata, to declare to all the world his own proud paternity.

Dillon Tambu Sundiata. Later the boy-soldier known as Worse-than-Death.

A beautiful baby. Everyone said so. Even I could see it, although I couldn’t at the same time keep from seeing my baby as an alien, a member of a different, non-human species. Not sub-human, but different and possibly superior.

The truth is, I wasn’t as bad a mother as I probably sound now, looking back all these years later and judging my past self from this distance. I’m less confused and turbulent now than I was then. But with regard to myself, less forgiving. When my sons were babies and little boys, certainly when they were newborn infants, I was diligent and careful and nurturing in all the ways of a good mother. No one faulted me then and no one can now, not even I. But nonetheless I was detached from my babies, detached in an unusual way, and I know this, and knew it at the time, too, because, with regard to my chimps, I was not detached and could tell the difference. I could look into the round, brown eyes of the chimps, even the eyes of the large and often fierce adult males, and could see all the way to their souls, it seemed, deep into the mystery of their essential being. But never, not once, could I see that deeply into the blue eyes of my sons.

I tried. I would wake in the middle of the night ashamed and in distress and would slip from bed and make my way to the crib and gently wake and lift Dillon in my arms. Sitting by the window, while the moonlight washed over my baby’s face, I gazed unblinking into his eyes and tried to see him, truly see him, for what and who he was, a person separate from me and yet a part of me, seen, known, honored, and protected; and every time, my gaze came bouncing back, as if reflected off a hard, shiny, opaque surface. I was like Narcissus staring into the pool.

It wasn’t his physical appearance that made Dillon seem alien to me — he was perfectly formed, straight boned and firmly muscled, even as an infant, and his skin was reddish, almost copper colored, and burnished, and his tiny face glowed in sunlight and shone in moonlight. His eyes were dark blue, almost black, though they later turned bright blue, like my father’s sapphire eyes. His head was large and round, like Woodrow’s, and symmetrical as a piece of fruit. His thin hair, the color of fresh-brewed coffee, was like a lace cap, and his tiny ears were perfect whorls, natural wonders, as if carved out of soft stone by trickling water, and I loved to touch them. He was a beautiful baby. I thrilled to his pomegranate smell and used to nuzzle him with my nose. And the quality of his attention — from the moment I first took him from the hospital nurse’s arms into mine and lifted his face to my breast and he began to suck — was refined and as selective and focused as a camera’s on the world that surrounded him: first the nipple of my breast, then my face, my eyes and mouth, and behind me Woodrow’s proudly smiling face, eyes, and mouth, the room, the light streaming through the open window, the noise of children playing outside, cars, buses, and trucks passing on the street.

But he didn’t seem to belong to the same species as we did, Woodrow and I. How could this infant, this stranger have emerged from my body? I kept wondering. The nine months of pregnancy had seemed like nine years to me, interminable, and though for the better part of it I had felt him moving inside me, shifting positions down there in the watery darkness, despite that long familiarity with him, when he was finally born he seemed to have arrived from another planet. His physical appearance kept surprising me, as if some other woman had borne him. Because he was male, I suppose, and had a penis attached to his body, and because his skin color and the texture of his hair were so unlike mine. He must be another mother’s child, I kept thinking.

You were the cutest little pink thing when you were a baby, with silky straight blond hair that I couldn’t bear to have cut until you were nearly six and your father insisted on it, and then I cried and cried, although for some reason you seemed extremely pleased to have it cut short. When my boys were infants, my mother’s voice in my ears plagued me. It was as if she were always standing just behind me, watching and commenting constantly while I washed, fed, and clothed my babies, brought them into the living room to show the guests, took them out in the carriage, held them up for the praise of strangers and friends alike, for Liberians love to make a fuss over newborns, and their attentions made me feel less like an alien myself.

It was only when Dillon was a few months old, and I could place him in the daily and nightly care of Jeannine, Woodrow’s eighteen-year-old niece who had come in from Fuama to keep house for us during my pregnancy and got promoted to governess, that my mother’s voice began to fade and eventually go silent. I no longer saw myself through her eyes and instead began once again to see myself through my father’s, which, while not ideal psychologically or otherwise, was preferable. It was, at least, familiar.

Then in short order I was pregnant again, another nine endless months of it. Pregnant with twins this time — although I didn’t know that I was carrying two babies until they had already arrived on the planet — and, as there were two of them, a matched, identical pair, they turned out to be even more alien to me than Dillon had been. And here came my mother’s voice again: Twins! They’re so adorable, like peas in a pod. I always wanted twins, you know. Especially when you were a baby. You were so cute and loveable that I wanted two of you. But you have to be careful and not name them similarly, calling them Florence and Francis, for example, or Ronald and Donald; and don’t dress them alike, or else they’ll have trouble separating from each other when they get older. Your father, you know, wrote about that in his second book, which, by the way, you have never read, have you? I don’t know why, Hannah, you refuse to read your father’s books, especially now that you have children of your own …

We named them William and Paul — William after Woodrow’s elder brother; Paul after Woodrow’s uncle, his father’s elder brother — and gave them both the same middle name, Musgrave, to indicate their mother’s lineage, with the last name Sundiata, to claim their father’s. It was William Musgrave Sundiata and Paul Musgrave Sundiata who became, years later, the boy-soldiers known as Fly and Demonology.

BUT I WASN’T going to get into that. Not now, anyhow. Not until I can first bring you to a sympathetic understanding of my sons and what happened to them and can keep you from being frightened of them. Just as there are certain things about me that I won’t reveal to you until your understanding of what happened to me early on and later is such that you won’t be afraid of me, either, and won’t judge me as you would a stranger. Like my sons, I, too, was once upon a time an infant, a child, and adolescent, all in a particular time and place with most particular parents; and like Fly, Demonology, and Worse-than-Death, I, too, was shaped, formed, and deformed by time, place, and parents — although, in the case of my sons, time and place were more influential in the creation of their fates than were parents. For me, probably, it was the opposite.

Even so, my hope and my intention is that you know us and not be afraid of us.

GIVING BIRTH, like being pregnant, like fucking, did remake me, just as everyone who had been through it themselves said it would. But it didn’t make me more of a woman, as promised. It made me more of a stranger to myself. I went from being a whale with a porpoise in her gut to an emptied snakeskin, a wrapper. Until slowly, with the baby and one year later the twins finally out of me, I filled again, swollen now with blood and milk that spilled, dripped, trickled, and sometimes squirted from my body, and I realized that I had become a leaking food source, a supply ship. Depersonalized. Objectified. My body a vessel no longer connected to my past self.

I was not a natural mother. Was not born programmed like most women with a mother’s instincts and abilities. Had to be taught nearly everything by Jeannine, sweet-natured Jeannine with the round, brown face and puffy cheeks, whose kindness and endless patience in those first years of my marriage astonished me. It’s almost as if I was, and still am, missing the gene. There are things that I am naturally good at, skills that seem to have been part of my DNA — math, mechanics, linear thinking, classification, etc. — right-brain stuff that we usually associate with males and that early on got me my father’s favor, my teachers’ and later my professors’ wary admiration and, from boyfriends who needed help with their calculus homework and tuning their cars, mistrust and envy. Women, including my mother, and other girls worried about me or merely felt superior. But thanks to my father’s constant delight and his proud endorsement of these tendencies and skills, I never minded my mother’s worry or my girlfriends’ superior airs or the wariness of the males. I courted it.

As a girl I was a full-blown tomboy. Wouldn’t wear a bathing suit top to cover my flat chest until I was almost thirteen and no longer flat. Took Scout for my nickname when I was ten, and from fourth grade until eighth insisted on being called by it and would not answer to Hannah, except when it was used in anger by my mother or father. Otherwise, it was, “Hannah? Who’s Hannah? I’m Scout.” Entered science fairs in grade school, always the only girl to win a prize. A fact that in the 1950s was worth an article in the Boston Globe, which Daddy clipped, framed, and hung in his office like one of his degrees. Built a tree house in our backyard with leftover scrap lumber the summer Mother had her garden house put up. Won a Westinghouse scholarship to study engineering at Brandeis (another article in the Globe), then switched to pre-med in order to impress a biology professor I’d developed a sophomore crush on. In the Movement ran and kept patched together with tape, spit, and baling wire the old Multilith presses we used then, when everyone else, especially the men, were or pretended to be hopelessly inept, and later in Weather was one of the half-dozen members nationwide who could be trusted not to blow themselves up while making bombs from dynamite and blasting caps stolen from construction sites. Though was never trusted to place and set the bomb itself, a job reserved for only the more charismatic comrades, so had to read about it in the papers afterwards if it went off successfully. And still had the gene-firing proteins in Africa whenever I needed them — building cages for the chimps, devising and installing a cistern for the house, replacing the busted radiator on the Mercedes with a radiator from a wrecked jeep when Satterthwaite couldn’t find anyone in Monrovia clever enough to do it. And years later still had it, the right brain clicking away, when I took over the farm here in Keene Valley, impressing Anthea and the girls and the local men with my ability to tune and maintain the vehicles, build stockades and fences, fix the furnace, and build a windmill from scratch. Talked trucks, tractors, guns, and plumbing with the guys down at the Ausable Inn, packing back brewskies with the boys while a football game raged from the TV at the end of the bar. And whenever one of them, drunk and reckless, put the moves on me in the parking lot, I’d punch him lightly on the shoulder and say, “Frank, for Christ’s sake, keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t you know I’m one of the guys?” And Frank or Pat or Chuck would laugh and shuffle his feet on the packed snow and say, “Sorry, Hannah, guess I forgot, heh-heh-heh,” and hoped like hell it never gets out that he got so drunk one night down at the Ausable Inn that he tried to fuck Hannah Musgrave, who is white haired and must be sixty and is probably a lesbian anyhow. But it does me no harm to have them think that I’m different from other women, that I’m not like their wives and daughters, that I’m Scout, a tomboy grown old. Safe.

IN AFRICA, especially early on, when the boys were babies and for many years afterwards, I had no such ruse to protect me. Especially around home, where my natural abilities were inappropriate or at best useless — except, perhaps, to the chimps, although even there Woodrow wanted me to delegate the physical work, give it to the native men and women who worked at the lab. My proper job, other than to function as Woodrow’s consort, was to supervise the household staff and to mother and raise his sons as little Americo-Liberian gentlemen. Consort and chief of staff were mindless tasks that I could handle in my sleep, practically. Turning myself into mommy was something else, however.

It was, as I said, Jeannine who taught me what I needed to know to get by. She showed me how to fake it as a mother, and when I couldn’t fake it, substituted for me altogether. She was little more than a child herself, barely eighteen years old and freshly arrived from the village of Fuama, not quite literate and, under her uncle the deputy minister’s tutelage and protection, eager to become a Christian. She had been part of the family dance troupe that performed at our wedding, and afterwards, at Woodrow’s request, although he didn’t tell me at the time, had remained in town and moved into his house, now my house, to cook and clean for us.

The house itself, up to now strictly a bachelor’s quarters, was owned by the government, one of a dozen or so that had originally been private residences built or bought by foreigners who’d afterwards moved up the housing scale or gotten themselves assigned to some other African capital. The houses had been acquired over the years by the government to dispense as favors or small rewards to ministers and VIPs and came with a staff, a car, and a driver, all paid for out of the national treasury. The residence assigned to Woodrow was a sprawling, white, single-story structure with a wide front porch and floor-to-ceiling windows, high ceilings, and large airy rooms — an American-style residence probably built in the 1940s, the sort of house a small-town southern lawyer would have built for himself. Except, that is, for the eight-foot-high, cinder-block wall that surrounded it and the heavy iron gate and Woodrow’s pair of huge, black, drooling Rottweilers roaming the grounds.

There was a small patio at the side of the house, where we often ate dinner, and a master bedroom fit for a Jamaican plantation owner, with a four-poster bed and private bath and French doors that opened onto a flower garden and a second patio, where Woodrow and I sometimes took our breakfast. There was a small bedroom that would soon become the nursery, a bathroom, and two additional bedrooms, and behind the house a servants’ quarters and a laundry and utility room. There was even a gardener’s shack for Kuyo, the part-time yardman — another of Woodrow’s close relations come in from the country for the support and protection of his cousin, uncle, nephew, or half-brother — the deputy minister. I was discovering the age-old Liberian system of exchange between the powerful and the powerless, a form of indentured servitude that more closely resembled slavery than nepotism.

The house had been outfitted with modern plumbing back when the city water system still worked, but the municipal pumping station and delivery pipes and valves had long since fallen into disrepair. Consequently, faucets ran only in a trickle and for a few hours a day, while outside on the street water poured from broken mains day and night. We had electricity and all the usual appliances, a TV, too, but even in those days, when the country was still relatively stable, we rarely had power for longer than three or fours hours a day, usually in the mornings, and relied on kerosene lamps and candles at night, and more often than not we were obliged to cook with charcoal on a backyard tin stove.

To me, it was a luxurious setting, however, almost embarrassingly so, compared with how most Liberians lived. A comparison, incidentally, that I rarely had the opportunity to make — because of Woodrow’s insistence that I account for every minute of my day when he wasn’t in attendance and his use of Satterthwaite as a keeper and spy as much as a driver and bodyguard and his refusal to allow me to go anywhere in the city alone. “You must not forget who you are,” he insisted. “Please, Hannah darling. The wife of a high government official must not be confused with a Peace Corps volunteer.”

The truth is, I had forgotten who I was. That’s what marriage and motherhood had given me: the upshot of the fucking, the pregnancy, the birthing of my sons and their infancy was that I wasn’t more of a woman or less; I was a different woman. You probably think of me as strong and independent, and I believe that I am — now. I was strong and independent when I was young, too, back before I came to Africa. But in the years between? No. Emphatically no. I was different then.

My weakness and dependence on Woodrow and other men — and in time I’ll tell you about them, too — caused terrible pain and harm to many people. To my sons, especially. Who was that terrible woman, and how do I deal with her now? And the chimpanzees, my dreamers — I need to know who betrayed and abandoned them, too. Was it Hannah darling? Was it Dawn Carrington? Was it Scout? Whom must I hate? And what will be the sentence for her sins and crimes?

IT WAS JEANNINE who taught me how to buy groceries at the Saturday market at Congo Square, and how to cook Liberian style with palm oil, peanut, or groundnut oil, with coconut milk and plenty of hot peppers. There wasn’t much meat available that wasn’t tinned — plenty of fresh fish, however, and chicken, and occasionally pork and goat and stringy chunks of beef. I knew all too well, of course, the local habit of eating chimps and monkeys, bush meat — an atavistic throwback to cannibalism, as far as I was concerned. But it wasn’t merely the country people in the distant villages who relished it and offered it up as a special tribute to distinguished guests. The townspeople loved bush meat, too, and considered roasted ape a luxury item, a delicacy. By then Woodrow had come to accept my abhorrence of bush meat — crediting it to my affection for the chimps at the lab and later the sanctuary and perhaps a white American fastidiousness — and ate it himself only when he dined out without me. “It’s actually very sweet,” he said. “Cooked correctly, it’s better than any pork, and no kind of mutton compares. In fact, in Sierra Leone that’s what they call it, ‘spring mutton.’ ”

No, at home we ate jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls. With Jeannine at my elbow, I learned to cook them all. We ate plantains, breadfruit, yams, gari, or cassava mixed with fish or chicken, one-dish meals mostly. Desserts were fruit salads, banana fritters, tapioca pudding, and shredded coconut balls. The gorgeously colored vegetables and plump fruits were always fresh, firm, a pleasure to cut, chop, mix, fry, roast, steam, and chill.

This was a whole new enterprise for me, who’d never paid much attention to cooking or even to shopping for food. Food had always been fuel, already there on the table before me, or if not, then prepared as quickly and easily as possible, and eaten the same way. Nourishment, that’s all. Now, however, it had become an intricately linked sequence of deeply satisfying, sensual, spiritual, and social rituals. In the past, I’d never really cooked, not even when keeping house back in Cleveland, where the preparation and consumption of food and cleanup afterwards were rigorously communal, or in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina — Carol had done all the cooking, actually. I did the cleanup, like a good husband. In the months when I was living alone at the lab compound I’d depended on expensive, Western-style groceries and imported canned goods purchased at what passed for a supermarket, Dot-Dot’s, on Ashmun Street. But after Woodrow and I were married, the marketing became a Wednesday- and Saturday-morning ritual for me and Jeannine that continued for years, long after I was capable of handling it alone. It was one of the few occasions when Jeannine and I stood on more or less equal footing, when I was less than the mistress of the house and she more than my servant. For a long time I didn’t know how much more, and back then, especially when we shopped for food, I thought we were friends.

I remember walking with her to the square, enjoying the beauty of the crowd, the thronged streets, and then, looking for a particular herb or spice, taking side trips down the alleys and side streets to the shops of the poor. I remember putting my face and hands forward in gestures learned from watching Jeannine haggle and gossip with the shopkeepers in the market, who were all women, many of them from outlying villages, at first feeling foolish for it, awkward, inauthentic, somehow condescending, until it became natural and almost intimate.

But how I wished I were invisible. My white skin was a noise, loud and self-proclaiming. It declared my caste and status for all to hear. And I was both hated and envied for it. For a long while, whenever we went to market, hard looks and cold shoulders greeted me. Then, when it became known among the higglers and shopkeepers that I was Deputy Minister Sundiata’s wife, visibly pregnant by the minister, and was in Liberia to stay, coldness alternated with servile deference, as the shopkeepers bypassed the locals in line to serve me ahead of the others. One or the other, hatred or envy, rejection or servility, would have been endurable, on some occasions maybe even desirable, but coming together as they did, they were like a sty in the eye — a cause of pain, but one’s only means of seeing the world.

And it stayed painful, even after I had become a fixture in town, no longer exotic with my brown babies in tow or pushing a carriage. As soon as he could walk, Dillon went ahead hand in hand with Jeannine, while the twins, magical beings to Liberians, lay tucked into the carriage that I insisted on pushing, after the usual argument with Satterthwaite, who was still under strict orders to drive us in the car and wait while we did the shopping. I carried the money, and though Jeannine translated for me — for I understood almost no Liberian English then and even after years of hearing it daily got lost whenever native speakers wanted me lost — and did most of the actual bargaining, I did all the numbers, until Dillon decided he wanted to do the calculations himself. And I let him, a proud mamma, for it was his special gift. Early on, it had become obvious that Dillon was precocious with numbers. Good at math, as they say. Though not yet two and still clinging to Jeannine’s hip, he would call out numbers for no apparent reason, “Seventeen! Twelve! Twenty-nine!” And because neither Jeannine nor I could determine the source or meaning of his numbers, we assumed they were random bits, numbers overheard from Woodrow talking on the telephone to someone in the ministry, just meaningless sound scraps that he was repeating for the simple pleasure of it. Until one day I happened to notice that, just before calling out a new number, he would stare intently at the number plate of a nearby parked car, and it dawned on me that he was calling out the sum of the numbers on the plate. He shouted, “Seventeen!” and I looked where he had been looking and added the numbers, five plus seven plus two plus three—seventeen.

It was the first recognizable sign of his precocity, of his love of numbers and preternatural skill at using them, and it was how he quickly became his father’s favorite. “The boy is a genius at math,” Woodrow proudly declared to anyone who asked after his sons. “Like me.” The twins, however, Woodrow regarded with a strangely anxious wariness, as if the two boys knew things that mere mortals didn’t and perhaps shouldn’t know. Which in a sense was true, because each twin knew another person better and deeper than any of us ever could. It’s dangerous, that much knowledge. They understood each other’s breathing and cries in the night and were able quickly, silently, to comfort each other and developed their own language long before expressing any willingness to use ours. It separated them from the rest of us, and it bound them together. The twins were like the chimps. Dillon, too — inasmuch as he had an ability that we did not, an ability that might be dangerous.

At first, my daily routine was surprisingly liberating to me. Then oppressive. Never before had I been so free, yet never so confined and controlled by others. Controlled by Woodrow, of course, and to some small degree by Satterthwaite, whose responsibility was to be on call for any driving I might require. At Woodrow’s direction, Satterthwaite was to leave the office whenever I wanted or needed to go out, whether to the doctor, the market, or to the stores downtown, where there was very little on the shelves that I wanted or needed anyhow. As for our past indiscretion, Satterthwaite’s cynicism matched mine. An exciting risk, that’s all it had been. The same for him as for me. We’d chanced it, and we’d gotten away with it, and that moment, that exact degree of risk, would never appear again. The danger would always be greater and therefore not worth it, or less, and therefore not exciting enough. He remained a boy who was employed by my husband, and I was his boss’s wife and practically middle aged. Without once having to say it, we both knew the same thing.

I was controlled, too, by the people who worked for Woodrow at home — the yardman, Kuyo, until he left that job to work full time at the sanctuary; the many village girls and boys who came and went, working for a season or two and sometimes longer as housekeepers, laundresses, cooks, and drivers; and Jeannine, who was at first by herself the cook and maid and then became the nanny — all of whom actually answered to Woodrow, not to me, and knew their jobs better than I anyhow and didn’t need any supervision. So I made lists, menus, schedules; tried, ineptly, to help with the flower gardens; and shopped; and arranged entertainments — dinners, teas, lunches — for Woodrow’s colleagues and friends among the Americo-Liberian elite. I’d ended up with my mother’s life.

In those first years in Liberia, it was of course mostly my own doing, falling into my mother’s life. It was a thing difficult to avoid. As soon as we were married, Woodrow had insisted that I quit my job at the lab. Not “seemly” for the wife of a minister of government, he pronounced. And I complied. For a long while I had been eager to quit the lab anyhow and hadn’t already done it only because until now in the entire country of Liberia there was nothing else available to me, nothing for which I was not over- or underqualified. And, of course, there was the matter of the chimps, my dreamers.

Until I married and moved into Woodrow’s house, I had nowhere else to live than in my cabin at the lab. Before long, however, the job had changed for me, and to my surprise I had actually become attached to it. Attached to the chimps. In the beginning, the work had been suffused with tedium. Every day it was the same — a simple, mind-numbing set of tasks associated with recording and tracking plasma samples taken from the chimps and shipping the samples back to the U.S. for testing. The chimps had been deliberately infected, and the progress of the disease had to be recorded month by month, until the subject, the infected chimp, died, date and cause of death carefully recorded. They’d been infected at different ages, depending on when they’d been brought to the lab, and I noted that; and gender, duly noted; and background (subject’s general health before infection; conditions of birth, i.e., born and raised in the wild or captivity; birth order, if known; location of early habitat; place and means of capture…) — all duly noted.

At the same time, my days were edged with the slow approach of despair, despair that later became intolerable, because of the condition and fate of the chimps. Those same tedious details, the data, however impersonal and repetitive, gradually provided the individual chimps with individual biographies and identities. They were nameless and were differentiated one from the other by a file number, each file containing the chimp’s entire life history. Number 241: male, age approx. 14 years; captured in Maryland County, mother killed by poachers; purchased at market in Gbong by Swedish businessman, seized from him by customs officials at point of departure from Liberia; age at capture, approx. 6 months; age when turned over to U.S. lab in Monrovia, approx. 2 years; infected with hepatitis C at age approx. 4 years; total time in confinement 12 years, 3 months, 4 days at time of most recent extraction of plasma sample….

Gradually, over time, each number came to contain within it a single chimp’s story. But it was a kind of obituary written in advance, for once a chimp was placed inside one of our cages, its life was effectively over. I worked in the office, a cinder-block bunker that hummed with the sound of the air-conditioner, but still it couldn’t blot out the noise of the chimps when they were hungry or angry or frightened. It was always one of those three — hunger, anger, and fear — and the chimps reacted to them like people who were mad, with wild screams, shouts, calls, and cries beyond weeping. It was like working in an insane asylum. Sometimes silence fell, and, as in an asylum, that was bad, for it usually meant that the patients were hurting themselves.

I did not handle the chimps myself and in the early days rarely saw them. I was the clerk of the works, as I called myself, the only one trusted with the numbers. The woman and man who actually took care of the chimps and drew the blood plasma from them and infected them with the diseases shipped in dry ice from the U.S. were local Liberians who had been recruited and trained by American physicians long before I arrived on the scene. Elizabeth Kolbert, a practical nurse, was in her late forties, a large, slovenly woman, very black, with six or seven kids — it was never clear exactly how many. Sometimes she said six, sometimes seven, sometimes simply “many.” Underpaid, with no husband to help provide for the kids, she got by as well as possible, but always came late to work and left early and sometimes didn’t show at all.

The other employee at the lab was Benji Haddad, also in his late forties, a light-skinned con man with a nasal voice, a toothpick in his mouth, and pomaded hair shaped like a helmet. He worked nights dealing blackjack at the hotel casino and part time at the lab, drifting into the compound around noon for a few hours to feed the chimps and clean up their cages, and because he hated doing these tasks, for they were beneath his dignity and understanding of his own status in town, he made things as difficult and uncomfortable for the chimps as possible, banging the bars with his shovel, spraying them with the hose as if in fun. It was he who knocked the chimps out with darts so Elizabeth could extract the blood samples and inject the viruses. Knockdowns, they were called. It was he who extracted their large incisors. And both Benji and Elizabeth talked about the knockdowns, extractions, and biopsies as if they were car mechanics discussing oil changes and tune-ups.

As clerk of the works, I was also the paymaster, which went a long way towards shaping my relationship with Elizabeth and Benji. They desperately needed their regular paychecks, a rare and luxurious thing in this country. Their monthly pay, drawn on the lab account at the Chase Bank in Monrovia, exceeded the average annual income for most Liberians and let Elizabeth and Benji and their families live modestly. It let them send their kids to school, rent a little house close to town, and even provided Benji with a car, a beat, old hand-me-down Ford.

Because of the way he treated the chimps, I was not fond of Benji, and he knew it. I could not keep a disapproving scowl off my face when in his presence. He was not especially fond of me, either, and we were barely civil to each other, except on payday, when I was officious and he as smooth as wet glass. But I liked Elizabeth. She was jolly, and although she viewed the chimps the way most people regard house cats or squirrels or caged birds — as if the creatures were without feelings, memories, or emotions and with no needs other than physical — she seemed to find them amusing and interesting. And she seemed to like me and enjoyed hanging out at the office telling stories about her kids and neighbors and now and then local politics.

It was Elizabeth who told me of the atrocities, told me in a way that let me for the first time believe the stories and rumors that I’d heard earlier, stories of how the soldiers, especially the president’s personal security force, took drugs and roamed the city at night looking for women and girls to rape; how they wantonly butchered people from the tribes not currently in favor, that is, killed people who were not members of the president’s own tribe, the Americo-Liberians, or the most populous and best educated of the native people, the Kpelle, though they had no qualms about torturing and killing Americos and Kpelles if it was on the president’s orders. Elizabeth told me also of rumors of cannibalism, of rituals among the stoned soldiers that consisted of disemboweling people and eating raw their hearts and livers and drinking their blood. These rumors I discounted, however. African urban legends, I thought. Stories told to scare the white lady. These guys might be murderers and thugs and rapists, and maybe they relish eating chimpanzee flesh, but they’re not cannibals. Not in this day and age.